Authors: Mike Read
I hope all goes well with you in Tahiti. The other day I met a Mr Dudley Ward, who had asked to meet me, as he had heard that I lived in Tahiti. He had been a great friend of Rupert Brooke and was up at Cambridge with him. He told me that when Rupert Brooke was in Tahiti he lived with a Tahitian girl called Taata Mata (the name is familiar to me, but I cannot remember the context, or whether I met her, or from whom I heard about her). Apparently she was the only woman that Rupert Brooke ever really cared about, and after he left Tahiti he was in doubt as to whether she might have been going to have a child by him or not. He had a strong desire to reproduce himself in the form of having a son.
When he went out to France he had a premonition that he might be killed and made Dudley Ward promise, that in the event of his death, Dudley Ward would let the girl know about it.
It was only after Rupert Brooke died that his poetry became famous and the press took him up as the hero-poet of the time, which disturbed the Brooke family, particularly his mother.
And for this reason Dudley Ward never fulfilled his promise, meaning to go out some day to the Islands himself; and in the meantime afraid that if he put about enquiries, the press would get hold of the story to the further discomfiture of R. B.’s mother, and with that added possibility of starting claims
by the Tahitian girl for money, or of a son being produced as Rupert Brooke’s, which might not really be his.
However his conscience seems to have been worrying him, and he asked me if I could do anything about it. I said I would try and I wondered if you would be so kind as to help.
Whether the Taata Mata who lived with Rupert Brooke is still traceable, I don’t know, but if by any chance she is still alive, I wondered if you would give the message to her, and if you could find out whether there is a Rupert Brooke child still living.
A certain discretion is advisable, as you will see…
Norman Hall responded on 16 March 1936:
Dear Hastings: –
Your letter has just (yesterday) reached me, having come by tramp steamer, the
Haraki
, which has brought about half of our monthly mail … About the Tahitian girl, Taata Mata: she is the Taata Mata who now lives on Moorea, near Maharepa. She is still a quite handsome woman and must have been a very attractive girl when Brooke knew her. I am certain that she is the one in question, for I used to hear Pare (Johnnie Gooding) of the Annex speak of Rupert Brooke when he stopped at the old Tiare Hotel. Johnnie was quite a youngster then but remembered Brooke well. He said they were all enchanted by him, particularly his mother, Lovaina, who was then the proprietress of the Tiare. Taata Mata was then a sort of protege of Lovaina’s and it was at the hotel, so Pare told me, that Brooke met her … Taata Mata is permanently settled on Moorea and rarely comes to Tahiti in these days. Therefore, as I am leaving for California by next week’s northbound steamer, I’m afraid
that I shan’t have an opportunity to see her before I go. If I should see her, you can count on my discretion and tact, and I shall, of course, speak of the matter to no one but herself … I greatly regret that I can’t settle the matter beyond all dispute by seeing Taata Mata. I have known her ever since I came to the island and I’m sure I could learn the truth in a ten minutes’ chat with her. But it is impossible for me to go to Moorea this week and, as I have said, I am leaving for S. E. a week from tomorrow. However, I will make enquiries of her as soon as I return, which may not be until about next November. Meanwhile, if you wish Taata Mata to be seen before this time, I suggest you write to Nordhoff about this. He would use the same discretion as myself but I don’t feel at liberty to ask him to see her, since you wrote to me in confidence … With my sincere regards for Lady Hastings and yourself.
Sincerely yours,
sgd. Norman Hall.
It is not known whether Norman Hall ever asked Taatamata, or indeed if he did, whether she preferred to leaye well alone. The Tahitians were adept at closing ranks from outsiders, but the silence could have come at any point along the line, either from a reticent Taatamata, Norman Hall or Viscount Hastings. Indeed if Dudley himself had been told of a child, he would undoubtedly have kept it under wraps. Besides, who was there to benefit from knowing? Ward was not the type of person to spread salacious gossip for the sake of it.
Norman Hall died in 1951, but Hall’s daughter Nancy was able to confirm that her mother had always known that Arlice Rapoto, a
close friend of the family, was the daughter of Brooke and Taatamata. A photograph taken in about 1950 shows an uncanny resemblance to Rupert. Arlice had a ten-year relationship with Serge Czerefkow, the estranged husband of the Grand Couterière, Madame Grès. Nancy’s mother told her, in confidence, who Arlice’s father was, but it wasn’t generally brought up in conversation, her friends clearly respecting her wishes for privacy, and perhaps not wanting to point up her illegitimacy. Arlice died some five or six years ago; sadly the Tahitian records of births and deaths are fairly non-existent and she apparently was childless, or so it is claimed…
With war looming at the end of the 1930s many turned to the poetry of the ’14–’18 conflict for inspiration and strength. Brooke was the idol of Rugby schoolboy John Gillespie Magee, who not only won the school poetry prize (as Brooke had done thirty-four years earlier) but was inspired to write a poem about him.
We laid him in a cool and shadowed grove
One evening, in the dreamy scent of time,
Where leaves were green, and whispered high above
A grave as humble as it was sublime;
There, dreaming in the fading deeps of light –
The hands that thrilled to touch a woman’s hair;
Brown eyes, that loved the Day, and looked on Night,
A soul that found at last its answered prayer…
There daylight, as a dust, slips through the trees,
And drifting, gilds the fern about his grave –
where even now, perhaps, the evening breeze
Steals slyly past the tomb of him who gave
New sight to blinded eyes; who sometimes wept –
A short time dearly loved; and after, – slept.
Magee’s poem ‘High Flight’ was to achieve lasting fame after he was killed in December 1941 when his Spitfire was in collision with an Airspeed Oxford 1,400 feet over Lincolnshire.
During the Second World War, two of Brooke’s sonnets were printed on illegal, bicycle-powered presses in German-occupied Holland. Dutch printers were forbidden to publish the work of British writers or poets during the conflict, but that did not stop them from producing limited editions of Shakespeare, Yeats, Auden, Emily Brontë, Rossetti and Brooke. The scarcity of paper was a serious problem, but the Dutch published secretly, flaunting their contempt for the Gestapo.
The spirit of Rupert Brooke was still very much alive during the Second World War. Cornish poet Charles Causley, who, like Brooke, also served in the Royal Navy, wrote these four verses at Grantchester:
Bank Holiday. A sky of guns. The river
Slopping black silver on the level stair.
A war-memorial that aims for ever
Its stopped, stone barrel on the enormous air.
A hoisted church, its cone of silence stilling
The conversations of the crow, the kite.
A coasting chimney-stack, advancing, filling
With smoking blossom the lean orchard light.
The verse, I am assured, has long ceased ticking
Though the immortal clock strikes ten to three,
The fencing wasp fights for its usual picking
And tongues of honey hang from every tree.
The swilling sea with its unvarying thunder
Searches the secret face of famous stone.
On the thrown wind blown words like hurt birds wander
That from the maimed, the murdered mouth have flown.
As late as 1947, the question of Rupert’s sexuality was brought up. Maurice Browne wrote to Eddie Marsh about a rumour in the States that Brooke was not only homosexual but had, in fact, died of syphilis. Marsh passed the letter on to Geoffrey Keynes, who could answer as both a longtime friend and eminent surgeon. Eddie himself scribbled a note that underlined ‘during all the years when I’ve known him I never saw the slightest reason for thinking that he had a “homosexual streak”.’ He admitted that he had not known him as a schoolboy, but if anything had occurred, as indeed it had, he had since outgrown his adolescent feelings. Even if there had been more to tell, Marsh, a trained civil servant, would have been even more proficient in closing ranks than the Tahitians. Actress Tallulah Bankhead claimed that she had seen love letters from Brooke to other men, but as she had been born in 1903, and therefore could not realistically claim to have seen them until the 1920s, at least, they would surely have manifested themselves over the years. Nevertheless some people still believe that he had homosexual inclinations. Wellington Cenotaph in New Zealand, which bears a line from ‘The Dead’ – ‘These laid the world away; poured out the red sweet wine of youth’, is included as part of the official lesbian/gay historical walk around Wellington. Walkers are informed that some of Brooke’s poems are self-hating love lyrics to men.
Catherine Abercrombie vividly recalled Brooke as late as the 1950s:
I have often been asked if Rupert was as good-looking and glamorous as was said. Certainly that, but with more beauty of expression and a radiance of youth, helped by his tawny colouring and his eager friendly ways. I remember him so well, when he came to say goodbye before going off on the disastrous Gallipoli expedition. There was a huge sloping field of poppies coming down to the edge of our garden. I can see him now, standing gazing absorbedly at them and saying to me: ‘I shall always remember that, always.’ He hadn’t really got over the Antwerp failure, when such a lot of men came back ill with dysentery, and he wasn’t really well enough to start off again. But he was so keen to throw himself into the thick of things and tried to tease my husband into joining him. Rupert went off in high spirits, but very pulled down in health, and open to any infection…
In 1993, the young bugler Malachi William Davey, who had sounded the Last Post at Brooke’s graveside on Skyros, died. He was the last of those present.
Brooke, like many young men in the Great War, was willing to lay down his life for his country and to fight against the nations that threatened the peace and stability of the world. In the words of Lieut. H. Reginald Freston in ‘The Gift’:
If his dust is one day lying in an unfamiliar land
(England, he went for you),
O England, sometimes think of him, of thousands only one,
In the dawning, or the noonday, or the setting of the sun,
(As once he thought of you).
I
N THE SPRING
of 1931 poets from many countries gathered on Skyros as the memorial to Brooke was unveiled. The bronze figure, fashioned by a Greek sculptor, was unveiled by the Greek Premier, M. Venezelos, and was erected through the efforts of the International Rupert Brooke Memorial Committee. Among those present were the British Minister in Greece, the Hon Patrick Ramsey, Rupert’s friend, the poet Lascelles Abercrombie, the Belgian author, Professor Louis Pier and the Belgian Professor, Paul Vauderborghet. Both the books about Brooke and Skyros feature the woodcut illustrations of a young lady called Phyllis Gardner. Until 2000, she appears as little more than a footnote in
Brooke’s life, but their brief romance remained a secret for ninety years.
In 1948, a leather case of papers formerly belonging to Irish Wolfhound breeder, painter and wood engraver, Phyllis Gardner was deposited with the British Library by her sister Delphis, with a caveat that the material was to remain sealed for fifty years. Having accepted the gift, the British Museum, of which the Library was then a part, were told that the material was of a ‘very intimate character’. The leather case contained a memoir written three years after Brooke’s death in 1915 and fifty letters.
Although they were de-reserved in 1998, the letters weren’t opened until 2000, to reveal an almost unknown relationship between Phyllis and Rupert.
The Museum Curators also discovered the ninety-page unpublished memoir from 1918. The daughter of eminent archaeologist Ernest Arthur Gardner, the 21-year-old first encountered Brooke on 11 November 1911 while having tea with her mother in the refreshment room at King’s Cross station. As Mrs Gardner pointed out his resemblance to a family friend, Phyllis was immediately captivated: ‘He had a mop of silky golden hair that he ran his fingers through … and his face appealed to me as being at once rather innocent and babyish and inspired with an almost fierce life and interest and keenness.’ She would later describe him as a ‘this strong and brilliant creature … this rushing whirlwind.’ An accomplished artist and still at art school, she sketched him on the train journey to Cambridge, admitting, ‘the more I drew him the better I liked him’. It was a friend who later identified him as King’s College student Rupert Brooke.
As we’ve already seen, following his emotional breakdown at Lulworth Cove, he had been making overtures to Ka Cox. During his recovery period in Cannes, he’d become so fixated with her that he wrote of his desire for her in their correspondence. There was also a
large part of him still very much infatuated with Noel Olivier, and he couldn’t help revealing his jealousy of former Bedalian, Ferenc Bekassy, who also had a passion for her. At the same time he was naively writing to Ka Cox about his feelings for yet another girl he knew.
There was more than a hint of a romance in that letter he wrote to Ka from Cannes in January 1912:
Oh, the most exciting. You know about the romance of my life. I know I told you because I remember how beastly you were about her. She went for tea day after day in St. John’s Wood, and I was always too sulky and too
schuchtern
to go. So it all ended you think. Ah! But you don’t know Phyllis(?)! Today I received through Sidgwick and Jackson, a letter.
Phyllis’s mother was trying to help her lovesick daughter with a little gentle matchmaking.
That June, Phyllis’s mother, Mary, invited Brooke to a lunch party at her club in London on the grounds that she had enjoyed his poetry and would like to meet him. Of course, the real reason behind the offer was her daughter’s increasing infatuation. ‘I could not get him out of my head,’ she wrote. ‘I felt as if I knew him well, wonderfully well, as if I had always known him. I felt that here was a person cut out on a colossal scale.’
Brooke, in return, seemed struck by her beauty and intrigued by her personality. After a meeting at his friend Eddie Marsh’s flat in London, in September 1912, he made a visit to the Gardner family home in Tadworth, Surrey. The young couple lay in hammocks under a row of elm trees and talked about their lives. Phyllis showed him her drawings, while Brooke read poetry to her. ‘His voice was such an exquisite instrument,’ wrote Phyllis in her memoir, ‘and the feeling for the poetry so exact.’
Brooke and Phyllis wrote many letters to one another, one of Rupert’s running:
Well, you strange Phyllis, what I had wanted to say was this; you are incredibly beautiful when you are naked and your wonderful hair is blowing about you … Fire runs through me, to think of it, you devil. I remember every inch of you lying there in that strange light.
Now I’m ensconced in Berlin, a hideous town but for me. Quiet – only two people I know here. I mean to work like anything for a month.
When shall I see you again? I’m leaving you at your direction to get the
Poetry Review
. But I copy out here ‘Beauty and Beauty’. I told you about it. I write it from memory, so it may not be quite the same as the printed version. But I wanted to give it to you.
You might send me out a few others of your verses.
In Berlin everybody’s hair is muddy brown. You’re a fine creature. It’s funny, that you should be blown together by the winds to be like that.
Write to me, tell me how you are and how London is. I shall write you a letter soon.
Goodbye, golden one.
With love,
Rupert
When Beauty and Beauty meet
All naked, fair to fair,
The earth is crying-sweet,
And scattering-bright the air,
Eddying, dizzying, closing round,
With soft and drunken laughter;
Veiling all that may befall
After … after…
Where Beauty and Beauty met,
Earth’s still a-tremble there,
And winds are scented yet,
And memory-soft the air,
Bosoming, folding glints of light,
And shreds of shadowy laughter:
Not the tears that fill the years
After … after…
Phyllis replied:
Bless you, I wanted you to write first and I’m glad you did. Thank you for the poem.
There is a saying that ‘every woman is at heart a savage’ – every man too I suppose. I love the poem. It has a way of ringing through one’s head. You’re a fine singer.
Write soon.
Phyllis
Rupert wrote to Francis Cornford at the end of September, ‘One can’t … I can’t be properly and permanently all right till I’m married. Marriage is the only thing. But, oh dear! One’s very reluctant
to go into it without love … the full business.’ Despite the revelation of their ‘acquaintanceship’, as Phyllis termed it, only one item of correspondence between them appeared in
The Letters of Rupert Brooke
, edited by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. It was written from Tahiti in March 1914, and began, ‘You may be dead … or married to a peer, or anything’. It also included general pleasantries, such as, ‘In any case I hope you’re flourishing, working hard and happy,’ and ending, ‘And may you be happy and prosperous,’ relationships with Cathleen Nesbitt and Taatamata having eliminated any previous feelings for the girl who’d fallen in love at first sight on King’s Cross station, almost two and a half years earlier. Phyllis said that she was so overcome by Rupert’s physical beauty and extraordinary presence, that he made her feel as if she had ‘stepped into some amazing fairy tale’. At Grantchester, she and Rupert went naked together into the river, Phyllis noting that, ‘He looked like a beautiful statue … and I could keep away from him no longer.’
Later that month, Brooke wrote to her from the Old Vicarage, telling her how beautiful she looked when she was naked:
Did you know what you were saying, child, when you said, ‘Why shouldn’t one be primitive, now?’ God it was a hard struggle in me, half against half, not to be. Sudden depths get moved – but it wouldn’t have done. It’s fine to be ‘primitive’ in a way: finer than to be merely a modern person. But there’s something finer yet – the best of each – beast and man.
After Brooke returned from Germany in the early summer of 1912, they met again at Marsh’s flat, in Grays Inn. After Brooke read Phyllis a new poem, ‘The Night Journey’, she confessed to having ‘a strange gripping of my heart … and the feel of him made my blood run fire.’ She later wrote, ‘“You don’t know how your touch
burns me,” I said; and for answer he rose up a little and put his arms round me.’ Phyllis’s diary fails to declare the level of intimacy, but she vividly recalled the electric light in the ceiling, the table by the window and the zebra skin on the floor. But chiefly she remembered the man of whom she was enamoured: ‘things in a sort of rainbow whirl … the chief part of the picture is himself, radiant, beautiful, at once pathetically helpless and full of a wild irresistible driving force.’ Phyllis didn’t remember how or when she left the flat, but she clearly displayed those tell-tale signs, because her mother asked her whether she had been in an accident. ‘No’ she replied.
‘Has R. been making love to you, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that,’ wrote Phyllis, ‘was all that was said.’ Making love then however was not taken to mean sexual intercourse.
The couple sometimes met at Eddie’s flat at Raymond Buildings, Brooke flattering her beautiful body – ‘just like a rather pretty boy’ – but by the end of 1912, Phyllis became concerned about his odd thought process. She was puzzled as why he thought that cranes were about to drop blocks of stone on the pedestrians below or that the bundles of straw under Chelsea Bridge, height markers for barges, were the scalps of evil-doers. Flights of fancy that would have been no stranger to his close friends, but Phyllis, completely in love with him, failed to see or understand the complexities of the man. When he travelled home to Rugby in December 1912, she clearly couldn’t bear to be parted from him – ‘My eyes were blinded with tears’. As she was pining though, she had no idea that Brooke had met actress Cathleen Nesbitt on 20 December at a gathering at Eddie Marsh’s flat. His feelings, romantic ideals and hormones were, as usual, in disarray, as he wrote to Eddie Marsh on Christmas Eve saying that he’d tidied up the flat, left the key, ‘and my heart all over the place,’ later declaring, ‘What else could
a young man say with his eyes full of sleep and his heart full of Cathleen?’ By the end of January he is taking steps to become better acquainted with her. With feminine intuition, Phyllis sensed that all was not well. In her memoir she wrote, ‘And now, not for the first time, a sickening fear came upon me … I knew that he had been drawn into a vortex of would-be original people, who to satisfy their own base natures had made inconstancy a principle.’
By February 1913, Brooke was not yet in a relationship with Cathleen Nesbitt and possibly going through the motions a little with Phyllis Gardner. One suspects that the basis of the ensuing argument was that he wanted sex while she wanted marriage. Phyllis believed life to consist of ‘some sort of striving after nobleness’, while perceiving his philosophy was ‘an opportunity for pleasure-seeking’. It had reached the point where the flattery had stopped and mild contempt had taken over. Meeting at Raymond Buildings, Brooke gave her the key, but she couldn’t turn the lock and gave it back to him. As it is with doors, there’s often a knack. Asking him why it opened so easily for him, he replied, ‘That’s because you’re a rotten female … all women are beasts! And they want a vote – but they’ll never get it!’ This, of course, was a pattern for Brooke; romantic in pursuit; offhand in retreat. She refused when Brooke suggested spending the whole night together, later recalling, ‘My heart sank within me … where was my castle in the air, where my visionary child?’
He wrote to her saying that there were two ways of living - the normal and wandering:
My dear, I’m a wanderer. If you are, too – if you’re satisfied with taking what you can get, and giving in or not as it happens - then we can give each other things. If, as I suspect, you are disposed to normality - then I shall harm and hurt you too much.
He was backing off … unless of course there was intercourse involved. She remained resolute: ‘I wish you wouldn’t accept hedonism with acquiescence,’ she wrote to Brooke. ‘If you commit yourself to it, though, I’m afraid I’ll have to say I won’t see you … If you think I don’t care, you’re very wrong. It’s about the hardest thing to say I’ve ever said. It’d be less trouble to be dead.’ With the situation appearing to have made her ill, her mother sent Brooke a stern letter. It was a guilty young man who wrote to Phyllis’s mother in the early spring of 1913. ‘You hate me for my general character and for my behaviour towards her … rightly, I suppose … And if she is ill, in any way through me, I have failed; and deserve any blame.’ On 21 May, he wrote to Phyllis to tell her he was leaving England. ‘I gather you think me evil,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m sorry. And I think you’re wrong … But if I have hurt you: if you have suffered pain on account of me, I am very deeply sorry.’ Brooke then set off for America, from where he would travel to Canada and the South Seas, writing to her in November 1913 that she was made for marriage while declaring himself a wanderer and insisting, ‘Child, don’t love me.’
Not only was Cathleen Nesbitt on the scene, but early in 1913 he’d become friendly with the Prime Minister’s daughter, Violet Asquith, had a full sexual relationship with Taatamata during his time in Tahiti and on return from the South Seas had become close to Lady Eileen Wellesley.
Rupert’s final meeting with Phyllis was again orchestrated by a mother distressed at seeing her lovesick daughter pining for an unfulfilled relationship. In November 1914, Phyllis, her mother and Brooke met at a café in Charing Cross, Phyllis noting that he looked ill and tired. The conversation was light and trivial, Phyllis unable to put her feelings into words. ‘It might have been different if we had known this would be the last time we should see one another,’
she wrote. ‘I would have dearly liked to take him in my arms and say: “Poor boy, I’m so sorry for you.”’