Forever England (31 page)
Authors: Mike Read
The day planned for the unveiling of a medallion of Brooke in Rugby chapel was 28 March 1919. The relief for the plaque had been undertaken by the sculptor Havard Thomas, working to the profile of Rupert taken by the photographer Sherril Schell, with the lettering cut by Eric Gill. The wording included the words from ‘The Soldier’. The Abercrombies came, Denis Browne’s mother, Geoffrey Keynes, Wilfred Gibson, Walter de la Mare, and the sister of Cleg Kelly, who had also been killed. Brooke’s company commander, Major-General Sir Bernard Freyburg, KCB, VC, DSO, attended and Rupert’s old Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton, unveiled the medallion and made a speech: ‘After four and a half years of war we have come together here in Rugby School chapel. The time is a time of Armistice – an armistice which may yet lead us onwards into the paths of peace.’ He went on to talk specifically of Brooke: ‘Is it because he was a hero? There were thousands. Is it because he looked a hero? There were few. Is it because he had
genius? There were others. But Rupert Brooke held all three gifts of the gods in his hand.’ After the ceremony Mrs Brooke received many of the guests for tea at Bilton Road, playing hostess again the following day after a concert which included an Elegy for String Orchestra and Harp in C, dedicated to Rupert, by the late Cleg Kelly. The plaque had been paid for by subscription and the £30 over was given to the delighted W. H. Davies.
D. H. Lawrence was one of the beneficiaries of the memoir. ‘Queer to receive money from the dead: as it were out of the dark sky. I have great beliefs in the dead – in Rupert dead. He fights with me I know.’ Eddie Marsh offered Mrs Brooke half of the first royalty cheque, which she refused. The money was eventually used to purchase Augustus John’s portrait of W. H. Davies, who along with the likes of Arthur Symons and George Bernard Shaw, had sat for John during the war. The portrait, another Brooke legacy of a sort, was presented to the National Portrait Gallery by Eddie.
By 1920, Mrs Brooke had approved a more permanent covering for Rupert’s grave. The loose stones were replaced by a slab of Pentelican marble. It was transported to Skyros under the supervision of Stanley Casson, the author of
Hellenic Studies
, five years to the month after Brooke’s death. Casson noted that, ‘The wooden crosses still stood undisturbed and intact. The stones near the grave were as when they were first placed there.’ It took three weeks to land and erect the marble slabs, as the stonemasons and local inhabitants had to cut a path to the grave, the nearest village being 15 miles away. Some of the shepherds in whose hut Casson stayed had witnessed Brooke’s burial at the spot that Casson referred to as lying ‘in a deserted valley at the deserted end of the island’. There was another grave down by the shoreline, where Brooke’s coffin had been landed, thought by the locals to be that of a Roman woman. Casson noted that the whole area in the vicinity of the grave was full
of ‘pale blue anemones, orchids, rock hyacinths, russet fritillaries, wild thyme, mint and wild olives’. One of the monks of the Monastery of St George, to which the land belonged, officiated in the consecration of the new tomb.
During the summer of 1921, Hugh Dalton had a vivid dream of Brooke. ‘Rupert came and talked to me … Rupert and I both knew that he was dead, killed in the war, but the conversation was quite matter of fact … Once in the course of our conversation he touched me and felt quite corporeal, but I had a shrinking feeling, which prevented me from voluntarily touching him …’ It had been Rupert’s poems that had been Dalton’s literary inspiration during the war.
Noel’s father Lord Olivier had a short-lived plan to publish the letters between Rupert and Margery Olivier to raise money to help her, now that she was unstable. She spent the rest of her life in a mental institution and outlived her three sisters, passing away in 1974.
