Eternal Boy

by Dennison, Matthew;

  In a boat with a single paddle, he drifted downstream, glimpsing loosestrife and meadowsweet and flowering bulrushes at the water’s edge. Minutely he traced the coming of spring, ‘the thrust of the snowdrop and then the crocus, the first green thrill that passes through the quickset hedgerows, the tender wash of faint water-colour that tells of the winter wheat coming thrusting through, the touch of rosiness in the black elm tree-tops’.25 He observed whatever was immutable, unchanging, dependable, features that allowed him to move at will from the present into his imagining of the past. At sunset he retreated to a ‘rustic inn’, armed always with tobacco and his pipe, ready for chops and ale and the promise of ‘the surest and the sweetest sleep’.26 His week fell into unequal halves, separated by location. The divide expressed the split in Kenneth himself. It was the country that engaged him viscerally and emotionally. He would evolve a theory that ‘there were two Englands existing together, the one firing the great iron highways wherever they might go… the other, unguessed at by many, in whatever places were still vacant of shriek and rattle… the England of heath and common and windy sheep down, of by-lanes and village-greens’.27 Conservative Kenneth endowed this ‘other’, older England with virtues: honesty, harmony, beauty. He escaped the ‘shriek and rattle’ in the Downs’ ancient stillnesses – and in imagination and, over time, in his own writing. Wish fulfilment played its part in his outlook. His nostalgia for an idealized countryside had a political dimension, implicitly an endorsement of age-old rural hierarchies and the dominance of a landowning class to which he did not belong. From Monday to Friday, according to Dame Henrietta Barnett, who encountered him at Toynbee Hall, he ‘seemed outwardly but a young City man with a dutiful consideration for his poorer neighbours’.28

  In London, the company of Furnivall and his coterie or family members, and his evenings with the London Scottish, still left time for reading. Beginning in 1878, Smith, Elder & Co published collections of Richard Jefferies’s natural history articles for the Pall Mall Gazette. Kenneth cannot have known at the time the debt he would incur to Jefferies’s subsequent children’s stories, Wood Magic and Bevis, in which a child communicates with the elements and animals – a talking mouse, rat and weasel – and the writer explores without sentiment a boy’s imagination.

  *

  By his early twenties, Kenneth had acquired a gloss of sophistication. He dressed smartly, even to the point of dandyism, a camellia his preferred buttonhole. A friend of Helen’s described ‘a tall… fine-looking young man, a splendid head, broad and well-proportioned’; she noted his ‘large, widely opened rather light grey eyes, always with a kindly expression in them… sensitive hands and mouth’.29 A clipped crescent of moustache marked the transition from boyhood; already his hair was beginning to thin. At home he was seldom far from his pipe. In an essay on smoking, he called tobacco ‘the true Herb of Grace, and a joy and healing balm, and respite and nepenthe’; he dismissed cigarettes as ‘shadows of the substance’.30 To Reginald Inglis he remained a favourite cousin. Kenneth took the impressionable sixteen-year-old to the theatre, to supper in Soho, a little Italian restaurant offering ‘about ten courses for 1s. 6d’; he offered him nightcaps of whisky and hot water and a favourite clay pipe that Reginald broke in his nervousness. Reginald observed Kenneth and Roland’s bachelor independence, including, it seems, undercurrents of tension between them. He recorded Kenneth’s variable health. Physically Kenneth had never completely recovered from the scarlet fever he had caught from Bessie Grahame at the age of five; he suffered bronchial problems and recurrent bouts of ‘what they called in those days inflammation of the bowels’, so severe on one occasion that his life appeared in danger. His convalescence involved lengthy, not unwelcome, absences from the bank.31 Either Reginald noticed for himself, or Kenneth told him, that he had begun submitting unsolicited contributions ‘to magazines and some literary pages’.32

  It was Furnivall who encouraged his writing. With some trepidation, Kenneth had shown him the bank ledger he filled with commonplaces, essays written under the combined influence of Robert Louis Stevenson and Punch, and poetry. The ledger disappeared following the death of Kenneth’s widow: all that survive are extracts quoted in 1933 by Patrick Chalmers. The poetry, as preserved in Chalmers’s extracts, is vapid even at its most pessimistic, and cumbrously metrical; the prose is sprightlier, though preoccupied by ‘harrying troubles’ and a sense of failure.33 Furnivall advised Kenneth to concentrate on prose. That he treated the younger man so gently points to affectionate esteem as well as perceptiveness. Similar feelings had prompted his invitation that Kenneth take on the secretaryship of the New Shakspere Society a year after they met.

  In 1882 or thereabouts, Kenneth left the flat in Bloomsbury Street. He moved – without Roland – to a waterside eyrie. His roof-top flat at 65 Chelsea Gardens, his home until 1894, lay at the top of winding spirals of stone stairs, ‘like climbing the stairs of a lighthouse’ in one view or, more prosaically, ‘interminable dingy stairs’.34 To Kenneth’s contemporaries, Chelsea was riparian, bohemian, artistic, damp, transgressive. To Kenneth it offered views over the Thames and, beyond, broad green expanses of Battersea Park, and at sunset, clouds ‘massing themselves in a low violet bank [and] to north and south, as far round as eye could reach, a narrow streak of gold [that] stretched away, straight along the horizon’.35 By ferry-steamer boarded at Chelsea Embankment, he travelled back and forth to the Bank of England. At least once he ‘got up at 6, and went a delightful walk by the river before breakfast’.36

  Georgina Grahame helped the motherless young man with his domestic arrangements. In the window a gate-legged tea table overlooked the river. A Chippendale bureau bought inexpensively in the Portobello Road and rumoured to have belonged to the Duke of Wellington revealed a hidden compartment that later inspired Kenneth’s story ‘The Secret Drawer’, in which a ‘faint odour of orris-root… seemed to identify itself with the yellows and browns of the old wood’ and, at last, ‘with a sort of small sigh, almost a sob – as it were – of relief, the secret drawer sprang open’.37 In Kenneth’s story, the drawer discloses ‘a real boy’s hoard’: buttons from a sailor’s uniform, foreign copper coins, ‘a list of bird’s eggs, with names of the places where they had been found… a ferret’s muzzle, and a twist of tarry string, still faintly aromatic’.38 To a visitor to the flat, Kenneth revealed his disappointment that the real secret drawer probably contained no more than the duke’s love letters. His replacement of these with boyish treasure trove in his story is characteristic. Avoidance of the subject of adult relationships was already a firm habit, as it is with the would-be writer-hero of E. M. Forster’s novel The Longest Journey, published in 1907, who announces ‘My notion just now is to leave the passions on the fringe.’39 (Kenneth shared a number of traits with Forster’s Rickie Elliot: self-effacement and sensitivity, awkwardness in his relations with women – the limitations of an over-rigid classical education.) In time, over everything, as Kenneth described rooms belonging to a fictional clergyman, ‘a faint aroma of tobacco cheered and heartened exceedingly’.40 He either cooked for himself or went out for meals. No accounts mention anywhere in the flat reminders of his parents.

  Amid the roof-tops in Chelsea Gardens, although he entertained cousins and colleagues from the bank there, Kenneth found opportunities for the solitude that, in the welcome absence of binding emotional ties, had become a necessity to him. The flat’s cool grey light, reflected off the river, was entirely conducive to the somnolence in which he daydreamed. In surroundings he had fashioned for himself he found reassurance and tangible happiness, like Mole at Mole End: ‘ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back’.41 Possessions and the act of possessing buoyed his spirits: ‘a brooding sense of peace and of possession’ dominates his account of his dream of the perfect room. Li
ke Mole, in thought if not in action, he ‘needs must go and caress his possessions’; he was reassured by ‘this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome’.42 His writing suggests that his reaction to overwhelming unhappiness as a child had been ‘mental aloofness – [the] habit of withdrawal into a secret chamber, of which [the child] sternly guards the key’ or into secret adventures of his own devising.43 The top-floor flat in which he lived alone for a dozen years was one more ‘secret chamber’. In a personal life of limited emotional scope, cherished surrounds provided a sense of belonging and wholeness of sorts.

  Nevertheless, another six years would pass before Kenneth’s writing appeared in print. ‘By a Northern Furrow’, the first of his paeans to the Berkshire Downs, was published anonymously in the St James’s Gazette in December 1888.

  • 6 •

  ‘The memory of the glades and wood’

  IN HIS MID-TWENTIES, before his writing found its own voice, Kenneth made a series of formative journeys that redrew the boundaries of his imagination.

  His first visit to Cornwall, in August 1884, in the company of his sister Helen, was prompted by illness. The siblings travelled to the Lizard peninsula, England’s southernmost tip, all but surrounded by the sea. Helen had become a hospital nurse, practical and capable, confirmed in her spinsterhood. A quality in her that Kenneth called her awkwardness was at odds with his own irresolute dreamy withdrawal from unpleasantness: she was vigilant and attentive in her care for him. Brother and sister stayed in a cottage belonging to Helen’s friend Mary Richardson.

  Distance from London and sea air wrought their magic on Kenneth; he was always susceptible to ‘the feel of the warm sun striking hard between my shoulder-blades’.1 At The Mount, he had revelled in ‘treasures of hedge and ditch; the rapt surprise of the first lords-and-ladies, the rustle of a field-mouse, the splash of a frog’.2 Thrilled by ‘the wildness, freshness and strangeness of the Lizard, its grandeur and sparkling air’, and with his illness on the wane, he rediscovered the sea.3 He had been too young for boats at Ardrishaig and Inveraray; but here, for a second time, Kenneth encountered a community dependent on the sea’s harvest. Inevitably he took a rosy view of the way of life, remote from any urban centre and the ugly, impersonal, mechanized stamp of ‘progress’ that he blamed for banishing ‘the old enchantment’ elsewhere: ‘the colliery, the leprosy of suburban brickfields, the devastating network which the railway spider ejects’.4

  In Cornwall in 1884, Kenneth went native. He spent as much of his time as possible among the fishermen, until his hair was streaked with lighter brown and his face sunburned. Like the wayfaring rat in The Wind in the Willows, he adopted the fishermen’s dress of ‘knitted jersey… of a faded blue, breeches, patched and stained… based on a blue foundation… and a blue cotton handkerchief’ and was delighted when a holidaying don from Oxford mistook him for a local.5 He ate like a native too: leek pasties wrapped in hot flannels to keep them warm; stargazy pie, in which whole pilchards poke head first through golden pastry; rolls of new bread split open and filled with clotted cream; and slices of warm bread spread with cream and drizzled with zigzags of treacle, called ‘Thunder and Lightning’. Mary Richardson noted that ordinarily Kenneth was ‘distinctly reserved’.6 Among the fisherfolk, his standoffishness evaporated.

  One thrilling night he joined the crew of the local lifeboat, when a White Star liner carrying frozen meat was wrecked offshore. The meat had been wrapped in sheepskins: the skins floated while the meat sank, boon for the fishermen and more valuable than their usual haul. Kenneth learned to catch cod, pollock, mackerel and sardines and, in the early evening, in the shadowy dusk of late summer, by lugger lamp fished for conger eels in the deep water beyond the harbour. He joked afterwards that, only once a 25-pound conger eel had made it into the boat, did the fun really begin. Sometimes he fished all night, in a boat belonging to an elderly fisherman called Tom Roberts. Through unhurried days he immersed himself in a version of those outdoor games of his imagining, his mind recasting each boisterous new escapade as an incident in stories he had read by Ballantyne or, more recently, Treasure Island. Like the boy heroes of fiction, in Cornwall he lived in an eternal present, with no mind for the return to London and the workaday world. Impressions silted into memory, dredged up later: ‘the hungry complaint of the gulls and the sea-mews, the soft thunder of the breaking wave, the cry of the protesting shingle’, as the seafaring rat describes them to Rat. ‘Of deep-sea fishings he heard tell, and mighty silver gatherings of the mile-long net; of sudden perils, noise of breakers on a moonlit night… the splash of the hawser’.7 In local bric-à-brac shops, Kenneth acquired the first of a large collection of the painted glass rolling pins called Sailor’s Farewells traditionally given by sailors to their sweethearts. He bought Nailsea glass and Battersea enamels. They would find their place among the careful arrangements of the attic flat.

