Forever England (14 page)
Authors: Mike Read
July saw the usual stream of visitors to the Old Vicarage, including Eddie Marsh, to whom Rupert wrote an exaggerated account of his primitive lifestyle of simple food, bathing, reading, talking and sleeping. The ‘simple’ lifestyle, though, did include beginning his dissertation and seeing in the Russian Ballet at Covent Garden performing
Scheherazade
.
During the summer of 1911, Virginia Stephen came to the Old Vicarage to spend five days with Rupert, and to revise her novel, begun in 1907 as
Melymbrosia
, and eventually published in 1915 as
The Voyage Out
. In between playing host to Virginia – the anticipation of her visiting having, by his own admission, made him a little nervous – he worked on his thesis and collection of poems.
Gwen Darwin captured the magic of the Grantchester era and even at the time wept for their impending and inevitable adulthood.
I wish one of us would write a ‘
Ballade
des beaux jours à
Grantchester’. I can’t bear to think of all these young, beautiful people getting old and tired and stiff in the joints. I don’t believe there is anything compensating in age and experience – we are at our very best and most livingest now – from now on the edge will go off our longings and the fierceness of our feelings and we shall no more swim in the Cam … and we shan’t mind much. I am still drunk with the feeling of Thursday afternoon. Do you know how one stops and sees them all sitting round – Rupert and Geoffrey and Jacques and Bryn and Noel – all so young and strong and keen and full of thought and desire, and one knows it will all be gone in twenty years and there will be nothing left. They will all be old and tired and perhaps resigned … If one of those afternoons could be written down, just as it was exactly,
it would be a poem – but I suppose a thoroughly
lived
poem can’t be written, only a partially lived one. Oh it is intolerable, this waste of beauty – it’s all there and nobody sees it but us and we can’t express it. We are none of us great enough to express a thing so simple and so large as last Thursday afternoon. I don’t believe in getting old.
In less than a year Rupert would capture those feelings in what would become one of the most endearing and enduring poems of the twentieth century.
As they, Brooke and Ka Cox, became closer, Brooke would often visit her home, Hook Hill Cottage just outside Woking in Surrey, with its panoramic vista of the North Downs to the Hog’s Back and Stag Hill – the latter to become the site for Guildford Cathedral. Although a cottage in name, it was a sizeable dwelling, built in 1910 by Horace Field, who was responsible for erecting several of the neighbouring houses; Field himself lived next door at South Hill. Ka’s father Henry Fisher-Cox, a wealthy stockbroker and a member of the Fabian Society, lived at Hook Hill House, which had been built in 1723 as a public house by the men working on the ladies’ prison at Knaphill; the Yew Tree that had given the inn its name still stands to this day. Following Ka’s mother’s early death her father remarried, and he and her stepmother Edith and Ka and her two sisters Margaret and Hester lived there, until he too died suddenly in 1905 when Ka was just eighteen, leaving her a financially independent young woman when she went up to Cambridge, with her own home on the lower slopes of the old family house.
Brooke increasingly turned to Ka in his troubled moments or when he needed a comforting shoulder, and by the second half of 1910, Ka having been supplanted in Jacques Raverat’s affections by Gwen Darwin, Rupert began to see the emotionally devastated
woman in a new light. The platonic relationship began very gradually to develop into something more romantic in Rupert’s mind, as her mature manner gave the volatile young poet a certain security and warmth – virtues that had been lacking in Noel. He wrote to Ka at Woking:
Oh! Why do you invite responsibilities? Are you a Cushion, or a Floor? Ignoble thought! But why does your face invite one to load weariness upon you? Why does your body appeal for an extra load of responsibilities? Why do your legs demand that one should plunge business affairs on them? Won’t you manage my committees? Will you take my soul over entire for me? Won’t you write my poems? … Ka, what can I give you? The world? A slight matter.
