by Sara Wheeler
Towards the end of the war H. G. Wells wrote that for the first time in their lives the men of Cherry’s generation ‘had met direction that believed in itself . . . They were up against something that seemed to be Order and something that had an aim.’ Many of those who had served felt, after the war, that the world had been everlastingly divided into those who had been there, and those who had not. To Cherry that binary vision had been cast before 1914, and the war only served to polarise it further: those who had been south, and those who had not. His psyche never fully engaged with the war. It was still in the Antarctic. ‘Talk of ex-soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘give me ex-antarctics, unsoured and with their ideals intact. They could sweep the world.’
At least he had a new enemy to occupy him, and he was determined that there should be no surrender. The Bishop of Peterborough had appointed a new rector to the living of Wheathampstead after a two-year interval following the death of the last incumbent at the age of eighty-five. The new man, Canon Nance, was sixty-four. This, according to Cherry, was too old, and he informed the Bishop that unless he stopped using Wheathampstead ‘as a dumping ground for his pensioners’ he would be seeing the end of Cherry’s tithe, which amounted to some £300 a year plus extras. The Bishop of St Albans weighed in to defend Peterborough and Nance, and excruciatingly polite acrimonious letters were exchanged. Cherry did not attend church, but he paid his feudal dues, and that, he felt, gave him a proprietorial right to poke his nose in. He did not have faith in any formal sense; like many of his generation, it had vanished with his first pony. As he didn’t feel remotely guilty about it he was able to blunder on, relentlessly beating the clergy on the head with his bank book. But in the secular field of public life he had inherited none of his paternal forbears’ predilection for municipal responsibility, and he was never to develop the slightest leanings in that direction. He was a very private man, and civic duty bored him.
He lived a solitary life with few servants, though he had engaged a middle-aged spinster, Eliza Merchant, as his housekeeper. By the middle of September he was able to walk about 300 yards. The loyal Farrer took the train up from Euston, and once they had got their business out of the way they strolled in the park and talked things over in a more general way. It did Cherry good to hear about events beyond the house and garden from a living person rather than a newspaper. But when, the following spring, he suggested a little partridge and pheasant shooting, Farrer declined on moral grounds: it seemed obscene to go out shooting when young men were being shot by the thousand across the Channel.
An anti-aircraft detachment had appeared on Gustard Wood Common a mile away, the officers billeted in the Mid-Herts Golf Club and the men in the thatched cottages clustered nearby. Soon a smaller one sprang up in Ayot St Lawrence, the leafy hamlet north-east of Lamer. From his bedroom window Cherry watched the silvery rods of the searchlights roam, briefly freezing the gentle Hertfordshire hills in a cold, grey-white frame. That portion of the county was a popular destination for Zeppelins. One night in October his heart ‘stood still for about half a minute’ as one flew low above the house; it went on to drop more than thirty bombs before being shot down over a field. Cherry got a good view, ‘so vivid that I fancied I could feel the heat coming from her’. The next day, a rainy one, the bodies of the crew were laid out in a barn, and crowds pressed in on the police cordon to catch a glimpse of a genuine dead German. The tallest man had the best view. His name was George Bernard Shaw.
GBS was thirty years Cherry’s senior. He was the most famous author in the world, and had been a household name for half a generation. He had married Charlotte Payne-Townshend in 1896, and a decade later, while Cherry was at Christ Church, they had rented the rectory in Ayot, once described by Shaw as ‘a village where nobody dreams of dressing’. Shortly after the war they bought the house, and it became known as ‘Shaw’s Corner’. Compared to Lamer it was a mean little Victorian dwelling (actually it was built in 1902), but it had eight bedrooms, and a revolving hut of its own at the bottom of the garden to which the master could escape to work.37 The Shaws kept a flat in London and flitted between town and country. They were committed travellers, both in the UK and abroad, and Ayot was their bolt-hole away from the glare of public attention and the wearisome business of packing and repacking. Au fond, Shaw liked his own company, and at Ayot, more than anywhere else, he got it.
