Forever England (18 page)

The tennis lawn at Leylands where Rupert, a keen player, would have spent many hours, is still there, only now the hard court close to it is used in preference; and the chimney stack on the north-east corner of the house, on the left of the photograph, has been demolished, but otherwise the house is much the same at it was, apart from occasional additions, and a fire damage which affected a section of the building in 1907–8. The ha-ha which still faces the house across what was the tennis lawn no longer has the floral display that greeted the house’s occupants each morning with Alexander Pope’s words from ‘An Essay on Man’: ‘Hope springs eternal.’ There was obviously neither the space, nor a patient enough gardener, to continue with the rest of the quotation: ‘in the human breast; Man never is, but always to be blest.’ The house went out of the hands of Justin Brooke’s family after the First World War, when his father Arthur retired, and it was bought by people called Hicks before being purchased by a Commander Whitworth. Whitworth eventually sold it to Justin’s younger sister Aline (by then Arrowsmith-Brown) who moved back into her childhood home in her old age with her memories of the young poet Rupert Brooke and the days before the estate was split up in the 1930s.

Brooke’s second cousin, Winifred Kinsman, whose grandmother Lucy Hoare was his mother’s sister, also has a vivid recollection of Rupert, from the summer of 1912, even though she was not yet four years old:

Another port of call was the house of the poet and novelist John Masefield and his wife Constance, which they took jointly with their friend Isabel Fry. Rectory Farm at Great Hampden in the Chilterns was described by Masefield in 1909 as ‘a lovely little farm in Buckinghamshire, high up on a chalk hill surrounded by beechwoods and common land, a very fresh, pretty, but rather bare and cold country like most chalk hills’. Writing to Ka from there during a visit, Rupert wrote, ‘I sit in front of the cottage writing … Mr Masefield is inside, singing sea shanties to the baby [their son Lewis].’ Heaven knows what a two-year-old made of the ‘sea shanties’, as most of his nautical writings, like those in his 1902 collection,
Salt Water Ballads
, dealt with suffering and death, as in the last lines of ‘The Turn of the Tide’: ‘An’ the ship can have my blessing and the Lord can have my life / For it’s time I quit the deck and went aloft.’

The conversation between the two poets would probably have touched upon a problem with Masefield’s newly published tragedy,
The Widow in the Bye Street
, a lengthy work of almost 500 verses. A strike had resulted in 2,000 of the 3,000 copies printed being held up for several weeks at London docks, having arrived by sea from Edinburgh. The publishers were Sidgwick and Jackson, who had also published Brooke’s poems. It would appear that Rupert was initially slightly jealous of Masefield’s success, although the latter was his senior by almost a decade. Masefield, however, was never less than generous in his advice to Brooke and was happy to be counselled. Rupert asked him about a photographer called Murchisan, who wanted to take some photographs of him. Masefield
duly gave him his advice, which ended with the telling words, ‘Remember that if you become as famous as we all expect of you, he will be able to make a lot of money out of your portrait.’ He was certainly right in terms of fame and longevity, as Brooke’s likeness is still admired eighty-five years on.

At the end of August, Rupert was once again fraught with tension and in a state of collapse, when a fellow Apostle from Cambridge, Harry Norton, whisked him off to relax on a tour in Scotland. Among the places they stayed were the Annandale Arms Hotel at Moffat, near Galloway, and Sanquhar, in Dumfries, from where he wrote to Noel declaring his intentions once again of visiting Justin Brooke at Leylands and taking her to task over her admission to not loving him: ‘You lie, Noel. You may have persuaded yourself you don’t love me, or engineered yourself into not loving me, now. But you lie when you say you never did – Penshurst and Grantchester and a thousand times. I know you did and you know it. And you could.’ Noel replied:

Forever optimistic, Rupert agreed, but on meeting her at The Champions he realised it was all to no avail.

Avoiding Rugby, he visited Leonard and Virginia Woolf in London, and stayed at the National Liberal Club and then with Eddie Marsh at Raymond Buildings, where they hatched the idea of an anthology of verse, with contributions from contemporary poets. The seeds of the idea were sown on 12 September. While in bed there, Brooke hit upon a scheme of publishing a book of poetry that would include a selection of work from twelve different writers – six men and six women; he would write all the poems under pseudonyms. This led to Marsh and Brooke deciding they might just as well use the work of existing poets, and, fired by the idea, they invited Wilfred Gibson, John Drinkwater, Harold Monro and Arundel de Re (the latter two being editor and sub-editor of the
Poetry Review
) to 5 Raymond Buildings to discuss the plan, the following day, the consequence of which was to be the publication of
Georgian Poetry 1911–12
.