He also went down to Woking in person to ask her to join an imminent summer camp in Devon, having already persuaded Virginia Stephen. Being worn down a little by Noel’s continual rejections, he began to lean more towards Ka, with her down-to-earth, straight-forward manner. His confidence, though, in her feelings towards him would be shattered by the events at Lulworth Cove at the tail-end of 1911 and the New Year of 1912.
The Chaplain at King’s had put a young Swedish student, Estrid Linder, in touch with Brooke, suggesting that he help her with the colloquial English she needed for her translation of Swedish plays. The assistance turned out to be reciprocal, as she was to introduce him to, and help translate, the plays of Strindberg, which he came to adore.
Another positive meeting during the summer was with the publisher Frank Sidgwick, who was sufficiently impressed with Rupert’s poems to agree to publication. The deal was to be 15 per cent for the publisher, with the author bearing the printing costs, which would
amount to a little under £10, for 500 copies. Brooke’s mother, rather decently, footed the bill, but there would be a small difference of opinion between Sidgwick and Brooke over some of the contents. As Rupert pointed out to Ka, he drove himself hard to achieve the desired result: ‘I’ve been working for ten days alone at this beastly poetry. Working at poetry isn’t like reading hard. It doesn’t just tire and exhaust you. The only effect is that your nerves and your brain go … I had reached the lowest depths possible to man.’
At the end of August 1911 Rupert and several of his friends, including Justin Brooke, Oscar Eckhardt, James Strachey, Geoffrey and Maynard Keynes, Maitland Radford, Daphne, Bryn and Noel Olivier, Gerald Shove and others set up camp in a meadow at Clifford Bridge, Devon, on the banks of the River Teign. Ka Cox and Virginia Stephen joined them later. In fact, they turned up to find no welcoming party, as the others had gone to Crediton, leaving them only mouldy fruit pie for supper. One of the party, Paul Montague (known as Pauly), a zoologist and accomplished musician, had suggested they all go over to his parents at Crediton some 10 miles to the north-east for afternoon tea, and the whole crowd of them descended on the residence of Colonel and Mrs Montague.
The Montagues’ home, Penton (formerly Panton or Painton), a Georgian stucco house with superb south-eastern views over the town, had its origins in a dwelling owned by John Burrington in 1685, the property becoming the area’s first Bluecoat School from 1804 to 1854. In 1860, Penton was rebuilt and enlarged by the Reverend George Porter, the property including parcels of land with the intriguing names of Three Cornered Close, Lame John’s Field, Barn Close and Shooting Close. In 1878, Pauly Montague’s grandfather Arthur purchased the estate, which passed to his son Leopold in 1887. A Justice of the Peace, Leopold rose to the rank of colonel; he also wrote plays which were performed in the double drawing-room,
one end serving as a stage, and was a revered writer of Victorian farce. Colonel Montague was not at home when the Clifford Bridge campers arrived at Penton, but Mrs Montague received them and provided them with tea in the dining-room. It was this occasion that inspired Rupert Brooke to write ‘Dining-Room Tea’ – one of his finest poems – where he, the observer, encapsulated a moment in time through the eyes of the writer. While the others are talking, laughing and eating, he takes a literary photograph, freezing a fleeting, but ultimately blissful, moment in his life – withdrawing to an objective plane before returning to the reality and normality of the situation. At the centrepiece of the poem were his feelings for Noel Olivier, and the security of a circle of friends who he loved, captured in a cameo that, ideally, he would have liked to have preserved for ever:
When you were there, and you, and you,
Happiness crowned the night; I too,
Laughing and looking, one of all,
I watched the quivering lamplight fall
On plate and flowers and pouring tea
And cup and cloth; and they and we
Flung all the dancing moments by
With jest and glitter. Lip and eye
Flashed on the glory, shone and cried,
Improvident, unmemoried;
And fitfully and like a flame
The light of laughter went and came.
Proud in their careless transience moved
The changing faces that I loved.
Till suddenly, and otherwhence,
I looked upon your innocence.
For lifted clear and still and strange
From the dark woven flow of change
Under a vast and starless sky
I saw the immortal moment lie.
One instant I, an instant, knew
As God knows all. And it and you
I, above Time, oh, blind! could see
In witless immortality.
I saw the marble cup; the tea,
Hung on the air, an amber stream;
I saw the fire’s unglittering gleam,
The painted flame, the frozen smoke.
No more the flooding lamplight broke
On flying eyes and lips and hair;
But lay, but slept unbroken there,
On stiller flesh, and body breathless,
And lips and laughter stayed and deathless,
And words on which no silence grew.
Light was more alive than you.
For suddenly, and otherwhence,
I looked on your magnificence.
I saw the stillness and the light,
And you, august, immortal, white,
Holy and strange; and every glint
Posture and jest and thought and tint
Freed from the mask of transiency,
Triumphant in eternity,
Immote, immortal.
Dazed at length
Human eyes grew, mortal strength
Wearied; and Time began to creep.
Change closed about me like a sleep.
Light glinted on the eyes I loved.
The cup was filled. The bodies moved.
The drifting petal came to ground.
The laughter chimed its perfect round.
The broken syllable was ended.
And I, so certain and so friended,
How could I cloud, or how distress,
The heaven of your unconsciousness?
Or shake at Time’s sufficient spell,
Stammering of lights unutterable?
The eternal holiness of you,
The timeless end, you never knew,
The peace that lay, the light that shone.
You never knew that I had gone
A million miles away, and stayed
A million years. The laughter played
Unbroken round me; and the jest
Flashed on. And we that knew the best
Down wonderful hours grew happier yet.
I sang at heart, and talked, and ate,
And lived from laugh to laugh, I too,
When you were there, and you, and you.
The paving stones, laid by Napoleonic prisoners of war a century before, still lead up to the house, dappled by the shade from the magnificent beech trees high above Crediton. The postal facilities at Clifford Bridge being nonexistent, it has been deemed over the
years most likely that Brooke posted his package of poems to publisher Frank Sidgwick from Crediton, thereby dating the ‘Dining Room Tea’ episode as 30 August
ex silentio
. They proved to be the only collection of his poems he saw published in his lifetime.
In the evening at Penton, Miss Montague suggested they all went to Crediton Fair, where a version of the popular drama
The Lyons Mail
was to be performed. The party took up the entire front row at a shilling a ticket, before moving on to the fair, where they saw a girl who looked uncannily like Ka Cox – who at that moment was making her way with Virginia to the Clifford Bridge camp. Pauly Montague’s sister Ruth, who was present at the tea, recalled:
[I]n return for tea my Mother and I were invited to spend the day at the camp at Clifford Bridge – she rode her bicycle and I my pony – returning in the dark. As I was young Rupert and Justin decided that a ball game was the best way to entertain me. I remember an enormous meal of stew cooked by my brother Paul, in which someone discovered a button. Afterwards we watched Rupert looking very beautiful swimming up and down in the river.
Ruth was later befriended by Ka Cox while at the Slade School of Art, and Justin Brooke would propose to her but withdraw the offer after she decided she needed time to think about it. She married another, becoming Mrs Pickwoad, and surviving her brother Paul (who was killed in the First World War) by some seventy-odd years, passing away in the late 1980s at the age of ninety.
Today, the Beeches is much as it was in 1911, apart from having being divided in two by Maurice Webber in the mid-1950s; the dining-room is intact, complete with its fireplace – and the alabaster Buddhas, squatting on the mantelpiece in the old picture, still preside over meal times.
Not everyone was a lover of the principles of Bedalian-style expeditions. James Strachey disappeared, to join his brother Lytton at nearby Becky Falls, after one night huddled in a blanket, sitting up especially to see the sun rise in an attempt to get into the mood of the camp. Rupert wrote the following couplet allegedly about him, although Noel Olivier felt it was written about Gerald Shove – either way it demonstrates that not all were willing or natural neo-pagans: ‘In the late evening he was out of place / And utterly irrelevant at dawn.’