Forever England (20 page)

His fellowship eased the tension between Rupert and his mother as she felt he had at last achieved something worthwhile. His literary efforts were now centred on trying to find a home for his play. The Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, thought the theme hackneyed, and novelist and critic Gilbert Cannan gave it the thumbs down, although John Drinkwater guardedly admitted that it showed promise.

Rupert decided to heed the advice of Frances Cornford and other friends, that he should go abroad for a while, to clear his head and sort himself out; and so, having placated a mother riddled with condemnation for the scheme, he planned a journey abroad. Rupert had a sitting for photographs to be taken, but the session proved unsatisfactory, with the result that a second was set up with an American photographer based in Pimlico Square, Victoria, London. Sherril Schell was enthusiastic about photographing Brooke, who discussed the Russian Ballet, the London show
Hullo, Rag-Time!
and asked questions about America, while Schell noted that Rupert had narrowly escaped being snub-nosed, that this hair was a golden-brown
with sprinklings of red and that he had a well-shaped face that wore a spasmodic wistful expression. The twelfth and final shot, Schell admitted, was ‘a pose that he himself suggested, his face in profile showing his bare neck and shoulders. For this he stripped to the waist, revealing a torso that recalled the young Heroes.’ The photograph became widely known among his friends at Cambridge as ‘your favourite actress’.

He wrote of the sitting to Cathleen while staying as a house guest of Conservative politician George Wyndham at Clouds, his house in East Knoyle, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, the village in which Sir Christopher Wren was born. The imposing residence, with its fine commanding views to Salisbury Plain and across to Somerset and Dorset, had played host to several literary giants on 16 October 1910 when Henry James, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc attended Percy Wyndham’s golden wedding. George Wyndham, his son, succeeded him as ‘lord of the manor’ in 1911. At the time of Brooke’s weekend visit in April 1913, the estate boasted 3,000 sheep, nine full-time shepherds, an army of servants, a team of laundresses and stable workers and ten gardeners under Mr Brown, who supplemented the food supply for guests from the 3-acre kitchen garden. Brooke was clearly taken with George Wyndham’s secretary, as he mentions her later that summer, in a letter to Eddie Marsh from Ottawa: ‘The face (though not the name) of George Wyndham’s secretary dwells in my mind, tenderly guarded.’ Having spent some time in Germany, he would undoubtedly have talked to Fräulein Schneider (‘Bun’) during his stay, the godmother to Wyndham’s niece Cynthia Asquith, whom he had met since the celebration party in Marsh’s rooms and at a party given by Violet Asquith. Wyndham and Brooke discussed among other subjects, literature and poetry. One of George’s sisters, Pamela Tennant, was a regular writer of poetry and prose, several of her poems having been published in a
volume called
Windlestraw
, which contained verses written in 1908, ‘Flowers and Weeds: a Garden Sequence’.

One wonders if this could have been an inspiration for ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. Her poem begins, ‘Lilies and Pansies, and the Pink that grows / In grey-leaved clusters by the garden’s edge…’ and later refers to ‘… Poppies, hectic in their pride.’

Brooke uses a similar arrangement as part of the start of his poem:

Tennant writes of ‘Red Roses’ and ‘Meadow-sweet’, and Brooke of ‘An English unofficial rose’ and ‘Thrilling-sweet’. Both gardens are set at a river’s edge, and both describe the different atmospheres in them, by day and night. Tennant writes, ‘I know this garden at dawn’ and ‘When all the cobwebs drenched upon the lawn’, while Brooke has a ‘spectral dance before the dawn’, with ‘a hundred Vicars down the lawn’. Tennant knows her garden ‘when night’s sands have run, And yet no daylight shows upon the skies’, in Brooke’s garden ‘black and white, creep whispers through the grass all night’. They both eulogise over their respective meadows, Tennant confessing, ‘I love these meadows’, and Brooke writing of his ‘deep meadows’. Early birds, too, feature in both, the fifth verse of Tennant’s poem containing the line ‘Before the birds awake, before the sun’, Brooke’s ‘Old Vicarage’ using ‘grey heavens the first bird’s drowsy calls’. In her last verse Tennant writes of her garden ‘That it should be encompassed by no hedge’, while Brooke wrote, ‘Unkempt about those hedges blow’. Tennant has leaves ‘listening, waiting for the little breeze’, as there is no moment there ‘in the quiet trees’; Brooke,
however, longs to ‘hear the breeze sobbing in the little trees’. ‘Rout’, it must be agreed, is an unusual word to use in a poem about gardens, but it is found in both: in ‘Flowers and Weeds’ ‘our places in the motley rout’, and in ‘The Old Vicarage’ ‘The prim ecclesiastic rout’. In her revision of the poem, also in 1908, Tennant set her garden in the month of May: ‘the scent of May in flower round fields’; Brooke extolling the virtues of the same month: ‘How the May fields all golden show’. Is it pushing the proposed influence of Pamela Tennant’s poem too far to suggest that the cluster of words in the sixth verse might well have suggested, and been incorporated into, another of Brooke’s classic poems, ‘Dining-Room Tea’? Tennant writes of ‘flower-cups’, ‘the air a-stream’ and ‘glittering’, within three lines and, albeit in a different context, Brooke also uses within three lines ‘marble-cup’, ‘hung on the air, an amber stream’ and ‘glittering’. Both poems also refer to petals dropping.

At the time of writing her poem, Pamela was the wife of Sir Edward Tennant (later to become Lord Glenconner). In 1922 she married former Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey.

On the Saturday night of his weekend with George Wyndham at Clouds, Rupert wrote from his bed, to Cathleen:

Only weeks after Brooke’s visit on 9 June, George Wyndham died in Paris. Rupert wrote to Eddie Marsh from America: ‘But I was shocked last night to hear about Wyndham. It seemed abrupt.’ Even in November when he wrote to Marsh from Fiji, a fondness for the man he knew only briefly is clearly still there: ‘Talking of affairs at home (of which I think continually, to the exclusion of romance) there’s nice things in the
Cornhill
article on Wyndham. I wish he hadn’t died!’

Among the functions Rupert attended in London were the Ballets Russes performing
Les Sylphides
at Covent Garden, the Fabian Society debate with George Bernard Shaw and Hilaire Belloc, and Richard Strauss’s opera
Elektra
, conducted by Thomas Beecham. His favourite London show was
Hullo, Rag-Time!
, which had opened
at the Hippodrome in December; Brooke thoroughly embraced the new ‘ragtime’ craze, which the older generation saw as rather subversive and modern. Cathleen Nesbitt, who thought Brooke ‘such tremendous fun’, often accompanied him:

The revue had been devised by Max Pemberton and Albert de Courville with music by Louis Hirsch and additional songs by various songwriters including Irving Berlin. The cast comprised Bonita, Jamieson Dodds, Lew Hearn, Shirley Kellog, Gerald Kirby, Eric Roper, Maud Tiffany and Brooke’s favourite, Ethel Levey, with Hirsch conducting the Ragtime quintet. The show opened at London’s Hippodrome on 23 December 1912, and contained such songs as ‘How Do You Do Miss Ragtime’, ‘Hitchy Koo’, ‘You’re My Baby’, and two Irving Berlin songs, ‘Ragtime Soldier Man’ and ‘Snooky Ookums’. Brooke made countless references to the show, which enticed him back time and time again, in his letters to Cathleen Nesbitt: ‘I see we shall scarcely know
Hullo, Rag-Time!
when we see it again: for Ethel Levey has introduced “Waiting For The Robert E. Lee”, in her own version, and some new performers have appeared.’ In another missive, he bemoans the temporary demise of his favourite singer: ‘Ethel Levey is out of
Hullo, Rag-Time!
all this week – I expect you know. I thought it worthwhile preventing your disappointment, in case you didn’t know.’ It was another part of his life shared more with his new London friends than with the old guard of neo-pagans. In a letter to Ka he informed her that
the latest London news was: ‘A new American review (It’s funny to think that Rag-time perhaps means nothing to you).’

While
Hullo, Rag-Time!
was his favourite show, the Pink and Lily was his favourite watering hole. The pub sits high in the hills above Princes Risborough, just over 2 miles out of town on the Lacey Green-to-Hampden road and was discovered, presumably, during one of his frequent walking tours of the Chilterns or perhaps on his visits to John Masefield’s cottage. Rupert adored the Chilterns, frequently walking from Wendover to the Pink and Lily to take in the deep cool woods and the splendid north-westerly views over the Thames valley. The Chilterns form the central section of a great chalk belt that runs from the coast of Dorset to the Wash, the hills running in a virtually straight line like vertebrae south-west to north-east, and over 50 miles in length. The range has its beginnings in Berkshire, before running into Oxfordshire and through Checkendon, Nettlebed and Stonor, then over the border into Buckinghamshire and eventually Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire; its chalk escarpment towns include Princes Risborough, Wendover, Tring and Markyate, up to Lilley Hoo, north-east of Luton. This is where the Chilterns are accepted as ending, although the hills continue north-east to Baldock and beyond. A section of the Icknield Way, a pre-Roman route, runs to the north of the Chilterns, for a majority of their course; it is the oldest known road in Britain, dating from the Bronze Age or earlier, although improved in parts by the Romans, and the route eventually runs up to Norfolk. Brooke wrote of the Icknield Way:

Rupert’s much-loved Pink and Lily made the transition from a private house around 1800, when Mr Pink, a butler from nearby Hampden House, moved there, followed a little later by Miss Lillie, a chambermaid from the same residence. The former employees of the Hampden family set up home together, and, although unmarried, had a son, Richard, who took his mother’s name and succeeded them in the hostelry, becoming the registered licensee there in 1833, when he amended the name ‘Lillie’ to ‘Lily’. By the time Rupert was frequenting the Pink and Lily, the landlord and landlady were Mr and Mrs Tom Wheatley, who had taken over the pub around 1900. Mrs Wheatley ran it until it was sold by auction on 5 September 1929, up until when the rent was £12 per annum.

Rupert frequented the hostelry many times with both Cathleen and Jacques Raverat. On one occasion when Brooke was at the Pink and Lily with Jacques he wrote the following lines: ‘Never came there to the Pink / Two men such as we, I think.’ The following couplet came from the mind of Raverat: ‘Never came there to the Lily / Two men quite so richly silly.’

Before Brooke continued:

After a lunch at the inn the pair left some food by the roadside with this note pinned to it:

The pub was the subject of a second piece of light-hearted verse by Brooke.