Authors: Mike Read
During his stay in Italy, Brooke journeyed to Pisa and Florence, where he stayed with two of his cousins, Margaret and Reeve, enjoying both the noisy spectacle of a street carnival and the awe-inspiring magnificence of the galleries. He read Oscar Wilde’s
De Profundis
, which Lucas had sent him, as requested; and he corresponded with, among others, his schoolfriend Geoffrey Keynes, to whom in a letter from the Villa dated 12 March 1905, he talked of the next school term:
[W]e shall pull the world to pieces again. You may think me impatient. But you see that is a thing one can only do while one is young, I take it. I have made an epigram on it. Before the age of twenty-five you pull the World to pieces: after twenty-five the World pulls you to pieces. And we are getting on for eighteen, you know!
Alfred left Rapallo first in order to get back to Rugby in time to start school, Rupert following in mid-March.
In March, before a planned holiday with his mother at Hastings, he went to stay with his two aunts in Bournemouth. Less than a century before, the area had been nothing but a desolate
and remote stretch of heathland, with not one house, other than a few fishing huts standing within 3 miles of what was to become the centre of the town – in the words of Thomas Hardy, ‘not a sod having been turned there since the time of the Caesars’. Rupert Brooke’s grandfather, the Reverend Richard England Brooke, Rector of Bath, retired to Bournemouth in 1895, by which time there were some 60,000 inhabitants – an unrivalled growth rate for a British seaside resort. He took a house called Grantchester Dene at 41 Littledown Road, where he lived with his two unmarried daughters, Harriet Elizabeth (Lizzie) and Frances May (Fanny), until his death on 27 March 1900, after which the two sisters kept the house on. Rupert had first come to stay regularly at Grantchester Dene as a boy during the 1890s. It was here in 1896 that Rupert first discovered the poems of Robert Browning, which were to kindle his interest in the crafting of words.
From Grantchester Dene he wrote to Geoffrey Keynes, mockingly chastising him for some near-the-knuckle schoolboy remark that Keynes had written on the envelope of a letter to Rupert:
For other matters – I only admire your device for proving so unconventional, but really you know! This is to say I am staying with two faded but religious aunts. They happened to be in when the post came and one of them, chancing on your letter, received quite a severe shock … it’s not as if she were young either … you really must be careful! … I haven’t as you may surmise much to do here. However, it is I think, less like hell than Italy is. Hell is a place where there are no English books!
He moved on to Southsea, some 40 or so miles east, where he wrote to local Rugby dramatist and contributor to
Punch
, Arthur
Eckersley, ‘The sun is about to undergo a partial eclipse on Wednesday, which appeals to my symbolic soul so much that I am thinking of writing a sonnet about it!’ He continued, ‘Fired by your example, I have begun a school novel,’ of which the letter includes a sample. Never completed, in fact barely started, it concluded: ‘Silence is older and more terrible than speech. Man speaks. God is silent. Sooner or later we shall all yield to silence…’
From Southsea Rupert joined his mother at the Palace Hotel in Hastings. The advent of the railways had afforded thousands of people the opportunity to get away from the industrial atmosphere of the towns and cities, and Hastings was an increasingly popular seaside resort. Some came to take the air, others came to live, resulting in its population rising from 3,175 in 1801 to almost 70,000 at the time of the Brookes’ stay more than 100 years later. The Palace Hotel was an imposing building just east of the pier, which had been constructed in two stages during the 1880s and 1890s, the façade displaying all the wrought-iron intricacy and architectural opulence of the late Victorian period. Rupert had sent his mother a note prior to his arrival, describing his hirsute appearance: ‘I haven’t had my hair cut since the end of February, and it’s simply grand now!’ The assumed impending maternal wrath caused him to add, ‘But I shall have it cut today. I daren’t face you as I am.’ During his stay at the Palace he read works by the English writer Walter Pater who published
Marius the Epicurean
in 1885 and
Imaginary Portrait
in 1887. Rupert also attempted to work on his projected poem, ‘The Bastille’. He recounted his lack of motivation in a letter to St John Lucas: ‘so far without producing a line. It is a most distressing task to have to write about a subject which neither interests nor inspires you. It lies heavily upon one like a nightmare.’
From the Palace Hotel Brooke also wrote to Geoffrey Keynes on 14 April, complaining in mock horror and drama:
The only tolerable things in Hastings are dinners at this Hotel. They are noble. I had some soup tonight that was tremulous with the tenseness of suppressed passion, and the entrees were odorous with the pale mystery of starlight … I write after dinner, by the way. The real reason of this absurd epistle is this – I wish to warn you. Be prepared. It is this … I am writing a Book. There will only be one copy. It will be inscribed in crimson ink on green paper. It will consist of thirteen small poems; each as beautiful, as perfect, as meaningless as a rose petal, or a dew drop. (These are not written however.) When the book is prepared I shall read it once a day for seven days. Then I shall burn the book: and die.
On 15 April Rupert returned to Rugby to the upper bench of the sixth form. He was still slaving away on ‘The Bastille’, and continuing to complain to Lucas about his lack of inspiration. He sent him twelve lines of other spontaneous verse: ‘I have evolved twelve lines, which I enclose; but they are, I know, of a sort it is merely ridiculous for me to write.’
Only the slow rain falling
Sobs through the silence of this bitter place.
(And in my heart returns one pale lost face
And the old voice calling, calling…)
Only the grey dawn breaking
Makes visible the long despair of rain.
(And from weariness of sleep I turn again
To the weariness of waking…)
Only the dark wave crying
Mocks ever the loneliness of hearts that yearn.
(Till from the weariness of Life at last I turn
To the wariness of dying…)
His entry for the previous year’s poetry prize, ‘The Pyramids’, had received a special runner-up award; now in 1905, not withstanding his tardiness in completing ‘The Bastille’, he took the first prize, winning poetry books by Christina Rossetti and Browning. Mrs Brooke had both poems privately bound at Overs, a leading Rugby printer, little realising that later in the century these early verses of her schoolboy son would be so sought after that they would eventually fetch many thousands of pounds a copy.
Rupert’s world was mainly confined to Rugby and almost entirely male-dominated. The exception, apart from his mother and the two aunts, was his cousin, Erica Cotterill, who lived with her parents, her mother’s brother Clement and Maud his wife, at Coombe Field, Harrison Road, in Godalming, Surrey. Uncle Clem was a teacher, writer and socialist campaigner. Rupert and Erica corresponded regularly on a range of topics that invariably included their views on books and plays. He had written to her from Rugby School in May 1904, affecting a self-effacing and world-weary attitude to his prize-winning poem ‘The Pyramids’: ‘It’s no use asking
me
about that poem, I have nothing to do with it … As a matter of fact I’ve disowned it long ago. It was a failure – nay more, it was a tragedy.’ He also told her that he felt George Bernard Shaw’s
Candida
to be the greatest play in the world. Brooke would soon share Shaw’s political convictions and be heavily influenced by a book left by his bedside at Coombe Field.
In addition to Keynes, another school contemporary with whom he was to remain friends throughout his life was Hugh Russell-Smith. Writing later about their schooldays in an obituary for Brooke for the school magazine
The Meteor,
in 1915, he said:
Rupert had an extraordinary vitality at school and afterwards, and it was a vitality that showed itself in a glorious enthusiasm and an almost boisterous sense of fun — qualities that are only loo rare in combination … I see Rupert singing at the very top of his voice, with a glorious disregard for tune, the evening hymn we used to have so often at Bigside Prayers … I see him tearing across the grass so as not to be late for Chapel. I generally think of him with a book.
Geoffrey Keynes observed,
Rupert, though a few months younger than I, was much wiser and more clever and he soon became the friend to whom I turned with complete confidence and admiration. I was at first unaware of the physical beauty for which he afterwards became so famous. He seemed somewhat overgrown, with cropped hair and rather bowed legs, which earned him the nickname ‘Bowles’ among his friends.
Speaking of himself, Brooke and Russell-Smith, Keynes also reflected,
We made up a cheerful trio, Brooke providing most of the entertainment with a flow of hilarious nonsense. Thus we climbed up the school in parallel until we found ourselves working in the same form, known as the Twenty, under a great classical scholar, Robert Whitelaw [Brooke’s godfather]. Brooke was at the top of the form and I was stationed firmly at the bottom.
Hugh Russell-Smith spent his summers at Watersgreen House, Watersgreen, Brockenhurst, in the New Forest, Hampshire, with
his parents, younger brother Denham and sister Elsie, and Brooke was a frequent visitor. He wrote to Hugh in September 1905, ‘I may see the fair Geoffrey before he has the happiness to be with you all at B’hurst … I shall probably disguise myself as Pimpo and visit you at B’hurst again…’ It was to prove one of the many parts of England with which he would fall in love and become a regular visitor. William Gilpin, in his book
Remarks on Forest Scenery
, wrote in 1791 that, ‘Brockenhurst is a pleasant forest-village, lying in a bottom, adorned with lawns, groves and rivulets, and surrounded on the higher ground by vast woods. From the churchyard an expanded view opens over the whole.’ It was little changed by Edwardian times.
At the beginning of the Michaelmas term, Rupert wrote from ‘an abyss of loneliness and dreariness’ to Lucas, complaining of an ‘excess of Classics’ and of being ‘rather weary of football and work’. He enclosed a new poem, ‘Vanitas’, and posted him another a little later: ‘I send you a sonnet I have just made; which seems to me to have some nice lines but to be quite incomplete as a whole.’
When on my night of life the Dawn shall break,
Scatt’ring the mists of dreams, the old sad gloom,
Before the terrible sunrise of the Tomb;
Shall I forget the dull memorial ache?
Shall not my tired heart, as a child, awake,
Filling the morn with music? nor retain
Aught of the sad notes of my former strain
But through that splendid day spring rise, and make
Beauty more beautiful, the dawn more fair?
Only – I fear me that I may not find
That brave smile that once lit my sunless air,
That bright swift eyes with purety there-behind,
Nor see the pale cloud of her tossing hair
Laugh and leap out along the desolate wind!
In between school, work and poetry, he borrowed an edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s
Morte D’Arthur
with Aubrey Beardsley illustrations from the school’s Temple reading room, edited a Liberal election paper, ‘The Rugby Elector’, and played numerous football matches. On the back flyleaf on his copy of the
Carmina
of Horace, which he was translating, he scribbled a few lines on Rugby football.
Our captain’s a Scotsman, what more need we say,
And the foe sometimes collar him once, but no more;
If you wish the best forward in Rugby to pace
He is fat and short-sighted and honest of face.
Neither Watson nor Beck could stand up before Peter,
Then our Kaffir no half could be pluckier or neater.
Brooke also jotted down an alternative phrase to ‘what more need we say’: ‘loves a good fray’.
As no Scotsman captained the School XV at this time, it seems likely that in this poem Brooke was referring to the School Field XV, whose captain was the Scottish half-back William Burt-Marshall. The Watson and Beck mentioned were Charles Challinor Watson, who went on to captain the School XV, and Charles Arthur Beck, a South African, from the Cape of Good Hope, both from other houses. Although there was no mention of him by name in the poem, Brooke played alongside Ronald William Poulton, who went on to play rugby for England from 1909 to 1914. The school
rugby report recorded that the 11st 2lbs centre three-quarter R. C. Brooke ‘tackles too high’.
His looks were beginning to create a stir:
A purple and terrific scandal has arisen around me … it began by Dean catching me one day and informing me that ‘a gentleman’ in another house had been trying to buy a photo of me … I secretly made enquiries and found it was one I knew of old – one with the form of a Greek God, the face of Hyacinthus, the mouth of Antinous, eyes like a sunset, a smile like dawn … it appears that the madman worships me at a pale distance…
Towards the end of March, Rupert, Hugh Russell-Smith and another schoolfriend developed an eye condition called opthalmia, which put paid to reading and writing for a couple of weeks. To save the strain on their eyes, they were read to, being treated to a new book by Hilaire Belloc. Geoffrey Keynes remembers it as being
Hills and the Sea
; as that particular book was not published until October of that year it is more likely that the book was
Esto Perpetua
. Brooke was disappointed in it – ‘it is not Belloc. I still miss that grave and fantastic irresponsibility; it is a clever book which might have been written by any of several men; I wanted one that only one could have written.’ Rupert’s eyes had still not healed enough for him to accompany his cousin Erica to see the play
Hippolytus
, so he resorted to developing the flirtation with his admirer at Rugby. ‘How much I am in earnest – or how much he is – I can’t really say. But it is spring.’ The relationship appeared to be carried out solely by letter.