Forever England (12 page)
Authors: Mike Read
From Wareham Rupert wrote to his cousin Erica at Godalming:
The last week (and the next) I have been going round delivering it [the Minority report] at towns and villages in the New Forest and round here. We travel in a caravan and live like savages. As a public orator I am a great success. As a caravaner, less. It rains incessantly.
At the end of the campaign, Rupert and Dudley Ward remained in the area, to join a crowd of their friends at Buckler’s Hard on the Beaulieu River; which included, of course, Noel. Ships had been built on the spot where they set up camp as early as the late seventeenth century, but in the 1740s Buckler’s Hard became an important shipbuilding village, providing fifty ships for the British Navy between 1754 and 1822. Two of the four terraces were demolished, leaving a wide airy space between the remaining two, as by the mid-nineteenth century the workforce and output had been scaled right down, due to the change to iron constructed vessels and the onslaught of the cheaper and speedier railways. By the time Bryn Olivier and Ward
discovered the place earlier in 1910, it looked much the same as it had done for the previous hundred years, with its two rows of old terraced houses and wide expanse of grass, and a clearing surrounded by extensive woodland running down to the peaceful Beaulieu River – an ideal place for a Bedalian-style camp.
The campers, in August 1910, included Noel and Bryn Olivier, Jacques Raverat, Ka Cox, the giant rowing blue and medical student Godwin Baynes, Harold Hobson who was studying engineering at King’s, Maitland Radford’s cousin Arthur ‘Hugh’ Popham, the Cambridge diving champion who was later to become the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, Bill Hubback and Eva Spielman (by now engaged to each other), Sybil and Ethel Pye, their younger brother David and Bunny Garnett. Ethel Pye painted the neo-pagan camp during their stay; A. E. Popham later describing her painting to Bryn Olivier (whom he eventually married):
On the extreme left the boat comes to her muddy mornings and I am seen unshipping the rudder, then Harold (Hobson) is seen grumbling on his way to fetch wood, then the big tent and Ka and you cooking, then Dudley (Ward) and the
Financial Times
and Rupert and all.
Choosing a moment when he and Noel were alone gathering wood together, Rupert plucked up the courage to ask her to marry him. Surprisingly, she agreed, but added the caveat that it was to be their secret, and he was not to tell a soul. Not surprisingly, it was soon common news in the camp. Jacques Raverat later summed up how the situation appeared to the other campers at Buckler’s Hard:
She accepted the homage of his devotion with a calm, indifferent, detached air, as if it were something quite natural. No
doubt she was flattered by his attentions, for she cannot have failed to see something of beauty and charm. Also, she saw how he was sought out, admired, showered with adulation on every side. But he did not inspire respect in her; she found him too young, too chimerical, too absurd.
Brooke celebrated his twenty-third birthday in the clearing haunted by blackheaded gulls, oyster-catchers, lapwings, redshanks and curlews on the very spot where three of Nelson’s fleet were built.
On his return to Grantchester, he discovered that Mrs Stephenson had people staying in his rooms, so briefly he decamped to the Old Vicarage next door. During the previous September when he was looking for somewhere, Rupert had described the house, garden and inmates to Lytton Strachey:
The Neeves are ‘working people’ who have ‘taken the house and want lodgers’ (beware of that plural). So far they have been singularly unsatisfied. Mr Neeve is a refined creature, with an accent above his class, who sits out near the beehives with a handkerchief over his head and reads advanced newspapers. He knows a lot about botany. They keep babies and chickens, and I rather think I have seen both classes entering the house. But you could be firm. The garden is the great glory. There is a soft lawn with a sundial and tangled, antique flowers abundantly; and a sham ruin, quite in a corner … Oh, I greatly recommend all the outside of the Old Vicarage. In the Autumn it will be Usher-like. There are trees rather too closely all around; and a mist. It’s right on the river. I nearly went there: but I could find no reason for deserting our present place.
He eventually would live there, but that was in the future.
In the late summer, James Strachey, Hugh Dalton and Rupert were back at the Fabian summer school in Llanbedr, Brooke and Strachey sleeping under their own blankets on the floor of one of the stables. The Society was still using Pen-yr-Allt, Caer-meddyg and their associated outbuildings. By now Beatrice Webb, a prime mover in the setting-up of the summer schools, was becoming disenchanted with them:
We have had interesting and useful talks with these young men, but the weather, being detestable, must have made the trip appear rather a bad investment for them, and they were inclined to go away rather more critical and supercilious than they came. Quite clearly we must not attempt it again unless we can ensure the presence of twenty or thirty leading dons and attractive celebrities. ‘They won’t come unless they know who they’re going to meet,’ sums up Rupert Brooke … They don’t want to learn, they don’t think they have anything to learn … the egotism of the young university man is colossal. Are they worth bothering about?
Nevertheless, Brooke:
We all loved Beatrice, who related amusing anecdotes about Mr Herbert Spencer over and over again … The Cambridge group teased her and founded an ‘Anti-Athletic League’ when she tried to organise long, uphill walks, but at least they were eager to talk to her and explain their point of view.
The Oxford boys, however, appeared recalcitrant and antagonistic. Beatrice asked, ‘Why must these young men be so rude?’ On one occasion, the local police had to be called following unruly behaviour
when the young Fabians vehemently supported each other against the hierarchy. If one of them was upbraided during a meeting, they would walk out as one body. After the summer school Rupert wrote to Geoffrey Keynes, ‘I’m just back from doing my accursed duty at the Fabian Summer School. It was really rather fun. A thousand different people from different parts of life.’ And to Ka Cox, ‘I went to Llanbedr. You ought to go one year, to learn a little about life, and to teach them a little about what? Anyhow it’s not so bad as you think … The Webbs too are very nice.’
