Bloomsbury's Outsider (13 page)

A few days later Bunny wrote again to Edward describing the tribunal as ‘a farce'.
²²
His application had been turned down and now he had to prepare to appeal. As Vanessa told Virginia Woolf, ‘The Tribunal consisted of perfectly bovine country bumpkins, whose skulls couldn't be penetrated at all. They would hardly listen to anything and one felt at once that it was quite hopeless.'
²³
From the outset, the parochial farmers on the Tribunal were suspicious because Bunny and Duncan had only recently moved to Suffolk. Moreover, when Adrian mentioned that Bunny's mother was a lifelong pacifist and had visited Tolstoy in Russia, the Tribunal was nonplussed, assuming Tolstoy was a Russian town.

Their futures unresolved, Bunny and Duncan continued to work under the suspicious eyes of the locals. They tried not to draw attention to themselves: ‘Yesterday was Sunday & we observe it by not working in the big orchards near the village.'
²⁴
In the countryside, suspicion of outsiders prevailed, and spy stories proliferated, particularly in coastal areas. The previous year, when Duncan and Clive had stayed at Wittering on the Sussex coast, they had been pursued by local police, following reports that they spoke in a foreign tongue. Duncan and Bunny had both been required to produce their birth certificates to prove their indigenous status. At Henham, just a few miles from
Wissett and close to the sea, the schoolmaster had been persecuted under suspicion as a German agent, on the flimsy premise that his son had entertained a German friend in previous years.
²⁵

The appeal took place at Ipswich on 19 May. This time the atmosphere was entirely different. Maynard arrived looking extremely purposeful, clutching a large bag emblazoned with the royal cipher. He demanded their cases be heard as expeditiously as possible, ‘as he had left work of the utmost national importance in order to attend'.
²⁶
Philip Morrell also gave evidence on their behalf, and Bunny submitted a letter from the Prefect of the Marne praising his work with the Quakers. They were awarded non-combatant service: they would be soldiers, but would not have to fight. Although Maynard appealed immediately, the response would take several months in coming. Uncertainty and tension prevailed.

In June Lytton Strachey arrived for a weekend. Bunny felt sure that Lytton's visit was ‘as much to see me as to see any of the others'.
²⁷
Initially feeling rather excluded from the tightly-knit triangular
ménage
, Lytton pondered whether it was ‘their married state that oppressed me?' ‘But then', he added, ‘were
they
married? – Perhaps it was their
un
married state.' Lytton's record of the weekend is preserved in an autobiographical fragment in which one particular passage suggests that his relationship with Bunny had hitherto progressed beyond flirtation. ‘Perhaps if I could have lain with Bunny', he reflected, ‘and then I smiled to think of my romantic visions before coming [to Wissett] – of a
recrudescence of that affair, under Duncan's nose'.
²⁸
Certainly Lytton found Bunny most attractive, and his recollections reveal something of the sexual potency which Bunny exuded. As Lytton chattered with Bunny outside, he found himself wanting to ‘take hold of his large brown bare arm.
That
I knew was beautiful.' Feeling progressively melancholy, Lytton later walked with Bunny in the dusk: ‘He was so calm and gentle, and his body was so large, with his shirt (with nothing under it) open all the way down – that I longed to throw myself onto him as if he were a feather-bed.'
²⁹

Lytton also captured the complexity of Bunny's character, the mixture of animal-magnetism and shyness, ‘his charming way', ‘his sympathy' his ability to amuse, and ‘how shy and distrustful of himself he was in company'. ‘Without any difficulty', Lytton continued, ‘I stretched out my hand and put it into his breast […]. We came nearer to each other, and with a divine vigour, embraced […]. We kissed a great deal, and I was happy. Physically, as well as mentally, he had assuaged me. That was what was so wonderful about him – he gave neither too little nor too much'.
³⁰
This encounter occurred in the context of Lytton's own confused state: he had fallen in love with the artist Dora Carrington (always known as Carrington), and felt unable to share his feelings with anyone except Bunny, to whom he confided in the garden at Wissett. Like others later on, Lytton turned to Bunny certain of his innate sympathy. Bunny expressed
this sympathy in a way in which he knew Lytton would understand. ‘The darling!' Lytton recalled, ‘How beautifully he had smoothed me down!'
³¹
‘You are a blessed creature to find in this world', he wrote to Bunny afterwards.
³²

Between comforting friends and harvesting blackcurrants, Bunny snatched moments to write, although reading
War and Peace
he despaired of ever achieving anything satisfactory. On 19 September Bunny wrote to Constance: ‘All has been chaos & confusion.'
³³
The Board of Agriculture man (Mr Watling, a local farmer) had visited Wissett to assess whether they could be considered to be undertaking work of national importance. He subsequently sent a damaging report refusing to recommend the continuation of their work at Wissett to the Pelham Committee, a committee established to assist the Tribunals in selecting suitable work for the applicants. He concluded that Bunny and Duncan were doing the work of two women, although the farm had been worked by two men, a boy and a woman before the war. ‘The mysterious atmosphere of one of Conrad's tales has descended on us', Bunny told Frankie. ‘The whole Pelham Committee & Central Tribunal believe that we were mysterious young men of means who had established themselves in a large country house with ten footmen and two mistresses apiece & spent our time shooting pheasants and entertaining the upper classes with champagne at breakfast […]. The whole thing is typically English isn't it?'
³⁴
But as Bunny informed Constance, a resolution had been found. Vanessa had taken a house at Firle in
Sussex, where Bunny and Duncan would work for a local farmer. Ever the optimist he added, ‘I have a thousand plans of course already'.
³⁵

‘The diary habit has come to life at Charleston.' (Virginia Woolf)
¹

Vanessa had taken on the lease of Charleston Farmhouse, an attractive four-square building sitting beneath Firle Beacon on the Sussex Downs. She left Wissett in September 1916, taking the children back to London, while Duncan cleared up the Suffolk house and Bunny set off for Charleston accompanied by Barbara Hiles and Carrington. In his distinctly civilian yellow corduroy coat and breeches, he felt self-conscious on the train to Lewes, surrounded by uniformed men. The three companions decided to walk from Lewes to Charleston, but as dusk fell they turned off to Asheham to seek the hospitality of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Finding the house in darkness and its inhabitants away, they decided nevertheless to spend the night there. Bunny shinned up a drainpipe, letting himself in through a back window.

The trio thought nothing of snuggling into the same bed for warmth, Bunny in the middle. Although he and Barbara were lovers, Bunny also fancied himself in love with Carrington. But she was in love with Lytton Strachey and afterwards wrote to Bunny deflecting his declarations of love: ‘I am sorry to be so solidly virtuous', she said, ‘But I still maintain it is quite impossible to talk seriously, or make love with another person in the same bed'.
²
In an ‘autobiographical fragment' Bunny alleged that he and Carrington later became lovers, but there is no evidence of this, and at different times he furnished conflicting accounts on the subject.
³

Barbara and Carrington returned to Lewes, and Bunny settled into a temporary, but solitary existence, at the Ram Inn, at nearby Firle. Alone at Wissett, Duncan was miserable: everything reminded him of Bunny. He was also remorseful, apologising to Bunny for having been selfish during their last days together, presumably because Barbara had been there as well. Bunny was lonely too. ‘The longer I am away from you', he
wrote to Duncan, ‘the more I feel that even temporary absence from you is intolerable.'
⁴

Having assumed their trespass at Asheham remained undetected, Bunny was surprised to receive a letter to the contrary from Carrington. They had been seen by a local resident who reported to the Woolfs that their house had been broken into. According to Carrington, ‘Virginia was in rather a panic as strange people had broken in, eaten all the food and
moved the beds
!!!!' ‘Of course', she added, ‘I knew at once it was a fabrication about the beds being moved.'
⁵
Bunny, whose tenacious adherence to the principle of truth often backfired, compounded the situation by confessing his involvement to Virginia, raking up the dust after it had settled and thus blotting his copybook with her for some time.

From the outset Bunny loved Charleston, but he had little time to execute his plans to cultivate the garden and tend bees, as he began work for Mr Hecks straight away. He soon discovered that working for someone else was entirely different to working for oneself. He was employed pulling mangels, a gruelling and back-breaking job involving hours stooping in muddy fields. Although Hecks was only four years Bunny's senior, their relations remained formal. Whilst Bunny was clearly a ‘gentleman', Hecks's attitude was that of a yeoman farmer towards his labourer. He made it clear that he was ‘anxious to keep the conscientious objector rather quiet'. ‘I am', Bunny explained, ‘a young man come to learn farming.'
⁶

The arrival of a strong young farm-hand might well have aroused suspicion, especially as there was only a tiny minority of
conscientious objectors working in agriculture. Moreover, in Sussex the war was omnipresent, military camps proliferated and gunfire could be heard across the Channel. Families were losing their men-folk to war and anti-conchie feeling was rife. The views of the headmaster of the village school at nearby Fletching were typical: ‘the papers are full of the applications for exemption that are coming before the Tribunals and the miserable excuses put forward make one's blood boil to think Englishmen are so degenerate.'
⁷
Bunny and Duncan kept a low profile, travelling the back lanes from Charleston to work. At the farm they were periodically scrutinized by plain-clothes policemen, checking they were not shirking their labours.

