Forever England (9 page)

On the academic side of his Cambridge activities, Brooke achieved a Second in his Classical Tripos in the summer of 1909, after which, in July, he was off again, ‘restless as a paper scrap that’s tossed down dusty pavements by the wind’, for a second visit to the Fabian summer school at Llanbedr. The general manager of the school was Mary Hankinson, who was very popular with the students but felt that the set-up should be more focused on dancing, sports, walks and pastimes, punctuated by some educational facilities and lectures; Sidney and Beatrice Webb, on the other hand, felt that it should be a learning establishment, with leisure activities available when time allowed. The main thrust of the Webbs’ lectures was centred on the outdated Poor Law of 1834. For months Rupert had read and reread the Fabian Society’s book,
The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission
, which set out the Fabian views. These differed from those in a review which had been set up by Balfour’s government in 1905. The basic Fabian premise was that each case of poverty should be considered on its merit and treated accordingly, unlike the outdated Victorian approach of lumping together the infirm, dissolute, mentally ill, old and unemployed as ‘the poor’.

For this and the previous summer, the summer school had proved so popular that a further Llanbedr house was secured. Caer-meddyg
(the doctor’s house in the field) was relatively new, having been built in 1905 as a retreat for the elderly and infirm, as the on-site spring allegedly possessed restorative properties. Were there no ailing ageds during the Fabian occupation, or was the good doctor’s apparent altruism temporarily affected by hard Fabian cash? It was here that the famous photograph of Brooke and other young Fabians clustered around an ornate fireplace was taken. There were strict rules governing meals, lecture times, ‘lights out’, noise after hours and times that musical instruments and phonography could be played, and there was a total ban on alcohol. Owen, the gardener at the other summer-school house at Pen-yr-Allt, would have been a familiar sight to Rupert, as he undertook odd jobs, as well as ensuring that the garden was in good order for the early morning Swedish drill classes that were held before the morning dew had evaporated. The activities of the Fabians worried the locals, who were concerned that a revolutionary uprising was being organised in their village. The ghost of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, from whom the society took its name, would have been proud – as long as the uprising was non-confrontational. Sexual segregation was the order of the day, although Beatrice Webb was becoming increasingly alarmed by the close friendship between H. G. Wells and the brilliant young Cambridge student Amber Reeves. Amber would, however, eventually marry another Fabian, ‘Blanco’ Rivers White. The Utopian ideal of the summer school was beginning to tarnish a little in the Webbs’ eyes, especially as news of evening parodies of daytime lectures reached the ears of Beatrice. Lytton Strachey recalled that he and Brooke upset her as they ‘tried to explain Moore’s ideas to Mrs Webb while she tried to convince us of the efficacy of prayer’.

After a surfeit of talks, lectures and discussions on the Welsh coast, Rupert headed south, to a riverside camp in Kent. An idyllic location had been discovered by a close neighbour and friend of
the Oliviers, David Garnett, who had found it when cycling with Bryn and Daphne Olivier to Penshurst for a picnic, with colleagues Godwin Baynes, the giant rowing blue later to become a physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and fellow student doctor Maitland Radford, who late in life would become Chief Medical Officer of Health for St Pancras in London. Garnett recalled the outing in his autobiography
The Golden Echo
:

Over the field stood the magnificent Penshurst Place, built during the first half of the fourteenth century for the wealthy John de Pulteney (four times Lord Mayor of London) on his recently acquired 4,000-acre estate at Penshurst, which had belonged to Sir Stephen de Penchester in the previous century. By the early part of the fifteenth century Henry IV’s third son John, Duke of Bedford, was in residence, the property on his death passing to his younger brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, founder of the Bodleian library at Oxford. The next incumbent Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, entertained Henry VIII there, the King repaying his host’s hospitality by beheading him and letting Anne Boleyn’s brother run the property. Henry VIII’s successor Edward VI eventually bequeathed the house and estate to his tutor and steward of his household Sir William Sidney. It soon passed to his son Henry
who, although related by marriage to the doomed Guildford Dudley and Lady Jane Grey, escaped implication in the plot against the eventual Queen Mary. Henry Sidney’s first child was Philip Sidney, later to become Sir Philip, soldier, scholar, poet and the personification of everything that was virtuous, chivalrous and noble. After Brooke’s death, his name would often be linked with that of Sidney; both poets died while serving as soldiers. The family built a London house, twice the size of Penshurst, but it was a white elephant pulled down 100 years later; the Empire, Leicester Square, now stands on the site. Many years later Sir Bysshe Shelley married into the family, his grandson Percy Bysshe Shelley becoming one of England’s most famous poets, who, like Brooke and Sidney, was to die tragically young.

At Penshurst the party in the long meadows flanking the river Eden was soon joined by Noel Olivier, when her summer term at Bedales ended, and then by Brooke and Dudley Ward, Rupert again knowing fully Noel’s movements. It was the first meeting between Brooke and Garnett, whom Rupert nicknamed ‘Bunny’. Garnett’s memory of his encounter with Brooke remained crystal clear:

The meadows by the River Eden, where the young Edwardians laughed, swam, talked and walked as July turned into August in that summer of 1909, were approached by turning off the Penshurst Road along the lane to Salman’s Farm. Just before the hill leading to the farm itself, a small bridge crossed the River Eden, to the left of which some 50 yards away the river opened out into an ideal spot for bathing just above the old weirhouse. During his sojourn there Brooke went for walks along the river with Noel and they all swam, even at night, by the light of bicycle lamps, amid, in Garnett’s words, ‘the smell of new-mown hay, of the river and weeds’. He recalled vividly this time at Penshurst in his autobiography:

Intrigued by the spectacle of a group of young people behaving in what they would deem an erratic, and probably erotic, manner, the locals lined the little bridge by the wider part of the river where they were about to bathe. Undeterred, they continued to swim, Noel picking her way through the assembly on the bridge to effect a perfect dive into the Eden.

In a letter to Brooke, written some eighteen months later, on 10 February 1911, Noel admitted:

The delightful spot by the River Eden that so enchanted Garnett, and where Noel’s feelings for Rupert were at their height, remains unchanged, with its tranquil meadows, winding waterway soon to flow into the River Medway views to Penshurst Palace and little arched bridge. The weirhouse has disappeared, although the weir still falls, and in the wide pool where Brooke and his friends swam, the occasional fisherman waits patiently for an obliging dace or chub.

The round of summer activity continued, as Rupert, his family and his friends headed west. A part of Avon since the shuffling of the counties in 1976, Clevedon, on the Severn Estuary was firmly in the more delightfully named Somerset in the summer of 1909, when Brooke persuaded his parents to rent a large Victorian vicarage there. Clevedon was once referred to as ‘the brain-workers’ paradise’; local postcards proudly proclaimed its best features as ‘unrivalled sunsets, daily steamer services to Devon and delightful inland and coastal scenery’. The literati had always been drawn to the town. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the first poet to write about the area when he resided in Old Church Road, describing the cottage and the view from Dial Hill in the ‘Valley of Seclusion’: ‘dim coasts, and cloud-like hills, and shoreless ocean’. Minor poets associated with the area include Charles Abraham Elton (of the Elton family of Clevedon Court), Alfred Lord Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam (buried in the Elton vaults), H. D. Rawnsley and Hallam’s second cousin Charles Isaac Elton, who wrote the following lines on Clevedon in 1885 about his childhood memories of the place:

Clevedon’s literary magnetism is borne out in the street names, acknowledging the likes of Thackeray, Tennyson, Hallam and Coleridge. The literary history of the area would have appealed to Brooke, who would undoubtedly have been familiar with the poem, ‘In Memoriam’, Tennyson’s poetic epitaph to his friend Arthur Hallam.

It was to All Saints Vicarage in Coleridge Road that the Brookes came that summer. The incumbent, the Reverend Richard A. Arden-Davis,
had taken up his position seven years earlier in 1902, five years after the building was erected. In a letter dated 10 November 1902, Miss Elizabeth Teulon, writing to her daughter Margaret, asked, ‘Have I described the new vicar? I think not. He is short, very bald, with quite light hair, a well-developed forehead and penetrating eyes, no nose worth mentioning, an expressive mouth, and chin denoting power and will. He has a most pleasant voice and I like him very much.’

Rupert and his friends’ predilection for walking and the open road would have been truly sated by the coastal clifftop path leading to Portishead, with its wide distant views to South Wales. But Rupert affected a dislike of the place: ‘Clevedon is insufferable. I have followed up all the rivers for miles around and they are all ditches.’ For the first fortnight of the holiday Rupert was ill: Dudley Ward kicked him by accident, and the injury laid him up. His chums started arriving in dribs and drabs, as was his plan in suggesting the Cleveland Vicarage; it enabled him to invite his friends down as opposed to being subjected to obligatory seclusion at home in Rugby. Paradoxically, though, he enjoyed the role of one appearing to sequester himself from the world, while really encouraging visitors. A mixed assortment of Cambridge friends and associates appeared for varying lengths of time, including Margery and Bryn Olivier, Dudley Ward, Maynard Keynes, Gerald Shove, Hugh Dalton, Francis Birrell, Gwen Darwin (who was to marry Jacques Raverat), A. Y. Campbell, Eva Spielman, Bill Hubback and Eddie Marsh. Mrs Brooke clearly was not sure what to make of Rupert’s new friends, commenting, ‘I have never met so many brilliant and conceited young men’.

She was none too pleased at their bad timekeeping and general behaviour; Rupert wrote to Ka Cox from the Vicarage, ‘Oh, poor Mother’s Experiment of having some of my Acquaintances in a House in the Country this Summer! They’ve come and gone, singly and in batches, and the Elder Generation couldn’t stand any of
them.’ Mrs Brooke was generally aware of several of her son’s friends, especially the Olivier girls, Bryn, Margery Daphne and Noel, about whom an acquaintance had exclaimed, ‘My, yes, the Oliviers! They’d do anything, those girls!’ Her major misgiving was about the attitude of Bryn (who, she wrongly assumed, was the object of Rupert’s affection) and her seemingly deliberate flaunting of normal convention and etiquette, although her attitude was in accordance with the freedom of her upbringing and education. In reality it was, of course, Noel who inflamed Rupert’s passion, but Margery ensured that Noel didn’t come to Clevedon and went as far as to tell him on arrival that his feelings weren’t returned – clearly out of a mixture of jealousy, complicity and concern on Margery’s part.