By 1911 the lease on Pen-yr-Allt would expire and a decision be taken to abandon North Wales and hold the schools at the Hotel Monte Movo at Saas Grund in the Swiss Alps, but Brooke would not be present.
Rupert’s cousin Erica had become increasingly obsessed with George Bernard Shaw. Initially she sought advice from him, but her attentions were soon to become embarrassing, and Shaw suggested that she found someone of her own age to distract her from her hero-worship. The fact that he had entered into a correspondence with her about his plays, and explained that the expressions and feelings of the characters weren’t necessarily his own, served only to fan the flames. Her declarations of love became more intense and she even moved closer to the Shaws, to try to inveigle her way into their household. He lectured her on the fact that marriage was sacred and spoke of the ‘iron laws of domestic honour’, but it did little to discourage her. It is evident that Rupert knew nothing of the situation.
During October 1910, Edward Thomas stayed with Brooke at the Orchard, as did E. M. Forster, who had just had his new novel,
Howards End,
published. Rupert returned to Froxfield Green to spend some time with Thomas while his wife was away. It is hard to imagine the two poets gelling – Brooke gregarious and youthful, Thomas
an often unhappy and depressed man weighed down with financial worries. Nevertheless, they read aloud to each other Brooke’s latest poems, including ‘Flight’, which would have sounded perfect read aloud in the beech hangers.
Voices out of the shade that cried,
And long noon in the hot calm places,
And children’s play by the wayside,
And country eyes, and quiet faces –
All these were round my steady paces.
Those that I could have loved went by me;
Cool gardened homes slept in the sun;
I heard the whisper of water nigh me,
Saw hands that beckoned, shone, were gone
In the green and gold. And I went on.
For if my echoing footfall slept,
Soon a far whispering there’d be
Of a little lonely wind that crept
From tree to tree, and distantly
Followed me, followed me…
But the blue vaporous end of day
Brought peace, and pursuit baffled quite,
Where between pine-woods dipped the way.
I turned, slipped in and out of sight.
I trod as quiet as the night.
The pine-boles kept perpetual hush;
And in the boughs wind never swirled.
I found a flowering lowly bush,
And bowed, slid in, and sighed and curled,
Hidden at rest from all the world.
Safe! I was safe, and glad, I knew!
Yet – with cold heart and cold wet brows
I lay. And the dark fell … There grew
Meward a sound of shaken boughs;
And ceased, above my intricate house;
And silence, silence, silence found me…
I felt the unfaltering movement creep
Among the leaves. They shed around me
Calm clouds of scent, that I did weep,
And stroked my face. I fell asleep.
Thomas noted that Brooke:
[S]tretched himself out … drew his fingers through his waved, fair hair, laughed, talked indolently and admired as much as he was admired. No one that knew him could easily separate him from his poetry … he was tall, broad, and easy in his movements. Either he stooped, or he thrust his head forward unusually much to look at you with his steady blue eyes. His clear rosy skin helped to give him the look of a great girl.
Brooke returned to Grantchester, inspired by his time with Thomas, just as Thomas himself was to be encouraged in his poetry by the American poet, Robert Frost.
On 5 November 1910, Rupert was at Ye Olde George Hotel at Chatteris, some 20 miles north of Cambridge, where he scribbled down and sent to Jacques Raverat a poem entitled ‘Mummy’ that was later published in
Poems 1911
as ‘Mummia’.
As those of old drank mummia
To fire their limbs of lead,
Making dead kings from Africa
Stand pandar to their bed;
Drunk on the dead, and medicined
With spiced imperial dust,
In a short night they reeled to find
Ten centuries of lust.
So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme,
Stuffed love’s infirmity,
And sucked all lovers of all time
To rarify ecstasy.
Helen’s the hair shuts out from me
Verona’s livid skies;
Gypsy the lips I press; and see
Two Antonys in your eyes.
The unheard invisible lonely dead
Lie with us in this place,
And ghostly hands above my head
Close face to straining face;
Woven from their tomb, and one with it,
The night wherein we press;
Their thousand pitchy pyres have lit
Your flaming nakedness…
The following day Noel Olivier received a copy.
This is a very rough unfinished copy of the sort of thing I shall send you
on a postcard
if you don’t write to me – even ten words to say you exist. Don’t ask me how I got here. I leave in five minutes … Farewell. Imagine, most unapproachable, a little figure stumping across the illimitable Fens, occasionally bowing to the sun because it reminds him of you.
Rupert continued his verbal bombardment to Noel, who, now almost eighteen, was usually confused by the ravings in his letters:
If I could only talk to you, ask you things. Two sensible people can say anything – anything in the world – to each other … I’m an infinitely vulgar nuisance … The world has given to you that you may have any emotion – violent lust, eternal hatred, infinite indifference – to me or to anyone else in the world, for as long or as short a time and at any moment you like.
Noel had just returned from Prunoy, in France, where she’d been a guest of Jacques Raverat’s family. During her stay Rupert had sent Jacques a new sonnet.
He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes
Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain
Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens. He lies;
And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise
Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,
Like a dry branch. No life is in that land,
Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;
An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck
Of moveless horror; an Immortal One
Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly
Fast-stuck in a grey sweat on a corpse’s neck.
I thought when love for you died, I should die.
It’s dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on.
Rupert kept up the onslaught, his frustration seeming to intensify with each letter:
