Forever England (6 page)

After finding a little time for sport – ‘I had my first game of tennis and found myself quite bad’ – the majority of his time was taken up with the organisation of a production of John Milton’s
Comus
, which was to be staged at the New Theatre in Cambridge to celebrate the poet John Milton’s tercentenary. Brooke played the Attendant Spirit and stage-managed the production. The organisation was indeed enormous. He dealt with H. and M. Rayne, the theatrical stores opposite Waterloo Station: ‘We received your letter today and note you require seventeen more animal masks … we cannot give you a definite price until we have seen the sketches.’ They also offered him ‘anything in Wigs, Tights, Shoes, or
Costumes.’ In mid-June, there was a flurry of letters and post-office telegraphs between Rupert and the set designer Albert Rothenstein, who informed him, ‘You will see from the drawing that it is perfectly possible to make use of scaffold or telegraph poles as trees,’ and, ‘When ordering clothes don’t forget they must be sized and prepared for working on.’ Rothenstein, groggy from having had his tonsils removed a few days before, was still full of enthusiasm: ‘Don’t forget that we shall want two Back Cloths, ready primed and prepared for painting on.’ Brooke’s workload was eased mentally by the workforce being joined by Noel Olivier, on holiday from Bedales. The telegrams, letters and notes increased as members of the cast checked rehearsal times, sent apologies for absence and made endless enquiries.

Comus
had first been presented in the Great Hall at Ludlow Castle on Michaelmas Day, 29 September 1634, with music by Henry Lawes, who, like Brooke, played the Attendant Spirit. Lawes, born in Salisbury in 1600, and a close friend of Milton, is credited with having been the first musician to introduce the Italian style of music into England. As the Spirit, Brooke had the task of handling both the prologue and the epilogue, so the first words the audience would hear would be Rupert’s, declaring:

Francis Cornford, a 33-year-old don, undertook the title role. It was during rehearsals for
Comus
that fellow student Frances Darwin, a
granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin, who was to later marry Cornford, composed her famous lines on Brooke:

Although she later rather regretted having written it, Brooke himself confessed to not minding the Apollo image. Those two words of hers, ‘young Apollo’, were to change people’s perception of Rupert for decades. In 1953, thirty-eight years after his death she wrote:

Frances saw Brooke as the pivotal figure in their circle of friends, which in effect he had become, having learned the knack of how to be the centre of attention and the central attraction. Bizarrely, he made all those associated with
Comus
solemnly promise that they wouldn’t get engaged or married during or within six months of the production – nonsense, of course, and impossible to impose upon anyone. In fact, Frances Darwin and Francis Cornford were the first to break the so-called pact by getting engaged.

Comus
, using the original music by Lawes, was repeated at a public matinee on the following day at the New Theatre, Cambridge. Ticket prices ranged from one to three shillings. The reviews for the first night were mixed, though Lytton Strachey, writing kindly of it in
The Spectator
, felt that it was ‘happily devoid of those jarring elements of theatricality and false taste which too often counterbalance the inherent merits of a dramatic revival’.

Scott and Wilkinson, photographers who were based at Camden Studio adjoining the New Theatre, Cambridge, wrote to Rupert asking him to ‘make an appointment with us to be photographed in your character in Milton’s
Comus
’. They added that the photographer would ‘consider it a personal favour’ if Brooke would be willing to pose for them. He posed. The production of
Comus
was a major feather in Brooke’s cap: the Milton tercentenary celebration was attended by such luminaries as the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin, Robert Bridges, who was to become Laureate after Austin’s death five years later, the author Edmund Gosse, Lytton Strachey and Thomas Hardy. The production was followed by a dance at Newnham Grange with the whole cast in costume, including Rupert in a rather short, spangled, sky-blue tunic that was far too skimpy to sit down in.

The only shadow cast over the success of
Comus
was the death, during the dress rehearsals, of Brooke’s friend and mentor at King’s, Walter Headlam. who had encouraged him to undertake a production of the play. Headlam had been taken ill while watching a cricket match at Lord’s and later died in hospital of strangulation of the bowels. Rupert was devastated, pouring out his feelings to his mother: ‘[I]t made me feel quite miserable and ill for days … he was the one classic I really admired and liked … what I loved so in him was his extraordinary and loving appreciation of all English poetry.’

In the summer of 1908, Brooke and several of his Cambridge friends, including Hugh Dalton, Noel’s sister Margery, Ben Keeling,
Dudley Ward and James Strachey, attended a Fabian summer school on the Welsh coast, in Merionethshire, some 3 miles south of Harlech. The first of the Society’s summer schools in Llanbedr had taken place the year before, following a suggestion by Fabian member Mabel Atkinson after she had been inspired by a German summer school. At the same time, a similar suggestion had arisen, and Frank Lawson Dodd had devised a scheme by which a large house could be procured for the education and recreation of Fabians during the holidays. The Society put their heads together and came up with a solution: Dodd discovered a house at Llanbedr called Pen-yr-Allt (top of the cliff), while Mabel Atkinson laid down a blueprint for an educational programme. A management committee of twelve was formed, all of whom pledged their own money in ten-year loans, at 5 per cent interest. They included George Bernard Shaw and his wife, H. G. Wells, and socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb. On the way to the camp Brooke and the others stayed with Beatrice at Leominster, after which the whole party went to Llanbedr via Ludlow Castle.

Before setting off, Rupert had sent Dalton a postcard claiming he was going to bring ‘a blanket, chocolate and nineteen books, all in a bag’. Dalton carried a torch for Rupert and was always eager to be in his presence, even though his feelings were not returned. Brooke’s rebuffs fired Dalton’s passions to greater heights and, although no relationship was forthcoming, Dalton was still inspired enough to quote Brooke’s poem ‘Second Best’ in his political speeches, both as Labour MP and as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1935. When he went down from Cambridge, he pointedly burned all his correspondence, keeping only communication from Rupert. News of Rupert’s death some seven years later would find Dalton inconsolable and in floods of tears. Thus Brooke moved people. Brooke also repelled James Strachey’s advances and suggestions with gentle humour during the period at Llanbedr.

Pen-yr-Allt became their temporary home for almost a fortnight. The origins of the house go back further than 1869, when a Mr Humphreys converted the old Welsh farmhouse into a fine family residence, complete with its Caernarvon arches, an architectural feature not usually found that far south. It was later inhabited by the Williams family with their seventeen children, before becoming a school. Four years before Brooke’s arrival, another future poet, Robert Graves, attended the establishment for a term, at the age of eight and three-quarters. It was there that Graves chanced upon the first two poems he remembered reading: the early English ballads of ‘Chevy Chase’ and ‘Sir Andrew Barton’. Here Graves was caned by the headmaster for learning the wrong collect one Sunday, and was terrified by the head’s daughter and her girlfriend, who tried to find out about the male anatomy by exploring down his shirt. It was not only girls who frightened him: ‘There was an open-air swimming bath where all the boys bathed naked, and I was very overcome by horror at the sight.’ Brooke had the benefit of the same swimming facilities, which were more like a small plunge bath than today’s conception of a pool. The changing hut had a small coal fire, to enable the boys to dry off properly before walking the quarter of a mile back to the house.

During his ten days at Pen-yr-Allt, Rupert attended lectures on Tolstoy and Shaw, long walks, daily exercises and evening dances – a formidable mixture. Fees were set at 35 shillings a week, with half a crown extra for Swedish drill. Despite these, and his comment, ‘Oh, the Fabians, I would to God they’d laugh and be charitable’, Rupert was not deterred from returning the following year. In between studies, there were not only Fabian meetings, football, rugby and cricket matches, drama societies, and poems to write, but also Carbonari gatherings. These are a few entries from Brooke’s Cambridge pocket diary for 1908–9.

It was at one of the Carbonari gatherings that Brooke was properly introduced to Eddie Marsh, then a civil servant at the colonial office, who had first seen Rupert in 1906 in
The Eumenides.
A former Apostle of the 1890s and the great-grandson of the assassinated British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, he was extremely well connected both politically and socially and was later to introduce Brooke into the rarefied atmosphere of these circles. At breakfast, the morning after meeting Marsh, Brooke, who had just won a prize in the
Westminster Gazette
for ‘The Jolly Company’, showed an impressed Marsh his poem, ‘Day That I Have Loved’.

At the beginning of the Michaelmas term of 1908, a Trinity man
who had been at Cambridge two years earlier returned for another year. He was Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde’s son, who had recently, at a friend’s behest, experimented with using his real surname. He found it an embarrassment, and indeed had dropped the experiment, and by the time he came up again, was using the family’s adopted name. ‘I got to know Rupert Brooke and A. C. Landsberg, and he used to hold poetry recitals in Firbank’s rooms.’

When Wilde’s close friend Robert Ross, who had done much to try to redeem Wilde’s reputation, came to Cambridge on business, Holland and his old Cambridge chum Ronald Firbank threw a supper for him, retaining the menu signed by those present, including Ross and Brooke. They drank Moët et Chandon, 1884.