Eternal Boy

by Dennison, Matthew;

  At St Edward’s Kenneth had learned to negotiate the conflicting claims of ‘imagination… in healthy working order’, with its colourful vistas into other worlds, and the diktats of conventional expectation.21 Immurement at Grahame, Currie and Spens exacerbated this disconnect between inner romanticism and conformity on the surface. In private Kenneth began to write. Writing poetry had been Helen’s response to Cunningham’s collapse, following her final months with her father in Inveraray. It is Mole’s remedy for Rat’s wanderlust in The Wind in the Willows: ‘“It’s quite a long time since you did any poetry,” [Mole] remarked. “You might have a try at it this evening – instead of, well, brooding over things so much. I’ve an idea that you’ll feel a lot better when you’ve got something jotted down – if it’s only just the rhymes.”’22 Kenneth’s writing took the form of a handful of anonymous contributions to the St Edward’s School Chronicle. Proof that, like Rat, it did indeed make him feel better, once begun, he would write on and off for the next two decades.

  *

  ‘To him who is destined to arrive, the fates never fail to afford, on the way, their small encouragements,’ Kenneth wrote optimistically in 1895.23 In his own case, encouragement came in the leonine form of irascible savant Frederick Furnivall. Furnivall was a literary zealot, a philologist, an editor of the New English Dictionary, founder of the Early English Text Society, the Chaucer Society, the Ballad Society and the New Shakspere Society. Like Kenneth, he kept faith lifelong with his boyhood enthusiasms: in Furnivall’s case, an absorption in medieval literature begun when, as a child, he read Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur. He was a Christian Socialist who taught grammar at the Working Men’s College, a barrister who practised intermittently as a conveyancer, a sculling enthusiast who badgered most of his friends onto the river. In equal measure he inspired discipleship and hostility.

  Kenneth met Furnivall in Soho, in an Italian restaurant some time in 1876. At first glance they had little in common, the gauche seventeen-year-old and this pugnacious dynamo, thirty-four years his senior, who cocked a snook at convention in ways Kenneth never would, with his idiosyncratic dress and bold, outspoken conversation and behaviour. Furnivall was at the centre of a crowded table, Kenneth on his own. Their introduction was informal – laughter on Kenneth’s part, overhearing one of Furnivall’s anecdotes, then an exchange of cards. It would be the first of many meetings. And it was to Furnivall, eminently well connected in literary London, that Kenneth would first show his writing.

  • 5 •

  ‘Journeymen in this great whirling London mill’

  ‘TO KNOW WHAT you would like to do is one thing,’ Kenneth wrote in 1892. ‘To go out boldly and do it is another – and a rarer.’1

  On 1 January 1879, in line with the wishes of his family, Kenneth arrived for the first time at the Bank of England and the position of gentleman clerk secured for him by William Lidderdale. He was nineteen years old, serious-minded, tall, broad-shouldered, no longer a child. In recent examinations for bank entry he had been awarded full marks for written composition for the only time in the bank’s history: an essay on the subject of India. He was greeted not by laurels, but the thickest yellow fog of the winter, so heavy over Threadneedle Street that the bulk of the bank’s employees had stayed away. His own short journey, from a new rented flat in Bloomsbury Street – the first home he could call his own – had taken him an hour and a half through impenetrable murk.

  Prudent John Grahame could not have made a safer choice for the nephew he did not understand than clerical work in the City. By the early 1870s, London’s financial institutions employed more than 120,000 frock-coated, stiff-white-collared clerks to write out by hand the invoices, letters and ledger entries of Victorian Britain’s trading revolution. In the Bank of England, a clerk’s position was for life, with no compulsory retirement age. On the surface, John Grahame’s certainty that he had found the answer for an educated, socially privileged young man without means was persuasive.

  Kenneth kept to himself any misgivings he retained; exigency and compulsion seldom win hearts and minds. In Twice Round the Clock; or the Hours of the Day and Night in London, published in 1859, George Augustus Sala had painted a sober picture of the clerk’s working day. He described a ‘great army of clerk martyrs… [setting] down their loads of cash-book and ledger-fillers’ each morning like clockwork. He apostrophized their wretchedness: ‘What an incalculable mass of figures must be collected in those commercial heads!… What a chaos of cash debtor, contra creditor, bills payable and bills receivable; waste-books, day-books, cash-books and journals; insurance policies and brokerage, dock warrants and general commercial bedevilment.’2

  At intervals Kenneth would indeed come to consider himself a ‘clerk martyr’. Rejection of commercial, corporate and committee life peppers his writing. Essays including ‘The Eternal Whither’, ‘A Bohemian in Exile’, ‘Long Odds’ and ‘Orion’ celebrate the ‘escape’ of city men from daily grind: the ‘old cashier in some ancient City establishment whose practice was to spend his yearly holiday in relieving some turnpike-man at his post’; Fothergill, who ‘passed out of our lives by way of the Bayswater Road’ for the north Berkshire Downs, a cart, a mare, ‘a few canvases and other artists’ materials’; the secretary of ‘some venerable Company or Corporation dating from Henry VII’, who ‘sent in his resignation, and with comfortable pension… crossed the Channel and worked South till he came to Venice’ and the Lido and a seahorse washed up on the sand; the stockbroker with a villa and a steam launch at Surbiton found tickling trout ‘in a wild nook of Hampshire’.3 In his satirical story of a seventeenth-century executioner, ‘The Headswoman’, Kenneth presents the town council as archetypal in its ‘general absence of any characteristic at all – unless a pervading hopeless insignificance can be considered as such’; in the same story he dismisses legalities as ‘a mass of lies, quibbles, dodges and tricks’.4 This was the world that Cunningham had rejected: Kenneth’s acceptance was equally qualified. Even long after his retirement, he rebuffed a suggestion that he write a magazine article about his experiences at the bank with the firm ‘Nothin’ Doin’ about B. of E [Bank of England]. Much too dull a subject.’5

  Kenneth’s childhood happiness – those intense solitary dream adventures set against the backdrop of The Mount – had been achieved in the face of bereavement, his father’s rejection and Mrs Inglis’s stern distractedness. In John Grahame’s Westminster offices, he had toyed with thoughts of political journalism: the dream shattered, he himself was not destroyed. Of his life lessons to date, none had been repeated so often as the pragmatism of adaptability. On the surface, as it would remain, pragmatism rather than rebellion was uppermost in Kenneth’s nature; and pragmatism did not preclude enjoyment. He remained at the Bank for England for thirty years, although two of his published essay collections, The Golden Age and Dream Days, were bestsellers and his wife an heiress. Save that brief hankering for political journalism, he never aspired to write full time.

  His response to City life was not, as might be expected and has sometimes been suggested, one of wretchedness and outright rejection. At times the Bank of England bored him. Then, as in his essay ‘The Rural Pan’, ‘through shady Throgmorton Street and about the vale of Cheapside the restless Mercury [flitted], with furtive eye and voice a little hoarse’, the restless Mercury an image of Kenneth’s distraction.6 At other times he enjoyed the bank’s venerable kaleidoscope: dividend day and shareholders of every shape, size and, apparently, level of neediness; the patrol of nightwatchmen with their lanterns, like an historical pageant; bullion vaults stacked like baker’s shelves with bars of silver and gold, and the slender bank cats chasing mice through lofty chambers. He enjoyed the methodical repetitions of clerical work, long chophouse lunches and errands that took him near and far, crisscrossing the capital. Like George the clerk in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, ‘who goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day’, he enjoyed the rhythm of short, unhurried
working days – one day, according to a surviving scrap of diary, he departed the bank at eleven o’clock in the morning, his work completed. In time, he enjoyed the freedom to decide for himself his comings and goings. He enjoyed the bank’s entrenched traditionalism. ‘If we are perfectly honest with ourselves,’ he wrote in 1921, ‘we must admit that we always do the thing that we really like doing, for the sake of the doing itself.’7 For much of the time, he was as numb to the unsympathetic aspects of bank life as he had become to the blows of his childhood and the brutishness of St Edward’s. ‘To all of us journeymen in this great whirling London mill, it happens sooner or later that the clatter and roar of its ceaseless wheels… becomes a part of our nature, with our clothes and our acquaintances,’ he wrote, ‘till at last the racket and din of a competitive striving humanity… cease to impinge on the sense,’ leaving him undisturbed with the absorbing inner life with which he consistently sought to shield himself.8 By 1879, for as long as he could remember, Kenneth had led a double life, slipping between the workaday world and wellsprings of rich fantasy. Employment at the Bank of England, like St Edward’s and the years of disillusionment at Grahame, Currie and Spens, consolidated this habit of mental dualism. Boredom and incomprehension opened doors into other realms.

  Unexpectedly in his favour was the bank’s affinity with the rumbustious lost world of the ‘Gallery’ and the games played at The Mount with Helen, Willie and the infant Roland. Kenneth’s arid preconceptions of the bank were shaped by Uncle John Grahame and whatever childish impressions he himself had formed at Ascot Place of William Lidderdale; he had not anticipated an environment of any imaginative appeal. In the event, the Bank of England astonished him. He would discover that its multiple identities were every bit as surprising as his own.

  ‘Gentlemen’ clerks were frequently anything but. The loutish hurly-burly of junior bank staff startled this reserved, self-contained young man whose social exposure had been narrow. Among its lower echelons, as a contemporary of Kenneth’s recorded, the bank was a rowdy pandemonium of pranks and ‘flying Pass-books’ and ‘the singing of a line from some popular song winding up with “Amen” in a solemn cadence of about a hundred voices’.9 Employees were regularly so drunk that they were forced to lie down on tables to recover. Animal carcases were deposited in lavatories awaiting amateur butchery at the end of the day. In cloakrooms after hours, wagers were laid on illicit dog fights. Clerks brawled and spat. The impression is of a Hogarthian cockfighting den. Fastidious Kenneth observed with horrified fascination – and combed the bank’s official records for past instances of unruliness or eccentricity, like the story of the clerk-turned-turnpike-man that he recycled in ‘The Eternal Whither’ or the abrupt termination of employment of an unnamed predecessor, who ‘did not attend at his office today, having been hanged at eight o’clock in the morning for horse-stealing’.10 Topsy-turvily an elderly Scottish ledger clerk criticized the neat regularity of Kenneth’s handwriting: ‘It’s no’ the hand of a principal, young Grahame.’11

  A measure of financial independence was Kenneth’s short-term reward, as John Grahame had intended, although bank salaries of the time were modest. Kenneth kept careful accounts, shrewd in every aspect of financial management, and would continue to do so. Predictably, bank life satisfied only a fraction of his thoughts. At Grahame, Currie and Spens, he had submitted mannered contributions to the St Edward’s School Chronicle, perhaps with the purpose of persuading his unbending uncle to reconsider the possibility of a career in journalism. From first arrival in Threadneedle Street, Kenneth devoted non-working hours to writing. He purloined a bank ledger for the purpose; alongside his own efforts were scraps of Horace, Caxton’s Golden Legend and poetry by Robert Herrick. His membership of Furnivall’s New Shakspere Society was a settled thing. Since 1877, he had acted as the society’s honorary secretary, present at its monthly meetings in rooms at University College – silent mostly, according to the society’s minutes; a watcher, witness to Furnivall’s boisterous charisma, his enthusiasms, his peppery tracasseries. The tug of Furnivall and literary London was well established by the time Kenneth entered his apprentice clerkship: his loyalty to the bank was as circumscribed as his faithfulness to John Grahame’s vision of family respectability. He kept up his membership of the London Scottish, changing into uniform before departure from Threadneedle Street. After 1884, again at Furnivall’s prompting, he helped out at Toynbee Hall in Stepney, organizing sing-songs, billiards and boxing for young East Enders, while recent graduates from Oxford and Cambridge provided lectures. At the neighbouring Whitechapel Art Gallery, part of the same philanthropic foundation, he saw exhibitions of modern art: Millais, Watts, Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones; in a story written later he satirized Burne-Jones’s style: ‘vapid, colourless, uninteresting characters, with straight up-and-down sort of figures, white night-gowns, white wings, and the same straight yellow hair parted in the middle’.12 None of the artists’ work moved him to the extent of future encounters with early Italian or Flemish painting. For relaxation he visited the popular Turkish baths, drawn by their promise of ‘a certain supernal, deific, state of mind… [a] golden glow of the faculties’, part opiate, part hallucination.13

  For a decade Kenneth did not allow himself any return to Oxford, save to visit his cousin Reginald Inglis at St Edward’s. Instead he repeatedly dreamed of the city, ‘the real thing, yet transformed and better, because the Gothic was better – a maze of lovely cloisters and chapels and courts’, proof of Oxford’s enduring stranglehold on his imagination and the impact on him of reading John Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’ in The Stones of Venice.14 Characteristically, his dreams had the tendency to make Kenneth happy. Awake, he had the bank and first tentative exercises in writing and, in the flat in Bloomsbury Street, a space in which to indulge the fantasies of home that balanced his longing for escape.

