Bloomsbury's Outsider (12 page)

Although Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell were deemed unfit to serve on health grounds, they nevertheless went before the Tribunals to gain exemption. Even Maynard, eligible for exemption as a result of his position in the Treasury, applied to be a conscientious objector. Duncan opted for conscientious objection, despite considerable family pressure to follow in the military footsteps of his father, Major Bartle Grant. (Bunny thought that Major Grant blamed him for Duncan's failure to enlist, as in conversation with Duncan, Major Grant always referred to Bunny as “Your friend Garbage”.
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) Within Bloomsbury, only Ralph Partridge enlisted, but this was before he joined the fold; he later resigned his commission on moral grounds. But Bloomsbury was unusual. Conscientious objectors were a small minority of the population, numbering only 16,000. Most of Bunny's non-Bloomsbury friends enlisted including Bertie Farjeon, Maitland Radford, Godwin Baynes and Geoffrey
Keynes. Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke lost their lives.

Bunny was prepared to face ‘whatever penalties I may be subjected to and however much I may suffer by incurring the contempt of brave & honourable men'.
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In his ‘Answers to Questions of Objection to Combatant Service', he explained that he held ‘a genuine conscientious objection' which extended to undertaking any form of military service, and that he had inherited these values from his parents. In answer to the stock-question concerning whether he would defend people to whom he was attached, he replied: ‘I should have no hesitation whatsoever in resorting to violence. My objection to being a soldier is not that I might have to kill but that my being a soldier involves delegating my right of moral judgment to commit me to supporting the prosecution of war.'
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Conscientious objectors displayed considerable courage. In many respects they were pioneers: in the absence of conscription in Britain before 1916, conscientious objection had been both unnecessary and unknown. Without a working model, the conchies had to make it up as they went along and were forced to cope with increasingly draconian treatment by the State and a derisive public image. As Bertrand Russell explained, the greatest challenge for a small minority ‘was the purely psychological one of resisting mass suggestion, of which the force becomes terrific when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement.'
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The threat of imprisonment loomed over conchies
at the mercy of largely unsympathetic tribunals. Adrian Stephen, who worked for the N-CF as an observer at tribunals, found them singularly biased and undemocratic. He observed that ‘it would have been asking much of half a dozen grocers, haberdashers and retired colonels, to rise above the general body of mankind to such a height as to behave with reasonable tolerance'.
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More than six thousand conchies were refused exemption, court-martialled and sent to military prisons. There they endured considerable privation. They slept on plank beds in tiny cells, were prohibited from communicating with their fellow prisoners and from sending or receiving letters; rations were meagre and lacked nutrition. Some prisoners became mentally ill; others, including Clifford Allen, one of the founders of the N-CF, died prematurely, weakened by years in prison. Faced with potential imprisonment, far from being cowards, conscientious objectors exhibited strength of purpose and commitment to a moral cause.

Bunny could have applied for exemption on medical grounds. As Connie observed, his eyesight was compromised and he had to turn his head in order to look to the side. This would probably have disbarred him from active service or even ambulance work. But there is no evidence that this course of action occurred to him. It is characteristic that he would, like Maynard, have chosen to make a stand for what he believed in, and that as an ‘outsider' this choice would represent the minority view.

The early months of 1916 were filled with uncertainty: when would Bunny receive his call-up papers? When would he go before the tribunal? Would he be sent to prison? Constance faced renewed anxiety about her son. But Bunny and Duncan decided the best scheme was to get on with life, and they soon had a
vague plan to become fruit farmers, and thus, as they thought, fall into the category of undertaking work of national importance. The fruit farm, located at Wissett, near Halesworth in Suffolk, had belonged to a cousin of Duncan's mother. She died in 1915, and as a result her executor, Duncan's father, was looking for a tenant.

