Authors: Mike Read
Of the girls in Rupert’s circle, his mother admitted:
I prefer Miss Cox, her wrists are very thick, and I don’t like the expression of her mouth, but she’s a sensible girl. I can’t understand what you all see in these Oliviers; they are pretty I suppose, but not at all clever, they’re shocking flirts and their manners are disgraceful.
Despite these shortcomings, Daphne co-founded the first Steiner School in England and Noel became an eminent physician.
Margery and Bryn Olivier, Dudley Ward and Bill Hubback joined Rupert on one particular walk along the cliffs to Portishead, where, looking out over the Severn Estuary, the company fell into conversation about the poet John Davidson, who had recently drowned himself in Cornwall at the age of fifty-one, and conjectured as to whether he had merely faked death to escape to another life elsewhere. Davidson’s dictum that life on the road to anywhere was preferable to a long-drawn-out downhill slide into old age appealed to the five friends. Discussing it during the walk back to
Clevedon, they made a pact to cast off their old lives at a certain point in the future and start afresh elsewhere, thereby denying any of their acquaintances the opportunity of watching them slip into senility. The plan was firmed up – to meet on 1 May 1933, the venue the dining-room, Basle station, where they would meet for breakfast. Back at the All Saints Vicarage they decided on others who would get the call and be an essential part of their plan; these included Godwin Baynes, Ka Cox and Jacques Raverat. Rupert wrote to the latter:
We are twenty-something. In 1920 we shall be thirty no-something. In 1930 we shall be forty no-something … still going to the last play reading the last book; passing through places we’ve been in for twenty years … having tea with each other’s wives; ‘working’ 10–5; taking a carefully organised holiday twice a year, with Ruskin, luggage and a family, to Florence, disapproving of rather wild young people … my dear Jacques, think of 1940, 50! … we shall become middle aged, tied with more and more ties, busier and busier, fussier and fussier; we shall become old, disinterested, peevishly or placidly old men; the world will fade to us … the idea, the splendour of this escape back into youth fascinated us … Will you join us? Will you, in twenty years, fling away your dingy wrappings of stale existence, and plunge into the unknown to taste Life anew? … it’s the greatest grandest offer of your life, or of ours … This is an offer. A damn serious and splendid offer … We’ll be children seventy years instead of seven.
Twenty-one years old when they made the Clevedon pact, Rupert would have been forty-five if he had made it to Basle station in 1933.
During the sojourn at Clevedon, the
English Review,
vol. III no. 2,
September 1909, published five of Brooke’s poems – ‘Blue Evening’, ‘Song of the Beasts’, ‘Sleeping Out’, ‘Full Moon’ and ‘Finding’.
From the candles and dumb shadows,
And the house where love had died,
I stole to the vast moonlight
And the whispering life outside.
But I found no lips of comfort,
No home in the moon’s light
(I, little and lone and frightened
In the unfriendly night),
And no meaning in the voices…
Far over the lands, and through
The dark, beyond the ocean,
I willed to think of
you
!
For I knew, had you been with me
I’d have known the words of night,
Found peace of heart, gone gladly
In comfort of that light.
Oh! The wind with soft beguiling
Would have stolen my thought away,
And the night, subtly smiling,
Came by the silver way;
And the moon came down and danced to me,
And her robe was white and flying;
And trees bent their heads to me
Mysteriously crying;
And dead voices wept around me;
And dead soft fingers thrilled;
And the little gods whispered …
But ever
Desperately I willed;
Till all grew soft and far
And silent…
And suddenly
I found you white and radiant,
Sleeping quietly,
Far out through the tides of darkness,
And there in that great light
Was alone no more, nor fearful;
For there, in the homely night,
Was no thought else that mattered,
And nothing else was true,
But the whole fire of moonlight,
And a white dream of you.
Of ‘Blue Evening’, the American George Edward Woodberry, who would later write the preface for Brooke’s first ever book of
Collected Poems
, was moved to comment:
It is original and complete. In its whispering embraces of sense, in the terror of seizure of the spirit, in the tranquil euthanasia of the end by the touch of speechless beauty, it seems to me a true symbol of life whole and entire. It is beautiful in language and feeling, with an extraordinary clarity and rise of power; and above all, though rare in experience, it is real.
My restless blood now lies a-quiver,
Knowing that always, exquisitely,
This April twilight on the river
Stirs anguish in the heart of me.
For the fast world in that rare glimmer
Puts on the witchery of a dream,
The straight grey buildings, richly dimmer,
The fiery windows, and the stream
With willows leaning quietly over,
The still ecstatic fading skies…
And all these, like a waiting lover,
Murmur and gleam, lift lustrous eyes,
Drift close to me, and sideways bending
Whisper delicious words.
But I
Stretch terrible hands, uncomprehending,
Shaken with love; and laugh; and cry.
My agony made the willows quiver;
I heard the knocking of my heart
Die loudly down the windless river,
I heard the pale skies fall apart,
And the shrill stars’ unmeaning laughter,
And my voice with the vocal trees
Weeping. And hatred followed after,
Shrilling madly down the breeze.
In peace from the wild heart of clamour,
A flower in moonlight, she was there,
Was rippling down white ways of glamour
Quietly laid on wave and air.
Her passing left no leaf a-quiver.
Pale flowers wreathed her white, white brows.
Her feet were silence on the river;
And ‘Hush!’ she said, between the boughs.
While at Clevedon, Rupert discussed his love for Noel with her sister Margery, who later touched on the subject in a letter to him: ‘Do be sensible! … she is so young … You are so young.’ She also informed him that women shouldn’t marry before twenty-six or twenty-seven, that Rupert was to be shut out of Noel’s existence and warned him, ‘if you bring this great terrible, terrible, all absorbing thing into Noel’s life now … it will stop her intellectual development’. Margery was soon to begin suffering from delusions, during which she would invariably imagine every young man she met to be in love with her. Sadly she became increasingly unmanageable, and was eventually, in 1922, committed to an institution.
The Vicarage in Coleridge Road has been less affected by the ravages of time, although the tennis lawn on which Brooke and his friends played in the summer of 1909 has reverted to its natural state, and the only plans drawn up today are those for the Sunday sermon.
B
EFORE RETURNING TO
Cambridge, Brooke called in at School Field. While there he made Fabian plans with Hugh Dalton, to whom he indicated a place on the wall in the Poet’s Corner of the Rugby Chapel: ‘There is a vacant space reserved for me between Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough.’ His prophecy would come true within a few short years.
More immediate plans included a visit to The Champions, the Oliviers’ home at Limpsfield Chart in Surrey – not somewhere he could be completely at ease, because of the unfulfilled relationship with Noel. He was there not at Noel’s invitation, but strangely at the behest of Margery – compensation of a sort for Brooke being
refused permission to take Noel to see
King Lear.
It was clear that most of the family, probably including Noel herself, felt that she was too young to be subjected to Rupert’s unswerving fixation. Their home was on the Surrey/Kent border; the Chart (as Limpsfield Chart is known) – Anglo-Saxon for stony ground – now belies its name with its woods and verdant setting, as indeed it already did by the time Sydney Olivier and his family settled there. Olivier, who held a high position on the staff of the South African Department, began to reconstruct the joined cottages at The Champions he had acquired in a wonderful position 600 feet above the Weald in 1891. His wife, Margaret Olivier, recalled, ‘We had already spent two summer holidays there in a tiny cottage near the common, a mile from Oxted station. The cottage we acquired later was a mile further on, near the Chart woods.’ The family found it enchanting, with its woods, commons, scent of the fir trees and stunning southerly views. The area had a magnetism that drew others to it, including the Peases (Edward Pease was the founding father of the Fabians), the literary Garnetts (Edward, Constance and David), and the Pye family, whose daughters Sybil (a bookbinder) and Ethel (a sculptress) would become close friends of Brooke. In 1905, H. G. Wells first came to the house, where he taught the Olivier girls to play croquet on the small and highly unsuitable lawn; another visitor, Prince Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, helped the girls to collect frogs, beetles and other creatures that fascinate children. George Bernard Shaw was also a regular at The Champions. The Oliviers extended the building in many directions, including building a long playroom for the girls in which they used to put on plays for, and with, their friends; George Bernard Shaw once politely sat through a performance of
The Admirable Bashful,
in which a twelve-year-old David Garnett portrayed the Zulu King, Cetewayo.
The Oliviers wholeheartedly and actively supported the local commons preservation society successfully fighting several right-of-way and enclosure battles with domineering landowners and the lord of the manor. The family often were abroad in Jamaica, and when in England Sydney was invariably based in London, occasionally going down to The Champions, which was looked after by a caretaker and her husband. The other occupant of the house was the Oliviers’ grey parrot – a gift from an African friend. Sydney Olivier embraced the Utopian principles of the Fabian Society when Fabianism was still in its infancy, helping to establish the movement for radical but passive social reform. It was Rupert becoming a young Fabian that led to that meeting with Sir Sydney Olivier and his daughters Margery and Noel at Ben Keeling’s supper party back on 10 May 1908.
The Champions was one of many venues that witnessed the cat-and-mouse tale of Rupert’s unrequited love for Noel, Rupert vacillating between open devotion and an assumed sang-froid, Noel wary and holding his frisky boyishness at arm’s length. While there, they walked in the garden and discussed the 1 May pact, which Rupert reminded her about weeks later:
Well do you remember as I drove away from The Champions in a strangely stuffy cab, weeping a little out of the left-hand window, I indistinctly cried through the cheering of the multitudes, ‘I shall write a letter about it.’ But I expect you never heard. Anyhow you foresaw it when we discussed – or rather when you asked questions among the flower pots, and I could not reply, because my mouth was full of biscuit, and my tongue burnt by the hot milk (which I dislike). By now, perhaps you have answered your own questions, or discovered new difficulties, or worked out the Scheme further than I.
In the middle of December, Rupert attended the Slade School of Art fancy dress ball, dressed, with a little help and advice from Gwen Darwin, as Shelley’s ‘West Wind’, before leaving England for a short holiday in Switzerland. From the Hotel Schweizerhof, at Lenzerheide, on Christmas Eve, he posted greetings to Noel: ‘I send a book you know because tomorrow is your and Jesus’ birthday … there are more trees than at Klosters: fewer people.’ On the way back, Rupert, Jacques and a couple of others stopped at what was their intended destination for 1933, sending a postcard to Ka – ‘We passed through Basle this morning while you slept. Ha, Ha!’ – before travelling to Paris, where Rupert fell ill, having eaten ‘green honey’ that disagreed with him. He fainted at the Louvre, and was so ill on returning to School Field that his face turned a bright orange and his tongue, mouth, throat and stomach were raw: ‘The skin peels off like bad paper from a rotten wall.’ From his sickbed, Brooke tidied up a poem that had been sketched out in Switzerland, having been inspired by a rough crossing from England to France. Initially titled ‘A Shakespearean Love Sonnet’, it became ‘A Channel Passage’, and was somewhat controversial because of the way it dealt with seasickness in such an overt way.
The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick
My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew
I must think hard of something, or be sick;
And could think hard of only one thing –
you
!
You, you alone could hold my fancy ever!
And with you memories come, sharp pain, and dole.
Now there’s a choice – heartache or tortured liver!
A sea-sick body, or a you-sick soul!
Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me,
Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw.
Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy,
The slobs and slobber of a last year’s woe.
And still the sick ship rolls. ‘Tis hard, I tell ye,
To choose ‘twixt love and nausea, heart and belly.
During January illness was plaguing the Brooke household. Rupert was still under the weather and his father beginning to suffer from acute neuralgia. Parker Brooke’s condition soon gave cause for alarm as his sight began to fail and he suffered increasingly from lapses of memory. A local doctor diagnosed a clot on the brain, an oculist found nothing wrong with his eyes, while a nerve specialist concurred with the doctor that there was something amiss in the brain. His condition was giving the family so much cause for concern that it looked certain that Rupert wouldn’t be able to participate in the Marlowe Society’s production of
Richard II,
or W. B. Yeats’s play,
The Land of Heart’s Desire.
Hugh Dalton took on Rupert’s Fabian work on the Minority Report.
A still feverish Brooke wrote another poem on 11 January.
I dreamt I was in love again
With the One Before the Last,
And smiled to greet the pleasant pain
Of that innocent young past.
But I jumped to feel how sharp had been
The pain when it did live,
How the faded dreams of Nineteen-ten
Were Hell in Nineteen-five.
The boy’s woe was keen and clear,
The boy’s love just as true,
And the One Before the Last, my dear,
Hurt quite as much as you.
*
Sickly I pondered how the lover
Wrongs the unanswering tomb,
And sentimentalizes over
What earned a better doom.
Gently he tombs the poor dim last time,
Strews pinkish dust above,
And sighs, ‘The dear dead boyish pastime!
But this – ah, God! – is Love!’
– Better oblivion hide dead true loves,
Better the night enfold,
Than man, to eke the praise of new loves,
Should lie about the old!
Oh! bitter thoughts I had in plenty.
But here’s the worst of it –
I shall forget, in Nineteen-twenty,
You ever hurt a bit!
For a while, it was thought that Rupert may have typhoid.
It turned out to be a false alarm, but he was undoubtedly susceptible to illness and appeared to have a weak immune system. Some forty-five years after his death, a nurse saw, among other photographs, a picture of Brooke. Without knowing who he was, she was moved to comment, ‘Well, that young man won’t see twenty-five, he’s tubercular.’
As Rupert’s condition improved, so his father’s deteriorated. Parker Brooke’s sight began to fail, and on 24 January he had a stroke. Rupert wrote to Dudley Ward from School Field: ‘Father has had a stroke. He is unconscious. We sit with him by turns. It is terrible. His face is twisted half out of recognition, and he lies gurgling and choking and fighting for life.’ Later that day his father died and a great sadness descended on the family. Rupert, still weak from his own illness, caught influenza at the funeral. There was still work to be done though, and fifty-four boys returning from the Christmas holidays. Rupert stepped into the breach and became Acting Housemaster, until the end of term. His Aunt Fanny came up from Bournemouth to lend a hand with the arrangements and Rupert’s friends sent him messages of condolence. He missed Grantchester, but soon warmed to his new role of pedagogue: ‘Being Housemaster is in a way pleasant. The boys are delightful; and I find I am an admirable schoolmaster … they remember I used to play for the School at various violent games, and respect me accordingly.’
In March he completed a poem begun in December:
When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world’s delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;
When your swift hair is quiet in death,
And through the lips corruption thrust
Has stilled the labour of my breath –
When we are dust, when we are dust! –
Not dead, not undesirous yet,
Still sentient, still unsatisfied,
We’ll ride the air, and shine, and flit,
Around the places where we died,
And dance as dust before the sun,
And light of foot, and unconfined,
Hurry from road to road, and run
About the errands of the wind.
And every mote, on earth or air,
Will speed and gleam, down later days,
And like a secret pilgrim fare
By eager and invisible ways,
Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,
Till, beyond thinking, out of view,
One mote of all the dust that’s I
Shall meet one atom that was you.
Then in some garden hushed from wind,
Warm in a sunset’s afterglow,
The lovers in the flowers will find
A sweet and strange unquiet grow
Upon the peace; and past desiring,
So high a beauty in the air,
And such a light, and such a quiring,
And such a radiant ecstasy there,
They’ll know not if it’s fire, or dew,
Or out of earth, or in the height,
Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,
Or two that pass, in light, to light,
Out of the garden, higher, higher…
But in that instant they shall learn
The shattering ecstasy of our fire,
And the weak passionless hearts will burn
And faint in that amazing glow,
Until the darkness close above;
And they will know – poor fools, they’ll know! –
One moment, what it is to love.
By the middle of the month he was, he informed Gwen Darwin, longing to return to Grantchester: ‘I shall be at the Orchard next term. Will you have a meal in the Meadows in May with me – i.e. honey under the Orchard apple-blossom?’ While he dreamed of his idyllic home near the Granta he was facing the practicalities of moving from School Field and finding another family home. After fifteen years there, leaving was a wrench for Mrs Brooke, who was praying that they wouldn’t be turned out overnight. Noel asked, ‘Will you have to go and build a house for your mother to live in and then write nonsense to support yourself and her? Or will she be independent and let you go back and play and be distinguished
in Cambridge?’ She was independent, taking a rather solid, plain-looking house at 24 Bilton Road, Rugby, which would be their new home and a part-time base for Rupert. On 27 March 1910, a few days before their departure from School Field, he sent these nostalgic words to Dudley Ward:
… Oh soon
The little white flowers whose names I never knew
Will wake at Cranborne. They’ve forgotten you
Robin, who ran the hedge a year ago
Runs still by Shaston. Does he remember? No
This year the ways of Fordingbridge won’t see
So meaty and so swift a poet as me
Mouthing undying lines. Down Lyndhurst way
The woods will rub along without us
Say,
Do you remember the motors on the down?
The stream we washed our feet in? Cranborne Town
By night? And the two Inns? The men we met?
The jolly things we said? The food we ate?
The last high-toast in shandy-gaff we drank?
And – certain people, under trees, at Bank?