by Nigel Jones
Whatever her qualities of mind and purpose, Mrs Brooke was a distinctly unlovable person. Severe, hard and self-righteous, she combined an unbendable will with narrow moral rectitude and an energetic de termination to rule the lives of others to a very unattractive degree. Much of her second son’s driving energy was devoted for too many of his mature years to evading and avoiding his mother’s unceasing vigilance, and to concocting elaborate and absurd schemes to hoodwink her about the true state of his life and affections. He wrote more letters to his mother than to any of his many correspondents, yet they are almost worthless as a true record of his doings and feelings. Even as he sailed to his death in the Aegean he remained in the same state of paralysed awe of her as he had been as a child. In his last letter to his most durable love, Ka Cox, he begged her not to tell his mother the true story of their tangled relationship: ‘you’d probably better not tell her much. Let her be. Let her think we might have married.’ Fear of his mother ran so deep, it seems, that it followed him into the valley of the shadow of death itself.
These habits of deceit, literally learned at his mother’s knee, soon seeped into all areas of Brooke’s life, so that his relations with his friends and lovers were also marked by lies, evasions and deception – not least self-deception.
It is no surprise to learn that Mrs Brooke, with the heritage of her family’s Evangelical radicalism and their social conscience, was an ardent supporter of the then dominant Liberal party, as well as a ‘Guardian of the Poor’ and Rugby’s first woman magistrate. In her all the worst traits of the Victorian Nonconformist spirit coalesce to create a uniquely unsympathetic personality type: bossy, shrill, narrow, nosy – the whole armoured in an armadillo-like strait-jacket of moral righteousness. One of Brooke’s greatest tragedies is that he was, with his inbred puritanism, truly his mother’s son.
The surroundings in which the infant Rupert was taken by his mother for his first outings in the autumn of 1887 were dominated by the sacred sward of the Close and by the architect William Butterfield’s imposing Italianate additions to the school buildings, its recent red and yellow brickwork gleaming raw. Chief among the new buildings was the cathedral-sized chapel, completed in 1872. Here, one day, an idealized plaque depicting a swan-necked, bare-shouldered Brooke would take pride of place in the chapel’s own Poet’s Corner, sandwiched between memorials to other literary Rugbeians, including Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Hugh Clough (‘Say not, the struggle naught availeth’) and Walter Savage Landor (‘I strove with none; for none was worth my strife;/Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;/I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;/It sinks, and I am ready to depart’).
Other local landmarks to which Brooke was wheeled in his pram included the gloomy Clifton Road municipal cemetery, the ultimate resting-place of his parents; and the new Clock Tower, erected in the Market Place as Rugby’s contribution to the Queen’s Jubilee. The tower and Rupert, Mrs Brooke liked to observe, arrived together.
With the birth of a third son, Alfred, in 1891, the Brooke family was complete. Possibly Mrs Brooke gave up after the disappointment of yet another male child. Or perhaps Parker Brooke’s growing gloom and scholastic responsibilities distracted him from his marital duties. These included, in the year of Alfred’s birth, the housemastership of School Field House. The family left the cramped confines of Hillmorton Road for the more commodious surroundings of School Field House, with its towering chimneys and ivy-clad walls, safe within the closed precincts of the school itself.
The change in their circumstances brought some financial improvement for the Brookes. By becoming housemistress, Ruth Brooke was able to amass a small but significant profit on the fees paid for the board and lodging of the 50 or so boys in her care. Responsibility for this extended family also gave her power-hungry instincts free rein, and even Christopher Hassall, most sympathetic to her of all Brooke’s biographers, is compelled to admit: ‘She was … not unsympathetic, so long as you were doing exactly as you were told.’
Outside the school walls Rugby, the place where Brooke was born, educated and to which until the end of his life he continually if reluctantly returned, remained essentially what it has always been: an ordinary town in a largely rural county. But, close to the geographical centre of the country, it was also the historic heartland of England, in the Warwickshire of Shakespeare, Avon and the forest of Arden.
Writing to Lady Eileen Wellesley on the eve of the war that was to take his life, Brooke describes a valedictory drive in his mother’s car to the scenes of his childhood, taken on 2 August 1914, the last Sunday of the old world that was about to vanish for ever. Beneath the irony, and the playful posturing so typical of Brooke in his out-to-impress style, it is a poignant and very fond farewell:
It’s the sort of country I adore. I’m a Warwickshire man. Don’t talk to me of Dartmoor or Snowdon or the Thames or the lakes. I know the heart of England. It has a hedgy, warm bountiful dimpled air. Baby fields run up and down the little hills, and all the roads wriggle with pleasure. There’s a spirit of rare homeliness about the houses and the countryside, earthy, uneccentric yet elusive, fresh, meadowy, gaily gentle. It is perpetually June in Warwickshire, and always six o’clock of a warm afternoon … Here the flowers smell of heaven; there are no such larks as ours, and no such nightingales; the men pay more than they owe; and the women have very great and wonderful virtue, and that, mind you, by no means through the mere absence of trial. In Warwickshire there are butterflies all the year round and a full moon every night … and every man can sing ‘John Peel’. Shakespeare and I are Warwickshire yokels. What a county!
This prose passage, aching with sentimental nostalgia, has clear echoes, whether conscious or not, of Brooke’s two most celebrated poems: ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’:
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought
and the poem he was about to write, ‘The Soldier’:
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
But, as Brooke’s letter to Lady Eileen goes on to acknowledge, such tranquillity was deceptive. Just over the horizon of green woods and fields sprawled Birmingham and the Black Country:
This is nonsense; and I will grant you that Richmond Park is lovelier than all the Midlands, and certainly better inhabited. For Hampden was just too full of the plutocracy of Birmingham, short, crafty, proudly vulgar men, for all the world like heroes of Arnold Bennett’s novels. They were extraordinarily dressed, and for the most part in very expensive clothes, but without collars. I think they’d started in collars, but removed them by the way. They rolled out of their cars, and along the street, none so much as five foot high, all hot, and canny to the point of unintelligibility, emitting the words ‘Eh …’ or ‘Ah, lad …’ at intervals. They were profound, terrifying, and of the essence of Life: but unlovely.
Brooke here exhibits all the terror of the middle class when confronted by the workers and the nouveaux riches who were actually making the guns and screws that held together the whole Imperial edifice: they appear to him as troglodytic interlopers from another world: dark, tiny, mouthing an unintelligible language, at least as threatening as the foes he was about to confront on the battlefield. No one growing up in Rugby at the turn of the century could fail to be uncomfortably aware of the subterranean stirrings beneath the crust of the Midlands mud.
The town, cradle of Rugby football, that ritualized warfare, rough yet fair, steered uncertainly into the new century with one foot stepping hesitantly towards a fearful new world of industry, social unrest and the questioning of time-hallowed tradition, while the other remained firmly mired in the Midlands loam. Even today, on Sundays Rugby remains wrapped in the provincial quiet of which Brooke frequently complained. But frozen, multicoloured pools of vomit on the m
orning pavements tell of a different Rugby, a Saturday-night party; a more ancient and Merrier England. Another duality for an already confused boy to wrestle with. A very English place, then, where an essentially English poet might try to grow up.
In 1897 Brooke, aged ten, was released from the restraints of his governess, Mrs Tottenham, whose watch over him had been extended for longer than usual. This was due to his mother’s worries about his already delicate health. He was dispatched down the road to Hillbrow, a preparatory school where boys destined for public school, especially Rugby, were readied for their fate. Brooke was spared the full ordeal of boarding school, however – he attended Hillbrow as a day boy, escorted to and from the premises by his elder brother Dick.
Hillbrow was the domain of yet another dominant female, Mrs T. B. Eden, wife of the headmaster. She had a habit of reading Dickens aloud to the assembled forty or so boys on Sunday evenings. The school’s physical environment was not the best place for a delicate boy of uncertain health: its stone corridors were bone-chillingly cold in winter; and summer dust exacerbated the frequent bouts of ‘pink-eye’ (conjunctivitis) that often laid Brooke low.
Despite these handicaps, he seemed to make his mark, if a letter from Tom Eden to Parker Brooke is any guide: ‘I send Rupert’s reports. I hope he may get many as good. His work certainly promises well. He might begin Greek as he understands Latin as far as he has learn’t.’ Brooke’s early school reports confirm this picture of a gifted and able boy; in Latin he is described as ‘careful and industrious – he has used his head more than most boys’. In English: ‘He works well and answers intelligently.’ His general conduct is described as ‘Quite satisfactory’.
In 1898 at Hillbrow Brooke made the first of many early friendships that would last for most of his life. This one was at once more passionate, more strained and more enduring than most. James Strachey, an almost exact contemporary, was the youngest of the brilliant and eccentric progeny of General Sir Richard and Lady Jane (née Grant) Strachey, who had produced five sons and five daughters. Like Brooke, James was burdened by an overweening mother similarly disappointed in her son’s maleness. He seems almost pre-programmed to be Brooke’s closest confidant.
The two boys’ similarities even extended to their hairstyles – a fringe cut straight across the forehead. It was not a fashion designed to endear them to the heartier type of teacher. Indeed the headmaster, Tom Eden, is recalled yelling to the two friends: ‘Back to the changing room, both of you, and part your hair properly! You look like a couple of girls!’ Girls! Again, that accursed accusation. It was a charge doomed to haunt Brooke, even from the mouth of a friend, as in Edward Thomas’s description: ‘His clear, rosy skin helped to give him the look of a great girl.’
The physical impression made by Brooke on older men, particularly those homosexually inclined, was almost always striking, and often overwhelming enough to lead them to suspend critical judgement on his intellectual gifts. For example, the habitually cynical Lytton Strachey, James’s eldest brother, wrote to his fellow-homosexual John Maynard Keynes – elder brother of Brooke’s friend Geoffrey – after meeting Brooke in 1905 ahead of his arrival at Cambridge: ‘He has rather nice – but you know – yellow ochreish hair, and a healthy young complexion.’ Three years on, writing to Virginia Stephen, another future friend of Brooke’s, Strachey was more smitten: ‘Rupert Brooke, isn’t it a romantic name? – with pink cheeks and bright yellow hair – it sounds horrible, but it wasn’t.’
Given this capacity for striking his elders silly with admiration and desire, it is small wonder that Brooke would be both unhealthily aware of the effect produced by his looks and in some perplexity over his sexual identity. One way of emphasizing his masculinity was by his prowess on the playing field, though this was not to come to its fullest fruition until his public-school years. Another was in rampant male competitiveness. ‘Aha!’ he exults in a Hillbrow journal. ‘One [mark] more than Strachey in Latin!’
Even at Hillbrow Brooke had begun a habit of winning school prizes. The Michaelmas term of 1898 ended with him taking second place in a recitation contest for his rendering of an ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’. The first prize went to another Hillbrow boy, his senior by three years, also fated to interweave in his future life. This was the Stracheys’ cousin Duncan Grant, painter and future lover of the Bloomsbury luminaries Maynard Keynes and Vanessa Bell. Like the Stracheys, the mainly homosexual Grant was to fall briefly under Brooke’s spell. His attraction to Brooke was at its height in the autumn of 1911, when they dined at London’s fashionably bohemian Eiffel Tower restaurant and afterwards visited a cinema to see the film Cesare Borgia. ‘But,’ notes Grant’s biographer, Frances Spurling, well used to her subject’s fickle attitude to love: ‘It was a fleeting emotion.’
It was in 1899, during an Easter holiday on the north Cornwall coast at St Ives, that another piece of Brooke’s chequered future fell into place. Here he first met the future Queen of Bloomsbury, Virginia Stephen, and played cricket with her on the beach. He was 12, she five years his senior. This was a foretaste of later shared aquatic delights when Brooke would invite her to visit him at his home in Grantchester outside Cambridge, and together they bathed nude in Byron’s Pool on the Cam. Memories of the Cornish holiday inspired Brooke’s fledgling literary efforts.
On his return to Rugby he compiled a hand-written magazine containing a description of a Cornish castle and a short story in which two burglars are apprehended when they rob the same house and disturb each other. These jottings show no particular promise to mark him out from the offerings of the average schoolboy, nor evidence of the themes that would come to preoccupy him – beyond a brief moan about the stultifying tedium of a typical Rugby Sunday. Nevertheless, with his new-found friends and his blossoming interest in writing, the future lineaments of his life were gathering around him.
James Strachey soon left Hillbrow to become a day boy at St Paul’s School in Hammersmith, London, but Rupert met him again on his first holiday of the new century, at Easter 1900, when the Brookes and the Stracheys ran into each other on Brighton sea front. Brooke was introduced to Lytton for the first time, but the future critic and iconoclast of Thomas Arnold failed to remember this early encounter with a boy who would one day demonize him as one of his chief hate figures.
The opening year of the new century saw the first serious challenge in contemporary times to Britain’s military might. The two small Boer republics of South Africa attempted to fight free of London’s rule. The Boer War divided opinion at home. The vast majority fiercely supported the war effort, but a vociferous radical minority of pro-Boers argued for the right of small nations to go their own way, thus questioning the whole morality of Britain’s imperial mission. Mrs Brooke, as a keen and committed Liberal, attended a pro-Boer meeting in Rugby. She was startled to see her 12-year-old son sitting among the meeting’s organizers on the platform. One steely glint from his mother’s hawk-like eyes was enough to persuade the boy to abandon his platform perch and join her. It was not the last time that Mrs Brooke would face a rebellion by her son, nor the last time that she would successfully stifle it.
Evidence of the diverging views of mother and son also survive in an album presented to Brooke on his thirteenth birthday. Here the pair answer a written catechism on their attitudes to life. Asked to name their favourite amusements, Mrs Brooke claims cycling and watching others play games; her son lists cricket, tennis and football – before admitting to reading and cards. As her ‘favourite qualities in a man’ Mrs Brooke characteristically gives ‘earnestness of purpose’ and ‘moral courage’. Brooke, ironically, given his later penchant for carrying on multiple simultaneous relationships, names ‘fidelity’ – followed by ‘intelligence’. His favourite reading, conventionally enough, is Kipling and the Sherlock Holmes stories, while his idea of ‘misery’ is ‘Ignorance, poverty and OBSCURITY’. His aim in life, he writes, is: ‘To be top of the tree in everything.’
2
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Youth is Stranger than Fiction
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Despite his subservience to his mother, Brooke, like his father, felt affronted by what he saw as his shameful servitude to her powerful personality. Indeed, his first recorded words, uttered at the age of seven, sound an authentic note of rebellion. His mother caught him bullying his younger brother, Alfred, and chided him for his ‘cowardice’. She then threatened him with more severe punishment should he repeat his behaviour. ‘Then you’d be the coward,’ he smartly replied.
Another form of revolt against the smothering tyranny of home was his ill health, although Brooke’s frequent bouts of sickness are doubtless also attributable to an inherently weak immune system. His elder brother Dick and his father both died early. But there is a psychosomatic hysteria behind the many maladies that laid him low in periods of crisis throughout his life. His first surviving letter, written in May 1901 to Owen O’Malley, a Hillbrow chum who had recently left the school – and who was destined to become Britain’s ambassador to Hungary – is written from one of his many sickbeds, to which he had been consigned after collapsing during the school’s Sports Day. Couched in cod Olde English and employing the boys’ nicknames – Brooke was ‘Oyster’ for reasons that remain obscure – the letter addresses the future diplomat as ‘Child’, a patronizing epithet that Brooke would employ with maddening frequency in his letters throughout his life, particularly to female correspondents. It begins: ‘Wherefore sendest thou strange manuscripts adorned with divers devices which bring back to the mind thoughts of a time which is past?’ and continues to report the circumstances of his collapse: ‘On the ninth day of May the sports for athletics were held and I did win many heats, and when I had finished running 3600 inches – a boy named B. Foote was about 70 inches behind. And the next day I was ill and unable to compete wherefore my temper was exceeding warm.’ Brooke reveals that his illness also barred him from the scholarship exam to enter Rugby School, and concludes: ‘Forgive my letter being strange in manner. The reason is that much trouble hath unhinged my brain; wherein I resemble Hamlet. And if you gaze closely on my portrait which I have sent you, you will see a wild look in my eyes; denoting insanity.’
