Forever England (11 page)
Authors: Mike Read
Following his mother’s move to Bilton Road, Brooke went to spend some time at Lulworth, staying this time a few yards across the road from the Post Office, at Cove Cottage, belonging to the Williams family. It was a pretty, typically English thatched house with a wonderfully wild garden that faced a peculiar cottage that had been constructed in Canada and transported to Lulworth during the nineteenth century. From Cove Cottage he wrote to Geoffrey Keynes on 8 April:
Here (
ecce iterum
!) I roam the cliffs and try to forget my bleeding soul. Tonight some Stracheys join me – James for his journalist’s weekend, Lytton for a week or so. After that – i.e. next Saturday or Sunday (or rather, Sat or Sun the 16th or 17th) – Jacques and Godwin Baynes may be joining me, or I them, somewhere for a day or two’s walk.
Five days later he wrote from Cove Cottage to Eddie Marsh, ‘My dear Eddie, At length I am escaped from the world’s great snare. This is Heaven – Downs, Hens, Cottages and the Sun.’
Rupert returned to the Orchard in time to celebrate May Day. It was now exactly twenty-three years away from the date that they all planned to meet at Basle station. On 1 May 1910 a crowd of friends, including Ka Cox and Geoffrey Keynes, came to have breakfast with Brooke at the Orchard, causing him to complain good-naturedly in a letter to Noel Olivier:
[T]he thing is that they insist on ‘dabbling in the dew’ and being ‘in the country’ on the first of May. I had to get up at half-past seven to give them breakfast; though I had worked until two. It rained in the morning, yet they all turned up, thousands of them – men and women – devastatingly and indomitably cheery … when rain ceased we put on galoshes and gathered cowslips in the fields. We celebrate the festival with a wealth of detailed and ancient pagan ritual; many dances and song.
Amid the comings and goings of the tea garden, Brooke worked on an essay on Webster, which was to win him the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize, as well as working on a collection of his own verse and devoting some time to his campaign in support of Beatrice Webb’s plans for Poor Law Reforms. Brooke’s guests at the Orchard
at various times included E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, both of whom received Mrs Stevenson’s hospitality. Brooke loved the Orchard – ‘golden and melancholy and sleepy and enchanted. I sit neck-deep in red leaves’ – but the Stevensons were unhappy with his habit of wandering around the house, garden and village barefoot. As a result Brooke moved a few months later to the Old Vicarage next door. Prior to his departure he wrote to Noel Olivier from the Orchard:
I’ve been finishing off a poem I began and planned in the spring. It’s a bit out of date now. But illuminating. The position is this – I worshipped. I once ridiculously hoped you’d fall in love with
me
. But that was blasphemy … Oh, my cleverness! My poor grubby cleverness! That couldn’t at all foresee you falling in love, and yet doing it in your own perfect and gracious manner. The poor poem is rather knocked on the head.
I think if you had loved me when I wanted;
If I’d looked up one day, and seen your eyes,
And found my wild sick blasphemous prayer granted,
And your brown face, that’s full of pity and wise,
Flushed suddenly; the white godhead in new fear
Intolerably so struggling, and so shamed;
Most holy and far, if you’d come all too near,
If earth had seen Earth’s lordliest wild limbs tamed,
Shaken, and trapped, and shivering, for
my
touch –
Myself should I have slain? or that foul you?
But this the strange gods, who had given so much,
To have seen and known you, this they might not do.
One last shame’s spared me, one black word’s unspoken;
And I’m alone; and you have not awoken.
Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf) came out of curiosity, to see the young poet living in the great outdoors at Grantchester, and dubbed Brooke and his group of friends who frequented the Orchard and the Old Vicarage, the ‘neo-pagans’. Her name was undoubtedly added to a long list of luminaries who nature would have called to the only ‘small house’ while taking tea at the Orchard. The privy in the garden with its two-hole bench still exists, as does the wooden tea pavilion.
That June, Rupert was back at Overcote, 13 miles north of Cambridge, camping with Geoffrey Keynes among the wildlife and communing with nature. While there he wrote a review of James Elroy Flecker’s new volume
Thirty-Six
Poems
, commenting: ‘Too often seems to have been inspired with a few good lines and completed the poems with a few dull ones … the healthy human vulgar man’s vulgar and mixed emotions made, somehow, beautiful by the magic of poetry.’ Keynes and Brooke discussed the staging of a revival of
Faustus
, walked, read and swam in the Ouse. The day after their return to Cambridge, Rupert described his few days at Overcote with enthusiasm:
I went into camp (a tent 6 feet each way) with Geoffrey on Monday … We had a very good time, with no rain at all. I slept out and Geoffrey slept inside the tent. We got extraordinarily red and brown. My nose is peeling, while Geoffrey’s arms and ankles went quite raw the last few days. We bathed a good deal. I became quite an expert at cooking – especially fried eggs. We had one or two visitors in camp – the Batesons among others. But it was too far for many people to come. Overcourt (or
more correctly Overcote) is a lovely place, with nothing but an old Inn and a ferry. There are villages round a mile or two away, but hidden. And there’s just the Ouse, a slow stream, and some trees and fields and an immense expanse of sky. There were a lot of wild birds about – wild duck and snipe and herons. I sat and wrote my beastly essay most of the day. We rose about 6.30 on Friday yesterday, made breakfast, washed up, packed everything up and rode off.
Four years later, while he was on board ship from the South Seas to the United States in April 1914, Brooke wrote nostalgically of this time to Frances Cornford (although addressing his letter to her six-month-old daughter Helena): ‘but you won’t have gone dabbling in the dew in Justin’s car at Overcote. No indeed – you young folks don’t do these things – these were days … but I weary you.’ Overcote is virtually unchanged to this day – the Ouse still glides past the ferry, wild fowl still abound – but the sight of a 1909 Opel crammed with Edwardian ‘dew-dabblers’ from Cambridge is rare.
Rupert continued to feed his wanderlust, plotting a Fabian expedition to the New Forest with Dudley Ward, where they would undertake a Poor Law Reform tour, travelling by horse and cart and preaching from village greens. Part of Rupert’s agenda was that they would approach their route via Froxfield, because of its proximity to Bedales and Noel. She had already suggested a visit in a letter written several months earlier: ‘You ought to come down here in the Summer once, it is better then than in the Spring or Winter, and there are downs; perhaps you have been already? If not, get Jacques to invite you, or Lupton.’ Rupert responded on 2 April, ‘Yes I shall get Jacques to take me there once more (Petersfield I mean) and in the Summer, or Dudley and I will come in our carriage.’
Known as little Switzerland, the area of Froxfield Green, Steep and
Stonor Hill, with its wooded heights and beech hangers, rises some 500 feet above the western end of the Weald and the River Rother. Despite the steep nature of Stonor Hill, the stage coaches from Petersfield to Winchester and Alton crawled their way up the face of the slope, tacking patiently across it before the route was replaced with a zigzag road in the 1820s. Brooke had been to the area in June 1909, writing to Noel Olivier from his uncle’s house at Godalming:
I shall go to Froxfield, Petersfield (address) on Thursday, talk to Jacques, meet Badley (perhaps, see Bedales, you by chance in the distance, or not) – and go back to London at six that evening … and if, if, there’s anything more to be said, a letter here by tomorrow’s first post, or to Froxfield, Petersfield (which I reach at noon) would find me. So if I even shan’t see Bedales, you know where and how to stop me. Damn the rain!
This western tail-end of the North Downs had a resident writer in Edward Thomas, who, at the time of Brooke’s first visit to the area, was living at Berryfield Cottage with his wife Helen, moving in December 1909 to the Red Cottage (later the Red House), a William Morris-style dwelling commissioned by Old Bedalian and local furniture craftsman Geoffrey Lupton and built by Alfred Powell. Lupton’s own house and workshops were just a few yards to the west, with equally commanding southerly views over Petersfield towards the South Downs. Both the Red House and Geoffrey Lupton’s home next door were tucked in a far corner of Froxfield Green out on a limb in Cockshott Lane and almost in Steep, which began at the bottom of their gardens. Thomas wrote in a small room away from the house that looked ‘through trees to a magnificent road winding up and round and a coombe among beeches, and to the Downs 4 miles away south’. Three years later Thomas would contemplate incorporating the name
of the area into the pseudonym ‘Arthur Froxfield’, when planning a work of fiction about a Welsh household in London set in the 1890s.
In 1910 Rupert’s plan was to break the journey and stop over at Froxfield Green, where he hoped to see Noel and converse with Edward Thomas. He revealed the plot to Jacques Raverat:
Dudley and I are going to – or want to – go to Petersfield before we start off in our cart: in, that is, about ten days from now. It is enormously unfortunate that you’ll not be there. For I, of course, daren’t face Bedale’s without you. But all, almost, we want to do is to see the gorgeous Noel and talk with the tired Thomas. Thomas himself has a wife and babes, so we should not bother him as a host, I suppose. But what of Lupton? You know the world, and him, and us. Would it be possible for me to suggest that he gave us a bed (or an outhouse) and, if necessary, had Noel to tea … or is he too quiet-loving, and does he hate us quick-tongued urbane people whom you have brought there too much? Tell me these things. For if it would be at all possible, I should like Dudley to see Life on a Hill, as well as Thomas. Is, if all’s well, Lupton’s address just Froxfield, Petersfield?
Despite Rupert’s enthusiasm for the adventure, Noel was typically cautious.
I cannot be sure about seeing you, but as Petersfield – its surroundings –
are
pleasant and as there is Thomas who you want to see, and also Lumpit, who provides such good teas, both of them live on a hill nearby, your efforts in reaching this district will not have been wasted, even if I have to spend the day in bed. Perhaps you had better find out from the two above mentioned people, whether they will be there …
Conclusion
come with your
German friend by all means and camp in the cart in Lumpit’s garden; I will try and intimate to you there if I can come, and arrange where, when and how.
Brooke, now hopeful of a meeting with Noel, put pen to paper to Lupton and then Dudley Ward:
I’ve written to Lupton: yesterday. But, you know, he’s one of those splendid, dour, natural, stupid men; who hates my dialectical skill and conversational wit, and would not scruple brutally to say so, or kick me in the stomach with his hobnailed boots. Still I’ve written him a winning letter.
The letter won the day, despite Brooke’s jokily disparaging remarks about Lupton to Ward. ‘Lupton’s answered, and will be alone and can manage us. So all is well.’ The news was quickly passed on to Noel:
Lupton, in fact,
will
be there. And the German and I are going to stay with him … Well ‘as things are’ we shall leave London on Thursday and reach Petersfield 3.32 or 4.45 or some such ridiculous time. And will leave it again, no doubt, on Saturday morning … can you, if you can, come on a walk or excursion on the Thursday or Friday, at any hour, and also to a meal? Or to one-developing-into-another? Or to which? I think, you know, you’d better make out, on the information I’ve given you, what can, may and shall be done and tell Lupton, or send a note to me up there.
Noel did get permission to join them for tea, bringing with her Mary Newberry, a close schoolfriend, who later married landscape painter Alick Riddell Sturrock, and lived to the ripe old age of ninety-three, dying in 1985. So Brooke and Dudley Ward stayed with Lupton,
among the furniture of the man who had studied under Ernest Grimson, and whom Nikolaus Pevsner called ‘the greatest English artist-craftsman’. Rupert’s mind, though, was more on Noel than on appreciating Lupton’s expertise in fashioning small pieces of timber. Other diversions were the captivating southerly views and Edward Thomas, whose wife Helen was heavily pregnant with their third child Myfanwy, born just one month after Brooke’s departure.
Eventually, Rupert and Dudley Ward set off on their tour, in a caravan borrowed from King’s colleagues Hugh and Steuart Wilson, with a horse called Guy pulling it to various destinations. Armed with assorted utensils from the Orchard, including a Primus stove and kettle, Ward and Brooke travelled the New Forest area for a fortnight, handing out leaflets and making speeches on village greens or in market places and encouraging debate. Posters proclaimed the travellers prior to their arrival at each venue. The Poole poster read: ‘Poole High Street, close to the free library. Principal speaker MR BROOKE. Questions invited. In support of proposals for Poor Law Reform. Sponsored by the NCPD.’ At Wareham, their spirits were temporarily dampened by the weather, which caused them to check into the Black Bear Hotel.
The hotel dates back to the early 1700s, the first mention of it occurring in 1722. Forty years later, the old hostelry was destroyed and the elegant inn where Rupert and Dudley were to stay was built. In their day, the ‘Emerald’ stage coach departed from the hotel for London six days a week, and the owners advertised good accommodation for motorists, cyclists and yachtsmen, the town being situated between the Rivers Frome and Piddle. The Romans were at Wareham for five centuries; St Aldhelm, the first bishop of the West Saxons, founded a nunnery on the banks of the Frome about 700
AD
. The Anglo-Saxons knew the town as Werham – the homestead by the weir -and fished its salmon-filled waters. Beorthric, the
King of the West Saxons, is buried there. By 876, the Vikings held the town, until they were beleaguered by King Alfred, while King Edward (the Martyr) was buried there 150 years later. In 1066, the town boasted a population of over a thousand, whose offspring years later were to side with William the Conqueror’s granddaughter over her brother Stephen in their tussle for the throne. As a personal thank-you, Stephen had the town razed to the ground. The town revived but Wareham’s next major fire in 1762 again destroyed a major part, including the Black Bear, with its 6-foot ursine character dominating the River Frome end of South Street. Local legend runs that ‘if the bear falls from the porch, the world will end’. In case of accidents and him subsequently getting the blame for the ensuing Armageddon, he is securely fastened by a collar and chain.