In the meantime, Bunny sent his application for military exemption to his local tribunal at St Pancras and began writing a story based on his experiences at Sommeilles. Beginning to make positive plans for the farm, Bunny informed Constance that he proposed to keep poultry but asked her for general instructions regarding when to sew crops. He had always been keen on growing vegetables and foraging for food, but had no experience as a fruit grower and smallholder. Duncan had no idea at all. It was Maynard who influenced their decision to become farmers, for he assured them they stood a better chance of exemption if they were working on the land. Aware that he would have to rely on Duncan and Vanessa to finance the enterprise, Bunny determined to do the lion's share of work in return for his keep.

Wissett is a small village situated within a river valley. It consists of a single main street occupied by cottages and a church, although when Bunny and Duncan lived there, it also had two public houses. Wissett Lodge is located half a mile from the village, on a ridge overlooking the valley. According to the present owners, the house dates back to the sixteenth century, but to Bunny it seemed like an early Victorian house, for it contained numerous small, dark rooms, the windows masked by both a magnificent wisteria and an enormous ilex. From the outset, his plans were grandiose: he proposed growing several hundredweights of potatoes, keeping a large flock of geese and a hundred hens.

While making Wissett Lodge habitable, Bunny stayed nearby at the Swan Inn. Suffering from a cold, Duncan was, at Vanessa's insistence, temporarily confined to bed in London. Meanwhile, Constance had again embarked on a frenzy of activity on behalf of her son, writing letters to anyone whom she felt could be of influence as a character witness at the tribunal. This irritated Bunny so much that he wrote what was for him an unusually tetchy letter, telling Constance that Sydney Olivier would not be the faintest use and that no one would have heard of J.A. Hobson. He added, ‘I think your [sic] more likely to spoil my chances by making me nervous than wake me up to the seriousness of my position'.
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While Duncan languished in London, Bunny was happily employed. Having moved into the Lodge, he set about restoring the neglected farm. The currants had suffered from lack of pruning and been attacked by mites. The numerous empty bee hives, in which the previous incumbents had been left to die, required thorough disinfecting. Bunny was particularly content as he had been joined by Barbara Hiles, the petite bobbed-haired artist with whom he had started a flirtatious correspondence in France. Although she spent the nights at the local inn (‘to keep the right side of the village gossips'), her days were spent with Bunny at the Lodge.
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This low-key romance marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship in which they would casually pick up the strings of their love affair from time to time. With typical Bloomsbury candour, Bunny felt the need to communicate his various
amours
to Duncan, announcing that Barbara was
presently ensconced and at Easter he expected Ruth Baynes to appear. Bunny loved Duncan dearly, but he needed women, was fascinated by them, and his ego required the regular burnishing that only a new love affair could bring. Duncan hoped that when he moved to Wissett, he would have Bunny to himself.

Women liked Bunny because he admired them and valued their intellects. According to his daughter, Frances Garnett, his seduction of a woman ‘would happen in a very romantic way – around actually talking ideas'.
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He was also physically attractive, strong and muscular. But it was the singular way in which he focussed on the object of his attention which was particularly beguiling. One former lover told him that the reason women found him so attractive was ‘the rapid turn of your head!'
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As Frances Partridge observed, when Bunny looked at someone, ‘it was characteristic of him to turn his whole head and blue gaze swiftly towards them, until his chin touched his shoulder'.
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He not only dazzled women with his blue gaze, but also, and perhaps unusually for a man at this time, sought to take care with what he liked to call ‘the lineaments of satisfied desire', an echo of William Blake's lines: ‘What is it women in men require? / The lineaments of gratified desire.'
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Duncan eventually arrived at Wissett in March 1916 and in early April Vanessa came accompanied by her children, Julian
and Quentin, and the servants, Blanche and Flossie. With the farm to manage and an uncertain future, they decided the best philosophy was to assume they would be installed for the duration. Bunny and Duncan discovered their tribunal would be held at Halesworth rather than in London. Thus, decisions regarding their requests for exemption were further delayed, giving cause for optimism. As Bunny told Constance, ‘Every delay is so much to the good as the best informers believe the War will be over this autumn or late summer'.
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At Wissett, however, war seemed closer than in London. One starlit night they saw a Zeppelin looming over the house; on another occasion, hearing a low whining noise, Bunny jumped out of bed and rushed out onto the lawn, where he saw a long dark outline in the sky and subsequently heard bombs dropping nearby at Wangford.

‘What an amazing book I could make out of the Wissett episode', Bunny wrote to Constance a year later. ‘Duncan dyeing the fowls blue, & then the time when we picked 60 bunches [of daffodils] containing twelve flowers & packed them up & cycled 20 miles to Norwich, sold them with the greatest difficulty for 4 shillings, had a lunch which cost us six shillings, & the innkeeper charged us 2/ – for the use of the bicycle'.
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In some respects this period at Wissett was idyllic, despite the military tribunals overshadowing them. Their happiness derived from relative independence, so that Bunny could indulge a nascent passion for farming and Duncan and Vanessa could continue to paint. Even their inexperience as farmers did not get them down. Bunny spent hours poring over Board of Agriculture manuals to little avail. In cold weather they brought all the rabbits indoors,
creating chaos. One of the doe rabbits was found to have a penis, but no testicles, their new puppy had nits, and Bunny was covered with a rash, resulting from a plague of fleas. The farm seemed to grow before their eyes: they discovered additional orchards in corners of the village which they didn't know existed and the numbers of blackcurrant bushes threatened to overwhelm them. Fortunately Constance came to stay, full of valuable suggestions about poultry and vegetables. Edward visited too, pronouncing Wissett a jolly place.

They received a continuous stream of visitors, Wissett becoming a country outpost of Bloomsbury. Clive Bell and his mistress, Mary Hutchinson, visited finding the fleas intolerable. They also received an improbable visitor in the shape of Ottoline Morrell, who found the house ‘dark and damp and exceedingly untidy', although she assumed a brave face, resolving that ‘untidiness in sunshine does not matter'. She noted that Bunny ‘has quite the look of a farm labourer now'.
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Finding it depressing to have twenty empty bee hives, Bunny set about purchasing bees, asking Constance to give him the bee-keepers bible, Simmins's
Modern Bee Farm
for his birthday. To his horror, on his twenty-fourth birthday Bunny found all his bees dead from Isle of Wight disease. He spent the day dejectedly burning the frames and dead bees. Later that summer, with financial help from Maynard, Bunny purchased Italian bees, ‘lovely yellow banded creatures', and informed Constance that he seriously considered going in for bee farming after the war. ‘I believe I have a natural aptitude', he told her. Bunny became increasingly absorbed in bee-keeping, enjoying practising
scientific methods and learning a new discipline. But as the months passed, mounting anxiety about whether they would be allowed to remain at Wissett and constant exhaustion began to take their toll. ‘You know what the evenings are', he wrote to his mother, ‘one yawns writes down how many eggs were laid & stumbles off to bed by 10 o'clock.'
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Bunny's temper began to emerge, partly as a result of his taking on the bulk of labour, but also because it was impossible to make long-term plans for the farm, which affected its viability. At this time Bunny took refuge in Constance's translation of
War and Peace
. ‘I'm absurd', he wrote, ‘& live among that society as much as among my own friends.'
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Eventually they learnt that they would go before the Halesworth Tribunal on 4 May. Constance and Edward expected to attend, but Bunny kept them at arm's length. He was an adult; in the past twelve months he had grown up enormously and was full of resilience and independence. Moreover, Bunny did not want to appear tied to his mother's apron strings. He had marshalled his own support from influential people among his friends. He did not need his parents' associates to intercede on his behalf: Maynard Keynes, Adrian Stephen and Ottoline's husband, the MP Philip Morrell, would more than suffice. Nevertheless, at the last moment Constance asked Nellie to garner the support of her brother Carl, now an influential Quaker. She also wrote to Galsworthy, who sent in a letter testifying to Bunny being a conscientious objector ‘of the most complete kind'.
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Assuming he would be sent to prison, Bunny
wrote to Edward, ‘don't worry, don't worry, don't worry'. ‘Nothing that one is afraid of is likely to hurt me.'
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