Forever England (11 page)

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

Despite Rupert’s enthusiasm for the adventure, Noel was typically cautious.

Brooke, now hopeful of a meeting with Noel, put pen to paper to Lupton and then Dudley Ward:

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:

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.