Nancy and I did all the work ourselves, including the washing. I undertook the cooking; she made and mended the children’s clothes; we shared the other chores. Catherine was born in 1922, and Sam in 1924. By the end of 1925, we had lived for eight successive years in an atmosphere of teething, minor accidents, epidemics, and perpetual washing of babies’ napkins. I did not dislike this sort of life, except for the money difficulties and almost never getting away to London. ‘Love in a cottage, I’m afraid’ had been the prophetic phrase current at our wedding. The strain told on Nancy, who was constantly ill, and I often had to take charge of everything. She tried to draw; but by the time she got her materials together some alarm from the nursery would always disturb her. At last she decided not to start again until all the children were house-trained and old enough for school. I kept on with my work because the responsibility for making money rested with me, and because nothing has ever stopped me writing. Nancy and I kept the cottage clean in a routine that left us little leisure for anything else: we had accumulated a number of brass ornaments and utensils that needed polishing and our children wore five times as many clean dresses as the neighbours’ children did.
I worked through constant interruptions. I could recognize the principal varieties of babies’ screams: hunger, indigestion, wetness, pins, boredom, wanting to be played with; and learned to disregard all but the more important ones. Most of my prose books published in those four years betray the conditions under which I wrote: they are scrappy, not properly considered, and obviously written out of reach of a reference library. Poetry alone did not suffer. When working at a poem in my head, I went on doing my mechanical tasks in a trance until I had time to sit down and record it. At one period I could allow myself only half an hour’s writing a day, and then had to scribble hard in an effort to disburden my mind – I never sat chewing a pen. My poetry-writing has always been a painful process of continual corrections, corrections on top of corrections, and persistent dissatisfaction.
The children were all healthy and gave us little trouble. Nancy had strong views about giving them no meat or tea but as much fruit as they wanted, putting them to bed early, making them rest in the afternoon. We did our best to avoid the of our own childhood; but when they went to the village school we could not protect them from formal religion, class snobbery, political prejudice, and mystifying fairy stories of the facts of sex. Islip seemed as good a place as any for the happy childhood that we wanted them to have. They had fields to play in, and animals all around, and play-fellows of their own age. The river was close and we could borrow a canoe. They even liked school.
The villagers called me ‘The Captain’; otherwise I had few reminders of the war, except my yearly visit to the standing Medical Board. The Board continued for some years to recommend me for a disability pension. My particular disability was neurasthenia; the train journey and the first-class army railway-warrant filled out with my rank and regiment usually produced reminiscential neurasthenia by the time I reached the Board.
Ex-service men were continually coming to the door selling bootlaces and asking for cast-off shirts and socks. We always gave them a cup of tea and money. Islip was a convenient halt between the Chipping Norton and the Oxford workhouses. One day an out-of-work ex-serviceman, a steamroller driver by trade, called with his three children, including a baby. Their mother had recently died in childbirth. We felt very sorry for them, and Nancy offered to adopt the eldest child, Daisy, who was about thirteen years old and her father’s greatest anxiety. She undertook to train Daisy in housework, so that she would be able later to go into service. The steamroller-man shed tears of gratitude; and Daisy, a big, ugly girl, strong as a horse and toughened by her three years on the roads, seemed happy enough to be a member of the family. Nancy made her new clothes, we cleaned her, bought her shoes, and gave her a bedroom. The steamroller-man wanted Daisy to continue her education, which had been interrupted by their wanderings. But the schoolmistress put Daisy into the baby class, and the bigger girls used to tease her. In return, she pulled their hair and thumped them, and learned to hate school. After a while she grew homesick for the road.
‘That was a good life,’ she used to say. ‘Dad and me and my brother and the baby. The baby was a blessing. When I fetched him along to the back doors I nearly always won something. ’Course, I was artful. If they tried to slam the door in my face, I used to put my foot in it and say: “This is my little orphan brother.” Then I used to look around and anything I seen I used to ast for. I used to ast for a pram for the baby, if I seen an old one in a shed; and I’d get it, too. ’Course, we had a pram really, a good one, and then we’d sell the pram I’d won in the next town we come to. Good beggars always ast for something particular, something they seen lying about. It’s no good asting for food or money. I used to pick up a lot for my dad. I was a better beggar nor he was, he said. We used to go along singing “On the Road to Anywhere”. And there was always the Spikes to go to when the weather got bad. They was very good to us there. The Spike at Chippy Norton was our winter home. We used to go to the movies once a week there. We had fine grub at Chippy. We been all over the country: Wales, and Devonshire, right up to Scotland, but we always come back to Chippy.’
Nancy and I were shocked one day when a tramp came to the door and Daisy slammed it in his face and told him to ‘clear out of it, Nosey, and don’t poke your ugly mug into respectable people’s houses.’ She went on: ‘I know you, Nosey Williams, you and your ex-service papers what you pinched from a bloke down in Salisbury, and them bigamy charges against you a-waiting down at Plymouth. Hop it now, quick, or I’ll run for the cop!’
Daisy told us the true stories of many of the beggars we had befriended. ‘There’s not one decent man in ten among them bums,’ she said. ‘My dad’s the only decent one of the lot. The reason most of them is on the road is the cops have something against them, so they has to keep moving. ’Course, my dad don’t like the life; he took to it too late. And my mum was very respectable, too. She kept us clean. Most of them bums is lousy, with nasty diseases, and they keeps out of the Spike as much as they can, ’cause they don’t like the carbolic baths.’
Daisy stayed with us for a whole winter. When spring came, and the roads dried, her father called for her again. He couldn’t manage the little ones without her, he said. That was the last we saw of Daisy, though she wrote once from Chipping Norton asking us for money.
My Government grant and College Exhibition had ended at the time we moved to Islip. Peace brought a slump in the sale of poetry, and our total income, counting birthday and Christmas cheques from relatives, now amounted to one hundred and thirty pounds a year, of which perhaps half came from my writing. As Nancy reminded me, this meant fifty shillings a week, and some farm-labourers at Islip, with more children than ourselves, earned only thirty shillings. They lived a much harder life than we did, and had no one to fall back on, in case of sudden illness or other emergency. We used to get holidays, too, at Harlech, when my mother would insist on paying the train-fare as well as giving us our board free. Thinking how difficult conditions were for the labourers’ wives kept Nancy permanently depressed.
We still called ourselves socialists, and when a branch of the Parliamentary Labour Party was formed in the village, lent the cottage for its weekly meetings throughout the winter months. Islip, though a rich agricultural area, had a reputation for slut-farming. Mr Wise, a farm-labourer, one of our members, once heckled a speaker in the Conservative interest about a protective duty imposed by the Conservative Goverment on dried currants. The speaker answered patronizingly: ‘Well, surely a duty on Greek currants won’t hurt you working men at Islip? You don’t grow currants in these parts, do you?’
‘No, sir,’ replied Mr Wise, ‘the farmers’ main crop hereabouts is squitch.’
They persuaded me to stand for the parish council, of which I became a member for a year. I wish now I had taken records of the smothered antagonism at the council meetings. There were
seven members, with three representatives of Labour and three Conservative representatives of the farmers and gentry; the chairman was a Liberal, whom we supported as a generous employer, and the only farmer for miles around with training at an agricultural college. He held the balance very fairly. The Council nearly came to blows over a proposed application to the District Council for the building of new cottages; many returned ex-soldiers who wanted to marry had nowhere to live with their wives. The Conservative members opposed thus application, because it would mean a penny on the rates.
Then there was the question of getting a recreation ground for the village. The football team did not wish to be dependent on the generosity of a big farmer who rented it to us at a nominal fee. The Conservatives opposed this plan, again in the interest of the rates, and pointed out that shortly after the Armistice the village had turned down a recreation ground scheme, preferring to spend the memorial subscription money on a cenotaph. The Labour members replied that the vote was taken, as at the 1918 General Election, before the soldiers could return to express their views. Nasty innuendoes were then aimed at farmers who had stayed at home and made their pile, while their labourers fought and bled. The chairman calmed the antagonists. Another caricature scene: myself in corduroys and a rough frieze coat, sitting in the village schoolroom (this time with no ‘Evils of Alcoholism’ around the walls, but nature drawings and mounted natural history specimens instead), debating, as an Oxfordshire village elder, whether or not Farmer Tomkins could use a footpath across the allotments as a bridle-path – having first overturned the decayed stile which, I urged, disproved his right.
This association with the Labour Party severed our friendly relations with the village gentry, who had hitherto regarded us as in their camp. My mother had taken the trouble to call on the Rector when she viewed the property, and he later asked me to speak from the chancel steps of the village church at a War Memorial service. He suggested that I should read war-poems. But instead of Rupert Brooke on the glorious dead, I read some of the more painful poems by Sassoon and Wilfred Owen about men dying from gas-poisoning, and about buttocks of corpses bulging from the mud. I also suggested that the men who had died, destroyed as it were by the fall of the Tower of Siloam, were not particularly virtuous or particularly wicked, but just average soldiers, and that the survivors should thank God they were alive, and do their best to avoid wars in the future. Though the Church party, apart from the liberal-minded Rector, professed to be scandalized, the ex-service men had not been too well treated on their return, and liked to be told that they stood on equal terms with the glorious dead. They were modest men: I noticed that though respecting the King’s desire to wear their campaign medals on this occasion, they kept them buttoned up inside their coats.
The leading Labourite at Islip was William Beckley, senior. He bore an inherited title dating from the time of Oliver Cromwell: being always known as ‘Fisher’ Beckley. A direct ancestor, fishing one day on the Cherwell during the siege of Oxford, had ferried Cromwell himself and a body of Parliamentary troops over the river. In return, Cromwell granted him perpetual fishing-rights from Islip to the stretch of river where the Cherwell Hotel now stands. The cavalry skirmish at Islip bridge still remained fresh in local tradition, and a cottager at the top of the hill showed me a small stone cannonball, fired on this occasion and found stuck in his chimney-stack. But even Cromwell came late in the history of the Beckley family; the Beckleys had been watermen on the river long before the seventeenth century. Indeed, Fisher Beckley knew, by family tradition, the exact spot in the river bed where a barge lay – sunk while conveying stone for the building of Westminster Abbey before the Norman Conquest. Islip was the birthplace of Edward the Confessor, who had awarded the Islip lands to the Abbey; they remained Abbey property after a thousand years. The Abbey stone came from a quarry on the hillside close to the river; our cottage stood on the old slipway down which the stone-barges were launched. Some time in the 1870s, American weed was introduced into the river and net-fishing at last became impossible. Fisher Beckley turned agricultural labourer. His socialist views prevented him from getting employment in the village, so he daily trudged to a farm some miles away. But he was still ‘Fisher’ Beckley, and for us cottagers the most respected man in Islip.
30
MY parents were most disappointed when, because of the shop crisis and my illness, I failed to take the B.A. degree at Oxford. But Sir Walter Raleigh, as head of the English School, allowed me to sit for the later degree of Bachelor of Letters, and present a written thesis on any subject I chose. He also agreed to be my tutor on condition that he should not be expected to tutor me. He thought well of my poetry, and suggested that we should only meet as friends. Sir Walter was engaged at the time on the official history of the war in the air, and wanted practical flying experience for the task. The R.A.F. took him up as often as he needed, but he caught typhoid fever on a flight out East and died. His death so saddened me that I did not apply for another tutor.
I found it difficult to write my thesis. The Illogical Element in English Poetry, in the required academic style, and decided to make it an ordinary book. I rewrote it some nine times; and did not like the final result. I was trying to show the nature of the supra-logical element in poetry, which could only be fully understood, I wrote, by studying the latent associations of the words used – the obvious prose sense being often in direct opposition to the latent content. The book’s weakness lay in its not clearly distinguishing between a poet’s supra-logical thought processes and the sub-logical process of the common psychopath.
I published a volume of poems every year from 1920 to 1925; after The Pierglass, which appeared in 1921, I made no attempt to please the ordinary reading public, and did not even flatter myself that I was conferring benefits on posterity; I had no reason to suppose that posterity would be more appreciative than my contemporaries. I never wrote unless a poem pressed to be written. Though assuming a reader of intelligence and sensibility, and envisaging his possible reactions to my words, I no longer identified him with any particular group of readers or (taking courage from Hardy) with critics of poetry. He was no more real a person than the conventional figure put in the foreground of an architectural design to indicate the size of a building. This greater strictness in writing, which showed in Whipperginny, laid me open to accusations of trying to get publicity and increase my sales by a wilful clowning modernism.
I made several attempts during these years to rid myself of the poison of war memories by finishing my novel, but had to abandon it – ashamed at having distorted my material with a plot, and yet not sure enough of myself to turn it back into undisguised history, as here.
I knew most of the poets then writing; they included Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, T. S. Eliot, the Sitwells, and many more. I liked Davies because he came from South Wales and was afraid of the dark, and because once, I heard, he made out a list of poets and crossed them off one by one as he decided that they were not true poets – until only two names were left – his own, and mine! He was very jealous of de la Mare and had bought a pistol, with which he used to take pot-shots at a photograph of de la Mare’s on the upper landing of his house. But I liked de la Mare, too, for his gentleness, and the hard work he obviously put into his poems – I was always interested in the writing-technique of my fellow-poets. I once asked whether he had not worried for hours over the lines:
Ah, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose…
and, in the end, been dissatisfied. De la Mare ruefully admitted that he was forced to leave the assonance ‘Roves and rose’, because no synonym for ‘roves’ seemed strong enough. In 1925, I agreed to collaborate with T. S. Eliot, then a harassed bank clerk, in a book about modern poetry to which we would each contribute essays, but the plan fell through.
I seldom saw Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell now. When I did, I always felt uncomfortably rustic in their society. One autumn, Osbert se
nt me a present of a brace of grouse. They came from Renishaw, the Derbyshire family seat, in a bag labelled: ‘With Captain Sitwell’s compliment to Captain Graves.’ Nancy and I could neither of us face the task of plucking and gutting and roasting the birds, so we gave them to a neighbour. I wrote to Osbert: ‘Captain Graves acknowledges with thanks Captain Sitwell’s gift of Captain Grouse.’ But we made friends with his sister Edith. It was a surprise, after reading her wild avant garde poems, to find her gentle, domesticated, and even devout. When she came to stay with us she spent her time sitting on the sofa and hemming handkerchiefs. She used to write to Nancy and me frequently, but our friendship ended in 1926.
I met none of my surviving army friends, with the very occasional exception of Siegfried. Edmund Blunden had gone as Professor of English Literature to Tokyo. Lawrence enlisted in the R.A.F. as soon as the Middle Eastern settlement went through, but a Labour member gave notice of a question in the House about his presence there under an assumed name, and the Air Ministry dismissed him. He was now a private in the Royal Tank Corps and hating it. When Sir Walter Raleigh died, I felt my connexion with Oxford University broken; and when Rivers died, and George Mallory on Everest, the death of my friends seemed to be following me in peacetime as relentlessly as in war.
A feeling of ill luck clouded these years. Islip had ceased to be a country refuge. I found myself resorting to the wartime technique of getting through things somehow, anyhow, in the hope that they would mend. Nancy’s poor health led her to do less and less work. Our finances were improved by an allowance from her father that covered the extra expense of the new children – we now had two hundred pounds a year – but cottage life with four of them under six years old, and Nancy ill, showed signs of palling. I might have, after all, had to violate my oath and take a teaching job. But for that I needed a degree; so I completed my thesis, which I published as Poetic Unreason, and handed it in, already printed, to the examining board. To my surprise, they accepted it, and now I had my B.Litt.’s degree. However, I did not want a preparatory or secondary school job, which would keep me away from home all day; Nancy could not bear having anyone else but myself and her taking care of the children. There seemed no solution to my problem.
Goodbye to All That Page 33
