book I
always found exactly the right one somewhere or other in Skelton’s poems. We moved into the Islip cottage and a new chapter started. I did not sit for my finals.
XXIX
We were at Islip from 1921 until 1925. My mother in renting us the house had put a clause in the agreement that it was to be used only as a residence and not for the carrying on of any trade or business. She wanted to guard against any further commercial enterprise on our part; she need not have worried. Islip was an agricultural village, and far enough from Oxford not to be contaminated with the roguery for which the outskirts of a university town are usually well known. The village policeman led an easy life. During the whole time we were living there we never had a thing stolen or ever had a complaint to make against a native Islip cottager. Once by mistake I left my bicycle at the station for two days, and, when I recovered it, not only were both lamps, the pump and the repair outfit still in place, but an anonymous friend had even cleaned it.
Every Saturday in the winter months, as long as I was at Islip, I played football for the village team. There had been no football in Islip for some eighty years; the ex-soldiers had reintroduced it. The village nonogenarian complained that the game was not what it had been when he was a boy; he called it unmanly. He pointed across the fields to two aged willow trees: ‘They used to be our home goals,’ he said. ‘T’other pair was half a mile upstream. Constable stopped our play in the end. Three men were killed in one game; one was kicked to death, t’other two drowned each other in a scrimmage. Her was a grand game.’ Islip football, though not unmanly, was ladylike by comparison with the game as I had played it at Charterhouse. When playing centre-forward I was often booed now for charging the goalkeeper while he was fumbling with the shot he had saved. The cheers were reserved for my inside-left, who spent most of his time stylishly dribbling the ball in circles round and round the field until he was robbed; he seldom went anywhere near the goal-mouth. The football club was democratic. The cricket club was not. I played cricket the first season but left the club because the selection of the team was not always a selection of the best eleven men; regular players would be dropped to make room for visitors to the village who were friends of a club official, one of the gentry.
At first we had so little money that we did all the work in the house ourselves, including the washing. I did the cooking, Nancy did the mending and making the children’s clothes; we shared the rest of the work. Later money improved: we found it more economical to send the washing out and get a neighbour in to do some of the heavier cleaning and scrubbing. In our last year at Islip we even had a decrepit car which Nancy drove. My part was to wind it up; the energy that I put into winding was almost equivalent to pushing it for a mile or two. The friends who gave it to us told us that its name was ‘Dr. Marie,’ and when we asked ‘Why?’ we were told ‘Because it’s all right in theory.’ One day when Nancy was driving down Foxcombe Hill, the steepest hill near Oxford, there was a slight jar. Nancy thought it advisable to stop; when we got out we found that there were only three wheels on the car. The other, with part of the axle, was retrieved nearly a mile back.
These four years I spent chiefly on housework and being nurse to the children. Catherine was born in 1922 and Sam in 1924. By the end of 1925 we had lived for eight successive years in an atmosphere of teething, minor accidents, epidemics, and perpetual washing of children’s napkins. I did not dislike this sort of life except for the money difficulties, I liked my life with the children. But the strain told on Nancy. She was constantly ill, and often I had to take charge of everything. She tried occasionally to draw; but by the time she had got her materials together some alarm from the nursery would always disturb her. She said at last that she would not start again until all the children were house-trained and old enough for school. I kept on writing because the responsibility for making money rested chiefly on me, and because nothing has ever stopped me writing when I have had something to write. We kept the cottage cleaned and polished in a routine that left us little time for anything else. We had accumulated a number of brass ornaments and utensils and allowed them to become a tyranny, and our children wore five times as many clean dresses as our neighbours’ children did.
I found that I had the faculty of working through constant interruptions. I could recognize the principal varieties of babies’ screams—hunger, indigestion, wetness, pins, boredom, wanting to be played with—and learned to disregard all but the more important ones. But most of the books that I wrote in these years betray the conditions under which I worked; they are scrappy, not properly considered and obviously written out of reach of a proper reference-library. Only poetry did not suffer. When I was working at a poem nothing else mattered; I went on doing my mechanical tasks in a trance until I had time to sit down to write it out. At one period I only allowed myself half an hour’s writing a day, but once I did write I always had too much to put down; I never sat chewing my pen. My poetry-writing has always been a painful process of continual corrections and corrections on top of corrections and persistent dissatisfaction. I have never written a poem in less than three drafts; the greatest number I recall is thirty-five (_The Troll’s Nosegay_). The average at this time was eight; it is now six or seven.
The children were all healthy and gave us little trouble. Nancy had strong views about giving them no meat or tea, putting them to bed early, making them rest in the afternoon and giving them as much fruit as they wanted. We did our best to keep them from the mistakes of our own childhood. But it was impossible for them when they went to the village school to avoid formal religion, class snobbery, political prejudice, and mystifying fairy stories about the facts of sex. I never felt any possessive feeling about them as Nancy did. To me they were close friends with the claims of friendship and liable to the accidents of friendship. We both made a point of punishing them in a disciplinary way as little as possible. If we lost our temper with them it was a different matter. Islip was as good a place as any for the happy childhood that we wanted to give them. The river was close and we had the loan of a canoe. There were fields to play about in, and animals, and plenty of children of their own age. They liked school.
After so much shifting about during the war I disliked leaving home, except to visit some well-ordered house where I could expect reasonable comfort. But Nancy was always proposing sudden ‘bursts for freedom,’ and I used to come with her and usually enjoy them. In 1922 we used a derelict baker’s van for a caravan ride down to the south-coast. We had three children with us, Catherine as a four-months-old baby. It rained every single day for the month we were away—and the problem of washing and drying the baby’s napkins whenever we camped for the night—and the problem of finding a farmer who would not mistake us for gypsies and would be willing to let us pull into his field—and then the shaft that twice dropped off when we were on hills—and twice the back of the cart flew open and a child fell out on the road—and the difficulty of getting oats for the horse (which had been five years on grass as being too old for work) on country roads organized for motor traffic—and cooking to be done in the open with usually a high wind and always rain and the primus stove sputtering and flaring up. It was near Lewes that we drew up on a strip of public land alongside the horse and van of a Mr. Hicks, a travelling showman from Brighton. He told us many tricks of the road and also the story of his life: ‘Yes, I saw the Reverend Powers, Cantab, of Rodmell last week, and he, knowing my history, said: “Well, Mr. Hicks, I suppose that in addressing you I should be right in putting the letters b.a. after your name?” I said: “I have the right to it certainly, but when a man’s down, you know how it is, he does not like attaching a handle to his name.” For you must know, I was once a master at Ardingly College.’
‘Indeed, Mr. Hicks, and where were you b.a.?’
‘Didn’t I just tell you, at Ardingly? I won a scholarship at the beginning and they gave me the choice of going to Oxford or Winchester or Cambridge or Eton. And I chose Winchester. But I was only there a twelvemonth. No, I couldn’t stand it any longer owing to the disgraceful corruption of the junior clergy and the undergraduates—you understand, of course. I rub up a bit of the classic now and then, but I like to forget those times. The other day, though, me and a young Jew-boy who had cleaned up seventy-five pounds at the race meeting with photographing and one thing and another, had a fine lark. I got out two old mortarboards and a couple of gowns from the box in the van where I keep them, and you should have seen us swaggering down Brighton Pier, my boy.’ A few days later we stopped at a large mansion in Hampshire, rented by Sir Lionel Philips, the South African financier, whom Nancy knew. I found myself in an argument with him about socialist economics, and he told me a story which I liked even better than Mr. Hicks’. ‘I visited Kimberley recently and realized what a deep hole I had made. Where, as a young man, I tore the first turf off with my bare hands, they were now mining down half a mile.’
In the end we got back safely.
I was so busy that I had no time to be ill myself. Nancy begged me not to talk about the war in her hearing, and I was ready to forget about it. The villagers called me ‘The Captain,’ otherwise I had few reminders except my yearly visit to the standing medical board. The board continued for some years to recommend me for a disability pension. The particular disability was neurasthenia; the train journey and the army railway-warrant filled out with my rank and regiment usually produced reminiscential neurasthenia by the time I reached the board. The award was at last made permanent at forty-two pounds a year. Ex-service men were continually coming to the door selling boot-laces and asking for cast-off shirts and socks. We always gave them a cup of tea and money. Islip was a convenient halt between the Chipping Norton and the Oxford workhouses. One day an out-of-work ex-service man, a steam-roller driver by trade, came calling with his three children, one of them a baby. Their mother had recently died in childbirth. We felt very sorry for them and Nancy offered to adopt the eldest child, Daisy, who was about thirteen years old and her father’s greatest anxiety. She undertook to train Daisy in housework so that she would be able later to go into service. Daisy was still of school age. Her father shed tears of gratitude, and Daisy seemed happy enough to be a member of the family. Nancy made her new clothes—we cleaned her, bought In shoes, and gave her a bedroom to herself. Daisy was not a success. She was a big ugly girl, strong as a horse and toughened by her three years on the roads. Her father was most anxious for her to continue her education, which had been interrupted by their wanderings. But Daisy hated school; she was put in the baby class and the girls of her own age used to tease her. In return she pulled their hair and thumped them, so they sent her to Coventry. After a while she grew homesick for the road. ‘That was a good life,’ she used to say. ‘Dad and me and my brother and the baby. The baby was a blessing. When I fetched him along to the back doors I nearly always won something. ’Course, I was artful. If they tried to slam the door in my face I used to put my foot in it and say: “This is my little orphan brother.” Then I used to look round and anything I seen I used to ast for. I used to ast for a pram for the baby, if I seen an old one in a shed; and I’d get it, too. Of course we had a pram really, a good one, and then we’d sell the pram I’d won, in the next town we come to. Good beggars always ast for something particlar, something they seen lying about. It’s no good asking for food or money. I used to pick up a lot for my dad. I was a better beggar nor he was, he said. We used to go along together singing _On the Road to Anywhere_. And there was always the Spikes to go to when the weather was bad. The Spike at Chippy Norton was our winter home. They was very good to us there. We used to go to the movies once a week. The grub was good at Chippy Norton. We been all over the country, Wales and Devonshire, right up to Scotland, but we always come back to Chippy.’ Nancy and I were shocked one day when a tramp came to the door and Daisy slammed the door in his face and told him to clear out of it, Nosey, and not to poke his ugly mug into respectable people’s houses. ‘I know you, Nosey Williams,’ she said, ‘you and your ex-service papers what you pinched from a bloke down in Salisbury, and the bigamy charge against you a-waiting down at Plymouth. Hop it now, quick, or I’ll run for the cop.’ Daisy told us the true histories of many of the beggars we had befriended. She said: ‘There’s not one decent man in ten among them bums. My dad’s the only decent one of the lot. The reason most of them is on the road is the cops have something against them, so they has to keep moving. Of course my dad don’t like the life; he took to it too late in life. And my mother was very respectable too. She kept us clean. Most of those bums is lousy, with nasty diseases, and they keeps out of the Spike as much as they can ’cause they don’t like the carbolic baths.’ Daisy was with us for a whole winter. When the spring came and the roads dried her father called for her again. He couldn’t manage the little ones without her he said. That was the last we saw of Daisy, though she wrote to us once from Chipping Norton asking us for money.
My pension was our only certain source of income, neither of us having any private means of our own. The Government grant and college exhibition had ended at the time we moved to Islip. I never made more at this time than thirty pounds a year from my books of poetry and anthology fees, with an occasional couple of guineas for poems contributed to periodicals. There was another sixteen pounds a year from the rent of the Harlech cottage and an odd guinea or two from reviewing. My volumes of poetry did not sell. _Fairies and Fusiliers_ had gone into two editions because it was published in the war-years when people were reading poetry as they had not done for many years. The inclusion of my work in Edward Marsh’s _Georgian Poetry_ had made my name well known, but after 1919, when the series ended, it was forgotten again. _Country Sentiment_ was hardly noticed; the _Pier-Glass_ was also a failure. They were published by Martin Seeker, not by Heinemann who had published _Fairies and Fusiliers_—William Heinemann, just before he died, had tried to teach me how poetry should be written and I resented it. These three books had been published in America, where my name was known since John Masefield, Robert Nichols and, finally, Siegfried Sassoon had gone to lecture about modern English poetry. But English poets slumped, and it was eight years before another book of my poems could find a publisher in America. In these days I used to take the reviews of my poetry-books seriously. I reckoned their effect on sales and so on the grocery bills. I still believed that it was possible to write poetry that was true poetry and yet could reach, say, a three or four thousand-copy sale. I expected some such success. I consorted with other poets and had a fellow-feeling for them. Beside Hardy, Siegfried, and the Boar’s Hill residents, I knew Delamare, W. H. Davies, T. S. Eliot, the Sitwells and many more. I liked W. H. Davies because he was from South Wales and afraid of the dark, and because once, I heard, he made out a list of poets and crossed them off one by one as he decided that they were not true poets—until only two names were left. I approved the final choice. Delamare I liked too. He was gentle and I could see how hard he worked at his poems—I was always interested in the writing-technique of my contemporaries. I once told him what hours of worry he must have had over the lines:
Ah, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose;
and how, in the end, he had been dissatisfied. He admitted that he had been forced to leave the assonance ‘Roves and rose,’ because no synonym for ‘roves’ was strong enough. I seldom saw Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell after the war-years. When I did I always felt uncomfortably rustic in their society. Once Osbert sent me a present of a brace of grouse. They came from his country residence in Derbyshire in a bag labelled: ‘With Captain Sitwell’s compliments to Captain Graves.’ Nancy and I could neither of us face the task of plucking and gutting and roasting the birds, so we gave them to a neighbour. I thanked Osbert: ‘Captain Graves acknowledges with thanks Captain Sitwell’s gift of Captain Grouse.’
Our total income, counting birthday and Christmas cheques from relatives, was about one hundred and thirty pounds a year. As Nancy reminded me, this was about fifty shillings a week and there were farm labourers at Islip, with more children than we had, who only got thirty shillings a week. They had a much harder time than we did earning it and had no one to fall back on, as we had, in case of sudden illness or other emergency. We used to get free holidays, too, at Harlech, when my mother would insist on paying the train-fare as well as giving us our board free. We really had nothing to complain about. Thinking how difficult life was for the labourers’ wives kept Nancy permanently depressed. I have omitted to mention a further source of income—the Rupert Brooke Fund, of which Edward Marsh was the administrator. Rupert Brooke had stated in his will that all royalties accruing from any published work of his should be divided among needy poets with families to support. When money was very short we would dip into this bag.
We still called ourselves socialists, but had become dissatisfied with Parliamentary socialism. We had greater sympathy with communism, though not members of the Communist Party. None the less, when a branch of the Parliamentary Labour Party was formed in the village, we gave the use of the cottage for its weekly meetings throughout the winter months. Islip was a rich agricultural area; but with a reputation for slut-farming. It did not pay the tenant farmers to farm too well. Mr. Wise, one of our members, once heckled a speaker in the Conservative interest about a protective duty imposed by the Conservative Government on dried currants. The speaker answered patronizingly: ‘Well, surely a duty on Greek currants won’t hurt you working men here at Islip? You don’t grow currants in these parts, do you?’ ‘No, sir,’ replied Mr Wise, ‘the farmers main crop hereabouts is squitch.’
I was persuaded to stand for the parish council, and was a member for a year. I wish I had taken records of the smothered antagonism of the council meetings. There were seven members of the council, with three representatives of labour and three representatives of the farmers and gentry; the chairman was a farmer, a Liberal who had Labour support as being a generous employer and the only farmer in the neighbourhood who had had a training at an agricultural college. He held the balance very fairly. We contended over a proposed application to the district council for the building of new cottages. Many returned ex-soldiers who wished to marry had nowhere to live with their wives. The Conservative members opposed this because it would mean a penny on the rates. Then there was the question of procuring a recreation ground for the village. The football team did not wish to be dependent on the generosity of one of the big farmers who rented it to us at a nominal rate. The Conservatives opposed this again in the interest of the rates, and pointed out that shortly after the Armistice the village had turned down a recreation ground scheme, preferring to spend the memorial subscription money on a cenotaph. The Labour members pointed out that the vote was taken, as at the 1918 General Election, before the soldiers had returned to express their view. Nasty innuendoes were made about farmers who had stayed at home and made their pile, while their labourers fought and bled. The chairman calmed the antagonists. Another caricature scene: myself in corduroys and a rough frieze coat, sitting in the village schoolroom (this time with no ‘evils of alcoholism’ around the wall, but with nature-drawings and mounted natural history specimens to take their place), debating as an Oxfordshire village elder whether or not Farmer So-and-so was justified in using a footpath across the allotments as a bridle-path, disregarding the decayed stile which, I urged, disproved his right.
My association with the Labour Party severed my relations with the village gentry with whom, when I first came to the village, I had been on friendly terms. My mother had been to the trouble of calling on the rector when she viewed the property. I had even been asked by the rector to speak from the chancel steps of the village church at a war memorial service. He suggested that I should read poems about the war. Instead of Rupert Brooke on the glorious dead, I read some of the more painful poems of Sassoon and Wilfred Owen about men dying of gas-poisoning and about buttocks of corpses bulging from the mud. And I suggested that the men who had fallen, destroyed as it were by the fall of the Tower of Siloam, had not been particularly virtuous or particularly wicked, but just average soldiers, and that the survivors should thank God that they were alive and do their best to avoid wars in the future. The church-party, with the exception of the rector, an intelligent man, was scandalized. But the ex-service men had not been too well treated on their return and it pleased them to be reminded that they were on equal terms with the glorious dead. They were modest men: I noticed that though obeying the King’s desire to wear their campaigning medals, they kept them buttoned up inside their coats.
The leading Labour man of the village was William Beckley, senior. He had an inherited title dating from the time of Cromwell: he was known as ‘Fisher’ Beckley. A direct ancestor had been fishing on the Cherwell during the siege of Oxford, and had ferried Cromwell himself and a body of Parliamentary troops over the river. In return Cromwell had given him perpetual fishing-rights from Islip to the stretch of river where the Cherwell Hotel now stands. The cavalry skirmish at Islip bridge still remained in local tradition, and a cottager at the top of the hill showed me a small stone cannon-ball, fired on that occasion, that he had found sticking in his chimney-stack. But even Cromwell came late in the history of the Beckley family; the Beckleys were watermen on the river long before the seventeenth century. Indeed Fisher Beckley knew, by family tradition, the exact spot where a barge was sunk conveying stone for the building of Westminster Abbey. Islip was the birthplace of Edward the Confessor, and the Islip lands had been given by him to the Abbey; it was still Abbey property after a thousand years. The Abbey stone had been quarried from the side of the hill close to the river; our cottage was on the old slip-way down which the stone-barges had been launched. Some time in the ’seventies American weed was introduced into the river and made netting difficult; fishing finally became unprofitable. Fisher Beckley had been for many years now an agricultural labourer. His socialist views prevented him from getting employment in the village, so he had to trudge to work to a farm some miles out. But he was still Fisher Beckley and, among us cottagers, the most respected man in Islip.
XXX
My parents were most disappointed when I failed to sit for my Oxford finals. But through the kindness of Sir Walter Raleigh, the head of the English School, I was excused finals as I had been excused everything else, and allowed to proceed to the later degree of Bachelor of Letters. Instead of estimating, at the examiners’ request, the effect of the influence of Dryden on pastoral poets of the early eighteenth century, or tracing the development of the sub-plot in Elizabethan comedies between the years 1583 and 1594, I was allowed to offer a written thesis on a subject of my own choice. Sir Walter Raleigh was a good friend to me. He agreed to be my tutor on condition that he should not be expected to tutor me. He liked my poetry, and suggested that we should only meet as friends. He was engaged at the time on the official history of the war in the air and found it necessary to have practical flying experience for the task. The R.A.F. took him up as often as he needed. It was on a flight out East that he got typhoid fever and died. I was so saddened by his death that it was some time before I thought again about my thesis, and I did not apply for another tutor. The subject I had offered was _The Illogical Element in English Poetry_. I had already written a prose book, _On English Poetry_, a series of ‘workshop notes’ about the writing of poetry. It contained much trivial but also much practical material, and emphasized the impossibility of writing poetry of ‘universal appeal.’ I regarded poetry as, first, a personal cathartic for the poet suffering from some inner conflict, and then as a cathartic for readers in a similar conflict. I made a tentative connection between poetry and dream in the light of the dream-psychology in which I was then interested as a means of curing myself.
The thesis did not work out like a thesis. I found it difficult to keep to an academic style and decided to write it as if it were an ordinary book. Anyhow, I could expect no knowledge of or sympathy with modern psychology from the literature committee that would read it. I rewrote it in all nine times, and it was unsatisfactory when finished. I was trying to show the nature of the supra-logical element in poetry. It was only, I wrote, to be fully understood by close analysis of the latent associations of the words used; the obvious prose meaning was often in direct opposition to the latent content. The weakness of the book lay in its not clearly distinguishing between the supra-logical thought-processes of poetry and of pathology. Before it appeared I had published _The Meaning of Dreams_, which was intended to be a popular shillingsworth for the railway bookstall; but I went to the wrong publisher and he issued it at five shillings. Being too simply written for the informed public, and too expensive for the ignorant public to which it was addressed, it fell flat; as indeed it deserved. I published a volume of poems every year between 1920 and 1925; after _The Pier-Glass_, published in 1921, I made no attempt to write for the ordinary reading public, and no longer regarded my work as being of public utility. I did not even flatter myself that I was conferring benefits on posterity; there was no reason to suppose that posterity would be more appreciative than my contemporaries. I only wrote when and because there was a poem pressing to be written. Though I assumed a reader of intelligence and sensibility and considered his possible reactions to what I wrote, I no longer identified him with contemporary readers or critics of poetry. He was no more real a person than the conventional figure put in the foreground of an architectural design to indicate the size of the building. As a result of this greater strictness of writing I was soon accused of trying to get publicity and increase my sales by a wilful clowning modernism. Of these books, _Whipperginny_, published in 1923, showed the first signs of my new psychological studies.
_Mock-Beggar Hall_, published in 1924, was almost wholly philosophical. As Lawrence wrote to me when I sent it to him, it was ‘not the sort of book that one would put under one’s pillow at night.’ This philosophic interest was a result of my meeting with Basanta Mallik, when I was reading a paper to an undergraduate society. One of the results of my education was a strong prejudice, amounting to contempt, against anyone of non-European race; the Jews, though with certain exceptions such as Siegfried, were included in this prejudice. But I had none of my usual feelings with Basanta. He did not behave as a member of a subject-race—neither with excessive admiration nor with excessive hatred of all things English. Though he was a Bengali he was not given to flattery or insolence. I found on inquiry that he belonged to a family of high caste. His father had become converted to Christianity and signalized his freedom from Hindu superstition by changing his diet; meat and alcohol, untouched by his ancestors for some two thousand years, soon brought about his death. Basanta had been brought up in the care of a still unconverted grandmother, but did not have the strict Hindu education that the boy of caste is given by his male relatives. He was sent to Calcutta University and, some years before the war, after taking a law degree, was given the post of assistant tutor to the children of the Maharajah of Nepal. In Nepal he came to the notice of the Maharajah as one of the few members of the Court not concerned in a plot against his life, and was promoted to chief tutor.
The relations between Nepal and India were strained at this time. Basanta was the only man in Nepal with an up-to-date knowledge of international law. His advice ultimately enabled the Maharajah to induce the British to sign the 1923 treaty recognizing the complete independence of the country, which had for many years been threatened with British protection. Under the terms of this treaty, no foreigners might enter Nepal except at the personal invitation of the Maharajah. The Maharajah had sent Basanta over to England to study British political psychology; this knowledge might be useful in the event of future misunderstandings between Nepal and India. He had now been some eleven years in Oxford but, becoming a philosopher and making many friends, had overcome his long-standing grudge against the British.
Basanta used to come out to Islip frequently to talk philosophy with us. With him came Sam Harries, a young Balliol scholar, who soon became our closest friend. Metaphysics soon made psychology of secondary interest for me: it threatened almost to displace poetry. Basanta’s philosophy was a development of formal metaphysics, but with characteristically Indian insistence on ethics. He believed in no hierarchy of ultimate values or the possibility of any unifying religion or ideology. But at the same time he insisted on the necessity of strict self-discipline in the individual in meeting every possible demand made upon him from whatever quarter, and he recommended constant self-watchfulness against either dominating or being dominated by any other individual. This view of strict personal morality consistent with scepticism of social morality agreed very well with my practice. He returned to India in 1923 and considered taking an appointment in Nepal, but decided that to do so would put him in a position incompatible with his philosophy. He would have returned to Oxford but a friend had died, leaving him to support a typical large Hindu family of aunts and cousins remotely related. We missed Basanta’s visits, but Sam Harries used to come out regularly. Sam was a communist, an atheist, enthusiastic about professional football (Aston Villa was his favourite team) and experimental films, and most puritanical in matters of sex.
Other friends were not numerous. Edith Sitwell was one of them. It was a surprise, after reading her poems, to find her gentle, domesticated, and even devout. When she came to stay with us she spent her time sitting on the sofa and hemming handkerchiefs. She used to write to Nancy and me frequently, but 1926 ended the friendship. 1926 was yesterday, when the autobiographical part of my life was fast approaching its end. I saw no more of any of my army friends, with the exception of Siegfried, and meetings with him were now only about once a year. Edmund Blunden had gone as professor of English Literature to Tokyo. Lawrence was now in the Royal Tank Corps. He had enlisted in the Royal Air Force when he came to the end of things after the Middle-Eastern settlement of 1921, but had been forced to leave it when a notice was given of a question in the House about his presence there under an assumed name. When Sir Walter Raleigh died I felt my connection with Oxford University was broken, and when Rivers died, and George Mallory on Everest, it seemed as though the death of my friends was following me in peace-time as relentlessly as in war. Basanta had spoken of getting an invitation from the Maharajah for us to visit Nepal with him but, when he found it impossible to resume his work there, the idea lapsed. Sam went to visit him in India in 1924; his reputation as a communist followed him there. He wrote that he was tagged by policemen wherever he went in Calcutta; but they need not have worried. A week or two after his arrival he died of cerebral malaria. After Sam’s death our friendship with Basanta gradually failed. India re-absorbed him and we changed.
There came one more death among our friends; a girl who had been a friend of Sam’s at Oxford and had married another friend at Balliol. They used to come out together to Islip with Basanta and talk philosophy. She died in childbirth. There had been insufficient care in the pre-natal period and a midwife attended the case without having sterilized her hands after attending an infectious case. Deaths in childbirth had as particular horror for me now as they had for Nancy. I had assisted the midwife at the birth of Sam, our fourth child, and could not have believed that a natural process like birth could be so abominable in its pain and extravagant messiness. Many deaths and a feeling of bad luck clouded these years. Islip was no longer a country refuge. I found myself resorting to my war-time technique of getting through things somehow, anyhow, in the hope that they would mend. Nancy was in poor health and able to do less and less work. Our finances had been improved by an allowance from Nancy’s father that covered the extra expense of the new children—we now had about two hundred pounds a year—but I decided that cottage life with four of them under six years old, and Nancy ill, was not good enough. I would have, after all, to take a job. Nancy and I had always sworn that we would manage somehow so that this would not be necessary.
The only possible job that I could undertake was teaching. But I needed a degree, so I completed my thesis, which I published under the title of _Poetic Unreason_ and handed in, when in print, to the examining board. I was most surprized when they accepted it and I had my bachelor’s degree. But the problem of an appointment remained, I did not want a preparatory or secondary-school job which would keep me away from home all day. Nancy did not want anyone else but myself and her looking after the children, so there seemed no solution. And then the doctor told Nancy that if she wished to regain her health she must spend the winter in Egypt. In fact, the only appointment that would be at all suitable would be a teaching job in Egypt, at a very high salary, where there was little work to do. And a week or two later (for this is the way things have always happened to me in emergencies) I was asked to offer myself as a candidate for the post of professor of English Literature at the newly-founded Egyptian University at Cairo. I had been recommended, I found out later, by two or three influential friends, among them Arnold Bennett, who has always been a good friend to me, and Lawrence, who had served in the war with Lord Lloyd, the then High Commissioner of Egypt. The salary amounted, with the passage money, to fourteen hundred pounds a year. I fortified these recommendations with others, from my neighbour, Colonel John Buchan, and from the Earl of Oxford, who had taken a fatherly interest in me and often visited Islip. And so was given the appointment.
Among other books written in the Islip period were two essays on contemporary poetry. I then held the view that there was not such a thing as poetry of constant value; I regarded it as a product of its period only having relevance in a limited context. I regarded all poetry, in a philosophic sense, as of equal merit, though admitting that at any given time pragmatic distinctions could be drawn between such poems as embodied the conflicts and syntheses of the time and were therefore charged with contemporary sagacity, and such as were literary hang-overs from a preceding period and were therefore inept. I was, in fact, finding only extrinsic values for poetry. I found psychological reasons why poems of a particular sort appealed to a particular class of reader, surviving even political, economic, and religious change. I published two other books. One was waste—a ballad-opera called _John Kemp’s Wager_. It marked the end of what I may call the folk-song period of my life. It was an artificial simple play for performance by village societies and has been once performed, in California. The newspaper cuttings that I was sent described it as delightfully English and quaint. A better book was _My Head, My Head_, a romance on the story of Elijah and the Shunamite woman. It was an ingenious attempt to repair the important omissions in the biblical story; but like all the other prose-books that I had written up to this time it failed in its chief object, which was to sell. During this period I was willing to undertake almost any writing job to bring in money. I wrote a series of rhymes for a big map-advertisement for Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits (I was paid, but the rhymes never appeared); and silly lyrics for a light opera, _Lord Clancarty_, for which I was not paid, because the opera was never staged; and translations from Dutch and German carols; and rhymes for children’s Christmas annuals; and edited three sixpenny pamphlets of verse for Benn’s popular series—selections from Skelton’s poems, and from my own, and a collection of the less familiar nursery rhymes. I did some verse-reviewing for the _Nation_ and _Athenæum_, but by 1925 I found it more and more difficult to be patient with dud books of poetry. And they all seemed to be dud now. I had agreed to collaborate with T. S. Eliot in a book about modernist poetry to which we were each to contribute essays, but the plan fell through; and later I was glad that it had.
I also made several attempts during these years to rid myself of the poison of war-memories by finishing my novel, but I had to abandon them. It was not only that they brought back neurasthenia, but that I was ashamed at having distorted my material with a plot, and yet not sure enough of myself to retranslate it into undisguised history. If my scruples had been literary and not moral I could easily have compromised, as many writers have since done, with a pretended diary stylistically disguising characters, times, and dates. I had found the same difficulty in my last year at Charterhouse with a projected novel of public-school life.
XXXI
So, second-class, by P. & O. to Egypt, with a nurse for the children, a new wardrobe in the new cabin-trunks and a good-looking motor-car in the hold. Lawrence had written to me:
Egypt, being so near Europe, is not a savage country. The Egyptians ... you need not dwell among. Indeed, it will be a miracle if an Englishman can get to know them. The bureaucrat society is exclusive, and lives smilingly unaware of the people. Partly because so many foreigners come there for pleasure, in the winter; and the other women, who live there, must be butterflies too, if they would consort with the visitors.
I thought the salary attractive. It has just been raised. The work may be interesting, or may be terrible, according to whether you get keen on it, like Hearn, or hate it, like Nichols. Even if you hate it, there will be no harm done. The climate is good, the country beautiful, the things admirable, the beings curious and disgusting; and you are stable enough not to be caught broadside by a mere dislike for your job. Execute it decently, as long as you draw the pay, and enjoy your free hours (plentiful in Egypt) more freely. Lloyd will be a good friend.
Roam about—Palestine. The Sahara oases. The Red Sea province. Sinai (a jolly desert). The Delta Swamps. Wilfred Jennings Bramly’s buildings in the Western Desert. The divine mosque architecture of Cairo town.
Yet, possibly, you will not dislike the job. I think the coin spins evenly. The harm to you is little, for the family will benefit by a stay in the warm (Cairo isn’t warm, in winter) and the job won’t drive you into frantic excesses of rage. And the money will be useful. You should save a good bit of your pay after the expense of the first six months. I recommend the iced coffee at Groppi’s.
And so, my blessing.
I had a married half-brother and half-sister in Cairo who had both been there since I was a little boy. My brother, a leading Government official (at a salary less than my own), and his wife viewed my coming to Egypt, I heard, with justifiable alarm. They had heard of my political opinions. My sister, to whom I was devoted, had no such suspicions and wrote a letter of most affectionate welcome. Siegfried came to see me off. He said: ‘Do you know who’s on board? “The Image!” He’s still in the regiment, going to join the battalion in India. Last time I saw him he was sitting in the bottom of a dug-out gnawing a chunk of bully-beef like a rat.’ The Image had been at my last preparatory school and had won a scholarship at the same time as myself; and we had been at Wrexham and Liverpool together; and he had been wounded with the Second Battalion at High Wood at the same time as myself; and now we were travelling out East together. A man with whom I had nothing in common; there was no natural reason why we should have been thrown so often in each other’s company. The ship touched at Gibraltar, where we disembarked and bought figs and rode round the town. I remembered the cancelled War Office telegram and thought what a fool I had been to prefer Rhyl. At Port Said a friend of my sister’s helped us through the Customs; I was feeling very sea-sick, but I knew that I was in the East because he began talking about Kipling and Kipling’s wattles of Lichtenburg, and whether they were really wattles or some allied plant. And so to Cairo, looking out of the windows all the way, delighted at summer fields in January.
My sister-in-law advised us against the more exclusive residential suburb of Gizereh, where she had just taken a flat herself, so with her help we found one at Heliopolis, a few miles east of Cairo. We found the cost of living very high, for this was the tourist season. But I was able to reduce the grocery bill by taking advantage of the more reasonable prices of the British army canteen; I presented myself as an officer on the pension list. We had two Sudanese servants, and, contrary to all that we had been warned about native servants, they were temperate, punctual, respectful, and never, to my knowledge, stole a thing beyond the remains of a single joint of mutton. It seemed queer to me not to look after the children or do housework, and almost too good to be true to have as much time as I needed for my writing.
The University was an invention of King Fuad’s, who had always been anxious to be known as a patron of the arts and sciences. There had been a Cairo University before this one, but it had been nationalistic in its policy and, not being directed by European experts or supported by the Government, had soon come to an end. The new University had been planned ambitiously. There were faculties of science, medicine and letters, with a full complement of highly-paid professors; only one or two of these were Egyptian, the rest being English, Swedish, French and Belgian. The medicine and science faculties were predominantly English, but the appointments to the faculty of letters were predominantly French. They had been made in the summer months when the British High Commissioner was out of Egypt, or he would no doubt have discountenanced them. Only one of the French and Belgian professors had any knowledge of English, and none of them had any knowledge of Arabic. Of the two hundred Egyptian students, who were mostly the sons of rich merchants and landowners, fewer than twenty had more than a smattering of French—just enough for shopping purposes—though they had all learned English in the secondary schools. All official university correspondence was in Arabic. I was told that it was classical Arabic, in which no word is admitted that is of later date than Mohammed, but I could not tell the difference. The ‘very learned Sheikh’ Graves had to take his letters to the post office for interpretation. My twelve or thirteen French colleagues were men of the highest academic distinction. But two or three English village-schoolmasters would have been glad to have undertaken their work at one-third of their salaries and done it far better. The University building had been a harem-palace of the Khedive. It was French in style, with mirrors and gilding.
British officials at the Ministry of Education told me that I must keep the British flag flying in the faculty of letters. This embarrassed me. I had not come to Egypt as an ambassador of Empire, and yet I did not intend to let the French indulge in semi-political activities at my expense. The dean, M. Grégoire, was a Belgian, an authority on Slav poetry. He was tough, witty, and ran his show very plausibly. He had acquired a certain slyness and adaptability during the war when, as a civilian in Belgium under German occupation, he had edited an underground anti-German publication. The professor of French Literature had lost a leg in France. He greeted me at first in a patronizing way: I was his young friend rather than his dear colleague. But as soon as he learned that I also had bled in the cause of civilization and France I became his most esteemed chum. The Frenchmen lectured, but with the help of Arabic interpreters, which did not make either for speed or accuracy. I found that I was expected to give two lectures a week, but the dean soon decided that if the students were ever to dispense with the interpreters they must be given special instruction in French—which reduced the time for lectures, so that I had only one a week to give. This one was pandemonium. The students were not hostile, merely excitable and anxious to show their regard for me and liberty and Zaghlul Pasha and the well-being of Egypt, all at the same time. I often had to shout at the top of my loudest barrack-square voice to restore order. They had no textbooks of any sort; there were no English books in the University library, and it took months to get any through the French librarian. This was January and they were due for an examination in May. They were most anxious to master Shakespeare, Byron, and Wordsworth in that time. I had no desire to teach Wordsworth and Byron to anyone, and I wished to protect Shakespeare from them. I decided to lecture on the most rudimentary forms of literature possible. I chose the primitive ballad and its development into epic and the drama. I thought that this would at least teach them the meaning of the simpler literary terms. But English was not easy for them, though they had learned it for eight years or so in the schools. Nobody, for instance, when I spoke of a ballad-maker singing to his harp, knew what a harp was. I told them it was what King David played upon, and drew a picture of it on the blackboard; at which they shouted out: ‘O, _anur_.’ But they thought it beneath their dignity to admit the existence of ballads in Egypt; though I had myself seen the communal ballad-group in action at the hind legs of the Sphinx, where a gang of fellaheen was clearing away the sand. One of the gang was a chanty-man: his whole job was to keep the others moving. The fellaheen did not exist for the students; they thought of them as animals. They were most anxious to be given printed notes of my lectures with which to prepare themselves for the examinations. I tried to make the clerical staff of the faculty duplicate some for me, but in spite of promises I never got them done. My lectures in the end became a dictation of lecture-notes for lectures that could not be given—this, at any rate, kept the students busy.
They were interested in my clothes. My trousers were the first Oxford trousers that they had seen in Egypt; their own were narrow at the ankles. So I set a new fashion. One evening I went to dine with the rector of the University. Two of my students, sons of Ministers, happened also to be invited. They noticed that I was wearing white silk socks with my evening dress. Later I heard from the vice-rector, Ali Bey Omar, whom I liked best of the University officials, that a day or two later he had seen the same students at a Government banquet, wearing white silk socks. When they looked round on the distinguished assembly they found that they were the only white socks present. Ali Bey Omar gave a pantomime account of how they tried to loosen their braces surreptitiously and stroke down their trousers to hide their shame.
For some weeks I missed even my single hour a week, because the students went on strike. It was Ramadan, and they had to fast for a month between sunrise and sunset. Between sunset and sunrise they ate rather more than usual in compensation, and this dislocation of their digestive processes had a bad effect on their nerves. I have forgotten the pretext for the strike: it was some trouble about the intensive French instruction. The fact was that they wanted leisure at home to read up their notes of the earlier work of the term in preparation for the examination. The Professor of Arabic, who was one of the few Egyptians with a reputation as an orientalist, published a book calling attention to pre-Islamic sources of the Koran. His lectures, delivered in Arabic, demanded more exertion from them than any of the others, so when the examination came round most of them absented themselves from the Arabic paper on religious grounds. To an orthodox Mohammedan the Koran, being dictated by God, can have no pre-Islamic sources.
I came to know only two of my students fairly well; one was a Greek, the other a Turk. The Turk was an intelligent, good-natured young man, perhaps twenty years old. He was very rich, and had a motor-car in which he twice took me for a drive to the Pyramids. He talked both French and English fluently, being about the only one (except for twelve who had attended a French Jesuit college) who could do so. He told me one day that he would not be able to attend my next lecture as he was going to be married. I asked him whether this was the first or second part of the ceremony; he said it was the first. When he returned he told me that he had not yet been allowed to see the face of his wife, because her family was orthodox; he would only see it at the second ceremony. But his sister had been at school with her and said that she was pretty and a good sort; and her father was a friend of his father’s. Later, the second ceremony took place, and he confessed himself perfectly satisfied. I learned that it seldom happened that when the veil was lifted the bridegroom refused the bride, though he had the right to do so; she had a similar right. Usually the couple contrived to meet before even the first ceremony, The girl would slip the man a note saying: ‘I shall be at Maison Cicurel at the hat-counter at three-thirty to-morrow I afternoon if you want to see me. It will be quite in order for me to lift my veil to try on a hat. You will recognize me by my purple parasol.’
I inquired about the rights of Mohammedan women in Egypt. Apparently divorce was simple; the man only had to say in the presence of a witness: ‘I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you,’ and she was divorced. On the other hand she was entitled to take her original dowry back with her, with the interest that had accrued on it during her married life. Dowries were always heavy and divorces comparatively rare. It was considered very low-class to have more than one wife; that was a fellaheen habit. I was told a story of an Egyptian who was angry with his wife one morning because the breakfast-coffee was badly made. He shouted out: ‘I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you.’ ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘now you’ve done it. The servants have heard what you said. I must go back to my father with my ten thousand pounds and my sixty camels.’ He apologized for his hasty temper. ‘We must be remarried,’ he said, ‘as soon as possible.’ She reminded him that the law prevented them from marrying again unless there were an intermediate marriage. So he called in a very old man who was watering the lawn and ordered him to marry her. He was to understand that it was a marriage of form only. So the gardener married the woman and, immediately after the ceremony, returned to his watering-pot. Two days later the woman died, and the gardener inherited the money and the camels.
The Greek invited me to tea once. He had three beautiful sisters named Pallas, Aphrodite, and Artemis. They gave me tea in the garden with European cakes that they had learned to make at the American college. Next door a pale-faced man stood on a third-floor balcony addressing the world. I asked Pallas what he was saying: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘don’t mind him; he’s a millionaire, so the police leave him alone. He’s quite mad. He lived ten years in England. He’s saying now that they’re burning him up with electricity, and he’s telling the birds all his troubles. He says that his secretary accuses him of stealing five piastres from him, and it isn’t true. Now he’s saying that there can’t be a God because God wouldn’t allow the English to steal the fellaheen’s camels for the war and not return them. Now he’s saying that all religions are very much the same, and that Buddha is as good as Mohammed. But really,’ she said, ‘he’s quite mad. He keeps a little dog in his house, actually in his very room, and plays with it and talks to it as though it were a human being.’ (Dogs are unclean in Egypt.) She told me that in another twenty years the women of Egypt would be in control of everything. The feminist movement had just started, and as the women of Egypt were by far the most active and intelligent part of the population, great changes were to be expected. She said that neither she nor her sisters would stand her father’s attempts to keep them in their places. Her brother showed me his library. He was doing the arts-course as a preliminary to law. Besides his legal textbooks he had Voltaire, Rousseau, a number of saucy French novels in paper covers, Shakespeare’s works and Samuel Smiles’ _Self Help_, a book which I had never met before. He asked my advice about his career, and I advised him to go to a European university because an arts degree at Cairo would be of little advantage to him.
I did not pay an official call at the Residency at first, though my brother urged it as etiquette; I decided not to until I had seen how things were at the University. I had not realized before to what extent the British were in power in Egypt. I had been told that Egypt was an independent kingdom, but it seemed that my principal allegiance was not to the King who had given me my appointment and paid me my salary, but to the British High Commissioner. Infantry, cavalry, and air squadrons were a reminder of his power. The British officials could not understand the Egyptians’ desire to be rid of them. They considered Egypt most ungrateful for all the painful and difficult administrative work that they had put into it since the ’eighties, raising it from a bankrupt country to one of the richest in the world. None of them took Egyptian nationalism seriously; there was no Egyptian nation they said. The Greeks, Turks, Syrians, and Armenians who called themselves Egyptians had no more right in the country than the British. Before the British occupation they had bled the fellaheen white. The fellaheen were the only true Egyptians, and it was not they who called for freedom. Freedom was mere politics, a symptom of the growing riches of the country and the smatterings of Western education that they had brought with them. The reduction of the British official class in the last few years was viewed with disgust. ‘We did all the hard work and when we go everything will run down; it’s running down already. And they’ll have to call us back, or if not us, the dagoes, and we don’t see why they should benefit.’ They did not realize how much the vanity of the Egyptians—probably the vainest people in the world—was hurt by the constant sight of British uniform.
Egypt now considered itself a European nation. At the same time it attempted to take the place of Turkey as the leading power of Islam. This led to many anomalies. On the same day that the University students made the protest against the professor of Arabic’s irreligious views, the students of El Azhar, the great Cairo theological college, struck against having to wear the Arab dress of kaftan and silk headdress and appeared in European dress and tarbouche. The tarbouche was the national hat; even British officials wore it. I myself had a tarbouche. Being red it attracted the heat of the sun; and it was stuffy inside and did not protect the back of the head. It would have been difficult to find a hat more unsuitable for the climate.
XXXII
I did two useful pieces of educational work in Egypt. I ordered a library of standard textbooks of English literature for the Faculty Library at the University (from which I hope Mr. Bonamy Dobrée, my successor, profited). And I acted as examiner to the diploma class of the Higher Training College which provided English teachers for the primary and secondary schools. The following is the substance of a letter handed to me for information as a member of the Board of Examiners concerned:
To The Principal, Higher Training College, Cairo.
Sir,
In accordance with your instructions, I beg to submit the following statement of the works read by the Diploma Class for the forthcoming examination in English Literature (1580 to 1788) and in Science:
ENGLISH LITERATURE
1. Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_.
2. Lobban’s _The Spectator Club_, p. 39, and _Sir Roger and the Widow_, p. 51; (111) 5 Essays of Addison, _Fans_, p. 64; _The Vision of Mirza_, p. 72; _Sir Roger at the Assizes_, p. 68; _Sir Roger at the Abbey_, p. 81; _Sir Roger at the Play_, p. 86.
3. Galsworthy’s _Justice_.
4. Dryden:
(_a_) With Class 4A, the following poems in Hales’ _Longer English Poems_:
(_i_) _Mac Flecknoe_ (omitting lines 76–77; 83–86; 142–145; 154–155; 160–165; 170–181; 192–197).
(_ii_) _The Song for St. Cecilia’s Day_ (Hales’, p. 32).
(_iii_) _Alexander’s Feast_ (Hales’, p. 34).
(_b_) With Class 4b, the extracts from _Absolam and Achitophel_, in Gwynn’s _Masters of English Literature_, p. 144–145 (characters of Shaftesbury and Buckingham).
5. Pope:
(_a_) With 4a, in Hales’ Longer English Poems: The Rape of the Lock (omitting lines 27–104; 221–282; 449–466; 483 to the end).
(_b_) With 4b, the character of ‘Atticus,’ in Gwynn’s Masters of Eng. Lit., p. 181.
6. Johnson’s _Vanity of Human Wishes_, in Hales’, p. 65 (omitting lines 241–343).
7. Goldsmith’s _Vicar of Wakefield_. (All done by 4a; but only to the end of chap. 19 in 4b.)
8. Goldsmith’s _The Traveller_, in Hales’, p. 91.
9. Gray’s _Elegy_, in Hales’, p. 79.
I regret that lack of time has prevented us from studying the works of Milton and Spenser or the prose works of Dr. Johnson.
SCIENCE
1. Episodes 1, 2, 3 and 6 of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s _Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes_.
2. The first seven chapters of Sir Ray Lankester’s Science from an Easy Chair.
I have the honour to be, Sir, Your obedient servant, etc.
These are my contemporary comments, pinned to the letter:
‘When some forty years ago England superseded France as the controlling European Power in Egypt, English was at first taught in the schools as an alternative to French, but gradually became dominant as the European administrative language, though French remained the chief language of commerce and culture. As a result, the young Egyptian, who now definitely claims himself a European and denies his African inheritance, has come to have two distinct minds (switched off and on casually)—the irresponsible hedonistic café and cinema mind, which leans towards French, and the grave moralizing bureaucratic mind, which leans towards English. Early English educationalists in Egypt shrewdly decided to give their students a moralistic character-forming view of English literature; and this tradition continues as a counterpoise to the boulevard view of life absorbed from translations of French yellow-back novels. But the student of 1926 is not so well-instructed in English as his predecessor of ten years ago, because the English educational staff has gradually been liquidated, and the teaching of English is now principally in the hands of Egyptians, former students, who are not born teachers or disciplinarians. The Western spirit of freedom as naively interpreted by the Egyptian student greatly hinders Egyptian education. The primary and secondary schools, not to mention the University, are always either on strike, threatening a strike, or prevented from striking by being given a holiday. So work gets more and more behindhand. Even the Higher Training College is not free from such disturbances, which possibly account for the regretted neglect of Milton, Spenser, and the prose works of Dr. Johnson. This Diploma Class consists of students who, after some twelve years’ study of English, the last four or five years under English instructors, are now qualifying to teach the language and literature to their compatriots.
‘The Egyptian student is embarrassingly friendly, very quick at learning by heart, disorderly, lazy, rhetorical, slow to reason, and absolutely without any curiosity for general knowledge. The most satisfactory way to treat him is with a good-humoured sarcasm, which he respects; but if he once gets politically excited nothing is any use but an affected violent loss of temper. When introduced to the simpler regions of English literature he finds himself most in sympathy with the eighteenth century; and the English instructor, if he wishes to get any results at all, must be ready to regard Shakespeare, Galsworthy and Conan Doyle as either immature or decadent figures in relation to the classical period. The _Science_ referred to in the attached letter is supposed to educate the student in twentieth-century rationalism, to which he gives an eighteenth-century cast. The following essay is the work of one Mahmoud Mohammed Mahmoud of the Diploma Class, and refers principally to two chapters of Sir Ray Lankester’s _Science from an Easy Chair_:
Environment as a Factor in Evolution
This is the theory of evolutions. Once it was thought that the earth’s crust was caused by catastrophes, but when Darwin came into the world and had a good deal of philosophy, he said: ‘All different kinds of species differ gradually as we go backwards and there is no catastrophes, and if we apply the fact upon previous predecessors we reach simpler and simpler predecessors, until we reach the Nature.’ Man, also, is under the evolutions. None can deny this if he could deny the sun in daylight. A child from the beginning of his birthday possesses instincts like to suckle his food from the mamel of his mother and many others. But he is free of habits and he is weak as anything. Then he is introduced into a house and usually finds himself among parents, and his body is either cleansed or left to the dirts. This shows his environment. Superficial thinkers are apt to look on environment as (at best) a trifle motive in bringing up, but learned men believe that a child born in the presence of some women who say a bad word, this word, as believed by them, remains in the brain of the child until it ejects.
Environment quickly supplies modification. The life of mountainous goats leads them to train themselves on jumping. The camel is flat-footed with hoofs for the sand. Some kind of cattle were wild in the past but lived in plain lands and changed into gentle sheep. The frog when young has her tail and nostrils like the fish, suitable for life at sea, but changing her environment, the tail decreased. The sea is broad and changeable, so those who live at sea are changeable and mysterious. Put a cow in a dirty damp place and she will become more and more slender until she die. Also horses; horse had five fingers on his legs but now one only from running for water in the draught. Climate also affects bodily habits of the dear Europeans who live in Egypt. They who were smart and patient and strong with a skin worth the name of weatherproof become also fatigable and fond of leisure.... From the theory we learn that human beings should be improved like the beasts by creating healthy youngs and by good Freubel education.
‘The next short specimen essay by Mohammed Mahmoud Mohammed is in answer to the question: “What impression do you get from Shakespeare of the character of Lady Macbeth?”:
The Character of Lady Macbeth
Sir, to write shortly, Lady Macbeth was brave and venturesome; but she had no tact. She says to Macbeth: ‘Now the opportunity creates itself, lose it not. Where is your manlihood in these suitable circumstances? I have children and I know the love of a mother’s heart. But you must know I would dash the child’s head and drive away the boneless teeth which are milking me rather than to give a promise and then leave it.’
Macbeth says: ‘But we may fail.’
‘Fail?’ says L. M. ‘But stick to the point and we will not fail. Leave the rest to me. I shall put drugs in the grooms’ drink and we shall ascuse them.’
Macbeth says: ‘You are fit to lay men-children only.’
The impression on the reader becomes very great and feels with anger.
‘And this from the hand of Mahmoud Mahmoud Mohammed, offered as a formal exercise in English composition:
The Best Use of Leisure Time
Leisure time is a variety to tireful affairs. God Almighty created the Universe in six days and took a rest in the seventh. He wished to teach us the necessity of leisure time. Man soon discovered by experience that ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ But this leisure time may be dangerous and ill-used if the mind will not take its handle and move it wisely to different directions. Many people love idleness. It is a great prodigality which leads to ruin. Many Egyptians spend their times in cafés longing for women and tracking them with their eyes, which corrupts and pollutes manners. They are perplexed and annoyed by the length of daytime. Others try to have rest through gumbling, which is the scourge of society and individual. But let _us_ rather enjoy external nature, the beautiful leavy trees, the flourishing fields, and the vast lawns of green grass starred with myriads of flowers of greater or small size. There the birds sing and build their nests, the meandering canals flow with fresh water, and the happy peasants, toiling afar from the multitude of town life, purify the human wishes from personal stain. Also museums are instructive. It is quite wrong to keep to usual work and fatigable studies, but quite right to free our minds from the web of wordly affairs in which they are entangled.
Yes, let us with the lark leave our beds to enjoy the cool breeze before sunrise. Let us when the lasy or luxurious are snoring or sunk in their debaucheries sit under the shady trees and meditate. We can think of God, the river and the moon, and enjoy the reading of Gray’s _Elegy_ to perfection. We shall brush the dues on the lawn at sunrise, for,
A country life is sweat In moderate cold and heat.
Or we may read the Best Companions, books full of honourable passions, wise moral and good pathos: reading maketh a full man, nobody will deny Bacon. Or we may easily get a musical instrument at little price. ‘Every schoolboy knows’ that music is a moral law which gives a soul to the universe. Criminals can be cured by the sweet power of music. The whale came up from the dark depths of the sea to carry the Greek musician because it was affected by the sweet harmonies which hold a mirror up to nature. Are we not better than the whale? Also gymnastic clubs are spread everywhere. Why do a youth not pass his leisure time in widdening his chest? Because a sound mind is in a sound body. Yet it is a physiological fact that the blacksmith cannot spend his leisure time in striking iron or the soldier in military exercises. The blacksmith may go to see the Egyptian Exhibition, and the soldier may go to the sea to practice swimming or to the mountains to know its caves in order that he may take shelter in time of war.
Milton knew the best uses of leisure time. He used to sit to his books reading, and to his music playing, and so put his name among the immortals. That was the case of Byron, Napoleon, Addison, and Palmerstone. And if a man is unhappy, says an ancient philosopher, it is his own fault. He _can_ be happy if his leisure time brings profit and not disgrace.
‘The Diploma Class students are supposed to be four years in advance of my own, and, not being of the moneyed class, are more interested in passing their examinations with distinction. Also, since their careers as teachers of English depend on the continuance of the British military occupation, they take the morality of this regime more seriously than the University students, who are mostly the sons of pashas. These, with few exceptions, suffer from the bankruptcy of modern Egyptian life; they are able to take neither European culture nor their own Islamic traditions seriously. So far as I can make out from talking with the more intelligent of them, what Egypt asks for is a European government and education free of European political domination, but with a European technical personnel in the key positions, which it cannot do without and will pay highly for. Egypt can never be a great independent spiritual or political force in the Near East, but because of its wealth it can become at least the commercial centre of Islamic orthodoxy. Turkey is already a modern European country; Egypt will remain for some time yet eighteenth-century in spirit—a compromise between political romanticism and religious classicism. For a generation or two yet the descendants of the landowners enriched by European administration will continue to “spend their times in cafés longing for women,” and to be “perplexed and annoyed by the length of daytime,” while “the happy peasants” go on “toiling afar from the multitude of town life.” And my professional successors will continue to become “fatigable and fond of leisure.”’
* * * * *
For I had already decided to resign. So had the professor of Latin, my only English colleague. And the one-legged professor of French Literature, who was an honest man. The others stayed on.
The Egyptians were most hospitable. I attended one heavy banquet, at the Semiramis Hotel, given by the Minister of Education. Tall Sudanese waiters dressed in red robes served a succession of the most magnificent dishes that I have seen anywhere, even on the films. I remember particularly a great model of the Cairo Citadel in ice, with the doors and windows filled with caviare which one scooped out with a golden Moorish spoon. I heard recently that this banquet, which must have cost thousands, has not yet been paid for. I found little to do in Egypt (since I had no intention of mixing with the British official class, joining the golf club, or paying official calls) but eat coffee-ices at Groppi’s, visit the open-air cinemas and sit at home in our flat at Heliopolis and get on with writing. My sister, who lived near, continued sisterly. During the season of the Khamsin, a hot wind which sent the temperature up on one occasion to 113 degrees in the shade, I put the finishing touches to a book called _Lars Porsena, or The Future of Swearing and Improper Language_. I also worked on a study of the English ballad.
The best thing that I saw in Egypt was the noble face of old King Seti the Good unwrapped of its mummy-cloths in the Cairo Museum. Nearly all the best things in Egypt were dead. The funniest thing was a French bedroom farce played in Arabic by Syrian actors in a native theatre. The men and women of the cast had, for religious reasons, to keep on opposite sides of the stage. They sang French songs (in translation), varying the tunes with the quarter-tones and shrieks and trills of their own music. The audience talked all the time and ate peanuts, oranges, sunflower-seeds and heads of lettuces.
I went to call on Lord Lloyd just before the close of the academic year, which was at the end of May. Soon after I was invited to dine at the Residency. I won twenty piastres off him at bridge and was told to collect it from his A.D.C. He asked me how I found Egypt and I said: ‘All right,’ with an intonation that made him catch me up quickly. ‘Only all right?’ That was all that passed between us. He believed in his job more than I did in mine. He used to drive through Cairo in a powerful car, with a Union Jack flying from it, at about sixty miles an hour. He had motor-cyclist outriders to clear the way—Sir Lee Stack, the Sirdar, had been killed the year before while driving through Cairo and a traffic jam had materially helped his assassins. One day I was shown the spot near the Ministry of Education where it happened; there was a crowd at the spot which I at first took for a party of sightseers, but the attraction proved to be a naked woman lying on the pavement, laughing wildly and waving her arms. She was one of the _hashish_ dope-cases that were very common in Egypt. The crowd was jeering at her; the policeman a few yards off paid no attention.
I attended a levee at the Abdin Palace, King Fuad’s Cairo residence. It began early, at nine o’clock in the morning. The King gave honourable precedence to the staff of the University; it came in soon after the diplomatic corps and the Ministers of the Crown and some time before the army. While still in England I had been warned to buy suitable clothes—a morning coat and trousers—for this occasion. To be really correct my coat should have had green facings, green being the national colour of Egypt, but I was told that this would not be insisted upon. Opinions differed greatly as to what was suitable Court-dress; most of the French professors arrived in full evening dress with swallowtail coats and white waistcoats, others wore ordinary dinner jackets. Most of them had opera-hats; they all had decorations round their necks. They looked like stragglers from an all-night fancy-dress ball. After signing my name in the two large hotel registers, one belonging to the King and the other to the Queen, I was given a refreshing rice-drink, a courtesy of the Queen’s. I then went up the noble marble staircase. On every other step stood an enormous black soldier, royally uniformed, with a lance in his hand. My soldier’s eye commented on their somewhat listless attitudes; but, no doubt, they pulled themselves smartly to attention when the Egyptian army general staff went past. I had been warned that when I met King Fuad I must not be surprised at anything extraordinary I heard; a curious wheezing cry was apt to burst from his throat occasionally when he was nervous. When he was a child his family had been shot up by an assassin employed by interested relatives; and Fuad had taken cover under a table and, though wounded, had survived. We were moved from room to room. At last a quiet Turkish-looking gentleman of middle age, wearing regulation Court-dress, greeted us deferentially in French; I took him for the Grand Chamberlain. I bowed and said the same thing in French as the professor in front of me had said, and expected to be led next to the Throne Room. But the next stage was the cloak-room once more. I had already met King Fuad. And no Eastern magnificence or wheezing cry.
I attended a royal soiree a few days later. The chief event was a theatrical variety show. The performance was predominantly Italian. King Fuad had been educated in Italy, where he attained the rank of captain in the Italian cavalry, and had a great regard for Italian culture. (He was ignorant of English, but was a good French scholar.) The performance belonged to the 1870’s. There was a discreet blonde shepherdess who did a hopping dance in ankle-length skirts, and a discreet tenor who confined his passion to his top notes; and there was a well-behaved comedian who made nice little jokes for the Queen. I clapped him, because I liked him better than the others, and everybody looked round at me; I realized that I had done the wrong thing. An official whispered to me that it was a command performance and that the actors were, therefore, entitled to no applause. Unless His Majesty was himself amused the turns must be greeted in silence. I was wearing Court-dress again but, not to be outdone by the Frenchmen, I had put on my three campaigning medals—and wished that I had that St. Anne of the Third Class with the Crossed Swords. And the refreshments! I will not attempt to describe that Arabian Night buffet; it was so splendid indeed that it has remained a mere blur in my memory. I pocketed some particularly fantastic confections to bring home to the children.
What caused me most surprise in Egypt was the great number of camels there. I had thought of them only as picture-postcard animals. I had not expected to see thousands of them in the streets of Cairo, holding up the motor traffic—in long trains, tied head to rump, with great sacks of green fodder on their backs.
Our children were a great anxiety. They had to drink boiled milk and boiled water and be watched all the time to prevent them from taking off their topees and blue veils. Then they all got measles and were carried off to an isolation hospital, where they were fed on all the things that we had been particular since their birth not to give them; and the native nurses stole their toys. They returned very thin and wretched-looking and we wondered if we should ever get them safely home. We booked our passages some time at the end of May. We had only just enough money for third-class on a small Italian boat with a cargo of onions. We disembarked at Venice and stopped a day there. After Egypt, Venice seemed like Heaven. It could never again be to me what it was that day. I had a European egg in Venice. Egyptian eggs were about the size of a pigeon’s egg and always tasted strongly of the garlic which seemed to form a large part of the diet of the Egyptian fowl.
There are plenty of caricature scenes to look back on in Egypt. Among them, for instance, myself dressed in my smart yellow gaberdine suit and seated at a long, baize-covered table in the Faculty Conference Room. In front of me is a cup of Turkish coffee, a sun helmet, and a long record in French of the minutes of the last meeting. I am talking angry bad French at my Belgian and French colleagues in support of the young professor of Latin, who has just leaped to his feet, pale with hatred. He is declaring in worse French that he positively refuses to make a forced contribution of fifty piastres to a memorial wreath for one of the Frenchmen (who had just died), since he was never consulted. I am declaring that neither will I, blustering to him in English that so far as I am concerned all dead Frenchmen can go bury themselves at their own expense. The lofty, elegant room, once a harem drawing-room—a portrait of the late Khedive, with a large rent in it, hanging at a tipsy slant at one end of the room; at the other a large glass showcase, full of Egypto-Roman brass coins, all muddled together, their labels loose, in one corner. Through the window market-gardens, buffaloes, camels, countrywomen in black. Around the table my horrified, shrugging colleagues, turning to each other and saying: ‘Inoui.... Inoui....’ And outside the rebellious shouts of our students working themselves up for another strike.
The rest makes no more than conversation—of the Government clerk who was so doubly unfortunate as to be run over by a racing-car and to find that the driver was the eldest son of the Minister of Justice; and of the rich girl in search of a husband who went as paying guest at fifteen guineas a week to the senior Government official’s wife, agreeing to pay for all wines and cigars and extras when society came to dine, and who, meeting only senior Government officials and their wives, complained that she did not get her money’s worth; and of my night visit to the temple of a headless monkey-god, full of bats; and of the English cotton manufacturer who defended the conditions in his factory on the ground that the population of Egypt since the British came had been increasing far too rapidly, and that pulmonary consumption was one of the few checks on it; and of the student’s mother who, at the sports, said how much she regretted having put him on the mantelpiece when a baby and run off (being only twelve years old) to play with her dolls; and of ‘The Limit,’ so named by Australians during the war, who told my three years’ fortune by moonlight under the long shadow of the pyramid of Cheops—told it truly and phrased it falsely; and of the Arab cab-driver who was kind to his horses; and of my visit to Chawki Bey, the national poet of Egypt, in his Moorish mansion by the Nile, who was so like Thomas Hardy and in whose presence his sons, like good Turks, sat dutifully silent; and of the beggar in the bazaar with too many toes; and of the veiled vengeance there who tried to touch us; and of the official who, during the war, on a dream of dearth, had played Joseph, dumping half the wheat of Australia in Egypt, where it found no buyers and was at last eaten by donkeys and camels, and who told me that the whole secret of vivid writing was to use the active rather than the passive voice—to say ‘Amr-ibn-el-Ass conquered Egypt,’ rather than ‘Egypt was conquered by Amr-ibn-el-Ass’; and of a visit to ancient dead Heliopolis with its lovely landscape of green fields, its crooked palm trees, its water-wheels turned by oxen, and its single obelisk; and of the other Heliopolis, a brand-new dead town on the desert’s edge, built by a Belgian company, complete with racecourse and Luna Park, where the R.A.F. planes flew low at night among the houses, and where the bored wives of disappointed officials wrote novels which they never finished, and painted a little in water-colours; and of the little garden of our flat where I went walking on the first day among the fruit-trees and flowering shrubs, and how I came upon no less than eight lean and mangy cats dozing in the beds, and never walked there again; and of the numerous kites, their foul counterpart in the sky and in the palm trees; and, lastly, of that fabulous cross-breed between kite and cat which woke us every morning at dawn, a creature kept as a pet in a neighbouring tenement inhabited by Syrians and Greeks, whose strangled cock-a-doodle-doo was to me the dawn-cry of modern Egypt. (Empty cigar-box—no applause—and I thank you.)
So back to Islip; much to the disappointment of my parents, who thought that I had at last seen reason and settled down to an appointment suited equally to my needs and my talents; and to the undisguised relief of my sister-in-law.
* * * * *
The story trails off here. But to end it with the return from Egypt would be to round it off too bookishly, to finish on a note of comfortable suspense, an anticipation of the endless human sequel. I am taking care to rob you of this. It is not that sort of story. From a historical point of view it must be read, rather, as one of gradual disintegration. By the summer of 1926 the disintegration was already well-advanced. Incidents of autobiographical pertinence became fewer and fewer.
When we came back Nancy’s health was very much better, but none of us had any money left. There were a number of books to be sold, chiefly autographed first editions of modern poets; and Lawrence came to the rescue with a copy of his _Seven Pillars_ marked, ‘Please sell when read,’ which fetched over three hundred pounds.
In 1927 Jonathan Cape wrote to me suggesting that I should write a book for boys about Lawrence. There was not much time to do it to have it ready for autumn publication (about two months)—and Lawrence was in India and I had to get his permission and send parts of the manuscript there for him to read and pass. Lowell Thomas anticipated me with a _Boy’s Book of Colonel Lawrence_; so I decided to make mine a general book, three times the length of his, working eighteen hours a day at it. Most of those to whom I wrote for information about Lawrence, including His Majesty the King, gave me their help. The only rebuff I got was from George Bernard Shaw, who wrote me the following postcard:
Eyot St. Lawrence, Welwyn, Herts. 8_th June_ 1927.
A great mistake. You might as well try to write a funny book about Mark Twain. T. E. has got all out of himself that is to be got. His name will rouse expectations which you will necessarily disappoint. Cape will curse his folly for proposing such a thing, and never give you another commission. Write a book (if you must) about the dullest person you know; clerical if possible. Give yourself a chance.
G. B. S.
Just before Christmas the book was selling at the rate of ten thousand copies a week. I heard later that Shaw had mistaken me for my _Daily Mail_ brother.
Shortly afterwards I had a reply, delayed for nine months, to an application that I had made, when things were bad, for an appointment as English lecturer in an Adult Education scheme. I was told that my qualifications were not considered sufficient. By this time I had lost all my academic manners and wrote wishing the entire committee in Baluchistan, to be tickled to death by wild butterflies.
In 1927, in a process of tidying-up, I published a collected book of my poems. One of the later ones began:
This, I admit, Death is terrible to me, To no man more so, naturally. And I have disenthralled my natural terror Of every comfortable philosopher Or tall dark doctor of divinity. Death stands at last in his true rank and order.
The book was selective rather than collective, intended as a disavowal of over half the poetry that I had so far printed. As Skelton told Fame, speaking of his regretted poem _Apollo Whirled up his Chair_, I had done what I could to scrape out the scrolls, To erase it for ever out of her ragman’s rolls. But I still permitted anthologists to print some of the rejected pieces if they paid highly enough—if they wanted them, that was their business and I was glad of the money. On the other hand I stopped contributing new poems to English and American periodicals. My critical writings I did not tidy up; but let them go out of print. In 1927 I began learning to print on a hand-press. In 1928 I continued learning to print.
On May 6th, 1929 Nancy and I suddenly parted company. I had already finished with nearly all my other leading and subsidiary characters, and dozens more whom I have not troubled to put in. I began to write my autobiography on May 23rd and write these words on July 24th, my thirty-fourth birthday; another month of final review and I shall have parted with myself for good. I have been able to draw on contemporary records for most of the facts, but in many passages memory has been the only source. My memory is good but not perfect. For instance, I can after two hearings remember the tune and words of any song that I like, and never afterwards forget them; but there are always odd discrepancies between my version and the original. So here, there must be many slight errors of one sort or another. No incidents, however, are invented or embellished. Some are, no doubt, in their wrong order; I am uncertain, for example, of the exact date and place of the megaphoned trench-conversation between the Royal Welch and the Germans, though I have a contemporary record of it. I am not sure of some of the less-important names (even of Lance-corporal Baxter’s, but it was at least a name like Baxter). To avoid the suggestion of libel I have disguised two names. Also, I make a general disclaimer of such opinions as I have recorded myself as holding from chapter to chapter, on education, nature, war, religion, literature, philosophy, psychology, politics, and so on. This is a story of what I was, not what I am. Wherever I have used autobiographical material in previous books and it does not tally with what I have written here, this is the story and that was literature.
I find myself wondering whether it is justified as a story. Yet I seem to have done most of the usual storybook things. I had, by the age of twenty-three, been born, initiated into a formal religion, travelled, learned to lie, loved unhappily, been married, gone to the war, taken life, procreated my kind, rejected formal religion, won fame, and been killed. At the age of thirty-four many things still remain undone. For instance, I have never been on a journey of exploration, or in a submarine, aeroplane or civil court of law (except a magistrate’s court on the charge of ‘riding a vehicle, to wit a bicycle, without proper illumination, to wit a rear lamp’). I have never mastered any musical instrument, starved, committed civil murder, found buried treasure, engaged in unnatural vice, slept with a prostitute, or seen a corpse that has died a natural death. On the other hand, I have ridden on a locomotive, won a prize at the Olympic Games, become a member of the senior common-room at one Oxford college before becoming a member of the junior common-room at another, been examined by the police on suspicion of attempted murder, passed at dusk in a hail-storm within half a mile of Stromboli when it was in eruption, had a statue of myself erected in my lifetime in a London park, and learned to tell the truth—nearly.
The End
Dedicatory Epilogue to Laura Riding
I have used your _World’s End_ as an introductory motto, but you will be glad to find no reference at all to yourself in the body of this book. I have not mentioned the _Survey of Modernist Poetry_ and the _Pamphlet against Anthologies_ as works of collaboration between you and me, though these books appear in publishers’ catalogues and obviously put much of my own previous critical writing out of account. And though I have mentioned printing, I have not given details of it, or even said that it was with you, printing and publishing in partnership as The Seizin Press. Because of you the last chapters have a ghostly look.
The reason of all this is, of course, that by mentioning you as a character in my autobiography I would seem to be denying you in your true quality of one living invisibly, against kind, as dead, beyond event. And yet the silence is false if it makes the book seem to have been written forward from where I was instead of backward from where you are. If the direction of the book were forward I should still be inside the body of it, arguing morals, literature, politics, suffering violent physical experiences, falling in and out of love, making and losing friends, enduring blindly in time; instead of here outside, writing this letter to you, as one also living against kind—indeed, rather against myself.
You know the autobiography of that Lord Herbert of Cherbury whose son founded the Royal Welch Fusiliers; how he was educated as a gentleman, studied at Oxford, married young, travelled, played games, fought in Northern France and wrote books; until at last his active life ended with a sudden clap of thunder from the blue sky which did ‘so comfort and cheer’ him that he resolved at last, at this sign, to print his book _De Veritate_, concerning truth. If you were to appear in my _De Veritate_ it could only be as ‘this loud though yet gentle noise ... one fair day in the summer, my casement being opened towards the south, the sun shining clear, and no wind stirring.’
For could the story of your coming be told between an Islip Parish Council Meeting and a conference of the professors of the Faculty of Letters at Cairo University? How she and I happening by seeming accident upon your teasing _Quids_, were drawn to write to you, who were in America, asking you to come to us. How, though you knew no more of us than we of you, and indeed less (for you knew me at a disadvantage, by my poems of the war), you forthwith came. And how there was thereupon a unity to which you and I pledged our faith and she her pleasure. How we went together to the land where the dead parade the streets and there met with demons and returned with the demons still treading behind. And how they drove us up and down the land.
That was the beginning of the end, and the end and after is yours. Yet I must relieve your parable of all anecdote of mine. I must tell, for instance, that in its extreme course in April last I re-lived the changes of many past years. That when I must suddenly hurry off to Ireland I found myself on the very boat, from Fishguard, that had been my hospital-boat twelve years before. That at Limerick I met Old Ireland herself sitting black-shawled and mourning on the station bench and telling of the Fall. And so to the beautiful city of Sligo celebrated in song by my father. And the next train back, this time by the Wales of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. And the next day to Rouen with you and her, to recollect the hill-top where you seemed to die as the one on which I had seemed to die thirteen years before. And then immediately back. And then, later in the same month, my sudden journey to Hilton in Huntingdon, to a farm with memories of her as I first knew her, to burst in upon—as it happened—David Garnett (whom I had never met before), gulping his vintage port and scandalizing him with my soldier’s oaths as I denied him a speaking part in your parable.
After which.
After which, anecdotes of yours, travesties of the parable and so precious to me as vulgar glosses on it. How on April 27th, 1929 it was a fourth-storey window and a stone area and you were dying. And how it was a joke between Harold the stretcher-bearer and myself that you did not die, but survived your dying, lucid interval.
After which.
After which, may I recall, since you would not care to do so yourself, with what professional appreciation (on May 16th) Mr. Lake is reported to have observed to those that stood by him in the operating theatre: ‘It is rarely that one sees the spinal-cord exposed to view—especially at right-angles to itself.’
After which.
After which, let me also recall on my own account my story _The Shout_, which, though written two years ago, belongs here; blind and slow like all prophecies—it has left you out entirely. And, because you are left out, it is an anecdote of mine.
After which.
After which, even anecdotes fail. No more anecdotes. And, of course, no more politics, religion, conversations, literature, arguments, dances, drunks, time, crowds, games, fun, unhappiness. I no longer repeat to myself: ‘He who shall endure to the end, shall be saved.’ It is enough now to say that I have endured. My lung, still barometric of foul weather, speaks of endurance, as your spine, barometric of fair weather, speaks of salvation.
[1] ‘Why,’ said the cobbler, ‘what should I do? Will you have me to go in the King’s wars and to be killed for my labour?’ ‘What, knave,’ said Skelton, ‘art thou a coward, having so great bones?’ ‘No,’ said the cobbler, ‘I am not afeared: it is good to sleep in a whole skin.’—Merry Tales of Skelton (_Early sixteenth century_).
[2] I do not know what happened to Miller. This was written in the summer of 1916.
[3] Jenkins was killed not long after.
[4] The quartermaster excepted.
[5] The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but ‘accessory’ in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about it long before this.
[6] Major Swainson recovered quickly and was back at the Middlesex Depot after a few weeks. On the other hand, Lawrie, a Royal Welch company quartermaster-sergeant back at Cambrin, was hit in the neck that day by a spent machine-gun bullet which just pierced the skin, and died of shock a few hours later.
[7] He was recommended for a Victoria Cross but got nothing because no officer evidence, which is a condition of award, was available.
[8] I cannot explain the discrepancy between his dating of my death and that of the published casualty list.
ERRATUM
_p. ♦396, line 1, et seq._
♦ “398” replaced with “396”
Since this paragraph was printed, I have heard from Mr. Marsh that the facts are not quite as I have stated them, and that there is not really any “Rupert Brooke Fund” administered by Mr. Marsh. I much regret this error which arose from an imperfect recollection. R. G.
Transcriber’s Notes
1. Italicised words are indicated by _underscores_.
2. Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of the book.
3. Illustrations are indicated by “[Illustration: caption-text]” and have been moved to before or after an enclosing paragraph.
4. Misspelled words have been corrected (see below). Archaic, inconsistent and alternative spellings have been left unchanged. Spelling and other typos (e.g. duplicate words) in direct quotes from other sources were left unchanged. Hyphenation has not been standardised.
5. “Edit Distance” in Corrections table below refers to the Levenshtein Distance.
Corrections:
Page Source Correction Edit distance
62 among the the five among the five 4 95 Crib-y-ddysgel Crib-y-ddysgl 1 175 opponets opponents 1 202 and the the brigadier and the brigadier 4 301 impossiblity impossibility 1 Erratum 398 396 1