Authors: Mike Read
A few months later, Phyllis suddenly felt so anxious she wrote in her diary, ‘Is R. all right?’ On 3 May 1915, her mother received a letter from Eddie Marsh telling her the news of Brooke’s death, from septicaemia, on April 23, on a hospital ship just off the coast of Skyros.
The news of her lover’s death seems to have unhinged Phyllis. ‘If R. wanted me I must come, but by what method I know not,’ she wrote, ‘and the sign was to be if I actually saw a waking vision of him.’ One night she was sitting on her mother’s bed, when the light cast by the gas onto the ceiling seemed to take his form, before melting away. ‘Therefore I am here to tell the tale,’ she wrote.
After Brooke’s death, Phyllis worked in Admiralty Intelligence during the war, then later as a wood engraver and a breeder of Irish wolfhounds. By the mid-1920s the family had moved to Maidenhead. She never married, and died, age forty-eight, on 16 February 1939, from breast cancer. Although little is known about her today, her legacy, through her unpublished memoir and letters, lives on.
‘Yes, some day I’ll die: so will you,’ she wrote to Brooke, in November 1912,
But I’d rather not think of it … I don’t think I’m afraid at all, only puzzled … You’re built of fire, and you must be perfectly free: you belong to nobody, as you said. But when all’s said, I feel as if I too were built of fire and for liberty.
In 1921, eleven of Phyllis’s woodcut illustrations adorned Stanley Casson’s publication,
Rupert Brooke and Skyros
, with one of them,
Trebuki Bay
, also being featured in the Imperial War Museum’s 1991 book,
Rupert Brooke’s Death and Burial
.
Abercrombie, Lascelles
Poems
(Oxford, 1930)
Adcock, A. St John
For Remembrance
(Hodder and Stoughton, 1918)
Asquith, Lady Cynthia
Diaries 1915–18
(Hutchinson, 1968)
Babington Smith, C.
John Masefield
(Oxford, 1978)
Belloc, Hilaire
The Four Men
(Nelson, 1912)
Benson, A. C.
Men and Memories
(John Murray), 1924)
Betjeman, John
Letters 1951–1984
(Methuen, 1995)
Brooke, Rupert
Collected Poems
(Sidgwick and Jackson, 1918)
Democracy and the Arts
(Hart-Davis, 1946)
Letters from America
(Scribners, 1916)
Letters to His Publisher
1911-1914 (Octagon, 1975)
Browne, Maurice
Recollections of Rupert Brooke
(Alexander Greene, 1927)
Casson, Stanley
Rupert Brooke and Skyros
(Elkin Matthews, 1921)
Cheason, Denis
The Cambridgeshire Rupert Brooke
(Plaistow, 1980)
Eliot, Sir Charles
Turkey in Europe
(Edward Arnold, 1908)
Eckert, Robert P.
Edward Thomas
(Dent, 1937)
Garnett, David
The Golden Echo
(Chatto and Windus, 1953)
Gibson, W. W.
Friends
(Elkin Matthews, 1916)
Graves, Robert
Goodbye to All That
(Cape, 1929)
Handley-Taylor, G.
John Masefield – A Bibliography
(Cranbook and Owen, 1960)
Harfield, Alan
Blandford and the Military
(Dorset Publishing, 1984)
Harris, Pippa (ed.)
Song of Love
(Crown, 1991)
Hassall, Christopher
Edward Marsh
(Longmans, 1959)
Rupert Brooke
(Faber and Faber, 1964)
Hastings, Michael
The Handsomest Young Man in England
(Michael Joseph, 1967)
Henley, W. G.
Poems
(D. Nutt, 1912)
Henderson, James L.
Irregularly Bold
(André Deutsch, 1978)
Hillier, Bevis
John Betjeman
(John Murray, 1988)
Holroyd, M.
Lytton Strachey
(Heinemann, 1968)
Keynes, G.
Bibliography of the Works of Rupert Brooke
(Hart-Davis, 1954)
Letters of Rupert Brooke
(Faber and Faber, 1968)
Mackail and Wyndham
Life and Letters of George Wyndham
(Hutchinson, 1914)
Marsh, Edward
Rupert Brooke – A Memoir
(John Lane, 1918)
Meredith, George
Poems
(Constable, 1910)
Muggeridge, Kitty and Adam, Ruth
Beatrice Webb
(Secker and Warburg, 1967)
Olivier, Sydney
Letters and Selected Writing
(Allen and Unwin, 1948)
Pimlott, Ben
Hugh Dalton
(HarperCollins, 1995)
Potter, R. M. G.
Rupert Brooke Fragments
(Hartford, 1925)
Rice, F. A.
The Granta 1889–1914
(Constable, 1924)
Rupert Brooke’s Death and Burial
(Imperial War Museum, 1992)
Speaight, Robert
Hilaire Belloc
(Hollis and Carter)
Spender, Stephen
Journals 1939–1983
(Faber and Faber, 1985)
Willmor, E. N.
Old Grantchester
(Birds Farm, 1976)
The following periodicals and newspapers have also been consulted:
New Numbers, The Times
, the
Times Literary Supplement, Granta, Meteor
All works referenced are by Brooke unless otherwise stated.