The Great Lover

by Jill Dawson

  Little is known of Taatamata. (“What does her name mean in Tahitian?” I ask a guide. “Nothing,” he replies. “It must have been made up.”) In some accounts, she worked at the hotel where Brooke stayed and was virtually a prostitute. In others, she was highborn, the daughter of a village chief or even a mythic princess, protector of the sacred turtles of Tahiti. Surviving photographs show a shy, elegant young woman staring wistfully into the distance beneath a straw hat. She wears the long unflattering dresses the missionaries introduced and stands smiling at a discreet distance from Brooke. He wrote in a letter that she was “a girl with wonderful eyes, the walk of a Goddess, & the heart of an angel, who is luckily, devoted to me. She gives her time to ministering to me, I mine to probing her queer mind. I think I shall write a book about her—only I fear I am too fond of her.”

  In poems written in Tahiti, Brooke’s passion pulses off the page, but the affair was fleeting: he had to leave the islands after three months. Traveling there myself—following the route that he took from the sweltering capital, Papeete, to the cooler, rainier Mataiea—I find that little is known of the famous English poet the Tahitians affectionately nicknamed Pupure, meaning “fair.”

  “In poems written in Tahiti, Brooke’s passion pulses off the page, but the affair was fleeting: he had to leave the islands after three months.”

  It is possible to spend hours, as Brooke did, floating in warm lagoons the color of “all the buds of spring” (his words), staring at the radiant, butterfly-colored fish. The coconut palms, the dawns of pearl and gold and red, the Tahitian habit of wearing single white tiare flowers behind their ears—everything mentioned by Brooke in his poem “Tiare Tahiti” is available to anyone chasing his story here, but I find nothing more, no record of his daughter, no traces of his life. This is deeply frustrating and yet enticing.

  Novelists thrive on the gaps in a story, the murky places that only imagination can illuminate. I’m guided by Brooke’s own words. His love for Tahiti quickly infects me: “And after dark, the black palms against a tropic night, the smell of the wind, the tangible moonlight like a white, dry, translucent mist, the lights in the huts, the murmur and laughter of passing figures, the passionate, queer thrill of the rhythm of some hidden dance…That alone is life; all else is death.”

  That alone is life—not a bad claim for a place, a way of life, or a girl. That is where I will start.

  “Everything mentioned by Brooke in his poem ‘Tiare Tahiti’ is available to anyone chasing his story here, but I find nothing more.”

  Read on

  The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

  by Rupert Brooke

  Just now the lilac is in bloom,

  All before my little room;

  And in my flower-beds, I think,

  Smile the carnation and the pink;

  And down the borders, well I know,

  The poppy and the pansy blow…

  Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,

  Beside the river make for you

  A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep

  Deeply above; and green and deep

  The stream mysterious glides beneath,

  Green as a dream and deep as death.

  —Oh, damn! I know it! and I know

  How the May fields all golden show,

  And when the day is young and sweet,

  Gild gloriously the bare feet

  That run to bathe…

  ‘Du lieber Gott!’

  Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,

  And there the shadowed waters fresh

  Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.

  Temperamentvoll German Jews

  Drink beer around;—and THERE the dews

  Are soft beneath a morn of gold.

  Here tulips bloom as they are told;

  Unkempt about those hedges blows

  An English unofficial rose;

  And there the unregulated sun

  Slopes down to rest when day is done,

  And wakes a vague unpunctual star,

  A slippered Hesper; and there are

  Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton

  Where das Betreten’s not verboten.

  …would I were

  In Grantchester, in Grantchester!—

  Some, it may be, can get in touch

  With Nature there, or Earth, or such.

  And clever modern men have seen

  A Faun a-peeping through the green,

  And felt the Classics were not dead,

  To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,

  Or hear the Goat-foot piping low:…

  But these are things I do not know.

  I only know that you may lie

  Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,

  And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,

  Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,

  Until the centuries blend and blur

  In Grantchester, in Grantchester…

  Still in the dawnlit waters cool

  His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,

  And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,

  Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.

  Dan Chaucer hears his river still

  Chatter beneath a phantom mill.

  Tennyson notes, with studious eye,

  How Cambridge waters hurry by…

  And in that garden, black and white,

  Creep whispers through the grass all night;

  And spectral dance, before the dawn,

  A hundred Vicars down the lawn;

  Curates, long dust, will come and go

  On lissom, clerical, printless toe;

  And oft between the boughs is seen

  The sly shade of a Rural Dean…

  Till, at a shiver in the skies,

  Vanishing with Satanic cries,

  The prim ecclesiastic rout

  Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,

  Grey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls,

  The falling house that never falls.

  God! I will pack, and take a train,

  And get me to England once again!

  For England’s the one land, I know,

  Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;

  And Cambridgeshire, of all England,

  The shire for Men who Understand;

  And of THAT district I prefer

  The lovely hamlet Grantchester.

  For Cambridge people rarely smil

  Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;

  And Royston men in the far South

  Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;

  At Over they fling oaths at one,

  And worse than oaths at Trumpington,

  And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,

  And there’s none in Harston under thirty,

  And folks in Shelford and those parts

  Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,

  And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,

  And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,

  And things are done you’d not believe

  At Madingley on Christmas Eve.

  Strong men have run for miles and miles,

  When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;

  Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,

  Rather than send them to St. Ives;

  Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,

  To hear what happened at Babraham.

  But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!

  There’s peace and holy quiet there,

  Great clouds along pacific skies,

  And men and women with straight eyes,

  Lithe children lovelier than a dream,

  A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,

  And little kindly winds that creep

  Round twilight corners, half asleep.

  In Grantchester their skins are white;

  They bathe by day, they bathe by night;

  The women there do all they ought;

  The men observe the Rules of Thought.
r />   They love the Good; they worship Truth;

  They laugh uproariously in youth;

  (And when they get to feeling old,

  They up and shoot themselves, I’m told)…

  Ah God! to see the branches stir

  Across the moon at Grantchester!

  To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten

  Unforgettable, unforgotten

  River-smell, and hear the breeze

  Sobbing in the little trees.

  Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand

  Still guardians of that holy land?

  The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,

  The yet unacademic stream?

  Is dawn a secret shy and cold

  Anadyomene, silver-gold?

  And sunset still a golden sea

  From Haslingfield to Madingley?

  And after, ere the night is born,

  Do hares come out about the corn?

  Oh, is the water sweet and cool,

  Gentle and brown, above the pool?

  And laughs the immortal river still

  Under the mill, under the mill?

  Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

  And Certainty? and Quiet kind?

  Deep meadows yet, for to forget

  The lies, and truths, and pain?…oh! yet

  Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

  And is there honey still for tea?

  Tiare Tahiti

  by Rupert Brooke

  Papeete, February 1914

  Mamua, when our laughter ends,

  And hearts and bodies, brown as white,

  Are dust about the doors of friends,

  Or scent ablowing down the night,

  Then, oh! then, the wise agree,

  Comes our immortality.

  Mamua, there waits a land

  Hard for us to understand.

  Out of time, beyond the sun,

  All are one in Paradise,

  You and Pupure are one,

  And Taü, and the ungainly wise.

  There the Eternals are, and there

  The Good, the Lovely, and the True,

  And Types, whose earthly copies were

  The foolish broken things we knew;

  There is the Face, whose ghosts we are;

  The real, the never-setting Star;

  And the Flower, of which we love

  Faint and fading shadows here;

  Never a tear, but only Grief;

  Dance, but not the limbs that move;

  Songs in Song shall disappear;

  Instead of lovers, Love shall be;

  For hearts, Immutability;

  And there, on the Ideal Reef,

  Thunders the Everlasting Sea!

  And my laughter, and my pain,

  Shall home to the Eternal Brain.

  And all lovely things, they say,

  Meet in Loveliness again;

  Miri’s laugh, Teipo’s feet,

  And the hands of Matua,

  Stars and sunlight there shall meet

  Coral’s hues and rainbows there,

  And Teüra’s braided hair;

  And with the starred ‘tiare’s’ white,

  And white birds in the dark ravine,

  And ‘flamboyants’ ablaze at night,

  And jewels, and evening’s after-green,

  And dawns of pearl and gold and red,

  Mamua, your lovelier head!

  And there’ll no more be one who dreams

  Under the ferns, of crumbling stuff,

  Eyes of illusion, mouth that seems,

  All time-entangled human love.

  And you’ll no longer swing and sway

  Divinely down the scented shade,

  Where feet to Ambulation fade,

  And moons are lost in endless Day.

  How shall we wind these wreaths of ours,

  Where there are neither heads nor flowers?

  Oh, Heaven’s Heaven!—but we’ll be missing

  The palms, and sunlight, and the south;

  And there’s an end, I think, of kissing,

  When our mouths are one with Mouth…

  ‘Taü here’, Mamua,

  Crown the hair, and come away!

  Hear the calling of the moon,

  And the whispering scents that stray

  About the idle warm lagoon.

  Hasten, hand in human hand,

  Down the dark, the flowered way,

  Along the whiteness of the sand,

  And in the water’s soft caress,

  Wash the mind of foolishness,

  Mamua, until the day.

  Spend the glittering moonlight there

  Pursuing down the soundless deep

  Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair,

  Or floating lazy, half-asleep.

  Dive and double and follow after,

  Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,

  With lips that fade, and human laughter

  And faces individual,

  Well this side of Paradise!…

  There’s little comfort in the wise.

  The Soldier

  by Rupert Brooke

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever England. There shall be

  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

  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.

  And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

  A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

  Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

  Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

  And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

  In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

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  Acknowledgements

  The Orchard House and garden still exist in Grantchester and host the Rupert Brooke Society. I first had the idea for this novel when visiting with another writer (Martin Goodman), and buying a postcard of the maids who worked there in Rupert Brooke’s time, standing in their aprons in front of a tin-roofed pavilion. These girls were possibly the daughters of Mrs Stevenson, but one of them soon became, in my mind, Nell.

  This is a novel. I have made things up. Nell and her family are made up, as are the other maids. Of course I made Rupert up, too, and he is ‘my’ Rupert Brooke, a figure from my imagination, fused from his poetry, his letters, his travel writing and essays, photographs, guesswork, the things I know about his life blended with my own dreams of him, and impressions.

  Those wanting to know more about Rupert’s life are referred to the following books and letters. Where I think the reader might be interested to know in the novel whether there is a basis in fact, I’ve indicated what my source might be. I’ve also embedded in the text many of Rupert’s actual letters and phrases from his own writings, and where I could find them, first-hand accounts and recorded words of others, such as Gwen Raverat and Phyllis Gardner.

  Preface from a letter of Rupert Brooke to Bryn Olivier, reprinted in The Neo-Pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth by Paul Delany, the Free Press, a division of Macmillan Inc., 1987.

  Preface quote from child psychologist D. W. Winnicott.

  In fact, Nell is wrong to say that Brooke’s biographers, being male, did not spot the meaning in Taatamata’s sentence: ‘I get fat all time Sweetheart’. It was Mike Read who revealed the existence of a daughter, and information about Arlice Rapoto can be found in his Forever England, Mainstream Publishing Company, Edinburgh, 1997.

  Extract from The Times, 26 April 1915, by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London, on behalf of T
he Estate of Winston Churchill. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.

  The biography that Nell suggests Arlice should read is Christopher Hassall’s Rupert Brooke: A Biography, Faber and Faber, 1964. Extracts reproduced with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. The prose book is: The Prose of Rupert Brooke, edited with an introduction by Christopher Hassall, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1956. Brooke’s lecture, ‘Democracy and the Arts’, in which he put forward an argument for endowing the artist at public expense, was enormously radical at the time. Thirty years later a body was instituted to do just that; it became the Arts Council of Britain.

  The Royal Literary Fund also benefited from the estate of Rupert Brooke. I have been financially supported at different times by the RLF and I’m immensely thankful.

  Nell’s account of how the letter from Taatamata was lost in the Empress of Ireland is true. The letter, dated 2 May 1914, reads:

  My dear Love darling

  I just wrote you some lines to let you know about Tahiti to day we have plainty people Argentin Espagniole, and we all very busy for four days. We have good times all girls in Papeete have good times whit Argentin boys. I think they might go away to day to Honolulu Lovina are give a ball last night for them. Beg ball. They 2 o’clock this morning…

  I wish you here that night I get fat all time Sweetheart you know I alway thinking about you that time when you left me I been sorry for long time. We have good time when you was here I always remember about you forget me all ready Oh! mon cher bien aimee je l’aimerai toujours. I send my kiss to you darling. Mille kiss. Taatamata.

  The Letters of Rupert Brooke, chosen and edited by Geoffrey Keynes, Faber and Faber, 1968; extracts reproduced with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and The Trustees of Rupert Brooke.

  Letters of Rupert Brooke and Phyllis Gardner, and Memoir of Phyllis Gardner, 1918; copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum. ‘He wore grey flannels and a soft collar with no tie; and his face appealed to me as being at once rather innocent and babyish and inspired with a fierce life.’ These lines said by Nell in Chapter 1 are taken from Phyllis’s descriptions of Rupert Brooke. Also Nell’s description of Rupert putting his hands around Phyllis’s throat by Byron’s Pool and his tussles with her over sex are taken from Phyllis’s own memoir. The lines in Chapter 4: ‘I stood by his bed. I did not know whether he was asleep at first, but then he whispered: “Well?” I sat down on the bed, and he put his arms around me, and I laid my head on his shoulder. He pressed me closer, and something in the touch of him made me suddenly afraid, and I began to tremble violently from head to foot. “Are you frightened?” he said. “Yes,” said I. “You needn’t be,” he said, “I wouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t like.”’ are verbatim from Phyllis Gardner’s account in her memoir of Brooke, A True History, written in 1918.