One day during Cherry’s long convalescence, Charlotte Shaw had appeared at the house to ask if there was anything she or her husband could do to help. The rectory was only a quarter of a mile from Lamer, and the Shaws’ land abutted the park. Cherry didn’t need help, but he needed company, and as soon as he was able to walk properly he got into the habit of strolling down the avenue of lime trees and over the footpaths to Ayot.
Cherry and the Shaws became intimate friends, in touch weekly and often daily until GBS died in 1950. The mundane detail of everyday living was the glue of their long relationship. They discussed fences and birds’ nests and what was to be done about rubbish collection, ate each other’s leftovers and took up the threads of each other’s conversation. The Shaws’ West Highland terrior, Kim, shrank at the approach of Kris, and the vegetarian GBS raised his exflorescent eyebrows in mock horror as Cherry turned up at the back door with a dead rabbit in one hand and a gun in the other. They colluded over local affairs, campaigning jointly against municipal neglect and doubling then quadrupling charitable collections raised by pious villagers. (Cherry was unwilling to take on civic responsibility, but willing to complain if he felt aggrieved.) When one or the other was away, they corresponded. Shaw had bought his first car in 1908, thereby imperilling the hapless villagers on a regular basis, and he was always on hand to advise Cherry on the purchase and maintenance of his own vehicles, a subject about which neither of them knew anything, or to take him on a spin through the previously quiet lanes around Ayot. The villagers did not know what to make of either man.
At first glance there was much that separated them. GBS thrived on public attention, and Cherry recoiled from it. Shaw’s Fabian instincts revolted at the sight of landowners like Cherry raking in unearned income and, as Shaw perceived it, exploiting the working classes. But their friendship was profound and lasting, despite their ideological differences. GBS instinctively questioned the orthodox, and that appealed to Cherry. Neither had much interest in God; both responded deeply to literature. Both naturally rebelled against the idea and the reality of war, and both badly wanted peace (when Shaw visited the front he said that Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British forces, was a very chivalrous man who made him feel that the war would last thirty years). Both were qualified cynics. Above all, the mix of seriousness and frivolity that was the essence of GBS was exactly what Cherry sought from a companion. Shaw never disappointed him.
Shaw towed many in his glittering wake who became regulars at Lamer during these later war years. One was Arnold Bennett, already a grand old man of letters but provincial in his heart, as Cherry was in his. He too toured the front, a companion of the war correspondent George Mair, Cherry’s brilliant Christ Church friend, and went on to occupy a senior post at the Ministry of Information. Bennett was an innately good, honourable man entirely without pretension, and Cherry admired him. (He liked his books, too: he had taken some of them to the Antarctic.) Another Shavian visitor who was a frequent house guest at Lamer for a short period was J. M. Barrie, the strange little man in whom Scott had found an unlikely friend. Although Barrie’s Peter Pan had confirmed his position as the most commercially successful dramatist alive, he was shy, like Cherry, and in the case of emotional matters both found writing easier than speaking.
As the autumn advanced Cherry was well enough to acquire a girlfriend, the mysterious38 Christine Davis, and to take the train down to London to complain to anyone who would listen about his tax bills. But his colitis continued to flare up periodically, and by the middle of October a navy doctor had found him unfit for further service. His commission was terminated, and h
e was thanked for his contribution to the war effort.
Shortly after his discharge, his doctor despatched him to a nursing home in the north of Scotland. At Duff House in Banff Cherry lived on a diet of Presbyterian severity and took walks along the banks of the Deveron in the perishing autumnal cold that crept off the North Sea. His life of lone splendour set him thinking about the point of having such a vast estate. The first thing he did on his return was to sell an outlying farm called Kimpton Bottom. ‘It is right out of the estate,’ he wrote to Farrer, who dealt with the transaction, ‘and it seemed unwise to go on paying out money in tithes, rates, property tax, insurance and management to a limitless degree. I live in solitary grandeur here. It’s a pity it isn’t someone who enjoys grandeur more!’ Cherry was to see less and less point in owning so much land and property; he had started the process which was going to end, thirty years later, in his owning no land at all.