  *

  His first experience of Italy was with his cousin Annie Grahame in 1886. The hillside farmhouse leased by Annie’s parents, ‘in a large park bordered by beautiful old ilexes and fir trees, with splendid conifers, tulip-trees and catalpas planted here and there’, overlooked nearby Florence and, in the distance, the hills of Vallombrosa and the Apennine mountains.8 In Georgina Grahame’s well-ordered Italian garden, Kenneth encountered verdancy undreamed of at The Mount. Over the courtyard hung the scent of lemon trees; there were tall stems of Madonna lilies with their flecked white trumpet flowers and heady perfume, roses and scented narcissi and festoons of climbing jasmine. Inside, Mrs Grahame had commissioned stencilled wall decoration ‘in artistic designs, copied from old Italian brocades’. She installed servants’ bells and terracotta fireplaces and, for good measure, ‘had several pieces of old English silver standing on shelves in the dining room’. In such beguiling surrounds, so different from the ‘gloomy squares and dusty streets’ of London, their exoticism tempered by service bells and family silver, Kenneth could be simultaneously inspired and cosseted.9

  The trip to Italy was a retreat from scandal. The previous year, Furnivall had founded the Shelley Society. At the Grand Theatre, Islington, on 7 May 1886, in front of an audience that included George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and the novelist George Meredith, the society staged a private production of Shelley’s verse drama The Cenci, with Kenneth in the role of Giacomo. A story of incest and murder – and banned since publication in 1819 by the Lord Chamberlain – The Cenci was strong meat for a Victorian audience. Predictable howls of outrage characterized the reviews that followed, including in the pages of the influential, eminently respectable Pall Mall Gazette. Furnivall’s housemaid noticed Kenneth most of all, telling her employer, ‘Mr Grahame did look so handsome walking up and down the stage in his best clothes.’10 With no appetite for scandal – and no noticeable taste for theatricals – it was a commendation Kenneth would have gladly forgone. Escape to Tuscany allowed him to leave behind the possibility of notoriety by association. His impressions of Italy took no account of the volatile hot-bloodedness of The Cenci, the play’s internecine sexual jealousy and murderous plotting. Such thoughts were anathema to Kenneth throughout his life. Sailors’ Farewells were safely sentimental, charming in their aesthetic naivety, tokens of forgotten, vanished affection; the disturbing passions of Shelley’s tragedy were altogether different. Instead his visit to the Villino Landau fixed an idea of ‘the South’ that Kenneth had first conceived in front of paintings by Filippo Lippo and Fra Angelico in the National Gallery, in the boisterous pungency of Italian restaurants in Soho, in tags of Virgil, Marcus Aurelius, Horace and Homer at St Edward’s: sustaining, health-giving, restorative, inspiriting, but sexless withal. He wrote later that anything not the South was ‘nothing’ and that ‘the mind may starve and pine in glacial surroundings’.11

  He steeped himself in Florentine art and history. Local festivals gripped his imagination, this Scots exile of no fixed f
aith, schooled in the colourful rituals of Oxford Movement Anglicanism. He visited frescoes in nearby churches, absorbed by these rich devotional images as the Pinturicchio St Catherine had absorbed him in Trafalgar Square. With Annie he set off over the hills to Fiesole to see at close quarters a festival of the Virgin. A decade later, he reimagined the spectacle in a story. ‘Carpets and gay-coloured stuffs were hung out of the windows, the church bells clamoured noisily, the little street was flower-strewn, and the whole population jostled each other along either side of it, chattering, shoving, and ordering each other to stand back.’12 The day was one of bright May sunshine. Confusion between Annie and her mother about travel arrangements meant that she and Kenneth had to walk both ways. Their excursion lasted the whole day: they returned at seven o’clock in the evening. Annie’s principal recollection was of Kenneth’s storytelling. As they crossed the green hillsides, Annie remembered, Kenneth ‘beguiled [the day] with delightful fairy tales’, continuing a dialogue begun a decade earlier in Pitlochry. It does not suggest flirtation. Kenneth bought a souvenir, a majolica plaque of the Virgin and Child made by the Florentine firm of Cantagalli, in imitation of sixteenth-century originals by the della Robbia family. He hung it outside his next London home.