It was not only Brooke’s poems that continued to arouse interest, but also his image. At Marlborough College in 1923–24, the teenage John Betjeman discovered the writings of Oscar Wilde, which led him to write to Wilde’s former lover and friend, Lord Alfred Douglas. Flattered by a letter from an admiring schoolboy, ‘Bosie’, as Douglas was known as, asked for a photograph. Thrilled to be on the receiving end of a communication from the infamous poet, the young Betjeman rushed down to the local photographer’s to have himself taken, ‘sideways-on and looking, I hoped, rather like the portrait of Rupert Brooke in that Sidgwick and Jackson edition – of Rupert Brooke with an open shirt’. By the time the future Poet Laureate went up to Oxford in 1926, Brooke’s
1914 and Other Poems
had sold in the region of 300,000 copies. Forty-four years later, just prior to the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson being ousted from 10 Downing Street, John Betjeman would write to his great friend Mary Wilson, the Prime Minster’s wife: ‘I have been slowly
reading all R. L. Stevenson’s poems. It is amazing how much Rupert Brooke owes to him.’
Wilfred Gibson wrote another poem about Brooke in 1927, which
The Observer
published that April, and it was included in an anthology containing the year’s best poetry.
Skyros – he spoke the name
With eager, boyish zest
And little guessed
His heart should come to rest
For evermore on that far island crest.
Skyros – I heard the name,
Nor ever thought ‘twould be Aught else to me,
Nor how unrestingly
My heart should haunt that far Aegean Sea.
Skyros – to me by day
An isle of marble white
Transfused by bright
Raptures of singing light
A beacon-fire of living song by night!
During the 1920s, a move was afoot to raise money to erect a statue on Skyros, carved by a great sculptor, in Rupert’s memory. It would be called ‘Youth’. It was initiated by a Belgian poet, and French writers Gide and Valéry were supportive, as was a ‘not entirely convinced’ Eddie Marsh. Again Mrs Brooke was concerned that it was going ahead
without her knowledge, but she ended her letter of inquisition to Eddie ‘with apologies and many thanks for all you have done for my boy’. Three months later in October 1930, she was taken ill. Mrs Brooke’s niece and her daughter Winifred motored up from Essex, arriving just before the end. Winifred was the last person to see her alive.
The nurse took us up to see her, but she was barely conscious. Later I slipped back on my own, and was sitting on the bed, when she opened her eyes and said quite clearly: ‘All my children have been to see me today.’ I don’t think she spoke again.
Despite her apparent softening towards Marsh before she died, the terms of her will transferred the position of literary executor from Marsh to four other trustees, although he would be allowed to keep Brooke’s manuscripts for his lifetime, the archive going to King’s on his death. The four trustees were Jack Sheppard, Dudley Ward, Geoffrey Keynes and Walter de la Mare. The quartet felt that Marsh still had a major role to play, but he handed Brooke’s manuscripts straight to King’s and four years later left all future editions to them.
During the first week of April 1931, the monument to the memory of Rupert Brooke was erected on Skyros with the Abercrombies in attendance. Lascelles’s wife Catherine remembered:
[W]e went with an Anglo/French/Dutch company of admirers, who had subscribed to the erection of a statue to Rupert, on the topmost peak of the island. Lascelles had been asked to give the English oration at the ceremony in the afternoon. When we’d landed from the ship in the morning, we had wandered away from the rest of the people and came upon the tomb on a hillside, with a few olive trees and these shepherds sitting round a fire, heating a huge cauldron of sheep’s milk. They gave us some to drink in two
handled vessels that hadn’t changed their shape since the days of Homer. One of them sprang to his feet and began to declaim a long poem, which we gathered was to Rupert’s memory, and the undying friendship of the English and the Greeks … At their evident request, my husband spoke some Milton. As we could not understand a word of our different languages, it did not matter, we were praising immortal poetry, and Rupert.
A commemorative book detailing and documenting the event appeared four years later, but was published in Greek only.
Lascelles Abercrombie’s earlier tribute to Rupert featured in his collection of poems published in 1930.
Beautiful life! As air delights to find
The white heat of a fire and to be flame,
The eager world throng’d into his glowing mind
And flame of burning beauty there became.
All things were turned to fire in him, and cast
The light of their transfiguring round his ways.
His secret gleamed upon us; where he past
He shone; he brought with him a golden place.
It was the purest fire of life that shone,
This angel brightness visiting our mould.
Life knew no way to make life lovelier, none;
But then came Death: ‘I know the way.
Behold!’
Writing between the wars, Wilfred Gibson remembered with affection
the time when so many literary greats had come together at his home the Old Nailshop, in Dymock, in his poem ‘The Golden Room’:
Do you remember that still summer evening
When, in the cosy cream-washed living-room
Of the Old Nailshop, we all talked and laughed –
Our neighbours from the Gallows, Catherine
And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;
Elinor and Robert Frost, living a while
At Little Iddens, who’d brought over with them
Helen and Edward Thomas? In the lamplight
We talked and laughed; but, for the most part, listened
While Robert Frost kept on and on and on,
In his slow New England fashion, for our delight,
Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,
And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes?
We sat there in the lamplight, while the day
Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers
Called over the low meadows, till the owls
Answered them from the elms, we sat and talked –
Now, a quick flash from Abercrombie; now,
A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas;
Now, a clear laughing word from Brooke; and then
Again Frost’s rich and ripe philosophy
That had the body and tang of good draught-cider,
And poured as clear a stream
’T’was in July
On nineteen-fourteen that we talked:
Then August brought the war, and scattered us.
Now, on the crest of an Aegean isle,
Brooke sleeps, and dreams of England: Thomas lies
’Neath Vimy Ridge, where he, among his fellows,
Died, just as life had touched his lips to a song.
And nigh as ruthlessly has life divided
Us who survive; for Abercrombie toils
In a Black Northern town, beneath the glower
Of hanging smoke; and in America
Frost farms once more; and, far from the Old Nailshop,
We sojourn by the Western Sea.
And yet,
Was it for nothing that the little room,
All golden in the lamplight, thrilled with golden
Laughter from the hearts of friends that summer night?
Darkness has fallen on it; and the shadow
May never more be lifted from the hearts
That went through those black years of war, and live
And still, wherever men and women gather
For talk and laughter on a summer night,
Shall not that lamp rekindle; and the room
Glow once again alive with light and laughter;
And, like a singing star in time’s abyss,
Burn golden-hearted through oblivion?
Ka Cox survived Mrs Brooke by three and a half years. During the war, she had worked hard with Serbian refugees in Corsica, before marrying naval officer and painter Will Arnold-Forster in 1918, moving to Cornwall in 1928 where she bore him a son, and dying at her home, Eagle’s Nest, Zennor, in 1934. Hook Heath Cottage, at Woking, where she and Brooke had often conducted their doomed relationship, had, at the time, featured a mullioned window on which many of the Bloomsbury group (the circle of friends who began to meet about 1905 at the Bloomsbury home of Virginia Woolf), Ka, Brooke and their circle had etched their signatures. The extraordinary piece of history was sadly destroyed during the 1970s, but one of the neighbouring houses, which belonged until 1914 to the Duke of Sutherland, still has a window with the names of Margaret, one of Ka’s sisters, and her father Henry Fisher-Cox and Christmas 1902 scratched clearly on the glass.
Early in 1936, almost twenty-one years after Rupert’s death, an unusual chain of events was sparked off by Dudley Ward. Then fifty years old, he was a CBE and had been an eminent member of the Treasury for many years. Unquestionably Rupert’s closest confidant in matters that required the utmost discretion, Ward was, it seems, entrusted with the poet’s darkest secret. Whether Rupert knew of the birth of a child to his beloved Taatamata Mamua or not is a matter of conjecture, as any correspondence relating to his knowledge of the matter has been either mislaid or destroyed. Late in 1935, the solid Ward, not given to flights of fancy, began to make serious enquiries as to a child who would have been born to Taatamata towards the end of 1915. He had a few leads to go on, although a letter confirming the existence of Brooke’s child came into Ward’s hands at some point. Why it took him twenty-one years to raise the question is uncertain; maybe other non-documented enquiries had proved fruitless. His quest led him to write a letter to Viscount
Hastings, who had owned a property on Moorea, an island to the north west of Tahiti. He asked him if any of his friends out in the South Seas could throw any light on the situation. Hastings thought that his friend Norman Hall, who had recently directed
Mutiny on the Bounty
, starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, might be able to help, as he had a wide circle of friends there. Hastings wrote to Hall on the last day of January 1936: