Forever England (7 page)

During 1908, Methuen and Co. published
The Westminster Problems Book
, which included three of Brooke’s contributions to the problem page of the
Westminster Gazette.
Two of these were in verse.

While he continued to develop as a poet, his passion for Noel Olivier grew. He became infatuated with her, although a strong will, sense of caution and independence instilled in her by school and family kept him firmly at arm’s length. Her unavailability fanned the flames of desire to such an extent that Rupert even wrote to Dudley Ward on 20 October, ‘Can’t she be kidnapped from Bedales?’

The spirit of the pioneering establishment at which she was studying was to affect Brooke via some of the pupils who passed through it. In 1900, the founder of the co-educational Bedales School, J. H. Badley, moved his expanding establishment from Haywards Heath in Sussex to a new home in Hampshire. A 150-acre site just to the north at Petersfield and close to the village of Steep was selected. It has fine views of the Downs towards Butser and Wardown to the south, while to the north, rising to 800 feet, the beech hangers from Stoner Hill to the Shoulder of Mutton mark it is a dramatic area of England. The main house on the estate, Steephurst, built in 1716, initially housed the seven girls at the school (compared to sixty-seven boys who had their dormitory in another building), while the architect and former pupil, Geoffrey Lupton, designed a new school building as an addition to the establishment. Badley’s creed, still praised by the Bedalians and staff alike in autonomous
retrospection, was integrated into his initial prospectus: ‘to develop their powers in a healthy and organic manner rather than to achieve immediate examination results; and thus to lay a sound basis for subsequent specialisations in any given direction. With this view, body, mind and character as subjects for training are regarded as of equal importance!’ Badley, ‘the Chief ’, was, in short, building an alternative to the imperialist sausage machine of the public schools (he, like Brooke, was a Rugbeian), with the focus more on the individual.

Several of the circle that were to become Brooke’s friends were Bedalians -Justin Brooke, Jacques Raverat and Noel Olivier – and their way of life and attitude towards it instilled the spirit of the school so strongly in him that he almost felt he had been partially educated there. Bedalian-style camps became a way of life for the group of friends for years. J. H. Badley had laid down the rules for the school camps:

Rupert and Noel formed part of a crowd who went skiing at Klosters, Switzerland, at the end of 1908; the eleven-day holiday cost him 11 guineas, which he was able to borrow from his mother.
While there Brooke helped to compose a melodrama,
From the Jaws of the Octopus
, in which he played the hero, Eugene de Montmorency. They saw the new year in with a whirligig of skiing, tobogganing and youthful exuberance, before Rupert returned to King’s, a round of Carbonari meetings, political and social debates, and to take up his role of president of the Cambridge Fabians for the year 1909–10.

On 9 February, he entertained in his own rooms, with Hilaire Belloc as the main guest and speaker. Belloc was a good catch, as he had already written some twenty-eight books stretching back to 1896, and 1909 would see another five published, including his epic
Marie Antoinette
. His books were discussed by King Edward VII; and he was the subject of cartoons in
Punch
. Rupert knew many of Belloc’s poems by heart and certainly some of his songs. The outpourings of the beer-loving Anglophile from La Celle St Cloud in France had far-reaching influences on Brooke’s poems. These lines from Belloc’s ‘West Sussex Drinking Song’ –

– with their naming of places in Sussex and Surrey villages, are not dissimilar in their roots to sections of a poem Brooke would write in 1912, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, in which he used place names local to Cambridge.

As well as Belloc’s words, Brooke was clearly impressed by the exhilarating manner, uproarious humour and powerful gift of speech of this larger-than-life character, who appeared to exist on a diet of beer and cheese.

The Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes was not so much of an influence. Brooke declared his play
The Frogs,
written around 400 BC, to be a farce after seeing it in Oxford during February 1909, declaring to his mother that it was ‘quite extraordinarily bad’. Notwithstanding his opinion,
The Frogs, The Birds
and
The Wasps,
three of Aristophanes most famous plays, have certainly achieved a certain amount of durability!

With the spring approaching, Rupert was temporarily without holiday plans. There were thoughts of Wales, Devon, Cornwall, and even Belgium and Holland, when he realised that he could get from London to Rotterdam for just 13 shillings. ‘In April,’ he declared, ‘I shall be God let loose!’

T
HE PLAN
OF
driving a donkey cart through Holland was forgotten as Rupert discovered Becky Falls, on the edge of Dartmoor. On 25 March, he extolled the virtues of the local topography in a letter to his cousin Erica: ‘My view from the window before me includes a lawn, flower-beds with many flowers, a waterfall, rocks and trees, forests, mountains and the sky. It covers some 20 miles of country and no houses.’

From under the shadow of Hound Tor to the south west, Becky, or Becka, Falls, tumbles and plunges some 70 feet over vast granite boulders becoming the Becca Brook, which eventually joins the River Bovey to the east of the Falls. The stamp of the Iron and
Bronze Age inhabitants on the area is very marked, with burrows, cairns and hut circles littering an area rich in natural and spectacular beauty. Manaton, a derivation of Maleston – Robert de Maleston having been given the manor by Edward I – is the parish in which the Falls lie, and at the time when Rupert Brooke, Lytton Strachey and their circle came to write here, there were just 300 or so people living in the area. From late Victorian times Becky Falls farmhouse, with its 60 acres, was occupied by Mr and Mrs Hern and their son Bob, the buildings comprising a sixteenth-century stone farmhouse with three bedrooms, a cowshed, milking parlour and Beechwood cottage, a two-bedroom Victorian structure.

Lytton Strachey was already staying at the Falls at Rupert’s suggestion, when Brooke and Hugh Russell-Smith arrived, following advice that Rupert should terminate his studies of Classics and concentrate on English Literature for his fourth year at Cambridge. Strachey was working on
Landmarks in French Literature.
In letters to friends, descriptive passages about this part of Devon which he had just discovered flowed from Rupert’s pen, with almost the speed and majesty of the Falls themselves. To Erica he wrote:

And to his close friend Dudley Ward, ‘Here it rains infinitely. But I – I dance through the rain, singing musically snatches of old Greek roundelays. Have you ever seen me in my mackintosh walking-cape dancing 17 miles in the rain?’ Jacques Raverat also received a missive:

The author John Galsworthy lived at Wingston Farm near Manaton for eighteen years until moving into Bury House, Sussex, in 1926. It was here he wrote
The Forsyte Saga
and other works, but there is no record of Brooke having visited him, although his friend David ‘Bunny’ Garnett did in 1914, just before the outbreak of war.

The Herns, the farmhouse tenants who played host to Brooke, were described by another visitor, Peggy Cornwell: ‘Mr and Mrs Hern were lovely people. Mrs Hern used to come up each morning with a tray of tea for mother and wedges of that home-made bread, spread with clotted cream for us little ones.’ The Herns’ son Bob continued to run the place until the 1950s, when it was described as a ‘large tea garden – set in surroundings of majestic beauty’.

By April 1909, Rupert was further west, at another gathering of the Apostles on the furthest tip of the Lizard, Cornwall. It was essentially a reading party, organised by G. E. Moore, who had been at Trinity with Edward Marsh and had become an Apostle in the early 1890s, at the same time as Bertrand Russell. Moore, in his early thirties at the time of this ‘coming together’ at the Lizard, was certainly a great influence on Brooke, who found the older man’s philosophies and attitude to life absorbing, and his personality infectious, despite his dislike of Fabianism. Moore was also a gifted pianist and singer. Their base, Penmenner House (‘Pen’ meaning headland and ‘menner’ standing stones) is one of Britain’s most southerly houses and was built around 1860 by Thomas Rowe. On his death in 1881, his Irish wife, Grace, lived there until her death
in 1914. The eight-bedroomed dwelling that she was running at the time of Brooke’s visit afforded panoramic sea views in all directions and views of the Lizard Lighthouse, as well as access to the path across the cliffs. This idyllic setting proved to be a great attraction to writers. It is said that Oscar Wilde came here to read to the locals, but the members of G. E. Moore’s reading party offered no such public declamations, keeping their philosophies, poetry and readings within the confines of their own circle. Among the Cambridge Apostles at the gathering were the drama critic Desmond Mac-Carthy, barrister and author C. P. Sanger, author Leonard Woolf, poet and playwright R. S. ‘Bob’ Trevelyan (another leading Fabian), James Strachey, and Lytton Strachey. Strachey, some years before, had described the setting of Penmenner House in a letter to his mother as being ‘nose to nose with the sea’. Brooke described the house in a letter from there to Dudley Ward: ‘The house is 12 miles from a station and the posts are said to be irregular.’ To Jacques Raverat he enthused that he went

The bays of Kynance and Housel were just a short stroll from the house, low tide revealing hundreds of rocky outcrops, and at Kynance a beautiful expanse of sandy beach. The extraordinarily warm weather and subsequent swimming activities brought pressure to bear on the desires of James Strachey, who had longed for an active relationship with the uninterested Brooke. James wrote to his brother, Lytton,

After the brief sojourn by the Cornish sea, the peripatetic Brooke was off again, this time to the depths of the New Forest, the main attraction being the presence of the object of his desires, Noel Olivier. Although Brooke’s letters and correspondence from there are headed ‘Bank, Lyndhurst’, the hamlet in which the house Beech Shade is situated is deeper into the forest, past Bank, in a cluster of some half dozen cottages called Gritnam, at the end of a track deep in the forest. Initially discovered by leading Cambridge University socialist Ben Keeling, the area may have been brought to his attention through Virginia Woolf, who stayed at Lane End House in Bank during 1904 and 1905. Bank, and nearby Lyndhurst, attracted many writers during the 1880s, as well as the inspiration for one: Alice Liddell, the model for Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking Glass,
lived at Bank, after marrying a local man, Reginald Hargreaves. Gritnam, small as it is, is mentioned in the ‘Domesday Book’ as Greteha (the Great Homestead) – its area being ‘half a hide’, some 120 acres, and the whole being held by the romantically named Waleron Hunter.

Noel’s sister Margery had organised a Newhamite reading party at Beech Shade, which included not only Noel, but also Cambridge friends Evelyn Radford and Dorothy Osmaston. The rooms were let to them by Alice Primmer, née Hawkins, and her new husband, former army officer, Harry, who was a stud groom at Wilverly Park, Lyndhurst, at the time of the reading party, later becoming Master of the Hounds before his death in 1925. Learning that Noel would
be at Bank, Rupert contrived, through Dudley Ward, who let him know the exact location, to drop in on the party as if by chance. Full of the joys of spring, he recounted his arrival in the New Forest in a letter to Jacques Raverat, liberally spiced with flights of poetic fancy:

Although Margery had been the instigator of the reading party, her presence did not make for an easy passage for Rupert, as a little jealousy, combined with her dual roles of guardian and older sister, meant that she watched over them. Despite that, Noel and Rupert managed walks in the woods together and some time alone, although it seems that his frustration with her ‘cheerful, clear, flat platitudes’
came through clearly at the end of The Voice’, a poem inspired by the few days at Beech Shade.

During the few days at Bank, one of the party was extremely camera-happy – presumably Dorothy Osmaston, as she does not appear in any of the many photographs taken outside Beech Shade.

‘The Voice’ was tidied up and completed at Sidmouth, where Rupert, after his few days in what he termed ‘Arcady’, at last arrived joining his parents and Aunt Fanny at the holiday hotel where they were staying. Aunt Lizzie, with whom Fanny shared Grantchester Dene in Bournemouth, had died on 9 April and this was by way of a recuperative holiday for her.

Long considered a ‘fashionable watering place’ for the wealthy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sidmouth became a health
resort for the old and sickly, despite the street being deep in mud during the winter, and carts moving around to lay the dust in the summer. The roadways were made of cracked flints bonded with clay and flattened with a horse-drawn roller, the horses creating their own form of pollution which ended up on the municipal manure dump on Bedford Lawn – on a hot day, too close for comfort to the Esplanade. When Rupert came to the resort at the mouth of the River Sid in April 1909, the fishing fleet had twenty-three ‘drifters’ in which the local fisherman would drift for mackerel; on fine evenings the town turned out to watch them sail away, as Brooke may well have done from his bedroom window at Gloucester House on the Esplanade, a part of York Terrace. The following winter brought a sudden disappearance of the herring, due partly to severe weather and more industrial methods being employed; the fishing industry was never the same again in Sidmouth. During Rupert’s stay, the beach was decorated with a dancing bear, barrel organ, hurdy-gurdy, crab, cockle and nougat vendors, a penny photographer, pony rides and bathing machines.