  In The Wind in the Willows, in Badger’s large, fire-lit kitchen, ‘rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser… The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.’15 In Kenneth’s description, inanimate objects betray human impulses and emotions, animism he would also apply to landscape and even weather.16 Home – in Badger’s case a ‘safe anchorage’ of ‘embracing light and warmth’ – assumes the parent’s role of security and protection that Kenneth had missed under Mrs Inglis’s roof. It is these attributes he sought out, and imposed upon, the places he chose to live himself.

  The flat in Bloomsbury Street lay within convenient walking distance of the bank. At twenty-five shillings, its weekly rent represented a considerable outlay for a junior clerk. As much as ‘safe anchorage’, it provided him with a space in which to enjoy autonomy that was more than imaginary. His enjoyment was brief. At some point before 1882, Roland followed Kenneth to the Bank of England. He followed him to Bloomsbury Street too, using the flat’s sitting room as his bedroom, an arrangement untenable beyond the short term.

  Before Roland’s advent, Kenneth embraced the joy of sole possession by arranging the flat entirely to his own liking – as he once described his ideal interior, ‘little rooms, full of books and pictures, and clean of the antimacassar taint’.17 His domestic routines were his own, too – a fussy way of making coffee from freshly ground beans using an earthenware strainer, evening pipes of Honeydew tobacco, the ash knocked out on the fire grate, carefully in the case of his favourite long clay pipes. Friends commended his ‘very good taste and… great appreciation of beautiful things’, the thoughtful placing of a piece of furniture found in an antiques shop or junkshop.18 He visited sales rooms, coveting woodcuts and etchings; in bookshops, in place of ‘the two-and-sixpenny edition for the million’, he coveted the latest ‘volume of poems in large paper’.19 The intensity of his quest for home and his preoccupation with its orderly
appearance and workings were legacies of his peripatetic childhood, with its frequent dispossessions of place and person. As years before he had dreamed repeatedly of a cream-coloured pony with a long-flowing tail, a vision of an ideal room came to dominate Kenneth’s dreams. ‘A certain little room very dear and familiar’, this dream room impressed upon him ‘a sense of snugness, of cushioned comfort, of home-coming’, like the rooms he provides for Mole, Rat and Badger. ‘All was modest – O, so very modest! But all was my very own, and, what was more, everything in that room was exactly right.’20 To a sympathetic friend he described the room he saw in his sleep. He also described a waking game he played with himself, of walking London’s streets in pursuit of this imaginary space that he had determined must exist. His need for its reality – or for proof of the reality of his dream – was a marker of the extent of his longing for ‘the well-known staircase… the ever-welcoming door… the same feeling of a homecoming’. The room contained a fire and ‘the most comfortable chair in the world’ – like Badger’s kitchen, where Badger, Rat and Mole ‘gathered round the glowing embers of the great wood fire, and thought how jolly it was to be sitting up so late, and so independent’.21 Far from feeling disappointment at his failure to locate the room in fact, Kenneth celebrated its ‘enchanting possibility’ and continued to dream of it.22

  At weekends he returned to the country he knew, walking or rowing that stretch of the Thames that links Cookham Dean to Cranbourne and beyond in both directions – as far once as Blewbury, close to Didcot, where on Mr Caudwell’s farm he saw a row of rats nailed to a wooden door, genesis of one of his darker essays, ‘The Barn Door’. He set off from the Thames-side village of Streatley to explore the Ridgeway, following ‘a broad green ribbon of turf’ that sliced through an ‘almost trackless expanse of billowy Downs’, eventually reaching Cuckhamsley Hill, some 10 miles distant. Like the shepherd in ‘The Reluctant Dragon’, ‘up on the wide ocean-bosom of the Downs, with only the sun and the stars and the sheep for company, and the friendly chattering world of men and women far out of sight and hearing’, he exulted in the sheer size and emptiness of the landscape.23 He pictured himself ‘alone with the southwest wind and the blue sky’ as if his surrounds had absorbed him bodily, he himself a part of nature’s huge panoply; and he insisted on his place in the sweeping panorama, noticing the ‘sky that was always dancing, shimmering, softly talking’, listening to ‘the water’s own noises’.24