The Great Silence

by Juliet Nicolson

  That summer Ottoline’s lawns at Garsington, stretching out into the Oxfordshire countryside to the water meadows beyond, were patterned with the yellow dapple of buttercups and cowslips. They seemed more crowded than ever with dons and students from nearby Oxford and the owners of the smartest local country houses. The notoriety surrounding both the lovely grey manor house and the hostess (whose large nose reminded small boys of a witch) meant that invitations to visit were contrived on the flimsiest of introductions. One neighbour, Margot Asquith, wife of the former prime minister, who lived at The Wharf, Sutton Courtenay, treated Garsington as a place of entertainment for her own guests, arriving – so one undergraduate, David Cecil, observed - with a medley of companions who ranged from ‘international tycoons and foreign ambassadors to out of work actors and schoolboys on holiday’. They would spread themselves out beneath the branches of the holm oak that Aldous Huxley thought ‘resembled a great wooden octopus’. Walking among them was their hostess with her ‘antique irregular stones like childish molars’ (Cecil again), the triple strand of pearls as ever at her neck, as she ‘maintained an air of patrician detachment and an enigmatic gleam in her strange eyes’.

  When the outside guests had gone home, Ottoline would exchange her ankle-gathered trousers and Grecian crêpe de Chine blouses for a ‘pink maillot and peplum-style tunic in rainbow colours’. Dressed in this way she would descend into what Carrington called ‘that cesspool of slime’, the pond in which the Garsington guests all swam although the cowman had drowned in it and a huge black boar had once tumbled into its stinking fetid water.

  A new employee, a young stonemason called Lionel Gomme, had come to help with some terracing in the garden. Lionel lived in the village with a famously intimidating and jealous foster-mother. His chief passions in life were football and cars. But he was a countryman, a child of nature, able to recognise every species of butterfly and to give a name to the tiniest beetle. He was 26. Ottoline was twenty-one years older. On 5 June, a day or two after he had begun work, Ottoline left her slim white bed and moved across to the open window of her bedroom. Below her in the sunshine she watched as, half kneeling, he began to form a new terrace, his shirtsleeves rolled right up to his elbows, his hands dripping with the sticky wet plaster that he was gently smoothing with a small trowel on to the grey Oxfordshire stone.

  A few days later Ottoline brought out her camera and took a picture of the young man, hatless and wearing dungarees, holding her own pug and with a broad open-mouthed smile directed straight at the photographer. She stuck two of the photographs into the body of her diary. That evening she wrote her first impressions of this ‘very remarkable boy’ with whom she had not yet exchanged a word. He had ‘a very intelligent face – and extremely beautiful’. What is more he looked ‘like a poeT’ – Ottoline’s long and satisfied stroke to the T travelling fully, as if exhaled, along the whole length of the word.

  She was apprehensive, however, reminding herself that ‘the superficial talk that men get from living with uneducated men is such a barrier’. Though certain of the young man’s intelligence, she feared he was unused to conversing much with anyone outside his work. For a brief moment also, she was doubtful whether she had the ability to attract him. Four days later she just happened to arrange to be outside in the garden, painting a metal seat a blue-green colour, while conveniently nearby ‘my beautiful boy’ was making a base for a statue. She was baffled at how to break through their mutual shyness. She knew not only that she needed to gain his trust but that she wanted to ‘inspire and help him’.

  In her diary she wrote down a further ambition, but on second thoughts crossed it out, at first with two firm strokes and then for double security with a neat dense coil of inky barbed wire. Ottoline was 47 but the jottings might as well have been those of a 16 year old. She was astonished and giddy with the realisation that she had fallen totally and all-consumingly in love. Over the next few weeks she gradually found the courage to talk to this beautiful young man, in her voice that could be at once emphatic and sing-song and which Bertrand Russell had described as ‘very beautiful, gentle, vibrant’.

  She began to call the object of her fascination by the name he had been known by in his family for most of his life: Tiger. One day at the end of the month she took Tiger into Oxford to show him the colleges, and two days later he came to her room, and took her hand in gratitude. He told her, she remembered later that night, that ‘he felt I was a friend’. Ottoline’s girlish delight in this new friendship and Tiger’s evident response to these flattering attentions by his extraordinary employer began to dissolve barriers. The only obstacle remaining to its further development, Ottoline felt, was that ‘I am old and he is young’.

  In early July England’s bishops were meeting at Lambeth Palace for the conference held roughly every ten years to discuss and assess the religious and moral state of the country. As well as issuing an official rejection of Christian Science, spiritualism and theosophy, all of which had done their part to shore up the ruins of many fragmented English souls, the conference came down firmly in defence of the underlying purpose of marriage and of the physical union between two adults. Not only was ‘an emphatic warning’ issued against any unnatural means taken for the avoidance of conception, but the Christian population of the country was reminded of ‘the paramount importance in married life of deliberate and thoughtful self-control’.

  In the same month, hungry for sunshine after the disappointingly chilly June, Ottoline went to Italy with Henry Lamb and Walter Sickert, confiding to her diary her by now consuming thoughts of the football-loving stonemason and the ‘unexpected thrills’ she received just by talking to him. She had seen ‘a good deal’ of him in the weeks before her holiday, boasting to herself privately that ‘He is athletic, and loves games and sports and all sorts of manly things and then besides he has The Poetic Love of Nature.’

  But Tiger had clearly given the prospect of taking his relationship further some thought and on her return he put up a polite but firm resistance to Ottoline’s seduction techniques. All through the summer months Ottoline wavered between excitement at the smallest sign of encouragement from him and flat despondency when he pulled back. In the middle of August she wrote in the diary that he ‘fades away and eludes one more and more – as usual I frighten’. She tried to justify his behaviour. ‘He is afraid I think of the undiscovered country inside himself.’ The gulf in their different backgrounds seemed insuperable. ‘His loyalty to his comrades ... makes him from self-preservation shy off from me’, and then in a pang of self-pity she cried, ‘I give and give and never receive.’

  As the long summer days began to shorten it seemed that there would be no question of Ottoline and Tiger overcoming the barriers that prevented what Tom Mitford and his five sisters referred to as ‘doing bodies’.

  In the southernmost part of the country another woman was at last beginning to emerge from the reverberating effects of the war. Edna Clarke Hall was known to Ottoline, not as a Garsington guest but as someone with whose utterly lovely face, albeit on canvas, Otto-line was familiar. Before the war, Ottoline had a short but loving affair with the exuberant artist Augustus John. For £40 he had sold her a portrait of a beautiful young woman, a contemporary and friend at the Slade of his sister Gwen. Edna had dearly wanted to buy the picture for herself. It showed, as she described it: ‘The figure on a cliff with bright green grass full of wild flowers and the sea ... blue but dark and the sky almost gloomy ... the face is turned full to the sky but the eyes are all closed. I feel proud and glad to have inspired him to paint it.’ The spirit of freedom in the painting was the spirit that Edna had yearned to capture for herself. But without money to buy the painting, it was left to Ottoline to become the owner. She named the picture with the upturned head and raised arms Nirvana.

  Edna was feeling trapped by the man she had married. Like Ottoline, she longed for some physical expression of affection. William Clarke Hall was thirteen years older than Edna an
d their marriage had come about in circumstances that made the confused adolescent Edna wonder whether she loved him or not. William was the leading barrister for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which Edna’s father Benjamin Waugh, a former minister of the Church, had helped to found in 1884. A growing awareness of the extent of the neglect and abuse of children within the home had moved Mr Waugh to take steps for their protection.

  Willie Clarke Hall was appointed to be barrister to the new organisation. But Willie’s interest in young children did not stop at the legal fight he undertook on their behalf. The poet Ernest Dowson, a friend ofWillie’s, detected that Willie joined him in being ‘a devout follower of the most excellent cult of La Fillette’. A love of girl-children by adult men had not been unusual in the late Victorian decades, a proclivity that did not involve lustful intentions but rather a devotion and fascination with preserving virginal innocence. Willie Clarke Hall was mesmerised by these young girls chiefly because they were not, in his word, ‘polluted’.

  Edna had never forgotten how Willie ‘would draw her to his knee, lovingly tease and talk to her’ and whisper words of poetry in her ear. He described her as ‘the child for whom of all things in the world I care most’. When they first met he was 26 and she was only 13. Within a year Willie had understood her passionate love of painting, and he persuaded Edna’s father to allow her to enrol at the Slade. Here, among the easels over which Professor Henry Tonks presided, Edna found happiness. A new, inspiring world opened up in which, despite her protected upbringing, she was surprisingly unperturbed by the challenge of making her own watercolour version of Rubens’s Rape of the Sabine Women. Mrs Clarke Hall was taken aback to come across her daughter standing on her bed, barely clothed, miming the repelling of seduction. Having posed as the model for her own dramatic picture, Edna won the Slade’s coveted Summer Figure Composition Prize.

  Edna’s great friend Gwen John had introduced her to the painters William Orpen and Ambrose McEvoy and to her own soon-smitten brother, Augustus. But although the eminent painter was, according to young Edna, ‘a handful’ he desisted from any attempt to seduce this lovely young woman and Edna’s gratitude to Willie for helping to give her this new life was enormous. But gratitude was not enough. Willie wanted Edna for himself, and three years later, with the encouragement of her parents, she agreed to become engaged to Willie. In 1898, when she was 19 and he was 32, they were married.

  In the legal contract that now bound them, the seductive power of Edna’s youthful purity vanished. By sleeping with his wife, as a husband was required to do, Willie himself had destroyed the precious innocence he had loved. His ‘immense delight’ in ‘the constant charm of childhood’ would have to be found elsewhere. He lost interest not only in Edna as the child-woman he had pursued but also, and perhaps more importantly, in Edna as the artist, whose talent he had once encouraged.

  Within the first few months of their marriage Edna began to feel as if she had been abandoned. ‘I was left standing like a confused child by an unkindness I could not interpret.’ She rapidly fell into a deep depression, feeling herself to be ‘in space, sick with desire for a near intimate touch’. Her regard for her own work was by then so diminished that she would sweep her paintings from the floor into a corner with a broom. Gradually she started to paint in secret as if her creativity was a shameful thing she needed to conceal. She could not bear Willie’s antagonism to her art.

  But if Edna had something to hide, so did her husband. Friends and family knew about the coldness of Willie’s behaviour and did not like it. Furthermore the family thought that his search for uncomplicated emotional and physical pleasure meant that he ‘pursued his way a bit too much’. They thought he should have ‘restrained’ himself and hoped Edna was unaware of her husband’s infidelities. But she knew all too well.

  During the war Edna had developed an abhorrence of the ‘organised hatred’ that summed up the conflict for her. The distress affected her ability to paint, but under the influence of a new friendship words for a while became her chief creative currency. The writer Edward Thomas was billeted at the army training camp at Hare Hall in Essex near the Clarkes’ new home, Great House at Upminster Common. Marriage had been a disappointment to them both and for eight brief but precious months Edna and Edward drew towards each other in an intimacy and companionship that had been missing from both their lives. They walked for hours through the fields and woods and along the lanes together, talking about the natural beauty of things that mattered to them both. And Edna fell in love with him.

  Edward made Edna feel like a woman embarking on the beginnings of a love affair for the first time. Every small gesture filled her with excitement. And one evening she asked him to her studio, filled with ‘heather and flowering reeds – candles, pens’. They stood together ‘by the open garden door with the darkness beyond’ as she read him the poem that she had finished writing only moments before. The ink was still wet on the page. ‘He became curiously tender and drew me lightly to him as I stood there and felt me trembling.’ He pronounced the poem ‘quite beautiful’, then pulled her closer and, she remembered later, ‘leaned his face against my breast’. They stood in silence, ‘the silence so eloquent there was no need of further speech’.

  These moments, the sensibilities of two artists meeting in silence and alone, became the riches of Edna’s life. And when one morning he arrived at her house and embraced her, she wrote some lines expressing her gratitude.

