The Great Lover

le 23 avril 1982

Dear Kind Stranger,

Greetings from Tahiti! My name is Arlice Rapoto. I do not know English, only Tahitian and French so a very lovely charming friend is writing this letter to you in England, in the hope that I might be able to find out some things that I have always wanted to know.

I am sixty-seven years old and before I die I hope to find out some thing about my father. My mother was Taatamata who lived for many years at Maharepa on the island of Moorea, Tahiti.

My mother always told me that my father was a very famous man, very pretty. She called him Pupure. (This means Fair One.) He was a sun god, she said, and a famous poet, very pretty. He came to Tahiti in 1914 and stayed three months with my mother at Papeete and Mataiea. Many things written about him after his death, one by the British Prime Minister, and my mother keep this and show it to me. I never met my father. His name was Rupert Brooke. He died in First World War and as him a young man who never married my mother, she said he never know about me. (In England it would be a bad thing if white people knew about me.) Taatamata did try to send him a letter, all that time ago in 1914, but the letter washed down to the bottom of the sea when a ship went down. Mother told Pupure she grew fat with me. She loved him very much. She said he found his true heart in Tahiti and for the first time he was happy.

I have read two poems by him but I would like to hear his voice. I would like to read his letters but mostly hear his living voice, to know what he smelled like and sounded like. How it felt wrap arms around him. I never married and have no children and now I am old I want to know: who was my father, what was he like, and why did all of England remember him?

I belong to an artist colony here in Tahiti and I also some time write some little thing. I wonder if I have poetry in my blood from my
popaa
father.

If you can help me, or write me, it would make old woman happy. I know from a book that he lived in this house, the Orchard, in Grantchester, Cambridgeshire in England, and so I am sending this letter to you. I hope that somebody kind who knew my father still lives there. I am sending the things I already know about my father, from
Times
newspaper. I know he was very pretty.

Mother many times told me I look just like him. I am tall, have thin face and fair skin and hair like
popaa,
like a Western girl.

The whole of England love my father, but his heart belongs to Tahiti and to my mother, Taatamata. He wrote many poems for her. What can you tell me about him, about Rupert Brooke? I’m old now. I want to know: was he good man?

Yours truly,
Arlice Rapoto

Rupert Brooke is dead. A telegram from the Admiralty at Lemnos tells us that his life has closed at the moment when it
seemed to have reached its springtime. A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war than any other–more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender, and with a power to carry comfort to those who watch them so intently from afar. The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.

During the last months of his life, months of preparation in gallant comradeship and open air, the poet-soldier told with all the simple force of genius the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause, and a heart devoid of hate for fellow-men.

The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself. Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, ruled by high undoubting purpose, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.

30 April 1982

Dear Miss Arlice Rapoto,

I was very surprised but happy to get your letter. I still live in Grantchester, and know the people who own the Orchard (there is both a house, a beautiful garden with the same lovely orchard trees still in it, and a café by the same name). They passed your letter on to me, remembering that I might perhaps have known your father, as I used to work at the Orchard Tea Gardens as a girl.

I too, am an old lady now. I am ninety years old and a widow. I did indeed know your father, Rupert Brooke, for a while.

I am a writer too. Or, rather, I was. I have had stories published in magazines here in England called
Woman’s Realm
and
Woman’s Weekly
and, once, had a letter published in a magazine called the
Lady
. After the War I took several courses at Night School and continued the education I’d given up as a girl. I once had different ambitions. I would like to rise to your challenge and do my best to answer your questions. I would especially like, if I am able, to do as you ask and tell you what your father smelled like, what he sounded like, what it felt like to wrap your arms around him. And also: what his living voice was like.

I must say, it was an odd feeling to read that newspaper piece you included. I remember reading it through tears at the time, standing in the scullery of the Orchard with a feeling in the pit of my stomach as if half of me was peeling away. I lost a brother in the war, as well as Rupert, my brother Edmund. It’s funny but of the sentiments in that piece, ‘ruled by high undoubting purpose’ leaped out at me. And when I went to look in my favourite biography of your father (written a long time ago, some twenty years I think, by a Mr Christopher Hassall), oddly enough that line was not included. Which was curious, and got me to thinking about biographies. I’m sending
you the one I mentioned as it’s very detailed and will give you a lot of information, if you can plough through it. I am also sending you a little gift he gave me (I hope it doesn’t fall out of the envelope!) and a book of your father’s prose-writing, essays and such-like. (Many English people forget that he wrote prose, knowing only his poetry, but to my mind, it contained the best of him.)

You’re right in saying he was very famous here in England. Most people can quote a line or two: ‘
If I should die, think only this of me…
’

But when I read that ‘high undoubting purpose’ again in
The Times
piece, I had to laugh. ‘Undoubting’ is not a word that suits Rupert. I think he would have laughed at it, too. He did like to laugh, much of the time. Often this was directed at himself. You can probably tell that by reading his poetry. The other poem that people here are most likely to remember him by is ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ (the house is still there, too, next door to the Orchard). He offended quite a few folk round here, at the time–‘Ditton girls are mean and dirty, and there’s none in Harston under thirty…’ that sort of thing. There have been a few more recent biographies of him and I wondered whether to send you one of those. In 1964, thirty-four years after Rupert’s mother died (he always called her the Ranee for reasons I’ve now forgotten), Mr Christopher Hassall felt a little freer to write what he wanted. But there were still things about your father that he
wasn’t
able to print. I knew them well enough and don’t see the point in hiding them from you. I’m taking a gamble that, like me, you’re too old now to care for anything but the truth.

It makes me sad to think that the Ranee never knew she had a grandchild! She died when you would have been fourteen, if I’ve got my dates right–you would have been born in early 1915, is that right? (My eldest son was born in April of the year before.) You know, she lost all her sons and her husband
in the space of a few years. First Dick, Rupert’s older brother, to pneumonia (and to drink, and perhaps he had a sort of tendency to, you know, gloomy moods, though naturally that sort of thing wasn’t easy to speak of at the time). Then her husband, Parker Brooke. Then Rupert, of course, who was only twenty-seven, and just a few months later her last boy, Alfred. Whatever the shock and scandal, the existence of a granddaughter…well, I can’t help thinking it might have given her a grain of comfort, whatever the Rupert Brooke Trustees might have thought. And I’ve suddenly remembered that she lost her only daughter too, as a baby girl of one year old. She was the child before Rupert.

Rumours of you started to circulate here many years ago, when a Mr Dudley Ward, a university friend of your father’s who inherited the Old Vicarage, was charged with finding out about you. I was not a friend of Mr Ward’s, although I always liked him. He married a German girl and had a little boy, Peter. We moved in different circles. I’m not sure how the rumour reached me but I did hear that a letter from your mother, Taatamata, somehow came to light. I believe your mother wrote: ‘I get fat all the time.’ Well, any woman would understand the meaning in that sentence. Unfortunately, your father’s biographers have all been men.

I’m sad to think that I don’t know what your father made of this letter, and if he understood that your mother was expecting. You’re right–the letter had lain at the bottom of the ocean, after the ship carrying it sank in 1914. It’s funny how people here remember the
Titanic
sinking but not the
Empress of Ireland
, and yet it was only two years later, and nearly as many losses. The
Titanic
was full of toffs, of course, whereas the
Empress
was just ordinary people, people like us, that’s what my Tom used to say. I think a fairer explanation was that there was a war on, and we thought of nothing else.

What an astonishing thought that the letter came to light at all…It seems your mother gave it to a man to post, who was
going by boat to Vancouver, and he posted it there and it lay in a sealed box with a lot of others from June to December until divers rescued it, and it arrived in Rupert’s hands. In Blandford, I believe he was at the time, waiting to be called up.

I do believe your mother was the love of Rupert’s life, the one true happiness he had. I think with her he found something he always searched for. I have read his poems (the ones he wrote for your mother and while in Tahiti) many, many times, and that is the conclusion I’ve come to. One of Rupert’s most famous lovers, Cathleen Nesbitt, an actress, wrote a book about him. Some of his letters to her have been published. They are full of loving sentiments–he was good at that, in writing!–but even so. It is possible to see that she was very much on a pedestal, if you know what that expression means. It’s only my personal opinion, of course, and others would disagree. Most seem to concentrate on the love affair he had with Cathleen because she was such a glamorous figure, or with Ka Cox, because there is so much to go on, evidence, you know, in the form of letters. Or just before he died, a Lady Eileen Wellesley, who he met on the boat coming back, and seemed to take up with for a time. She was a plain sort. At least I could see what he saw in the lovely actress Cathleen Nesbitt. Cathleen writes in her book that she didn’t feel Rupert would ever have been ‘a one-woman man’. In your father’s early letters there’s a fair bit of showing off. Don’t get me wrong–I’m not saying your father was a false man. But he was a clever letter-writer.

I think you are right about the South Seas and how the English prefer to forget this part of his life. Perhaps people find it difficult to square the idea of the golden Apollo, the intellectual gentleman-soldier, finding peace not in an English meadow but on a tropical island far away. And with an unmarried coloured lady, to boot. I hope you don’t mind me describing your mother like that? I did one time try to find out about you, and I even went so far as to write to the Hotel Tiare Tahiti, where I believe
your father stayed. But I’m told many hotels in Tahiti are called that, the
tiare
being the national flower and all, something like a gardenia, is that right? And that your mother moved to the island of Moorea, which from your letter I see is true.

As for my point above, I’m not a sentimental woman, and I stick to my guns. Those same people would not be able to say with any authority who was the love of
my
life, either, if they were using only evidence, and hard facts. They might assume that it was Tom, since we were married for fifty-two years. (My Tom died in 1965, having had a good innings, as we say–he was seventy-four. He survived being called up in both wars, so I was luckier than most.)

Well now, my wrist soon aches when I write for a long time these days, so I will have to leave you to read the biography I’m sending. A biography is a good way to find out things but to my mind, well. It has its limits. After all, a biography is written by a person and a person does not always understand another as well as they might think. I enjoy a good biography as well as the next person but I do think they set too much store by facts and not enough by feelings. As a girl, I set a lot of store by facts, but I learned that they could be wrong. Then another thing: biographers spend so much time going on about the person’s death, and who wants to dwell on that? I mean, in your father’s case, the war was only the last eight months of his life, and yet that’s what he’s remembered for, his war sonnets, especially the one I quoted, ‘The Soldier’, which they still read out at every war-memorial service, year on year.

My daughter Janet now, she became quite an expert on Literature here in Cambridge (she’s retired now). She told me that Rupert’s poetry was sentimental and it was unfortunate that he wrote such patriotic nonsense when other poets were about to see for themselves how bad the war was. His reputation did go downhill after that, and there are other war poets who are much better known, like Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen.
Of course he didn’t even die in action, and for some people, septicaemia from a mosquito bite wasn’t the right kind of death for a poet-hero. I don’t know much about all that. All I know is that, in the way of daughters, my three girls don’t think of me as having a life before I had them, and certainly not as being in love with anyone before their father, so I have never told them about that side of my life.

It was Janet who told me there has even been a new memoir donated to the British Library, written by a young woman called Phyllis Gardner, who was a lady artist at the Slade in the days when that was quite unusual. After his death a couple of new loves came to light–Violet Asquith, who had sent him an amulet to wear round his neck, and the plain one I mentioned, Lady Eileen Wellesley–he used to move in some grand circles at that point in his life. But previous biographers knew nothing of Phyllis and didn’t include her in any of their books. He was with Phyllis an awful lot during the terrible year after his nervous breakdown. (It tickled my daughters to think I’d known Rupert Brooke, of course.) It was an eye-opener, I can tell you. That Phyllis was crazy about him.

Oh, yes, and he was handsome all right. I didn’t always think so. He was famously described by one of our writers, Mr W. B. Yeats, as the ‘the handsomest young man in England’, and it used to make him cross, to be honest, all the kerfuffle about his looks. I’ll send you a postcard photo of him if you haven’t seen one before–there aren’t any, I see, in the Christopher Hassall book, and you must judge for yourself. That’ll be the best way, as people don’t agree, do they, on that kind of thing?

There is so much more I would like to ask you–about your mother, and your life in Tahiti and how it was, growing up without knowing your father. In England, we only know of Tahiti through films like
Mutiny on the Bounty
, I’m afraid, and I’m sure that gave a very silly picture–but I’m old now, and though I put this letter down last night and took it up again,
my wrist is tired again, and it tires me so. Rupert only ever wrote me one letter, which I’ve decided I’ll include, along with the small gift I mentioned, which I feel should be rightfully yours, so I am returning it. I have kept it all these years. Oh and a poem, one you might already know, as he wrote it while in your country, which he seemed to think contained the best of him.

I hope you are not the easily shocked sort. (Some of the things your father did and described in letters were against the law when he did them.) Janet tells me (Janet, the one who was at Cambridge) that Tahitians have different attitudes to these things from us, that even allowing for exaggeration by Captain Cook and others, your country was far more comfortable than ours with such matters, but I don’t know if I believe her. I’m an old lady now, and can still remember how such things were viewed here and, as a young girl, I did find them very shocking.

You asked about your father’s living voice and I believe that his letters, along with his poems and the prose writing I’m sending, are the best way to answer you. But he was a difficult man to pin down, and he was in the habit of saying things playfully that he did not mean at all, or were quite the opposite of his meaning, so maybe it’s true he was a little more of a slippery fish than some.

I am very sorry that we are both too old to meet. If you ever find your way to England, to Grantchester, do be sure to write to me again, and you are, of course, very welcome to stay with me.

Also to answer your question: was your father a good man?

I suppose I knew Rupert as well as anyone. You must make up your own mind, of course.

I was very surprised but happy to get your letter.

Yours sincerely,
Nell Sanderson (née Golightly)
Grantchester, England