Forever England (3 page)

Notwithstanding this schoolboy nonsense, Brooke also had a very masculine side, throwing himself enthusiastically into the discipline of the school cadet corps, where he rose swiftly to colour sergeant before being promoted to second lieutenant.

During the April school break, the Brookes repaired to Venice for a short holiday, following which Rupert went to spend a few days with his older brother Richard, who was now working for a firm in Southsea, Hampshire.

On May 1906 Rupert wrote from School Field to Geoffrey Keynes, who had left Rugby the previous year:

His overwhelming sadness at the realisation that these were his final days as a pupil al School Field came pouring out in words, powerfully demonstrating his feelings in the closing lines of a letter to Keynes dated 22 June: ‘That gay witch, the summer, who charmed me three weeks ago! I have looked into her face and seen behind the rouge and the smile, the old, mocking visage of a harlot.’

During the height of his final golden summer at School Field Rupert was moved to write a poem that was eventually published
as ‘English Minnesong’ in the
Westminster Gazette
on 16 February 1907 and later as ‘The Beginning’ in
Poems 1911.

Rupert was never again to find the security afforded him by Rugby School, except perhaps many years later as an officer in the Royal Naval Battalion, when once again he belonged to a unit of young men with whom he had a unique bond and sense of purpose. Brooke
was moulded by the school made great by its former headmaster Thomas Arnold. Thomas Hughes, the author of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
, who had been a pupil there some years before Brooke, noted: ‘The mark by which you may know them is, their genial and hearty freshness and youthfulness of character.’ So enamoured was Hughes of Arnold’s ‘New Jerusalem’ that in 1880 he founded the township of Rugby in Morgan County, Tennessee.

Two months before he was to go up to King’s College, Cambridge, Rupert was drawn back to the Russell-Smith household in the New Forest. His obvious enjoyment of staying at Watersgreen House was displayed in a thank-you letter to Mrs Russell-Smith in August 1906:

In October, with his new life at Cambridge about to begin, Rupert was again at Bournemouth, from where he wrote to Geoffrey Keynes,
‘I have been in this quiet place of invalids and gentlemanly sunsets for about a hundred years, ever since yesterday week.’ St John Lucas was also treated to vivid descriptions from Brooke’s over-imaginative scribblings during the same visit:

It is clear that Brooke was apprehensive about leaving Rugby for Cambridge, covering his fears with an assumed equanimity: ‘I have seen everything there is to see and my eyes are tired.’

B
EFORE OCTOBER
1906 was out, Brooke was living away from home for the first time as an undergraduate of King's College, at Cambridge University. The King's College of St Nicholas in Cambridge was established by Henry VI in 1440, the monarch giving thanks ‘to the honour of Almighty God, in whose hand are the hearts of Kings; of the most blessed and immaculate Virgin Mary Mother of Christ, and also of the glorious Confessor and Bishop Nicholas, Patron of my intended college, on whose festival we first saw the light'. In imitation of William Wykeham (founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford), the King immediately closely connected his
college with the King's College of Blessed Mary of Eton beside Windsor. The King's Chapel is a breathtakingly unique piece of architecture, surrounded by later work from eminent architects such as William Wilkins, Sir Gilbert Scott and Sir George Boldy. Until 1857, just half a century too early for Rupert, King's College students had the right to claim degrees without examination. He became one of some fifty freshmen to join the 100 or so established King's men, and was allotted Room 14 (actually two rooms) at the top of staircase A, in Fellows' Buildings, almost in the far corner of the front court – rooms that had been occupied by the artist Aubrey Beardsley some seventeen years before. Rupert had once written to his cousin Erica, while still at school, suggesting that she acquired and absorb ‘one third of Swinburne, all Oscar Wilde, and the drawings of Beardsley'.

Brooke had won a scholarship to King's, where his uncle Alan Brooke was Dean of the college, as his father had done before him. As with Rupert's schooldays under his father, no favours were asked for, nor expected, except that an arrangement was reached that he would call on his uncle for tea on Saturday afternoons. At an initial, more formal meeting with the Dean he met and became friendly with Hugh Dalton, later to become Chancellor of the Exchequer under Prime Minister Clement Attlee in the mid-1940s. Discovering that they had much in common, Brooke and Dalton, the son of a canon of Windsor, agreed to form a society where they could discuss such mutual interests as poetry, politics and any other subjects that took their fancy, deciding on the name ‘Carbonari' (the charcoal burners) after the nineteenth-century Italian revolutionaries.

Brooke also fraternised with old Rugbeians who had gone up to Cambridge, Hugh Russell-Smith, Geoffrey Keynes and Andrew Gow, and found (as he had in St John Lucas at Rugby) another
literary mentor, in the 42-year-old university librarian Charles Sayle, known as ‘Aunt Snayle'. Brooke was later to write in his diary on 22 February 1908: ‘I do not know in what language to moderate my appreciation of this great man … great in his ideals, great in his imagination, great in his charm.'

Other Cambridge men with whom Rupert became close friends were Justin Brooke, who had come up to Emmanuel in 1904 and was a leading light in the university's dramatic circle, and Jacques Raverat, a Frenchman from Prunoy who had arrived at Cambridge from university at the Sorbonne, Paris, having previously been at Bedales School with Justin. Raverat had this to say of Rupert:

During his first year at King's, Rupert took time to glance over his shoulder at the past: ‘I have been happier at Rugby than I can find words to say. As I looked back at five years I seemed to see almost every hour golden and radiant, and always increasing in beauty as I grew more conscious and I could not and cannot hope for, as even quite imagine, such happiness elsewhere.' The man later to become another literary mentor, Edward Marsh, a high-ranking civil servant and former Cambridge graduate who was to fly the flag for Brooke's poetry and would bring him together with many other leading poets, was to say of Brooke's time at School Field, ‘He loved the house and garden, especially his own particular long grass-path, where he used to walk up and
down reading.' Brooke showed misgivings about leaving Rugby for King's: ‘I shall live in Cambridge very silently, in a dark corner of a great room … I shall never speak, but I shall read all day and night – philosophy or science – nothing beautiful any more.'

Once at Cambridge, he soon began to orchestrate a suitable image. To Keynes he confided:

Although Rupert made no great claims to be an actor, his looks and charisma drew him to the attention of the university dramatic societies. Via Justin Brooke, and fourth-year King's man A. E. Scholfield, Rupert landed the non-speaking role of the Herald in
The Eumenides,
which was being produced by the Greek play committee. It was in this production that he first made an impression on Eddie Marsh, who was in the audience. Following his triumph in
The Eumenides
, Brooke became a college pin-up. Winston Churchill's cousin Sir Shane Leslie later wrote in an article for
Tatler
about him:

This side of him was shielded from his mother, to whom he wrote from King's of other matters: ‘I am going to see the South Africans, if they play, tomorrow. As it has been raining for a week they will probably have a wet ball and be handicapped considerably, but I suppose we shan't beat them. I have an atrocious but cheap seat right behind the goal-posts.' This was the Springboks' first ever visit to the British Isles, rugby having been introduced there just thirty years earlier. He also informed her about his new neighbour Oscar Browning, the historian and fellow of King's already in his seventieth year, who had rooms just opposite Rupert's: ‘I went to lunch with the “OB” on Sunday. He was rather quaint to watch but I did not much like him. He was so very egotistical, and a little dull.' If James Strachey had similar views, they didn't appear to deter him from being sexually submissive to Browning, who would have sexual intercourse with him, accompanied by a string quartet of elderly ladies, secreted behind a curtain!

In January 1907, Rupert was ill in bed at Rugby with a bout of influenza which had hit the family; his mother and elder brother Richard were also down with it. He described his ailments in letters to Geoffrey Keynes and Erica Cotterill, writing to the latter enclosing a new poem that he had just written: ‘To make up for all this bosh, I shall copy out for you the wonderfullest sonnet of the century. But if you show it to respectable people they'll kill you.' Some four and a half years after his original handwritten verses were secretly read by Erica, they were published in
Poems 1911
as ‘The Vision of Archangels' and would sit on the bookshelves of the ‘respectable people' he once feared might blanche at them.

On Sunday 13 January, Richard died of pneumonia, with his father Parker Brooke by his side. The family was devastated and Rupert was feeling ‘terribly despondent and sad … there is an instinct to hide in sorrow, and at Cambridge where I know nowhere properly I can be alone'. He also felt that his father was ‘tired and broken by it'. He offered to stay at School Field for a while, but his parents felt they could cope. Rupert went back to Cambridge and very gradually life began to return to normal.

As Brooke became increasingly involved with student life, he began to contribute poems and reviews to the
Cambridge Review,
as well as playing Stingo in the Amateur Dramatic Club's (ADC) production of Oliver Goldsmith's sentimental comedy,
She Stoops to Conquer.
His first poem to be printed while at King's was ‘The Call', in February 1907.

Having found his feet and many new friends, and established his popularity, the Brooke of 1907 was a quantum leap from the freshman of 1906 who had written to St John Lucas on his arrival, ‘this place is rather funny to watch; and a little wearying. It is full of very young people, and my blear eyes look dolefully at them from the lofty window where I sit and moan … my room is a gaunt yellow wilderness.'

On top of Rupert's dramatic commitment and studies, he was writing poetry and reviewing it. He confessed to St John Lucas, ‘in my “literary life” I have taken the last step of infamy and become – a reviewer! I have undertaken to “do” great slabs of minor poetry for the
Cambridge Review
… Cambridge is terrible, slushy and full of un-Whistlerian mists.'

Rupert's increasing enthusiasm for exploring England took him along the South Downs of Sussex through the sleepy villages of Amberley, Arundel, Duncton and Petworth and along the River Arun in a walking tour with Hugh Russell-Smith, which he picturesquely embellished in a letter to St John Lucas: ‘[W]e slew a million dragons and wandered on unknown hills. We met many knights and I made indelicate songs about them.' This was the heart of Hilaire Belloc country: Belloc had started many of his
own walking tours from his house, Kings Land at Shipley. It must have crossed Brooke's mind to call unsolicited; even though he did not, the two were to meet within a couple of months. The marathon ramble ended at the Green Dragon, Market Lavington, over the Easter weekend of 1907, during which time Rupert was proclaiming himself, through Hugh Dalton's influence, a committed Fabian and was allegedly trying to write Fabian hymns, although one suspects they were more fancy than fact, as Rupert had little musical talent. For one who was so taken with the image and character of Belloc – who would write many songs while walking the downs and the Arun Valley, through which Brooke had just travelled – if he were trying to compose, it would undoubtedly be in Belloc style. Possibly something in the vein of Belloc's ‘On Sussex Hills'.

Brooke and Belloc eventually met at King's in the spring of 1907: