Forever England (24 page)
Authors: Mike Read
He had written this in Mataiea, in the South Seas, as he had âRetrospect', during January 1914.
In your arms was still delight,
Quiet as a street at night;
And thoughts of you, I do remember,
Were green leaves in a darkened chamber,
Were dark clouds in a moonless sky.
Love, in you, went passing by,
Penetrative, remote, and rare,
Like a bird in the wide air,
And, as the bird, it left no trace
In the heaven of your face.
In your stupidity I found
The sweet hush after a sweet sound.
All about you was the light
That dims the greying end of night;
Desire was the unrisen sun,
Joy the day not yet begun,
With tree whispering to tree,
Without wind, quietly.
Wisdom slept within your hair,
And Long-Suffering was there,
And, in the flowing of your dress,
Undiscerning Tenderness.
And when you thought, it seemed to me,
Infinitely, and like the sea,
About the slight world you had known
Your vast unconsciousness was thrownâ¦
O haven without wave or tide!
Silence, in which all songs have died!
Holy book, where hearts are still!
And home at length under the hill!
O mother-quiet, breasts of peace,
Where love itself would faint and cease!
O finite deep I never knew,
I would come back, come back to you,
Find you, as a pool unstirred,
Kneel down by you, and never a word,
Lay my head, and nothing said,
In your hands, ungarlanded;
And a long watch you would keep;
And I should sleep, and I should sleep!
The metre of âRetrospect' closely followed that of Robert Louis Stevenson's âRequiem', a poem that had been written in the year of Brooke's birth. It also incorporated several ideas from the Stevenson poem:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me die.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me;
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
In Robert Bridges's 1915 anthology
The Spirit of Man
, he juxtaposes Brooke's âSoldier' and Stevenson's âRequiem', as the latter continues the sentiments of the former.
During June, prior to the publication of the third edition of
New Numbers
, Rupert went to stay at the Old Nailshop, Greenway, near Dymock, with Geraldine and Wilfred Gibson. From there he wrote to Russell Loines:
Dear Loines
You will have received from Wilfred Gibson a parcel of
New Numbers
, as you demanded. The thing is going pretty well: about 7800 of each number, which pays expenses very easily and leaves a good bit for division. It goes on selling steadily and I suppose it always will â I mean that back numbers will continue to go off. I hope so, for the more it's sold the more poetry and less reviews Abercrombie and Gibson can write, and the better for the worldâ¦
He continued, âI've stayed two days with Gibson. He is still a Heaven of delight. I'm going down there again in August', and was moved to comment on Abercrombie's residence: âYou didn't see his cottage did you? Only the Gibsons'? Abercrombie's is the most beautiful you can imagine: black-beamed and rose-covered. And a porch where one drinks great mugs of cider and looks at fields of poppies in the corn. A life that makes London a very foolish affairâ¦'
By the summer of 1914 the American poet Robert Frost had come to stay with the Abercrombies before taking Little Iddens at Leddington, a mile or two away. His friend Edward Thomas came to
the Dymock area for a while in the late summer, renting Oldfields, two meadows away from Frost. Brooke, of course, already knew Thomas, having stayed with him at Froxfield Green in Hampshire.
Having read D. H. Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers
while journeying back through the United States, Rupert had been urging Eddie Marsh to effect an introduction to the author, but Marsh wrote to him at the Old Nailshop admitting to having no luck in tracking him down. In London, though â where there was a reunion for the Cambridge Apostles at the Connaught Rooms, which Brooke attended, the assembled company including James Strachey, Maynard Keynes, G. E. Moore, Harry Norton (with whom he had travelled to Scotland) and Gerald Shove â he had an excellent day with D. H. Lawrence at last. He also went to 10 Downing Street, and had supper at the Savoy Hotel with, among others J. M. Barrie, who had been made a baronet the year before, George Bernard Shaw, Herbert Asquith, G. K. Chesterton, Mrs Patrick Campbell, W. B. Yeats, Marie Tempest, Eddie Marsh and Charles Ricketts, yet to write his
Recollections of Oscar Wilde
. A cinematographer with a biograph appeared in the room and proceeded to take a moving film of the assembled company. Could this historic piece of footage be sitting, unmarked, in somebody's archive?
Brooke then breakfasted with W. H. Davies and Siegfried Sassoon, a would-be poet a year older than himself, at Raymond Buildings. Sassoon recalled:
Davies departed, and I was alone with Rupert Brooke for about half an hour. Some way removed from me, he sat by a window serenely observing the trees of Gray's Inn Gardens. From time to time his eyes met mine with a clouded though direct regard. I was conscious that his even-toned voice was tolerant rather than communicative, and that his manner had become
gravely submissive to the continuing presence of strength. He may have been shy, but I am afraid he was also a little bored with me. We agreed that Davies was an excellent poet and a most likeable man.
They discussed the pros and cons of Kipling's poetry, and Sassoon fought shy of declaring his admiration for Rupert's work, especially âThe Old Vicarage, Grantchester'.
The Eumenides
was talked about, as Sassoon had seen the production in which Brooke had performed in his first term at Cambridge.
It came back to me vividly now. For the Herald had been such a striking figure that everybody in Cambridge had talked about him ⦠I was only one in the procession of people who were more interested in him than he was in them ⦠to him I was merely an amateur poet who had scarcely arrived at publication, strongly favoured with the philistinism of the hunting field. His intellectual development was years ahead of me, and his character was much more fully formed than mine ⦠I felt rather like a lower fifth form boy talking to the Head of the school! During that singular encounter it was his kindness, I think, which impressed me, and the almost meditative deliberation of his voice. His movements so restful, so controlled, and so unaffected. But beyond that was my assured perception that I was in the presence of one on whom had been conferred all the invisible attributes of a poet. To this his radiant good looks seemed subsidiary ⦠There is no need to explain that our one brief meeting had a quite unpredictable significanceâ¦
Encouraged as a poet by Eddie Marsh, and subsequently taking a three-year lease on his own rooms at Raymond Buildings, Sassoon
may have thought that he and Rupert would meet again. They did not, but history was to bind them together as two of the First World War poets whose names, along with those of Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, would still be the first on people's lips eighty years on. Perhaps Rupert's apparent indifference to Sassoon was because his mind was on matters of the heart. In an anguished letter to Jacques he wailed, âI must marry soon. And I can't find anyone to marry â oh, I suppose one could marry anyone; but, I mean, I can't decide whom to marry. It seems such an important step. Perhaps there's a better choice in Samoa.'
In July, Eddie Marsh took Rupert and Denis Browne to dine with the Duchess of Leeds, where he met the Duke of Wellington's daughter, Lady Eileen Wellesley. Later that evening, Rupert met Sir Ian Hamilton, who was soon to be his commander-in-chief, before Marsh, Browne and Rupert saw Eileen back to Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner, the building with the illustrious address of No. 1, London. He was immediately taken with Eileen, but then he was inclined to eulogise over the spiritual attributes he attached to the women he idealised. He had placed Noel on a pedestal, then Ka (briefly) and then Cathleen, all of whom were women who needed a normal relationship. Cathleen confessed:
[H]e had a great belief that I was very good, and I don't know why. I don't think I was good particularly, but that was one of the little icons he made, and he had to put it inside a body to worship. It was important to him I think, in a sense.
Of the three of them Cathleen probably understood him the best:
I think like all artists who have a neurotic strain, that he would always have needed â I knew in the South Seas that he'd had a
lovely girl there, and somewhere in Canada I always suspected there was a red-haired girl that he'd had an affair with. When he wrote I could sort of read between the lines â and I always felt that there might, although I didn't feel possessive about him then, I felt if I were married to him, I probably would and that I would probably suffer a great deal, because I thought there was no chance of his ever being a one woman man.
At the end of July, Brooke and D. H. Lawrence were waiting for Eddie at the Ship restaurant in London, when Marsh arrived to tell them that Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, had just succeeded in averting war with Germany. Europe had been in a dangerous state since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, who had triggered a time-bomb that would be the catalyst for millions of deaths.
The result was Austria declaring war on Serbia, followed by Austria and Germany declaring war on Russia. In a letter to Jacques Raverat, Rupert confided:
Everyone in the governing classes seems to think we shall be at war â¦
I
want Germany to smash Russia to fragments, and then France to break Germany. Instead of which I'm afraid Germany will badly smash France and then be wiped out by Russia. France and England are the only countries that ought to have any power. Prussia is a devil. And Russia means the end of Europe and any decency. I suppose the future is a Slav Empire, world-wide, despotic, and insaneâ¦
Also from Bilton Road, Rugby, he wrote of his love of his country to Eileen from his bed on Sunday 2 August 1914.
I'm a Warwickshire man. Don't talk to me of Dartmoor or Snowdon or the Thames or the Lakes. I know the
heart
of England. It has a hedgy, warm, bountiful, dimpled air. Baby fields run up and down the little hills and all the roads wriggle with pleasure. There's a spirit of rare homeliness about the houses and the countryside, earthy, uneccentric yet elusive, fresh, meadowy, gaily gentle. It is perpetually June in Warwickshire and always six o'clock of a warm afternoon ⦠Here the flowers smell of heaven; there are no such larks as ours, and no such nightingales ⦠In Warwickshire there are butterflies all the year round and a full moon every night, every man can sing âJohn Peel'. Shakespeare and I are Warwickshire yokels. What a county!
With typical perversity, Brooke follows this flowery prose with: âThis is nonsense; and I will grant you that Richmond Park is lovelier than all the Midlands and certainly better inhabited.' He ended, âEileen, there's something solid and real and wonderful about you, in a world of shadows. Do you know how real you are? The time with you is the only waking hours in a life of dreams. All that's another way of saying I adore you.' He also described a trip he and his brother Alfred took in Mrs Brooke's motor car to Hampden-in-Arden. Within a fortnight the England in which they had grown up would be changed for ever.
Rupert in the meantime had travelled to the north Norfolk coast, at the invitation of Frances and Francis Cornford, to Cley-next-the-Sea, where they were staying at Umtata, a house facing the 400 or so acres of Cley Marsh. Rupert was to stay at the cottage next door, Umgeni. Completing the row of unusually named dwellings was Umvolosi. The origins all three were names of ships of the Rennie Line, which sailed to Natal, called after towns and rivers in South
Africa â the names being Zulu in origin. The names arrived in Cley with a Captain Lewis, who had sailed with the fleet, and built and bought properties in the village. To Brooke, the house names seemed magical. He wrote to Frances from Rugby on 31 July, âI'm sure I shall love Umgeni. It sounds far more romantic than Fiji ⦠I'd be happy with anyone â except three or four persons, I feel you somehow aren't likely to have staying with you.' It is a reasonable assumption that one of these would be Lytton Strachey, who was still
persona non grata
with Brooke, who continued to nurse a grudge over the role he assumed Lytton had played in the Ka Cox/Henry Lamb affair at Lulworth, which had precipitated Rupert's nervous breakdown. Only recently, he had cut Strachey dead at a London theatre.
Three days later, Brooke sent his temporary address to Eddie Marsh: âI'm going (D. V.) on Tuesday to c/o E. M. Cornford, Umtata, Cley, Norfolk, for at least a week.' The day before he wrote to Marsh, Germany had declared war against France, having declared war against Russia the previous day. He prophetically included the following words in his letter to Marsh: âDo you have a Brussels-before-Waterloo feeling? That we'll all â or some â meet with other eyes in 1915?' He knew in his head, as did millions of others, that war was imminent. He was right. On the following day, Germany invaded Belgium, compelling Britain to declare war on Germany. On the same day, Rupert turned twenty-seven. Writing from Cley on Thursday 6 August, Rupert tried to placate Jacques Raverat, who had obviously reacted violently to the war.