From his base at Raymond Buildings, Marsh introduced him to London society, Brooke becoming friendly with Asquith, the then Prime Minister, and his family, as well as meeting fellow writers Walter de la Mare, Drinkwater, Gibson and W. H. Davies, among others whose acquaintance he had already made including Henry James, John Masefield and W. B. Yeats.

Two days after conceiving the
Georgian Poets
scheme Brooke went to the first night of Shakespeare’s
The Winter’s Tale
, where he became rather taken with actress Cathleen Nesbitt, who was playing the part of Perdita; maybe it was possible to love again.

A week later actor/manager Henry Ainley took her to a supper party given by Eddie Marsh at Raymond Buildings, where she was eager to meet the writer Gilbert Cannan, for whom she had great admiration. She found Cannan uncommunicative, but did strike up conversation with Rupert.

The meeting culminated in Brooke asking her to lunch, and the two of them becoming closer, although gradually, as they had both recently emerged from unhappy love affairs – Rupert with Ka, and Cathleen with Henry Ainley. She understood from Brooke that he was feeling ‘neurotic, depressed and against love altogether’.

During September, Rupert was back seeking sanctuary under the chestnuts at Grantchester. ‘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 was almost a mouthing idiot.’ Rupert was to leave his beloved Old Vicarage later in 1912, and the days of the Grantchester summers would be over for ever.

The first book of
Georgian Poetry
was printed and ready to be published in December, with contributions from Brooke, Lascelles, Abercrombie, G. K. Chesterton, John Masefield and Wilfred Gibson. It would sell for 3s 6d.

The initial edition of
Georgian Poetry
included five of Brooke’s poems: ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, ‘Dust’, ‘The Fish’, ‘Dining-Room Tea’ and ‘Town and Country’.

The year 1912 also saw Brooke’s first poem being published in the United States, when ‘Second Best’ was included in Thomas Bird Mosher’s
Amphoria, A Collection of Prose and Verse Chosen by the Editor of Bibelot.

Early in October, Rupert was discussing more poetry, this time near Chichester. Between September and November 1912, 23-year-old John Middleton Murry, the editor of
Rhythm
, an avant-garde magazine of art literature and music, and his girlfriend of nine months, the 24-year-old New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield, rented Runcton Cottage at Runcton, West Sussex. A Queen Anne house, the dwelling was situated in the heart of a small hamlet that centred around the Manor and the Mill House, the latter being worked by the waters of Pagham Rife, which flowed from Vinnetrow, one of the dozen or so lakes to the north-east of the cluster of houses and past Runcton Cottage before emptying into the English Channel at Little Welbourne in Pagham harbour, 2 miles to the south. Brooke and Murry would walk for miles across the marshes, talking, discussing poetry and singing songs.

Rupert came to know Murry, a classical Oxford scholar, through
Rhythm
, which had first been mooted at Christmas 1910 by Murry and the painter J. D. Ferguson. The first issue appeared in June 1911. Murry’s Oxford chum Frederick Goodyear wrote the manifesto and the publication attracted many illustrious contributors. During its two-year existence, before transmogrifying into the
Blue Review
, its pages were graced by the works of Wilfred Gibson, W. H. Davies, Frank Swinnerton, Frank Harris, John Drinkwater, Duncan Grant, Brooke and dozens of others from the world of art, literature and music. Brooke visited Murry and Katherine Mansfield on more than one occasion while they were living at Runcton Cottage, once arriving with Eddie Marsh, having affected the initial introduction between Marsh and Murry and Frederick Goodyear.

Brooke was certainly at Runcton in early October 1912, writing a letter to Marsh on 4 October: ‘I’m going to Runcton Cottage tomorrow for the weekend … I suppose the Tigers [as he called them] won’t want me longer than till Monday.’ Rupert stayed for several days with Murry and Katherine Mansfield at the house that could barely be described as a cottage, considering its size. Here they talked and discussed the future of
Rhythm
, blissfully unaware of the fact that ‘Stephen Swift’, the publisher of the organ, was about to abscond, leaving a debt of £400, which Murry and Mansfield had to shoulder. During his stay at Runcton, Rupert shocked his host and hostess with a tale of an old woman who had sat motionless by her open window for so long that neighbours decided to force an entry, whereupon they discovered that all her lower half had been eaten by her cats! When Brooke left Runcton on Tuesday 8 October, he sent his love to ‘the Tigers when you see them’ in a letter to Eddie Marsh from Berlin the following month.