Stalemate and attrition characterised the war at the end of 1916. At home, Asquith resigned as prime minister, the coalition goverment broke down and Lloyd George took over at Downing Street. Food shortages, rising costs and servant problems had become the norm in country houses. The war had seeped so deeply into daily life that it seemed it had always been there. When Cherry came back from Banff for his first Christmas at Lamer without his mother, he fortunately had Kathleen to jolly him through the cheerless dawn of 1917. She had responded to the war with her usual energy and independence. At first she had organised the transportation of cars and ambulances to France, and had even stayed on the Continent for a time to help set up a French hospital. Then, back in England, she had joined the production line at a Vickers factory that made electrical coils. At the end of 1916 she took up an office job at the Ministry of Pensions. She and the eight-year-old Peter spent that Christmas at Lamer. They all tried to make the most of it: Peter took a stocking into Cherry’s room on Christmas morning, Shaw read them a play about the Kaiser on Boxing Day afternoon, and several guns went shooting. Cherry was an excellent shot, reputedly one of the best in the county, and he always took trouble to ensure that the game coverts in the woods were well stocked.
After Christmas, Kathleen took him back to London with her, ‘for I diagnose cheerful forgetfulness as the quickest cure for him . . . He wants a dose of hilarity or intense interest in something to be quite cured.’ But there was no prospect of cheerfulness: only more sorrow.
On 26 December 1916, Reggie threw himself out of a fourth-floor window at Green Street. He had been seriously depressed for weeks, and was known to be suicidal. It was not the first time he had been ill; he had almost had a breakdown in 1913. Nurses had been placed on round-the-clock duty, but in an unguarded moment poor Reggie had hurled himself out of the sash window in his pyjamas. Cherry had been close to him all his life, and Reggie had shared his Antarctic experience, good and bad, more intimately than anyone who was not actually there. Green Street had been Cherry’s second home. Most importantly of all, Reggie had been a link with Wilson, who still lived in Cherry’s fantasy life. ‘I want to say,’ the dying Wilson had written to the Smiths from the last tent, ‘how I have valued your friendship and your example, and how I and my beloved wife have loved you both from first to last.’
The funeral took place in London on 29 December. ‘We saw Mrs Wilson there,’ noted Kathleen. ‘She’s an absurd prig.’
His health more or less restored, in 1917 Cherry began to make fuller use of the house. Visitors colonised the spare bedrooms: Kathleen and Peter took the train up at least once a month, and when GBS and Charlotte were in Hertfordshire they used to walk over for lunch and invite everyone back to Ayot for tea. Peter caught newts, Kathleen sculpted, and in the season some of them shot. The whole party would then stroll back down the avenue of limes for dinner at Lamer, followed by a play-reading by GBS (occasionally he even banged out a song on the old silk-backed piano). When the weather was mild, people slept outside, and Kathleen danced barefoot in the moonlight in her nightie. Cherry knew that GBS was the draw: ‘It’s much better fun . . . when he’s here,’ he wrote to Christabel McLaren when she was planning her own visit.39 He relished his lesser role, while chuckling over the star attraction.
Meanwhile Cherry had got himself into a jam with Christine Davis. She was putting pressure on him to get engaged. ‘He was he says bounced into it by an old woman who said Christine was making herself ill wanting to know the situation,’ Kathleen reported to her diary after Cherry had stayed the night with her in London. Christine had also complained that he wasn’t passionate enough. But as many girlfriends were to discover, he was not given to external passions; they embarrassed him. At the end of May, to his immense relief, he divested himself of Christine, and she disappeared leaving no trace. By then, another young woman had begun to appear regularly at Lamer. Pussy Russell Cooke was a swan-like creature with a slender figure, crinkly dark hair she wore parted in the middle, and piercing brown eyes. She was classically English in appearance, with a creamy porcelain complexion and a becoming diffidence. Pussy had a handy chaperone in her brother Sydney, who went everywhere with her, and at the end of June Kathleen arrived at Lamer to find Cherry and Pussy ‘most intimate and cordial friends’. The pair of them slept on a bed of hay outside the revolving summer house, the spell of romance shattered only by Cherry’s old sleeptalking tricks and a stertorous Kathleen in the shelter (obviously Sydney wasn’t a very effective chaperone). Soon Charlotte Shaw was announcing conspiratorially to Kathleen that it could only be a matter of days before Cherry proposed to Pussy, and that she was sure Pussy would accept – though, personally, Charlotte had preferred Christine Davis.
