Forever England (16 page)

This stay at Bank, in April 1912, found him in a totally different mood to the lovestruck 22-year-old who had gone ‘dancing and leaping through the New Forest’ in 1909. His nervous breakdown following the jealousy and paranoia over Ka Cox’s dalliance with Henry Lamb, and his own subsequent affair with her, had left his nerves taut, his behaviour erratic and his state of mind irrational.
Their love-making in Germany resulted in Ka becoming pregnant with Brooke’s child, but a subsequent miscarriage circumvented any hurried talk of marriage plans; in any case, he continued to feel disenchanted with the relationship, seeing Ka as a ‘fallen woman’.

Ka was attempting to be philosophical about the situation, while her friends feared for her general well-being. The relationship between Rupert and Ka was to be awkward for some time while before the channels of communication became a little more open. The potential threat of extramarital parenthood with all its implications, although now averted, was clearly pushing him towards a second breakdown, causing him to escape to the solitude and happy memories of Beech Shade with the loyal James Strachey. On 6 April he wrote to Noel:

The black hut stood, until recent times, on a clearing near the house, and the holly-bush – which grew nearby – remained until it was taken down as late as the 1950s when the track was metalled. To Ka he wrote a more factual, conversational note.

Despite his apparent joy at the solitude that was now his, in reality he didn’t want to be left alone, and following James’s departure, his anxious entreaties to Bryn Olivier brought her to Bank – probably more out of concern for his state of mind than any other reason. Whether in a cry for help or a dramatic pose, he talked of suicide and of buying a revolver, apparently searching the shops at Brockenhurst for a suitable firearm, treading the pathway towards insanity one moment and relapsing into a sentimental lassitude the next. Almost as an automaton he wrote to Hugh Dalton:

Probably kept sane by the excellent home cooking of Mrs Primmer, he waxed lyrical about her culinary expertise in a letter from Beech Shade to Maynard Keynes: ‘I’m here, under the charge of Brynhild at present. Most charming. And about my intellectual level … Oh! Oh! Mrs Primmer’s five-course dinner is on the table – funny she should be the best cook in England. Brynhild, a little nervously, sends you her love.’ His black mood also came through in a letter to the poet James Elroy Flecker: ‘I galloped downhill for months and then took the abyss with a leap … nine days I lay without sleep or food. Monsters of the darkest Hell nibbled my soul.’

April also brought the gloomy news that he had failed to obtain his fellowship. Rupert later confided to Bryn, ‘I’d been infinitely wretched and ill, wretcheder than I’d thought possible. And then for a few days it all dropped away and – oh! – how lovely Bank was!’ During those days at Bank, he must have seen her as a lifeline in his hour of need, and felt that closeness that a patient in hospital so often does with their nurse.

‘The best cook in England’ outlived Brooke by thirty years and her husband by twenty, Mrs Primmer passing away in 1945 at Bridport, while Beech Shade and the rest of the hamlet of Gritnam nearly became a victim of the motor age when Royal Blue Coaches attempted to buy the clearing in which the handful of cottages stood, in order to demolish it and create a coach park. Fortunately the Gritnam Trust was formed which put paid to the plan, but Beech Shade and the adjoining cottage were pulled down and rebuilt in the late thirties after falling into the hands of the Forestry Commission. The new house bears the name of its predecessor and, although not dissimilar in style, is different - the best example of how Beech Shade looked during Brooke’s day is its near neighbour Woodbine Cottage.

In a rootless and agitated frame of mind Rupert returned briefly to Limpsfield Chart, before heading to the anonymity of London. Ka was now convinced that Rupert’s feelings for her were cooling. They met in Trafalgar Square, close to where he was staying at the National Liberal Club. She was in tears and he was comforting, but undoubtedly going through the motions of consoling her, as the beginnings of guilt gnawed at him. He escaped to Berlin to stay with Dudley Ward, who was about to marry his girlfriend Anne Marie Von der Planitz, on 11 May in Munich, but he did ask Ka to go and visit. No doubt her pragmatism detected a faint demurring in his suggestion. Nevertheless she agreed to join him at some point.

Near the station in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg, the Café des Westens was where Brooke took to sitting, reading and writing, well away from the wedding preparations, and leaving Dudley space to write his articles for
The Economist.
The café proved the unlikely setting for two major trains of thought for Rupert. First, a friend of Dudley’s told him a tale there. The action had allegedly taken place in Lithuania the previous year. A boy who had run away from there at the age of thirteen, returned as a man, unrecognised by his own family. They put him up for the night, and the daughter, encouraged by the parents, killed him for his money. When the truth was revealed, they were overcome with grief and remorse. Whether true or apocryphal, and the story is an old one, it was to sow the seed for his only play,
Lithuania
, which would be produced three and a half years later in America. The other work that germinated at the Café des Westens was the poem that eventually became ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. Initially entitled ‘Home’, it then became ‘Fragments of a Poem to be Entitled “The Sentimental Exile”’.

He was homesick not for England in general – after all, he had only just completed the circuitous route of Rugby, Rye, Limpsfield Chart, Bank, Limpsfield Chart, Rugby and London – but for Grantchester. In a letter to Ka on the train to Germany he admitted his unashamed nostalgia for the Old Vicarage, as fragments and ideas for a poem were clearly beginning to form themselves in his mind. ‘I fancy you may be, just now, in Grantchester. I envy you, frightfully. That river and the chestnuts come back to me a lot. Tea on the lawn. Just wire to me and we’ll spend the Summer there.’ At the Café des Westens his ideas became notes, the notes became couplets and the couplets began to form what was to become one of his two most famous and enduring poems. On its completion he dispatched it to the editor of the King’s magazine,
Basileon
, preceded by a telegram: ‘A masterpiece on its way.’