The engagement seemed long. In the June of 1912 Mrs Hicks wrote from Lincoln to Mrs K.:
My husband and I are beginning to think that it is too long to put off the wedding to next May! They are both getting worried, I think. Eddie is coming here on Sat: next and we think it will be as well to settle something by then. He can’t get anything more certain in the way of working at present but after all they have enough to begin with (if it only continues!) and perhaps if the furnishing can be arranged it would be best to let them start. Xtina is not aware of this letter nor (of course) is Edmund and you won’t mention it. Xtina says ‘it does seem a long time till May’. She is anxious because he is lonely. They might begin in a flat she thought.
A small Hampstead house was found, No. 55 Haverstock Hill. Hampstead was not too “cabby” in 1912, and both families contributed odds and ends of furniture. Mrs Hicks sent the second-best forks from Lincoln, and had electric light installed. Eddie brought with him all the bills and papers in two hat boxes. When he was obliged to answer a business letter he emptied the hat boxes onto the floor, and began: “Sir, On consulting my files …”
The wedding, on 20 September, aroused “extraordinary interest” in the Lincoln Chronicle, who were able to use the headline bishop’s son weds bishop’s daughter. The bells of the cathedral were “fired”—that is, the whole peal rung at once—and, almost equally remarkable, Dilly was induced to enter St Hugh’s Chapel, and to act as best man. The young couple departed to “an awfully jolly farmhouse on the moor” near Porlock. It poured with rain, and they were extremely happy.
Winnie, too, was thinking of marriage. The strain of the endless discussions between Ronald, Wilfred and the Bishop was beginning to tell. “I began to think,” she recalled, “that it would be a relief not to have theological discussions at every meal.” Out of her admirers she had almost decided on a small, quiet, reliable, clever and honourable Scotsman. James Peck’s father had been a ruined shipbuilder, who at one time had taken refuge in drink, but the son had emerged all the stronger from his misfortunes. “I do feel that one would be absolutely safe with him. Every time I see him it seems more possible in a queer sort of way,” Winnie wrote to her father. James Peck had a sound old-fashioned Scottish appreciation of literature, and hoped to share, through poetry, the emotions which he found it hard to express. Winnie and he corresponded by postcard, giving the page and line number in The Golden Treasury. This was too much of a temptation for her brothers, who made trifling alterations to the postcards as they lay in the hall, so that Shelley’s
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruin’d cell,
was answered by Wordsworth’s
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell.
In the end, Winnie was glad to get away from them all, but only for the time being, then her affection poured out again. She was married to James in the autumn of 1912, at Manchester Cathedral. Eddie, who was one of the ushers, found that the crowd of well-wishers was so great that he had to go back to Bishopscourt, in his hired frock coat, by tram. Scotland seemed far away. They all, but Ronnie in particular, missed her. To his studies of Bradshaw he now added a minute knowledge of all the railway connections to Edinburgh.
Ronnie, it may be remembered, had taken stock, while he was still at Eton, of his own temperament, which “craved for human sympathy and support”. While his elder brother and sister were finding happiness in marriage, his tender nature (“He was the kindest person I ever met,” Winnie said) searched his environment for a response.
His new friendships, though in no way sensual, were deeply emotional, and although physical presence was in no way part of them, he believed that they would survive death. “The love of friends,” he wrote, “which in this world depends so much on a trivial communication like the curl of a lip, or the lighting up of an eye, will somehow be a thing more immediate and more intimate when we are true selves.” “I am a personal person,” he wrote to another friend, “whatever I haven’t got, I think I have sympathy.”
There was a circle of undergraduates who came up to Oxford in 1911–12, whom Ronnie loved and influenced, and who came to love and influence him. “It is hard to give a definition or even a description of them,” he wrote in 1917, “except perhaps to say that in a rather varied experience I have never met conversation so brilliant—with the brilliance of humour, not of wit. The circle is broken now by distance and by death … At the time of which I am speaking two of them had already adopted what I heard (and shuddered to hear) described as ‘Ronnie’s religion.’ ” These two were Harold Macmillan and Guy Lawrence.
The friendship with Harold Macmillan had begun with a disaster, wounding to Ronnie, and the first real check in his career. Macmillan left Eton in 1910, and that autumn his family wanted a private tutor to coach him at home for a Balliol scholarship. At first Dilly, who was a friend of the elder brother, Daniel, came for a few weeks. This was a failure, Dilly was found austere and uncongenial. Then Ronnie came. There was an immediate sympathy between teacher and pupil, and Ronnie, feeling that the seventeen-year-old boy was in need of spiritual guidance as well as coaching in the classics, begin to explain the hopes and the beliefs of Anglo-Catholics. Then, at the boy’s request, he took him to an Anglo-Catholic mass.
“Could you rather pray for me?” he wrote to Winnie at the end of October. “I’ve a most heart-rending and nerve-racking dispute going on with Mrs Macmillan, not about money this time, but about things 7000 times more important. Don’t tell anyone.” In reply to Winnie’s anxious inquiry he explained that the family had asked him to give his word never to mention religion to Harold again. This Ronnie could not do, so he had had to leave, and “by now I’m extremely (and not unreturnedly) fond of the boy, and it’s been a horrid wrench to go without saying a word to him of what I wanted to say.” But when, two years later, Harold Macmillan came up to Balliol the friendship between them returned, unbroken.
My dear, of course don’t stop coming to Mass [Ronnie wrote in January 1914 to another of the group, Dick Rawstorne], I think it will get more familiar as you go on—Harold will be serving me, I expect, every Saturday next term at a quarter to nine. Only don’t expect to understand all about it until you are part of it all … I can’t allow, with any patience, your idea that the way I worship God is good for me, but not for other people. I know you think I’m prepared to make fun of everybody and everything, but I mean what I do, and I am quite deliberately staking my soul on the result. Do come and talk to me sometimes next term. I shall be at home every Wednesday, and always lonely for you.
This letter, and many others like it, conveyed Ronnie’s hopeful affection and enthusiasm as he gathered round him his company of souls.
Of all this company the one that Ronnie loved best was Guy Lawrence, who came up to Trinity as senior classical scholar in 1912. Guy Francis Lawrence was a brilliant, brave and athletic, but also a nervous and delicate, young man. He was the son of a Chancery lawyer and a grandson of George Lawrence, the romantic historical novelist. He was very fair, very handsome and highly strung. At Winchester he had been made to take the female parts in Shakespeare productions, but he hastened, with relief, to discard these as soon as he joined O.U.D.S. His temperament was deeply religious, and by the time he left school he was thinking of taking orders.
During his second term at Trinity, Guy broke down, and had to be sent to San Remo to recuperate. “I think it is disgraceful of Ronnie to absent himself from Manchester for Christmas,” Eddie wrote to the Bishop, but Ronnie was at the Hôtel de Londres in San Remo, where Guy was gradually recovering the strength to return to University. The hotel was a kind of genteel rest home, the management requesting priests not to appear there too often for fear the guests should think somebody was dying. While Guy rested, Ronnie wrote a short story, once again in the style of Hugh Benson. A young man accompanies his friend, who is suffering from a nervous breakdown, to the Côte d’Azur. On a tou
r of the hill villages he visits a ruined church, haunted by the spirits of dead peasants who were attending mass there when an earthquake swept them away. Trapped in the church, alone in the darkness, he struggles to control his fear.
He tried hard not to think of his friends, but it was no use; one by one they came and took his brain by storm. In an agony of loneliness he stretched out his arms as if to fling them round some warm protecting body, and when they closed upon air he shook with sobbing. His whole body shook with the unquenchable thirst for human contact … Yet when his brain cleared, it cleared completely.
To Guy, Ronnie was his spiritual director, but, from an earthly point of view, it was with a certain wistfulness that Ronnie wrote, “I have a theory that everybody in the world really wants to run errands for him, and it’s only the people whom he doesn’t deign to fag who come to dislike him.” As always, he dreaded the undue interference of emotion, yet now he allowed himself to trust it, and it did not betray him. A prayer which he sent that year to Rawstorne begins:
Oh God, I submit my affections to Thee, beseeching Thee to take from me all particular objects of my desire, all friendships and acquaintance, however harmless in themselves, which Thou seest to be a distraction to my soul, or to interfere with my love for Thee … I desire to love even my enemies for Thee, and my friends only to Thee.
As 1913 turned into 1914, the character patterns of the four brothers had taken shape for their lifetime. Eddie could never forget that he was the eldest, Dilly that he was the second, Wilfred that he was the cheerfully and necessarily philosophic third, Ronnie that he was the baby. Eddie looked for responsibility, Dilly for independence, Wilfred for reunion, Ronnie for authority. All needed love, Wilfred and Ronnie because they had had so much in childhood, Eddie and Dilly because they had had rather too little.
Wilfred, down at the Stratford Mission, had taken the first steps towards ordination. His bishop directed him to study theology at St Anselm’s in Cambridge. Here, entirely on his own decision, he took a vow not only of celibacy, but of poverty. Celibacy, he once suggested at a conference, was only an aspect of that difficult frame of mind, humility—an attitude to created things, including friendship and love, which made it possible to renounce them. This did not mean he underestimated the strength of what he called “the temptations of the flesh incidental to youth and liable to return with equal severity in middle life; we simply have to recognize them for what they are, and take appropriate means to cope with them.” Wilfred, at this time of his life, resembled Dilly in hardly ever speaking to a woman at all, except for Winnie, Mrs K., his aunts at Edmundthorpe and Christina, who won him over without difficulty.
By poverty he meant something specific. Whatever he earned, he would never keep more than a hundred pounds a year (this was in 1912; he had to put it up later), except for a small sum to guard against being a burden to others in old age. With this vow went the duty not to indulge in regrets on the subject, not to become stingy—“the danger,” he called it, “of clinging unduly to what remains”—and, hardest of all, not to mind being regarded as a delightful eccentric who, like the birds of the air, neither knows nor cares what comfort is. This idea was particularly irritating. Wilfred was the young man who had chosen his ties in the Burlington Arcade, and he loved good wine, good tea and the best tobacco. But renunciation must never be seen in terms of loss.
What did the brothers expect from the next five years? Wilfred would be a deacon in 1914, a priest in 1915, and his dearest hope was to work side by side with Ronnie in the Anglo-Catholic movement. This did not mean that he saw eye to eye with his brother in everything. Ronnie was mistaken when he told Evelyn Waugh that Wilfred was “like me, only more so”. Wilfred had grave doubts about the Society of St Peter and St Paul—for example, about one of its publisher’s announcements for 1912:
In this twentieth century the Society of St Peter and St Paul would seek to rouse Catholics from their sad worship of material things, from the strife of strikes and haunting Insurance Acts, to some degree of merriness, by printing for them the Hours of Blessed Mary in the vernacular. How sad Caxton would be if he were to come again to visit this merrye England and find all merriness gone from us!
This reference to the dock and rail strikes of 1911 caused Wilfred to use two favourite words, “bilge” and “tripe”. Yet he believed, without sentimentality, that he and Ronnie could work together, as brothers and priests, on their own lines, and remain as close as they had been in Uncle Lindsey’s garden. The failure of this hope was the greatest blow of Wilfred’s life.
Eddie, the journalist, saw more clearly into the future. He had already felt a premonitory gloom in 1907, when Straight had commissioned for The Pall Mall Magazine a feature article on a visit to the German Navy:
My friend the Kapitän-sur-Zee delivered his soul with a fiery eye, and an inexpressible emphasis, in that little white-painted cabin set with photographs of British naval officers.
‘The German Navy,’ he said to me, ‘is strictly for defence. These people who write for the newspapers—yes, on both sides—they lie. The Emperor himself told me, walking on this quarterdeck, that his intention was peace … We are a serious people.’ The captain called a midshipman. ‘Show this gentleman all—everything—alles!’ he cried.
Eddie had been very much more impressed by H. G. Wells’s War in the Air, which he persuaded his editor, with difficulty, to print as a serial in the following year. In 1912 he wrote to his father that he could only hope that the cousins (George V and Kaiser Wilhelm) would decide to be polite to each other; otherwise he would be obliged to join the Territorials, the last thing he wanted to do. His job hardly seemed to cover his Tube fares into London, and Christina was expecting a baby.
Wilfred was what was then called a “Lansburyite”—a total pacifist—but, somewhat inconsistently, he went to Territorial camp every summer with the East Enders. Early in 1914 he and Ronnie were both at Bishopscourt “holding the fort”—not very efficiently, one would have thought—while Mrs K. went up to Edinburgh; Winnie, too, was expecting her first baby. This was a chance to talk at length, but, whatever they discussed, it seems not to have been the possibilities of war. Ronnie had expectations of a peaceful summer term, with only three lectures a week, and six pupils, and he had devised a method of teaching logic by card games, which he copied out onto rather perishable slips of cardboard. In the Long Vacation, the August, that is, of 1914, there was to be a reading party at More Hall, a country house retreat in Gloucestershire. Guy Lawrence was coming with some of his closest friends, Harold Macmillan perhaps, although his family were likely to disapprove. Ronnie was to choose the wine, and the housework would be done by resident lay-brothers. All was set fair.
I never read the papers at this time [Ronnie wrote in A Spiritual Aeneid], and it was only in casual conversation I learned that all was not well with Europe. Then the bugles went round to call up the Naval Reserves, a big German cargo ship sulkily submitted to be towed across the Sound to its long resting-place and as I travelled north to stay with [Guy] in the Midlands, I read the Foreign Secretary’s speech.
As for Dilly, one never knew what he would think or say. Cambridge, as 1914 approached, was in a delicious turmoil over the rumour that the Master of Trinity had gone mad, and was shooting at the Fellows as they came through the Great Gate. “Ah, there is dear Dr Jackson! Bang!” King’s was convulsed by new appointments as Bursar and junior Dean, and by the disappearance of the porter’s cat. When darker clouds gathered, Dilly surprised his family by declaring that he thought “the whole of Cambridge” should join the Territorials, including Lytton Strachey. But Erm did not really believe that his future would be interrupted. By 1916 he confidently expected to have finished editing Herodas.
V
1914–1918
Brothers at War
WAR WAS DECLARED ON 4 AUGUST 1914, at eleven p.m. On the following evening, Eddie saw people dancing in their enthusiasm on the tables of the Café Royal. He came home
by the Tube train, hung up his bowler hat, and whistled for the terrier, Caesar. He was thirty-four, an age when it is awkward to interrupt a promising career, and he had hoped to take Christina and his year-old baby son for a holiday to Whitby.
Neither of them doubted that the cause was a just one, or that the Germans must be made to restore Belgium. It was something, in any case, that we had undertaken, as a nation, to do. “I knew, and he knew, that he would have to go,” Christina wrote in her diary. “Going”, at that moment, meant joining the first quarter-million auxiliaries who were enlisted in 1914 to reinforce Kitchener’s Army and the Territorials. It was assumed that since the war would be fought at sea by Britain, and on land by the French, the quarter-million would be quite enough to fulfil our obligations.
The war might not last long. Belloc, who had emerged, as editor of Land and Water, as the continental expert, declared in October that the Germans had already thrown in their last reserves. Not very much appeared to be ready for the reserves at home. Eddie drilled all weekend; there were no uniforms; he learned to slope arms with his umbrella. “It seems that we are to have 400 rifles shortly,” he wrote to his father in November, “of a somewhat antiquated pattern, and also, they say, a machine-gun, so that we shall be extremely deadly—probably about the time the next European war takes place. It is now possible to sleep in camp permanently if one wishes it. I—strange to say—don’t.” Kitchener at this time was hesitating between two or four machine-guns for each regiment.
By Christmas Eddie was a temporary second lieutenant in the Lincolns, and wrote to his Fleet Street editors to say that after the emergency he hoped to be working for them again. Owen Seaman wrote:
The Knox Brothers Page 14