Initially, the triangular bond between Vanessa, Bunny and Duncan held reasonably firm. Bunny became fond of Vanessa's boys, establishing lifelong friendships with both. He gave Julian a copy of Richard Jefferies'
Bevis
for his ninth birthday, containing the map which he had drawn in 1904. Julian's younger brother, Quentin, when teased by one of the servants about ‘Uncle Bunny', retorted: ‘Now you know Trissie Bunny isn't really my uncle quite well', adding, ‘Do you know what he is? He's my bosom friend.'
⁸
Quentin later described Bunny at this time as a ‘shy youth but very attractive'; ‘a tall, rather clumsy, but very athletic-looking young man', referring to ‘the sculptural splendour' of his body.
⁹
Farm work helped Bunny to achieve this
physique, a physique which he took pride in maintaining well into his sixties.

Bunny and Duncan established an unvarying routine in which they left for work at 7.30, returning at 12.00 for lunch, finishing work at 5.00. Constance, who visited Charleston in late October, observed that Bunny ‘looks a perfect picture of a young farmer – in his velveteen coat & his gaiter & his mild sunburnt face'. In contrast she thought Duncan looked very white.
¹⁰
At Charleston Bunny established a vegetable garden in which he worked all day on Sundays. Perhaps this gave him the idea to write a gardening manual, based on Alfred Gressent's
Le Potager Moderne
. ‘Do you think', he asked Edward, ‘a publisher would take the sort of little book I propose because I could turn it out very quickly.'
¹¹
Bunny thought a condensed version of Gressent would provide the English market with a book for the domestic gardener, and that it would help people to produce twice as much food.

After the mangel harvest, Bunny and Duncan were immediately set to threshing, equally tiring and repetitive work. As Bunny told Constance, ‘I throw a sheaf every second with my prong off the stack to a man who cuts string & pitches it to a man who lets it into the mouth of the machine. Another man on the stack throws the sheaves to me. So we go hour after hour. The wind blows the thick spray from the steam engine over us, the dust grimes our faces & things clog up our eyes.'
¹²
Having expected to learn farming, Bunny was surprised to be allocated the most unskilled manual work, including dung-carting in
weather so cold that icicles hung from the horses' whiskers.

He managed to escape occasionally for a weekend in London or at The Cearne. In February 1917 when Frankie returned briefly from France, he and Bunny were so delighted to see each other that they talked non-stop from five in the afternoon until two in the morning. Bunny had a new admirer, the Bloomsbury mathematician Harry Norton, who seems to have fallen for Bunny just as James and Lytton had, and in his eagerness for Bunny's affection, followed the same pattern of rebuffed pursuit. ‘There are a thousand questions', he wrote to Bunny, ‘one would like to know the answer to – when you're coming – How long you'll be here – whether you'll be alone – whether you'll be nice to me.' ‘Shall I dare to make love to you?'
¹³

Working steadily at Gressent, Bunny wished he had time to write the novel constantly at the back of his mind. Lytton's comment that Laurence Sterne had written nothing until he was forty-five was hardly reassuring. But the relentless nature of farm work was beginning to take its toll. For Duncan, the effects were largely physical: he lost weight and felt run-down. Bunny, on the other hand, suffered emotionally, particularly as he felt trapped by the enforced nature of their work, and by being confined with Duncan at Charleston. It was the usual problem: if he and Duncan were going to get along, Bunny required the stimulation of diversions and other love affairs. And so, on a rare foray to London in September 1917, Bunny lost no time in wooing Alix Sargant-Florence, a young woman he had met briefly at the Caroline Club in February 1915. He decided, at that first meeting, that Alix was ‘one of the women for whom I could feel
raging passion'.
¹⁴
The fact that Alix was in love with James Strachey was only a minor inconvenience, as James appeared beyond her reach, himself in love with Noel Olivier.