Towards the end of a wet July the gang decamped to the Isle of Wight, where the Russell Cookes had a home near Newport. Cherry was to be a regular visitor at this house, which was called ‘Bellecroft’; it was there that he forged a friendship with the young Stephen Roskill, the son of Pussy’s half-sister and later a distinguished naval historian. That weekend in July 1917 Cherry and Pussy gazed lovingly at each other, but no proposal was forthcoming. A few days after they crossed the Solent and returned to Portsmouth, the assault on Passchendaele began to the north-east of Ypres.
Cherry saw Kathleen regularly throughout that year. She opened her London home to him as he opened Lamer to her. He confided in her, they read each other poetry, and she sent him warm, affectionate letters. He was fond of her son, Peter, who sometimes stayed on at Lamer when his mother had to return to her job at the Ministry of Pensions, and bought him a special junior bed at Heal’s. In London he took the boy to pantomimes and dined at Claridge’s with Kathleen, well aware of his position in the hierarchy: once, visiting for tea in 1915, Cherry was hastily shoved out of the door as Asquith – admittedly the prime minister – was about to arrive. If she rented a holiday cottage Cherry would often turn up, usually on Shaw’s coat-tails. Yet her diary reveals a cooler attitude. He rarely has more than a walk-on part in its discursive entries, the speaking roles being allocated to brighter stars such as GBS. Kathleen adored Shaw, and he was a large part of the attraction of Lamer (unusually, she also liked Charlotte). The feeling was mutual. Some years later Shaw told Kathleen that she was so like a man (this was meant to be a compliment) that his affection for her was ‘the nearest I ever came to homosexuality’. Kathleen’s romantic admirers were legion. Cherry was one of the few men on the planet to meet her without falling hopelessly in love; perhaps this lapse on his part explains her condescension. ‘He is coming on in intelligence,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘but it’s acquired. He is very easily influenced. He is echoing Shaw . . . Are all young things like that?’
However undemonstrative and curmudgeonly he might be, Cherry was also capable of sustained support for a good cause. He leapt to the defence of the King penguins and other beasts that were allegedly being boiled alive for their oil on the Australian-owned Macquarie Island, out in the Southern Ocean 900 miles from Tasmania. Wilson had agitated against this barbaric practice after the Discovery
expedition, and in 1917 Cherry once again took up his baton. The Yorkshire-born Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson was also campaigning for the penguins. Cherry knew and admired Mawson, and while he was in England they swapped notes on Macquarie Island and lobbied the Zoological Society. The value of each bird’s oil, minus freight, was about a farthing, but the voracious wartime demand for fats and oils meant that the King penguin was in danger of extinction. Cherry roped various famous friends into signing letters of protest, and even wrote to The Times supporting his enemy Sidney Harmer’s arguments against the slaughter.
Although he was now active and well, Cherry was still subject to moods. Bleak fogs descended on him intermittently throughout his adult life. At the beginning of May, during dinner at Lamer with Kathleen, GBS and Harley Granville Barker, he said almost nothing throughout the meal. It was partly his silence that appealed to Barker, a refugee from a failing marriage who was a frequent guest at Lamer that year. An actor, director, dramatist and poet of dazzling talent and unspeakable handwriting, Barker was twenty-one years younger than Shaw and the pair enjoyed a successful collaboration which resulted in the introduction of repertory to the London theatre.40 Barker had been using the Shaws’ Ayot house as a second home throughout the war (according to GBS he was ‘a regular domestic institution’), and, when they were away, he took to staying at Lamer instead. Although he was a heartbreakingly handsome man who could turn on the charm of Adonis himself, Barker also exuded a certain froideur, and it suited him to lose himself at Lamer during the day and join Cherry for dinner (‘If you happen to have other people coming or want to have them say no to me, for quite brutally I am bad company for strangers and casual acquaintances just now’). Besides that he was a glutton for luxury and appreciated the art and furniture that made Lamer such an endlessly beguiling house. Barker fulfilled a filial role for the childless Shaw, one which, to a certain extent, Cherry took over when Barker withdrew to Devon with his second wife.