  I did my best

  The clothes they were neat pressed;

  The hour was early

  Even my pinafore was blue

  And in the sun stood you;

  Your kiss took me to heaven!

  Edward left one day in August 1916 smelling of what his wife Helen called ‘that queer sour smell of khaki’. Nine months later, on 9 April 1917, he was killed at Arras.

  Almost a year after Thomas’s death Edna was still protesting in her diary at the cruel way that dreams can make death seem an illusion: ‘I forgot you had died and were hid in a grave. I do not believe you are hid in a grave, for you came to me then gave to me more than I can ever return unto you till I die.’ His death triggered a long-repressed nervous breakdown. She tried at first ‘her very best’ to master the onset, spending one afternoon painting a frantic grief-induced series of forty drawings ‘relating to life at sea and life at Great House, all intimate and vivid’. During those few heady hours Edna was ‘urged on by a divine madness almost as if I had died’. When she showed the paintings to her old professor from the Slade, Henry Tonks, he pronounced them to be ‘little gems all of them’.

  But Willie had insisted that Edna and her younger son Denis go further into the countryside to escape the bombs that were now falling on London and that were threatening the surrounding counties. Isolated from her much loved sisters, and separated from her elder son Justin, who was away at boarding school, Edna felt waves of guilt and loneliness sweep over her. Edna knew Willie was ‘just, wise and very kind’; she was aware too that the compassion he showed towards the troubled children under his care impressed all those who knew him. But he denied her the intimacy she longed for. By some queer misfortune the reverse of his double-sided nature was the side he showed to Edna. She was only one of thousands of women who envied those who had loved their dead husbands. For them even death could not take away the memory of their love, whereas the reality of a living but unloving husband was inescapably painful.

  After the intense strain of concealing a sadness that sometimes possessed her ‘for weeks with hardly a break’, she descended into a state of mind ‘akin to those who plunge shocking live razors and carving knives into their gizzards’. Only her own poetry prevented her from some ultimate act of madness. In these lines the whole range of emotions finds expression. Sometimes she wrote in anger, sometimes in despair, occasionally with nostalgia for the love her husband had shown her when she was a child, always with the immediacy and spontaneity that she
had used in her paintings. Although she was not using paint to express herself, her love of colour and image spilled into her written words:

  The sense of colour is my wealth,

  With careless loveliness it lies

  Cast on the chair, or on the shelf,

  Above the hearth to lift my eyes;

  In earthen jug, in cloak of blue,

  In sober brown of cupboard door,

  In time-stained walls of pallid hue

  And sunlit grey of boarded floor.

  At Tonks’s urging she agreed to see Henry Head, a close friend and colleague of the Craiglockhart doctor, William Rivers, and the same portly, friendly psychiatrist who had once tried to help Virginia Woolf with her episodes of mental collapse. Head’s compassionate recognition of her loneliness helped Edna recover. ‘His profound interest in the psychological aspect of my painting and poetry in relation to experience, and his deep sympathy and understanding of the intricacies and the subtle things that matter in that experience were worth much to me,’ she wrote in gratitude. At his suggestion she spoke to Willie and persuaded him that her mental well-being would benefit from a room or a place of her own in which to paint.

  In the summer, with Willie’s blessing, Edna and Denis went alone to their cottage on the Cornish coast. Denis was ten years old and between schools. His brother Justin was to join them later. For Denis, the journey itself was entirely thrilling and he later recorded the familiar adventure in detail. The trunks were weighed at Paddington and labels were then stuck in the top of the trunk stating the destination in large letters. At the same time the flame-licking firebox, a monstrous insatiable engine painted in gleaming green, with fittings in brass and steel, was being stoked prior to departure as Denis climbed into the brown and cream carriage with his mother. He hung out of the window for as much of the long journey as his mother would allow, wiping from his eyes the smuts that were carried down the length of the train from the engine. But things got even better when ‘the real excitement started with the Exe estuary, the red cliffs and the red deserted beaches of Dawlish’. The journey was not yet over as the Clarke Hall carriage was disconnected from the body of the train and pulled by a small tank engine up the hill, through the countryside and over the ‘rickety timber bridge’ towards Helston.