Fatal Glamour (17 page)

Seen through French eyes, Badley's ideas on sex were at once touching and absurd, and so were the female teachers that he dutifully hired: “The mistresses were almost always advanced women, feminists, socialists, Tolstoyans, etc. They dressed according to their theories: sandals, hygienic Jaeger fabrics, dresses without waists or shape called Gibbahs . . . usually in a deliquescent green, thought to be artistic; no corsets, naturally – not hygienic – the hair drawn into flat
bandeaux;
in a word, everything needed to make women as unattractive as possible.”
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Carrying all this ideological baggage, how did Badley succeed as well as he did? Unlike Reddie, he was no raving crank, and he was a highly gifted and devoted teacher. He had to keep up the appearance of a reputable, fee-paying school for the middle class. There would be self-expression without anarchy, nudity without fornication. Badley's vaguely leftist ideals owed more to William Morris than to Marx. He wanted his pupils to appreciate arts and crafts, physical labour, and country life. In the early years, little was done to prepare Bedalians for competitive examinations. Instead of stringing his students up for the battle of life, Badley taught them the arts of peace, leisure, domesticity.

At Bedales, the symbolic space of the public school was turned inside out. The buildings had no mock fortifications, nor did they enclose their playing fields. Instead, they opened on the woods and meadows where
the students would learn to cultivate the land, but could also roam at will. Badley's personality dominated his school as much as Arnold's had dominated Rugby; but one cannot imagine Arnold shovelling out the school's earth-closets for a waiting line of boys with wheelbarrows. There were cooking and sewing classes at Bedales but only for boys, since Badley thought that they were the ones who needed lessons. For the patriarchal mystique of Rugby, Bedales substituted an ideal of rational comradeship between the sexes. Badley retired in 1935, though he went on living at the school; he died in 1967, at the age of 101. As with Thomas Arnold, his students never forgot him and they carried his influence throughout their lives.

In late July 1909 Rupert joined an outing organised by the young and enterprising Bunny Garnett. Bunny found an ideal spot to camp on the River Eden near Penshurst, a short ride from his country home at The Cearne and the Olivier house at Limpsfield. After a week he was joined there by Godwin Baynes, the herculean medical student who had been on the last Christmas excursion to Klosters. Godwin was “openhearted, warm, affectionate and generous,” Garnett recalled. “Having escaped from a strict nonconformist upbringing at home, with prayers muttered into the seats of chairs before breakfast, he had become an enthusiastic neo-pagan.”
²⁷
Instead of hymns in the parlour, he now sang Wagner arias as he strode along the ridges of Snowdon. Bryn, Noel, and Daphne Olivier arrived next, with their neighbour Dorothy Osmaston; then Harold Hobson (an engineer friend of Bunny's) and Walter Layton – soon to be engaged to Dorothy. Finally, Rupert and Dudley Ward turned up – by the same “coincidence” that had brought them to Bank at Easter. But this time Margery was not there to keep a jealous eye on his walks with Noel. A story of Bunny's catches the true Olivier style – panache or blind arrogance, depending on one's prejudices:

On Sunday morning the rustics of Penshurst came down and leant in a line upon the parapet of the bridge, staring into the pool in which we were to bathe.

“Come on,” said Daphne. “They're not going to stop us.”

Nor did they. We bathed, ignoring them, and Noel, not to be put off from her high dives, picked her way along the parapet between the rows of wrists and elbows, politely asked for standing-room in the middle, and made a perfect dive into the pool. With florid expressionless face, the nearest labourer shook his black Sunday coat-sleeve free of the drops which had fallen from her heel.
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Camping out was just coming into style. It was more adventurous than the traditional reading parties for undergraduates, and more likely to include women (often, it must be said, because they understood the mysteries of cooking and washing up). At Bedales camping was actually part of the curriculum and Old Bedalians were reunited at an annual camp, invariably attended by “The Chief.” He would welcome the Boy Scout movement, founded by Baden-Powell in 1908 to prepare British youth for colonial life and, when necessary, for colonial warfare. Scouting, Badley argued, “satisfies . . . the universal craving for adventure and for open-air life which is particularly strong in the ‘Red Indian' phase of growth; a phase through which children normally pass in their recapitulation of the social and economic development of mankind just as they have passed, before birth, through a recapitulation of organic evolution.”
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Instead of a cadet corps with uniforms and drill, Bedales had a scout corps, whose training was modelled on the Boer commandos. The open field was more appealing than the parade ground, but students did not go there just to dabble in the dew. Like everything else at Bedales, camping had plenty of rules:

The Camp is always pitched near a bathing-place, for Bedalians, like fish, cannot live long out of water . . . The Camp itself consists of four tents – the cook tent, one sleeping tent for the girls, and two for the boys. Bedding of straw, bracken, or heather is provided, and each camper brings with him three blankets, one of which is sewn up into a sleeping-bag. Pillows most of us scorn; the most hardened do without, the others roll up their clothes, and thus make a good substitute.

Every other day, at least, is spent in a good tramp across the country – ten or fifteen miles at first to get into training, but this may be increased to twenty, or even twenty-five, later on . . . We
take sandwiches with us for lunch, thus avoiding an elaborate midday meal, and on the longer walks find tea on the way, arriving back at Camp in time for a bathe and supper. Then we adjourn to the neighbouring farmhouse (whence we get our bread, butter, eggs, and milk) and for the rest of the evening sit lazily, while the Chief and another take turn and turn about in reading aloud some novel. After a strenuous day of walk, a slack day in Camp usually follows, with plenty of bathing and perhaps a short walk in the afternoon to get up an appetite for supper. Too many slack days, however, should be discouraged, as they mean extra work for the cook, and anyway we don't come to Camp to slack.
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At Penshurst, Noel showed her Bedalian spirit by joining the men to bathe nude in the river – under cover of darkness, but using a bicycle lamp to show them where to dive. “There is much to be said,” Badley proclaimed, “for the practice, where possible, of nudism as a means of mental as well as of bodily health . . . Under right conditions, amongst friends and at camp for instance, it is perfectly possible and, I believe, all to the good. But I have never wished to make it the rule for all, as there are some whom it makes unwholesomely sex-conscious.”
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There would be mixed nude bathing in the junior school (to age twelve or thirteen); then boys separately in the nude, girls with their choice of nudity or a costume; at mixed events all wore costumes. At an Old Bedalian weekend, Noel once scandalised Badley by diving nude off the high board in sight of everyone. He insisted on bathing suits after that. Badley was trying to carry water on both shoulders, even if the side of restraint outweighed that of liberation. Neo-paganism had similar contradictions. There was the cult of the body beautiful and scorn for social conventions; but there was also a strict, self-imposed chastity before marriage. It was an unstable mixture of impulses, and for some an explosive one.

Bunny Garnett saw Rupert for the first time at the Penshurst camp: “His complexion, his skin, his eyes and hair were perfect. He was tall and well built, loosely put together, with a careless animal grace and a face made for smiling and teasing and sudden laughter. As he ate in the firelight I watched him, at once delighted by him and afraid that his friendliness might be a mask. What might not lie below it?”
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Rupert's poem “Jealousy” shows one emotion that lay below. A girl whom the poet once admired for her coolness and wisdom is now “Gazing with
silly sickness” on a fool, whose “empty grace . . . strong legs and arms . . . rosy face” suggest Godwin Baynes. Godwin did propose to Bryn a couple of months after the camp and, if they are models for the two lovers, the poet cast a morbid eye on their affection. He imagines them married: the husband's strength running to fat, love sinking into habit, until the last act:

And you, that loved young life and clean, must tend

A foul sick fumbling dribbling body and old,

When his rare lips hang flabby and can't hold

Slobber, and you're enduring that worst thing,

Senility's queasy furtive love-making.

That's how I'll see your man and you?

But you

– Oh, when
that
time comes, you'll be dirty too!

Rupert started with a pastiche of seventeenth-century satire, but soon his own preoccupations took over. For him, “dirtiness” was moral rather than physical, and was caused by sexual experience. His Neo-paganism was a willful, sometimes desperate attempt to escape from his engrained puritanism. The Olivier girls, raised by free-thinking parents, were more instinctually pagan than he could ever be. A further reason for his confusion was Noel's strategic control over her own emotions. She had had several chances to be with Rupert in 1908–09: at the dinner for her father, during the production of
Comus
, at Bank in the New Forest, and at the Penshurst camp. Rupert had no hesitation about feeling and expressing his love; but at Bedales the rule was that tender emotions were best kept hidden. A school friend reminded her of this, four years later: “I sometimes fear I am still capable of that absurd sensation, i.e. a pash . . . My dear, pashes are vain and silly (tho' I don't for one moment say ‘unreal') things I have come to the conclusion.”
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It was not until three years after their first meeting that Noel was ready to admit to Rupert the “pash” she had felt for him from the very beginning:

I thought: there is Rupert in Germany, very wise and clever . . . and he is very beautiful, everyone who sees him loves him; when I first saw him cracking nuts in Ben Keeling's rooms with Margery, I fell in love with him, as I had fallen in love with other people
before, only this time it seemed final – as it had, indeed, every time – I got excited when people talked of him and spent every day waiting and expecting to see him and felt wondrous proud when he talked to me or took any notice. When he talked for a long time on the river I got more and more in love and said so to myself when he was there . . . At camp at Penshurst I was driven silly with love and it was perhaps at that time that I felt it most strongly.
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Rupert often blamed Margery Olivier for keeping Noel away from him, but it was just as much that Noel kept herself away for fear of being at the mercy of her emotions. Her elusiveness, paradoxically, provided fuel for Rupert's passion; perhaps, on some level, she saw an advantage in this. But if Noel had been more open about her feelings, Rupert might have been less frantic in his attempts to break into her citadel.

Going to Cambridge had not made Rupert free of his gloomy parental home. He was still regularly summoned back to Rugby for weeks of seclusion, while his mother anxiously watched him for signs of illness or strain. Later in that summer of 1909, he decided to break the tedium of family life by bringing his friends to his family. He persuaded his parents to rent a large Victorian vicarage at Clevedon, on the Severn estuary, and there they awaited the invasion. The Ranee, however, was already on her guard. At Rugby she had met a young lady who knew the Oliviers. “My, yes!” the Person shrilled, “the Oliviers! they'd do anything, those girls!”
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It was shocking enough that the Oliviers roamed around Britain unchaperoned, but what really frightened Mrs Brooke, most likely, was the risk of an imprudent early marriage that could torpedo the career of her favourite son.

For the first two weeks at Clevedon there were few visitors, and Rupert was ill. “My only way of keeping in touch with ‘life,'” he told Dudley Ward, “is playing tennis barefoot. It's not so effective as living in a tent and a river with three Oliviers: but it annoys the family . . . The family atmosphere is too paralysing.” Then the guests started to arrive in packs and the family, which meant the Ranee was even more annoyed.
Most irritating was Bryn, with her complete disregard of drawing-room convention. “It's such a responsibility taking Bryn about,” Margery had written to Rupert. “People always fall in love with her.” Not the Ranee, however. “I prefer Miss Cox,” she told Gwen Darwin, “her wrists are very thick and I don't like the expression of her mouth, but she's a sensible girl. I can't understand what you all see in these Oliviers; they are pretty, I suppose, but not at all clever; they're shocking flirts and their manners are disgraceful.”
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The failure at Clevedon underlined the homelessness of the Neo-pagans. Ka's parents were dead, the Oliviers' parents mostly in Jamaica, Jacques's father in France. There were advantages, however, to being orphans. In lodgings, still more in a tent or a river, they could live by their own rules. Gwen Darwin, whose parents were alive and highly respectable, was not allowed to go on these frolics unless she could convince them that a suitable chaperone would be there too. “Sometimes I think that every one ought to be killed off at 40,” she had written to her cousin Frances, “when I see what a misery all parents are to their children.”
³⁷

Another solution to the problem of parents was to make sure that when you got older you would be nothing like them. Walking on the cliffs at Portishead, Rupert, Margery, Bryn, Dudley, and Bill Hubback hit on a scheme to bring this about. The poet John Davidson had recently drowned himself in Cornwall at the age of fifty. The year before, in
The Testament of John Davidson
, he had glorified the life of the road as the only antidote to age and death: