Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  It is not known if Owen had read A Shropshire Lad when he wrote ‘Uriconium’ in 1913, though given the book’s popularity, its element of ‘local colour’ for a young man brought up in Shropshire, and its distinct sensibility, it would be astonishing if he had not encountered the poems before he bought a copy in 1915. Temperamentally he would certainly count as one of the ‘young men’ whom Housman envisaged as his primary readers, and he readily embraced the word ‘lad’ in his poetry. He had already used the word in poems he wrote before enlisting, mostly in a homoerotic context, as when addressing the ‘prim and trim’ navy boy encountered on a train as ‘lad’, kissing the ‘brown hands of a server-lad’ in ‘Maundy Thursday’, or asking a youthful male prostitute ‘What shall I pay for you, lily-lad?’ in ‘Who is the god of Canongate?’ The word ‘lad’ also crops up in his pre-war correspondence, tending to generate the kind of warmth Fussell noted. The two boys he began tutoring in France towards the end of 1914 (one of whom he describes as ‘pretty rather than handsome’) turned out to be ‘dear, clever lads’. A fifteen-year-old French ‘lad’ first encountered at the Union Chrétienne in Bordeaux later produces a postcard Owen had sent him, ‘preciously preserved among the billet-doux and secret photographs of his pocket book!’ In a letter from the spring of 1915, subsequently much mutilated by the overly protective Harold, Owen writes to their mother that ‘Perseus was a sailor lad; and never, I take it, bore epaulets on his brown shoulders or gold-braid on his bare chest.’

  Young men who seem especially vulnerable and evoke the ‘pity’ that Owen declared the principal inspiration for his war poetry are often referred to as ‘lads’. Coming back from a night patrol, he observes that his men were ‘all half dead with fatigue & some quite, poor lads’, and when a shell explodes near a dugout, he tells his mother that ‘one lad was blown down and, I am afraid, blinded’, an incident he re-created in his poem ‘The Sentry’. Another of Owen’s ‘lads’ exposed to danger was a railway clerk called Browne, who had ‘stood by’ the poet at the front before it was discovered he was underage and so was sent back to England. At Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he was being treated for shell shock and first met Sassoon, Owen thought often of those left behind at the front and in particular of ‘the bleeding lad’s cheeks I have wiped’. Having rejoined his regiment in Scarborough, he describes a waiter in the mess as ‘the best lad for work I’ve got – wounded in the leg’. Also at Scarborough, with a knowing nod to Housman, Owen refers to ‘Shropshire lads whose speech bewrayed them to me.’

  Back in France, he is greatly cheered to see among the members of his regiment marching into camp ‘at least two lads [who] instantly recognize me. They were, strangely enough, the very two I most hoped would survive.’ Similarly, in the poems men become ‘lads’ when they are most under threat or deserving of pity, whether it is Isaac about to be sacrificed by Abraham, who ignores God’s order ‘Lay not thine hand upon the lad’ and slaughters him anyway, or ‘The Dead-Beat’, who is accounted a ‘stout lad’ before shell shock and exhaustion reduce him to breakdown and result in his death. In ‘S.I.W.’ another ‘lad’, pressured into joining up by his family, is unable to stand the trenches and ends up shooting himself dead, like the Woolwich cadet. A supposedly luckier soldier in the unfinished poem ‘Beauty’ is congratulated by his comrades when he is hit in the arm by a shrapnel ball – ‘What a beauty! What a beauty, lad!’ – because the wound is a ‘blighty’, a minor one that will result in a man being sent back to England; but the wound festers and the soldier dies on board the ship taking him across the Channel. Perhaps the most sensuous, and most Housman-like, image occurs in ‘Arms and the Boy’, where Owen refers to bullets ‘Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads’.

  Another poem which does not use the word ‘lad’ is nevertheless clearly indebted to Housman – and was written after Owen had purchased his copy of A Shropshire Lad in 1915. ‘Disabled’ both echoes and subverts ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’ (XIX). Both poems portray a sporting hero, Housman’s now dead, Owen’s legless and missing one arm. Owen’s image of the young man ‘After the matches, carried shoulder-high’ more or less paraphrases the opening lines of Housman’s poem:

  The time you won your town the race

  We chaired you through the market-place;

  Man and boy stood cheering by,

  And home we brought you shoulder-high.

  The principal difference is that Housman’s athlete has died in his glory, whereas Owen’s has survived, an embittered amputee who recalls (in another echo of Housman’s poem) that ‘Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal’.

  The fact that Housman tended to write about the doomed youth in his poetry more in sorrow than in anger provided Owen and other poets with a model. Owen’s friend and mentor Siegfried Sassoon became known for his angrily satirical poems about the callousness and indifference to individual suffering he thought characterised both the general staff and those on the home front. There was, however, a more tender side to his war poetry and, like Owen, he made strategic use of the word ‘lad’ when in this mood, perhaps because Housman was so much of a presence during his war service. Sassoon not only carried A Shropshire Lad with him throughout the war, sometimes quoting lines from the poems in his diaries, but visited Housman Country while on leave in Liverpool in September 1915, stopping at a hotel in Church Stretton for tea with some fellow officers, with one of whom he had been in love rather in the manner of Housman and Moses Jackson. He returned to the hotel almost exactly nine years later, driving from Ludlow over Wenlock Edge and walking in the Shropshire Hills alone with his memories. ‘Strange to think that on that day [in 1915] I knew so few of my present circle of friends. But the difference between then and now’ – at which point a half-page has been torn out of the diary. Even incomplete, this entry has what Laurence Housman would have called ‘the authentic note of the “Shropshire Lad”’ – as do some of Sassoon’s poems.

  In ‘Song-Books of the War’, for example, Sassoon imagines a time fifty years after the war when ‘Adventurous lads will sigh and cast / Proud looks upon the plundered past’, a couplet that, read ‘blind’, might well be ascribed to Housman. Occasionally Sassoon uses the word ‘lad’ conventionally, as when a man in a London club in ‘The Fathers’ refers to his ‘eldest lad’, but ‘lads’ are more usually seen from the perspective of the officer-poet as innocent young men either in danger or already dead. The difference between these two usages is apparent in ‘To Any Dead Officer’, in which the salute ‘Good-bye, old lad!’ is in marked contrast to the pitiful image of ‘lads […] left in shell-holes dying slow’. In ‘Night on the Convoy’, the deck of a troopship is ‘heaped and spread with lads in sprawling strength’, who lie there ‘prostrate and defenceless, head to head’. ‘Editorial Impressions’ is one of Sassoon’s satirical poems, in which a journalist who has had ‘a glorious time’ visiting the trenches is depicted in conversation with a cheerful ‘lad’ who has been badly wounded in ‘some wiped-out impossible Attack’. In another angry poem, ‘Suicide in the Trenches’, the poet hopes that the crowds ‘who cheer when soldier lads march by’ will ‘never know / The hell where youth and laughter go’, while one of the things we are urged not to forget in ‘Aftermath’ is ‘those ashen-grey / Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay’. Sassoon certainly never will: ‘Oh lad that I loved, there is rain on your face,’ he exclaims with dismay in ‘I Stood with the Dead’, written in France in June 1918.

  *   *   *

  Long after the hostilities ended Housman would continue to have a particular association with the First World War. For those mourning the loss of a generation, four lines published in More Poems in 1936 spoke with simple eloquence for the youthful dead. They were in fact written between 1895 and 1900, and so commemorated the dead of the South African wars, but, as so often with Housman, they proved universal:

  Here dead we lie because we did not choose

  To live and shame the land fr
om which we sprung.

  Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,

  But young men think it is, and we were young.

  For those who survived, the world Housman had created in A Shropshire Lad reminded them of what they had nevertheless lost. The grandfather of the writer Maggie Fergusson was brought up in what she describes as ‘a kind of rural idyll’ in Claughton, a small village between the Calder and Brock valleys in Lancashire. ‘An album of old photographs evokes an apparently endless, carefree, Edwardian summer,’ she writes. ‘Men with turned-up trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves carry cricket bats and tennis racquets. Women in ankle-length skirts and pin-tucked blouses laugh from the shade of parasols. A farmer cuts a field of hay with a horse-drawn scythe.’ In the summer of 1918, at the age of nineteen, her grandfather was commissioned in the Coldstream Guards and set off for the Western Front. In September, while leading his men over the top, he was wounded by a hand grenade, a jagged piece of which ‘penetrated his cheekbone just below his left eye, passed through the narrow space between the bottom of his brain and the roof of his mouth, and broke his right jaw’. His mother had already lost her eldest son, a brother and four of her five nephews, and when she received news that another son had been wounded, perhaps fatally, she took her own life.

  Her son in fact survived, but doctors were unable to remove the fragment of metal, which remained in his head for the rest of his life, and his face was left permanently scarred. In later life he was, unsurprisingly, easily moved to tears. He would often spend evenings listening to Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge in the famous recording made by Gervase Elwes. The song that particularly moved him was ‘Bredon Hill’. Fergusson remembers her grandfather in old age, sitting in the twilight, a tumbler of whisky at his elbow, playing the record over and over as tears streamed silently down his ruined face. The words and music may have been written and composed before his war, but their evocation of young people relaxing on a perfect summer’s day on a peaceful English hill, unaware of what lies in store for them, represented for this old soldier a whole irrecoverable world.

  VI

  THE REDISCOVERY OF ENGLAND

  Never before have so many people been searching for England

  H.V. Morton, 1927

  One of the most striking things about England in the years immediately after the war was the overwhelming quotidian presence, and the resulting psychological burden, of ‘the Glorious Dead’. As the war memorials erected in every city, town and village in the land proclaimed all too clearly, Housman had indeed foreseen the Somme and lads in their hundreds and thousands would never be old. Ludlow Tower was still standing, but beneath it a roll of honour would record 137 names, including those of the three sons of Thomas and Sarah Halford, who lived in the centre of the town at 9 Raven Lane: Private John Robert Halford of the 7th Battalion, the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, killed at Mametz in July 1916, aged twenty-four; Private William Henry Halford of the Army Service Corps, who died aged twenty-seven when his troopship was torpedoed in the Aegean in April 1917; and Private George Halford of the 8th Battalion, the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, who died of wounds aged twenty-four in Salonika in September 1918. The names of those who might have ‘come in for the fair’ from outlying districts are recorded on their own village memorials at nearby Bromfield, Caynham, Stokesay, Onibury and Ashford Carbonell.

  Twenty-four of the war dead are recorded on a plaque in Clunbury church, twelve on one at Clungunford, and thirty-one beneath a large granite cross rearing out of the churchyard wall at Clun. Thirty-two lads who ended up ‘a long way further than Knighton’ are marshalled on the cenotaph in the centre of that town. The roll of officers and men killed, printed in double columns in The History of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in the Great War 1914–1918, runs to sixty-six pages, and the book has as its epigraph ‘They carry back bright to the Coiner the mintage of man’. The regiment was also commemorated by John Ernest Auden, uncle of the poet: the 1918 revised edition of his guide to Shropshire is dedicated

  TO MY OLD COMRADES

  THE OFFICERS, NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS AND MEN

  OF THE

  4TH BATT. K.S.L.I. (T.)

  Over the Herefordshire border, in the village of Cradley, is a memorial to four men from the same family, among them Captain Ivan Clarkson Maclean and Lieutenant Alec Clarkson Maclean, the two younger brothers of Harry Maclean, the Woolwich cadet, who is buried in the adjoining churchyard. Thirty-eight names of students and staff at the Royal College of Music are recorded on the war memorial there, among them George Butterworth and Ernest Farrar, both of whom were further commemorated when two prizes were founded in their names. Among the six men who formed the English Folk Dance Society’s first Morris side, three – Butterworth, George Jerrard Wilkinson and Perceval Lucas (younger brother of the editor of The Open Road) – were killed on the Somme within weeks of each other in August 1916, as was R.J.E. Tiddy, an occasional member of the side who was also the author of The Mummers’ Play, a collection of thirty-three folk plays published posthumously in 1923.

  There is no record that he was aware of the fact, but in 1916 Housman had himself appeared in a design for a war memorial. When it became clear that the thousands of people killed in action would require some form of commemoration after the war, Henry Wilson, President of the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society, mounted an exhibition of designs for future war memorials at the Royal Academy of Art. When he asked Housman’s friend William Rothenstein to contribute something, the artist immediately recalled a degree ceremony he had witnessed at Oxford University:

  The sight of a number of youths, booted and spurred, with their gowns over their khaki, kneeling before the Chancellor to receive their degrees, put me in mind of the age of chivalry, so touching and beautiful were these young figures; and I thought what a fine subject for a memorial painting this would make […] I therefore painted a group of representative figures, Vice-Chancellors, scholars and men of science surrounding a Chancellor conferring a degree upon a young soldier, with a group of undergraduates, Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Raymond Asquith, John Manners and others, walking up, hand in hand, to receive symbolically what could never now be given them.

  In the event the exhibition was postponed, but Rothenstein’s three huge panels, ‘Designed as a Memorial for Members of the English Universities who have served in the War’, were exhibited at the Royal Academy in the autumn of that year. Rothenstein had worked on the painting with the assistance of the war artist Eric Kennington, who helped square out the canvases and transfer Rothenstein’s original drawing onto them, as well as painting some of the architectural details and the decorations on the Chancellor’s robe. ‘I was glad of his help,’ Rothenstein recalled, ‘for there were sixty feet of canvas to be covered with life-size figures.’ These figures included representatives of ‘university types’ (including Housman, M.R. James, A.C. Benson, Sir Joseph Thomson, Sir Walter Raleigh and Robert Bridges) whose portraits Rothenstein had already drawn at Oxford and Cambridge or when they came to stay at his Gloucestershire home, alongside ‘Rupert Brooke and other heroic young men who had lost their lives in the war’, whom he painted from photographs supplied by Edward Marsh. Rothenstein recalled that when the exhibition ended, ‘my 60 feet of canvas were rolled up and forgotten’; but after his death his son John found the panels and in 1959 presented them to the University of Southampton. The central panel, depicting Housman and the other gowned academics, is displayed in the university’s Senate Room, while the two flanking panels depicting the war dead are on loan to Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire, the former home of Julian and Billy Grenfell.

  In spite of the proliferation of war memorials, the English countryside itself seemed little changed after the war – particularly when compared with the more or less erased landscapes over which many of the returning soldiers had fought in France and Belgium. In 1922 Grant Richards published a collection of articles by the journalist S.P.B. Mais under the title Oh! To
Be in England – a sentiment very familiar to those who had served in the war. The phrase comes from ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’, Robert Browning’s popular poem of 1845 celebrating the arrival of the English spring and written while the poet was travelling in Italy. Browning’s poem had, unsurprisingly, been included in Rhys’s The Old Country, and Mais evidently expected his readers to recognise his reference to it since he did not use the poem as an epigraph to his book. Instead he selected lines from Shakespeare and Rupert Brooke, two poets who were now considered exemplars of Englishness – not least because of the coincidence that, almost exactly three centuries apart, both men had died on 23 April, St George’s Day.

  Mais was a prolific journalist, who had previously been employed as an English teacher in several public schools and now worked at the Daily Express as a book reviewer. In the Preface to Oh! To Be in England he writes: ‘This book is a debt that I owe, a long-standing debt, to England, which to me is not the Fleet Street where I work, but the country-side to which I belong.’ Like H.V. Morton, who was also employed by the Express at this period, Mais was not a countryman by birth, having been born in Birmingham. Shortly afterwards, however, his father was appointed rector of the mining village of Tansley in Derbyshire, on the southern edge of the Peak District, and during his youth Mais became a keen walker and runner in the surrounding hills. Unlike Morton, Mais disdained motorised transport and believed that the only way to appreciate the countryside was by walking in it. He even followed Alfred Hyatt, editor of The Footpath Way, in considering exploration by bicycle, a recreation that had become very popular, too speedy for a properly immersive encounter with the English landscape. ‘I am told that I may perhaps set other men wandering to discover England, the England who refuses to disclose her naked beauty in its full glory to any but the devout worshipper on foot,’ he wrote. ‘The best is hidden from all except the few who follow in the footsteps of George Borrow, Richard [sic] Cobbett, Edward Thomas, W.H. Davies, W.H. Hudson, Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies, William Hazlitt, the youthful Belloc and their like.’