Forever England (17 page)

Ka joined Rupert in Berlin, but his physical passion for her was no longer there, as he told Dudley:

Ka fell ill in Germany, and Rupert’s mental equilibrium was still inharmonious and out of kilter, causing them to put the future on hold. She returned to her sister Hester in London, while Rupert, in a state of torpor, wrote to Jacques Raverat, ‘my love for Ka was pretty well at an end – poisoned, dead – before I discovered she was after all in love with me.’ Despite the finality of his feeling when writing to friends, his communications with Ka still gave her hope: ‘Hadn’t we better fix a date? The end of July? Would that do? It’s madness for me to make up my mind now, isn’t it?’ He also confesses to a ‘mechanical dull drifting through the days’. He felt, though, that he owed her something and was going through the motions of what he imagined to be doing the right thing by her.

James Strachey joined Rupert in Berlin and the two of them journeyed to the Hague. Rupert eagerly devouring Hilaire Belloc’s new book
The Four Men
at the Hotel des Indes where they were staying. The tale – a journey under the downs of Sussex – was to have a profound effect on him, the verses at the end of the work eventually inspiring his most quoted poem, ‘The Soldier’.

B
ACK IN LONDON
came a little occupational therapy for his confused mind: a play with the Cornfords, a gathering of the Apostles and a meet with E. M. Forster, who was also staying at Raymond Buildings with Eddie Marsh. From Gray’s Inn, it was a fleeting visit to see his mother before retiring to his spiritual home, the Old Vicarage. He was glad to discover that God was in his heaven, and indeed all was right with the world – at least this little plot. Mrs Neeve was still there, so was the honey, and his poem had been published in
Basileon
. Bryn Olivier impressed the family
at The Champions when she read it to them over Sunday breakfast; while Eddie Marsh thought it ‘the most human thing you’ve written, the only one that has brought tears to my fine eyes’, and implored him to ‘never write anything so good again without my knowing’. It was admired not only by friends: eminent poets Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson were enraptured, as was the writer and fellow of King’s, G. Lowes Dickinson.

Rupert’s general misery was compounded in July by the news of the death of one of his oldest friends, Hugh Russell-Smith’s brother Denham. He had written quite often to Denham, who usually answered his letters by return of post. The family that had made him envious with their obvious good nature were shattered by his early death in July 1912, aged just twenty-three. It was only after Denham’s death that Rupert confessed, in a letter to James Strachey, to an experimental sexual dalliance that he and the younger Russell-Smith had had at the Orchard in the autumn of 1909.

Of the one-off escapade at the Orchard he wrote, ‘I wanted to have some fun, and, still more, to see what it was like and to do away with the shame (as I thought it was) of being a virgin.’ He was, inevitably, disillusioned by what he believed was going to be a quantum leap from virginity to sexual knowledge. Despite the rushed, unsatisfactory night in his bedroom at the Orchard, the two remained good friends and did not speak of the moment again. As far as can be
ascertained it was Brooke’s only real homosexual experience, apart from schoolboy experimentation at Rugby.

In spite of being run-down, taking strong sedations to help him sleep and living with the knowledge that sooner rather than later he must address the situation with Ka, he joined a summer reading party at a hostelry situated on the extreme north-east edge of Salisbury Plain. Maynard Keynes attempted to go one better than the previous year’s camp at Clifford Bridge by taking over the Crown at Everleigh for a few weeks and inviting a mixture of Apostles and Brooke’s neo-pagan/old Bedalian circle. Keynes had recently become interested in riding, so maybe he discovered the Crown via Cobbett’s
Rural Rides
or, less likely, through the knowledge that the 1897 (and 1898) Grand National winner, Manifesto, came from the stables at the Crown Inn! The Crown Inn at Everleigh was originally built as the Dower House, being converted to its present use around 1790. The journalist and reformer William Cobbett stayed at the Crown on 27 August 1826, commenting in
Rural Rides
:

The area was once so open that one could ride from Everleigh to Salisbury, a distance of about 10 miles, without jumping a fence or opening a gate.

Among Maynard’s guests were his brother Geoffrey, Daphne, Bryn and Noel Olivier, Justin Brooke, Rupert, James Strachey, Apostles Gerald Shove and Gordon Luce and Frankie Birrell. The company rode, played croquet and walked, as they wished, and read from Jane Austen in the evenings. Noel’s notes about the occasion reveal that Brooke was no horseman, and took no part in the riding side of the activities. The Crown possessing only some five or six bedrooms, the party took over the whole inn with the exception of the small bar for the locals. Maynard, whose inclinations were then exclusively homosexual, seemed disenchanted with the female contingent, and annoyed by Rupert’s overtures to Bryn, confessing in a letter to Duncan Grant,

Rupert’s nerves and emotions, coupled with the heavy medication, contributed to his irrationality and confusion while at Everleigh. He was flirting outrageously with Bryn – inviting her to go boating with him the following month – only to be told, when cornered, that she wanted to take Hugh Popham as well. Rupert’s incredulity forced her to confess to him that she had, in fact, decided to marry Popham. Rupert was distraught, and not only reneged on the boating arrangements but refused to say goodbye to her when she left Everleigh. His feelings seemed to be all over the place as he wrote to Noel from the Crown after her departure.

Fine words, but to write them to Noel, who had watched Rupert openly flirting and making romantic overtures to her sister Bryn during the previous few days, points to him being close to a relapse following his nervous breakdown earlier in the year. In a further letter to Noel, written at the Crown, he reiterates his emotions and feelings for her: ‘Noel, Noel, there’s love between you and me,
and you’ve given me such kindness and such sympathy in your own Noel way – I’m wanting your presence so much – I’m leaning on you at this moment, stretching towards you.’ To complicate the issue even further, in the same letter he discussed his impending meeting with Ka, as she was awaiting a decision from him as to their future together. To Noel he confided: ‘I couldn’t ever live with her, I know from experience even, I should go mad, or kill her, in a few months. And – I love someone else. We’ve got to part. I suppose she really knows that by now. But I’ve got to tell her tomorrow.’ And he did. Justin Brooke drove him away from Everleigh, the Crown, the Keynes’ poker games and the croquet to a meeting place by the roadside at Bibury, where Ka was staying at the Swan. She and Rupert went off for three hours to discuss their relationship while Justin waited in his Opel. It was the end. Ka was inconsolable and Rupert riddled with guilt; it was the sour icing on the stale cake of his stay at Everleigh. His state of mind that weekend, and his being at such an all-time low, led to Frances Cornford suggesting that he go abroad for a while. Although he didn’t eventually take her advice until the following May, with beneficial results, he never sank so low again.

Rupert was, though, overcome himself with his own grief and guilt about ending the relationship. He poured his anguish into a letter to Noel.

The visitors’ book from the Crown, containing not only the signatures and comments of Keynes, Brooke and the rest of the party but also those of many other distinguished guests, including Montgomery of Alamein and General de Gaulle, disappeared some two or three years ago under mysterious circumstances.

During August, Rupert ricocheted from place to place like a pinball; from Witney in Oxfordshire he headed back to Rugby, before heading to the Cornfords’ house at Cambridge and then up to Overstrand on the Norfolk coast, where he stayed at Beckwythe Manor, the home of Gilbert and Rosalind Murray. Frances Cornford had introduced them to Brooke during rehearsals for Comus and they had subsequently become friends. On his first day at Overstrand, he wrote to Noel about his possible plans; ‘I spent most of yesterday talking to Frances. She’s Ka’s only decent real friend: she’s good, and, not being a virgin, she understands things. She wants me to go abroad for a year – to Australia or somewhere, and work manually. It’d be better for Ka she thinks.’ Rupert’s only problem in going abroad for a period was his concern that Noel might succumb sexually to one of her other suitors, which now rather bizarrely included James Strachey. At the end of the month Noel drove the final nail into the coffin when she admitted, ‘It was stupid of me even to have shared the little bit of love I had for you, and wicked of me to let you express your love for me … it was last November that I decided and you found out I didn’t love you.’

Justin Brooke’s home at Wotton in Surrey was also on Rupert’s itinerary that August. From Beckwythe Manor he informed Noel,
‘I go on Tuesday to c/o Justin, Leylands, Wotton, Dorking, Surrey, for a few days. You could say if we met what you thought about my retiring to California and how much you’d welcome the respite – yours as you left him, Rupert.’

Long associated with the Evelyn family since the days of the famous seventeenth-century English diarist, Wotton is undoubtedly still as much a piece of Old England as it was then, thanks to the arboricultural efforts of John Evelyn, whose passion for planting trees rapidly spread to the owners of other large country homes. During the Victorian era other eminent men brought their families to settle on the slopes of Leith Hill, with its stunning views across the Weald to the South Downs and its bracing ‘Swiss’ air, where the Evelyns live to this day.

In 1885 Arthur Brooke and his family acquired the expansive Leylands estate, having single-handedly built up his Manchester grocer’s shop until they had become one of the largest tea merchants in Britain – Brooke Bond. Brooke and his wife Alice already had two daughters and five sons by the time they moved in, with a third daughter, Aline, arriving later. Their sixth youngest, Justin, became close friends with Rupert Brooke at Cambridge, initially through the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club – both Brookes eventually becoming part of the group of friends that revelled in camping, swimming, walking and reading parties. As a good friend of Justin (who, coincidentally, had an older brother called Rupert), Rupert was always welcome at Leylands, where the walks, woods, views and tennis courts were major attractions.

A keen walker and lover of the English countryside, Rupert would surely have walked the short distance from the house, on the south-west corner of Leith Hill, to the tower – at 965 feet the highest point in south-east England with its views to the South Downs and English Channel to the south and the entire London
skyline and the Dunstable hills to the north. Built in 1765, the folly was erected by the altruistic Hull for his own pleasure, and for that of everyone else who wanted to take in the wonderful views. It is hard to believe that Brooke resisted the lure of the patchwork-quilt panorama, or the short walk to the secluded lake at Friday Street. Another draw in the area would have been Polesden Lacey, the playwright Sheridan’s sometime home and then owned by the Hon. Ronald and Mrs Greville, she being one of the legendary Edwardian hostesses. Again commanding fine southerly views, the late classic house built in 1824 on the North Downs was sufficiently close to writer George Meredith’s old home on Box Hill for Brooke to take them both in during his visits to Leylands. Although Meredith had died in 1909, just as Brooke came to know the area, he may still have gone, as he was one of the young poet’s influences and he had a high regard for his writing, except for his later work. Meredith had immortalised the forest near Wotton in ‘The Woods of Westermain’.