XXVIII
I met T. E. Lawrence first at a guest-night at All Souls’. Lawrence had just been given a college fellowship, and it was the first time for many years that he had worn evening dress. The restlessness of his eyes was the first thing about him I noticed. He told me that he had read my poems in Egypt during one of his flying visits from Arabia; he and my brother Philip had been together in the Intelligence Department at Cairo, before his part in the Arab revolt had begun, working out the Turkish order of battle. I knew nothing about his organization of the Arab revolt, his exploits and sufferings in the desert, and his final entry into Damascus. He was merely, to me, a fellow-soldier who had come back to Oxford for a rest after the war. But I felt a sudden extraordinary sympathy with him. Later, when I was told that every one was fascinated by Lawrence, I tried to dismiss this feeling as extravagant. But it remained. Between lectures at Oxford I now often visited Lawrence at All Souls’. Though he never drank himself, he used always to send his scout for a silver goblet of audit ale for me. Audit ale was brewed in the college; it was as soft as barley-water but of great strength. (A prince once came down to Oxford to open a new museum and lunched at All Souls’ before the ceremony; the mildness of the audit ale deceived him—he took it for lager—and he had to be taken back to the station in a cab with the blinds drawn.) Nancy and I lunched in Lawrence’s rooms once with Vachel Lindsay, the American poet, and his mother. Mrs. Lindsay was from Springfield, Illinois, and, like her son, a prominent member of the Illinois Anti-Saloon League. When Lawrence told his scout that Mr. Lindsay, though a poet, was an Anti-Saloon Leaguer, he was scandalized and asked Lawrence’s permission to lay on Lindsay’s place a copy of verses composed in 1661 by a fellow of the college. One stanza was:
Mrs. Lindsay had been warned by friends to comment on nothing unusual that she met at Oxford. Lawrence had brought out the college gold service in her honour and this she took to be the ordinary thing at a university luncheon-party.
His rooms were dark and oak-panelled. A large table and a desk were the principal furniture. And there were two heavy leather chairs, simply acquired. An American oil-financier had come in suddenly one day when I was visiting T. E. and said: ‘I am here from the States, Colonel Lawrence, to ask you a single question. You are the only man who will answer it honestly. Do Middle-Eastern conditions justify my putting any money in South Arabian oil?’ Lawrence, without rising, simply answered:‘No.’ ‘That’s all I wanted to know; it was worth coming for that. Thank you, and good day!’ In his brief glance about the room he had found something missing; on his way home through London he chose the chairs and had them sent to Lawrence with his card. Other things in the room were pictures, including Augustus John’s portrait of Feisul, which Lawrence, I believe, bought from John with the diamond which he had worn as a mark of honour in his Arab headdress; his books, including a Kelmscott Chaucer, three prayer-rugs, the gift of Arab leaders who had fought with him, one of them with the sheen on the nap made with crushed lapis-lazuli; a station bell from the Hedjaz railway; and on the mantelpiece a four-thousand-year-old toy, a clay soldier on horseback from a child’s grave at Carchemish, where Lawrence was digging before the war.
We talked most about poetry. I was working at a book of poems which appeared later under the title of The Pier-Glass. They were poems that reflected my haunted condition; the Country Sentiment mood was breaking down. Lawrence made a number of suggestions for improving these poems and I adopted most of them. He told me of two or three of his schemes for brightening All Souls’ and Oxford generally. One was for improving the turf in the quadrangle, which he said was in a disgraceful condition, nearly rotting away; he had suggested at a college meeting that it should be manured or treated in some way or other, but no action had been taken. He now said that he was going to plant mushrooms on it, so that they would have to re-turf it altogether. He consulted a mushroom expert in town, but found that it was difficult to make spawn grow. He would have persisted if he had not been called away about this time to help Winston Churchill with the Middle-Eastern settlement. Another scheme, in which I was to have helped, was to steal the Magdalen College deer. He was going to drive them into the small inner quadrangle of All Souls’, having persuaded the college to reply, when Magdalen protested and asked for its deer back, that it was the All Souls’ herd and had been pastured there from time immemorial. Great things were expected of this raid. It fell through for the same reason as the other. But a successful strike of college-servants for better pay and hours was said to have been engineered by Lawrence.
I took no part in undergraduate life, seldom visiting my college except to draw my Government grant and exhibition money; I refused to pay the college games’ subscription, having little interest in St. John’s and being unfit for games myself. Most of my friends were at Balliol and Queen’s, and in any case Wadham had a prior claim on my loyalty. I spent as little time as possible away from Boar’s Hill. At this time I had little to do with the children; they were in the hands of Nancy and the nurse—the nurse now also did the cooking and housework for us. Nancy felt that she wanted some activity besides drawing, though she could not decide what. One evening in the middle of the long vacation she suddenly said: ‘I must get away somewhere out of this for a change. Let’s go off on bicycles somewhere.’ We packed a few things and rode off in the general direction of Devonshire. The nights were coldish and we had not brought blankets. We found that the best way was to bicycle by night and sleep by day. We went over Salisbury Plain past several deserted army camps; they had a ghostly look. There was accommodation in these camps for a million men, the number of men killed in the Imperial Forces during the war. We found ourselves near Dorchester, so we turned in there to visit Thomas Hardy, whom we had met not long before when he came up to Oxford to get his honorary doctor’s degree. We found him active and gay, with none of the aphasia and wandering of attention that we had noticed in him at Oxford.
I wrote out a record of the conversation we had with him. He welcomed us as representatives of the post-war generation. He said that he lived such a quiet life at Dorchester that he feared he was altogether behind the times. He wanted, for instance, to know whether we had any sympathy with the Bolshevik regime, and whether he could trust the Morning Post’s account of the Red Terror. Then he was interested in Nancy’s hair, which she wore short, in advance of the fashion, and in her keeping her own name. His comment on the name question was: ‘Why, you are old-fashioned. I knew an old couple here sixty years ago that did the same. The woman was called Nanny Priddle (descendant of an ancient family, the Paradelies, long decayed into peasantry), and she would never change her name either.’ Then he wanted to know why I no longer used my army rank. I said it was because I was no longer soldiering. ‘But you have a right to it; I would certainly keep my rank if I had one. I should be very proud to be called Captain Hardy.’
He told us that he was now engaged in restoring a Norman font in a church near by. He had only the bowl to work upon, but enjoyed doing a bit of his old work again. Nancy mentioned that we had not baptized our children. He was interested, but not scandalized, remarking that his old mother had always said of baptism that at any rate there was no harm in it, and that she would not like her children to blame her in after-life for leaving any duty to them undone. ‘I have usually found that what my old mother said was right.’ He said that to his mind the new generation of clergymen were very much better men than the last.... Though he now only went to church three times a year—one visit to each of the three neighbouring churches—he could not forget that the church was in the old days the centre of all the musical, literary and artistic education in the country village. He talked about the old string orchestras in Wessex churches, in one of which his father, grandfather, and he himself had taken part; he regretted their disappearance. He told us that the clergyman who appears as old St. Clair in Tess of the D’Urbervilles was the man who protested to the War Office about the Sunday brass-band performances at the Dorchester Barracks, and was the cause of headquarters no longer being sent to this once very popular station.
We had tea in the drawing-room, which, like the rest of the house, was crowded with furniture and ornaments. Hardy had an affection for old possessions, and Mrs. Hardy was too fond to suggest that anything at all should be removed. Hardy, his cup of tea in hand, began making jokes about bishops at the Athenæum Club and imitating their episcopal tones when they ordered: ‘China tea and a little bread and butter (Yes, my lord!).’ Apparently he considered bishops were fair game. He was soon censuring Sir Edmund Gosse, who had recently stayed with them, for a breach of good taste in imitating his old friend, Henry James, eating soup. Loyalty to his friends was always a passion with Hardy.
After tea we went into the garden, and Hardy asked to see some of my recent poems. I showed him one, and he asked if he might make some suggestions. He objected to the phrase the ‘scent of thyme,’ which he said was one of the clichés which the poets of his generation studied to avoid. I replied that they had avoided it so well that it could be used again now without offence, and he withdrew the objection. He asked whether I wrote easily, and I said that this poem was in its sixth draft and would probably be finished in two more. ‘Why!’ he said, ‘I have never in my life taken more than three, or perhaps four, drafts for a poem. I am afraid of it losing its freshness.’ He said that he had been able to sit down and write novels by time-table, but that poetry was always accidental, and perhaps it was for that reason that he prized it more highly.
He spoke disparagingly of his novels, though admitting that there were chapters in them that he had enjoyed writing. We were walking round the garden, and Hardy paused at a spot near the greenhouse. He said that he had once been pruning a tree here when an idea suddenly had come into his head for a story, the best story that he had ever thought of. It came complete with characters, setting, and even some of the dialogue. But as he had no pencil and paper with him, and was anxious to finish pruning the tree before it rained, he had let it go. By the time he sat down to recall it, all was utterly gone. ‘Always carry a pencil and paper,’ he said. He added: ‘Of course, even if I could remember that story now, I couldn’t write it. I am past novel-writing. But I often wonder what it was.’
At dinner that night he grew enthusiastic in praise of cider, which he had drunk since a boy, and which, he said, was the finest medicine he knew. I suggested that in the Message to the American People, which he had been asked to write, he might take the opportunity of recommending cider.
He began complaining of autograph-hunters and their persistence. He disliked leaving letters unanswered, and yet if he did not write these people pestered him the more; he had been upset that morning by a letter from an autograph-fiend which began:
Dear Mr. Hardy,—I am interested to know why the devil you don’t reply to my request ...
He asked me for my advice, and was grateful for the suggestion that a mythical secretary should reply offering his autograph at one or two guineas, the amount to be sent to a hospital (‘Swanage Children’s Hospital,’ put in Hardy), which would forward a receipt.
He said that he regarded professional critics as parasites no less noxious than autograph-hunters, and wished the world rid of them. He also wished that he had not listened to them when he was a young man; on their advice he had cut out dialect-words from his early poems, though they had no exact synonyms to fit the context. And still the critics were plaguing him. One of them recently complained of a poem of his where he had written ‘his shape smalled in the distance.’ Now what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed a little and said that once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and had found it there right enough—only to read on and find that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of early literary influences, and said that he had none at all, for he did not come of literary stock. Then he corrected himself and said that a friend, a fellow-apprentice in the architect’s office where he worked as a young man, used to lend him books. (His taste in literature was certainly most unexpected. Once when Lawrence had ventured to say something disparaging against Homer’s Iliad, he protested: ‘Oh, but I admire the Iliad greatly. Why, it’s in the Marmion class!’ Lawrence could not at first believe that Hardy was not making a little joke.)
We went off the next day, but there was more talk at breakfast before we went. Hardy was at the critics again. He was complaining that they accused him of pessimism. One man had recently singled out as an example of gloom a poem he had written about a woman whose house was burned down on her wedding-night. ‘Of course it is a humorous piece,’ said Hardy, ‘and the man must have been thick-witted not to see that. When I read his criticism I went through my last collection of poems with a pencil, marking them S, N, and C, according as they were sad, neutral or cheerful. I found them as nearly as possible in equal proportions; which nobody could call pessimism.’ In his opinion vers libre could come to nothing in England. ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us.’ About his own poems he said that once they were written he cared very little what happened to them.
He told us of his work during the war, and said that he was glad to have been chairman of the Anti-Profiteering Committee, and to have succeeded in bringing a number of rascally Dorchester tradesmen to book. ‘It made me unpopular, of course,’ he said, ‘but it was a hundred times better than sitting on a military tribunal and sending young men to the war who did not want to go.’
This was the last time we saw Hardy, though we had a standing invitation to come and visit him.
From Dorchester we bicycled to Tiverton in Devonshire, where Nancy’s old nurse kept a fancy-goods shop. Nancy helped her dress the shop-window and advised her about framing the prints that she was selling. She also gave the shop a good turn-out, dusted the stock, and took her turn behind the counter. As a result of Nancy’s work the week’s receipts went up several shillings and continued at the improved figure for a week or two after we were gone. This gave Nancy the idea of starting a shop herself on Boar’s Hill. It was a large residential district with no shop nearer than three miles away. She said that we should buy a second-hand army-hut, stock it with confectionery, groceries, tobacco, hardware, medicines, and all the other things that one finds in a village shop, run it tidily and economically and make our fortune. I undertook to help her while the vacation lasted and became quite excited about the idea myself. She decided to take a neighbour, the Hon. Mrs. Michael Howard, into partnership. Neither Nancy nor Mrs. Howard had any experience of shop-management or commercial book-keeping. But Mrs. Howard undertook to keep the books while Nancy did most of the other work. Nancy was anxious to start the shop six weeks after the original decision, but army huts were not obtainable at any reasonable price (the timber-merchants were in a ring); so it was decided to employ a local carpenter to build a shop to Nancy’s design. A neighbour rented us a corner of his field close to the Masefields’ house. The work was finished in time and the stock bought. The Daily Mirror advertised the opening on its front page with the heading ‘Shop-Keeping on Parnassus,’ and crowds came up from Oxford to look at us. We soon realized that it had either to be a big general shop which made Boar’s Hill more or less independent of Oxford (and of the unsatisfactory system of vans calling at the door and bringing stuff of inferior quality with ‘take it or leave it’) or it had to be a small sweet and tobacco shop making no challenge to the Oxford tradesmen. We decided on the challenge. The building had to be enlarged and two or three hundred pounds’ worth of stock purchased. Mrs. Howard was not able to give much of her time to the work, having children to look after and no nurse; most of it fell on Nancy and myself. I used to serve in the shop several hours of the day while she went round to the big houses for the daily orders. The term had now begun and I was supposed to be attending lectures in Oxford. Another caricature scene: myself, wearing a green-baize apron this time, with flushed face and disordered hair, selling a packet of Bird’s Eye tobacco to the Poet Laureate with one hand and with the other weighing out half a pound of brown sugar for Sir Arthur Evans’ gardener’s wife.
The gross weekly takings were now £60 a week and Nancy, though she had given up her drawing, still had the house and children to consider. We had no car, and constant emergency bicycle-rides had to be made to Oxford to get new stock from the wholesalers; we made a point of always being able to supply whatever was asked for. We engaged a shop-boy to call for orders, but the work was still too heavy. Mrs. Howard went out of partnership and Nancy and I found great difficulty in understanding her accounts. I was fairly good at conventional book-keeping; the keeping of company accounts had been part of my lecture-syllabus when I was instructing cadets. But that did not help me with these, which were on a novel system.
The shop business finally ousted everything, not only Nancy’s painting, but my writing, my university work, and Nancy’s proper supervision of the house and children. We had the custom of every resident of Boar’s Hill but two or three. One of those whom we courted unsuccessfully was Mrs. Masefield. The proximity of the shop to her house did not please her. And her housekeeper, she said, preferred to deal with a provision merchant in Oxford and she could not override this arrangement. However, to show that there was no ill-feeling, she used to come once a week to the shop and buy a tin of Vim and a packet of Lux, for which she paid money down from a cash-box which she carried with her. The moral problems of trade interested me. Nancy and I both found that it was very difficult at this time of fluctuating prices to be really honest; we could not resist the temptation of undercharging the poor villagers of Wootton, who were frequent customers, and recovering our money from the richer residents. Playing at Robin Hood came easily to me. Nobody ever caught us out; it was as easy as shelling peas, the shop-boy said, who also took his turn behind the counter. We found that most people bought tea by price and not by quality. If we happened to be out of the tea selling at ninepence a quarter which Mrs. So-and-so always bought, refusing the eightpenny tea, and Mrs. So-and-so asked for it in a hurry, the only thing to do was to make up a pound of the sevenpenny, which was the same colour as the ninepenny, and charge it at ninepence; the difference would not be noticed. We were sorry for the commercial travellers who came sweating up the hill with their heavy bags of samples, usually on foot, and had to be sent away without any orders. They would pitch a hard-luck tale and often we would relent and get in more stock than we needed. In gratitude they would tell us some of the tricks of the trade, advising us, for instance, never to cut cheese or bacon exactly to weight, but to make it an ounce or two more and overcharge for this extra piece. ‘There’s few can do the sum before you take the stuff off the scales and there’s fewer still who will take the trouble to weigh up again when they get back home.’
The shop lasted six months. Nancy suddenly dismissed the nurse. Nancy had always practised the most up-to-date methods of training and feeding children, and the nurse, over-devoted to the children, had recently disobeyed her instructions. Nancy put the children before everything. She decided that there was nothing to be done but to take them and the house over herself, and to find a manager for the shop. At this point I caught influenza and took a long time to recover from it.
War horror overcame me again. The political situation in Europe seemed to be going from bad to worse. There was already trouble in Ireland, Russia and the Near East. The papers promised new and deadlier poison gases for the next war. There was a rumour that Lord Berkeley’s house on Boar’s Hill was to become an experimental laboratory for making them. I had bad nights. I thought that perhaps I owed it to Nancy to go to a psychiatrist to be cured; yet I was not sure. Somehow I thought that the power of writing poetry, which was more important to me than anything else I did, would disappear if I allowed myself to get cured; my Pier-Glass haunting would end and I would become merely a dull easy writer. It seemed to me less important to be well than to be a good poet. I also had a strong repugnance against allowing anyone to have the power over me that psychiatrists always seemed to win over their patients. I had always refused to allow myself to be hypnotized by anyone in any way.
I decided to see as few people as possible, stop all outside work, and cure myself. I would read the modern psychological books and apply them to my case. I had already learned the rudiments of morbid psychology from talks with Rivers, and from his colleague, Dr. Henry Head, the neurologist, under whose care Robert Nichols had been. I liked Head’s scientific integrity. Once when he was testing a man whom he suspected of homicidal mania he had made some suggestion to him which came within the danger-area of his insanity; the man picked up a heavy knife from his consulting table and rushed threateningly at Head. Head, not at all quick on his legs and dodging round the table, exclaimed: ‘Typical, typical! Capital, capital!’ and, only as an afterthought: ‘Help! Help!’ He had great knowledge of the geography of the brain and the peculiar delusions and maladjustments that followed lesions in the different parts. He told me, at different times, exactly what was wrong with Mr. Jingle in Pickwick Papers, why some otherwise literate people found it impossible to spell, and why some others saw ghosts standing by their bedside. He said about the bedside ghosts: ‘They always come to the same side of the bed, and if you turn the bed round you turn the ghost round with it. They come to the contrary side of the lesion.’
A manager was found for the shop. But as soon as it was known that Nancy and I were no longer behind the counter the weekly receipts immediately began to fall; they were soon down to £20, and still falling steadily. The manager’s salary was more than our profits. Prices were now falling, too, at the rate of about five per cent, every week, so that the stock on our shelves had depreciated greatly in value. And we had let one or two of the Wootton villagers run up bad debts. When we came to reckon things up we realized that it was wisest to cut the losses and sell out. We hoped to recoup our original expenditure and even to be in pocket on the whole transaction by selling the shop and the goodwill to a big firm of Oxford grocers that wished to buy it as a branch establishment. Unfortunately, the site was not ours and the landlord was prevailed upon by an interested neighbour not to let any ordinary business firm take over the shop from us and spoil the local amenities. No other site was available, so there was nothing to do but sell off what stock remained at bankrupt prices to the wholesalers and find a buyer for the building. Unfortunately again, the building was not made in bolted sections, and could not be sold to be put up again elsewhere; its only value was as timber, and in these six months the corner in timber had also been broken and the prices fallen to very little. We recovered twenty pounds of the two hundred that had been spent on it. Nancy and I were so disgusted that we decided to leave Boar’s Hill. We were about five hundred pounds in debt to the wholesalers and others. A lawyer took the whole matter in hand, disposed of our assets for us, and the debt was finally reduced to about three hundred pounds. Nancy’s father sent her a hundred-pound note (in a match-box) as his contribution, and the remainder was unexpectedly contributed by Lawrence. He gave me four chapters of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his history of the Arab revolt, to sell for serial publication in the United States. It was a point of honour with him not to make any money out of the revolt even in the most indirect way; but if it could help a poet in difficulties, there seemed no harm in that.
We gave the Masefields notice that we were leaving the cottage at the end of the June quarter 1921. We had no idea where we were going or what we were going to do. We decided that we must get another cottage somewhere and live very quietly, looking after the children ourselves, and that we must try to make what money we needed by writing and drawing. Nancy, who had taken charge of everything when I was ill, now gave me the task of finding a cottage. It had to be found in about three weeks’ time. I said: ‘But you know that there are no cottages anywhere to be had.’ She said: ‘I know, but we are going to get one.’ I said ironically: ‘Describe it in detail; since there are no cottages we might as well have a no-cottage that we really like.’ She said: ‘Well, it must have six rooms, water in the house, a beamed attic, a walled-in garden, and it must be near the river. It must be in a village with shops and yet a little removed from the village. The village must be five or six miles from Oxford in the opposite direction from Boar’s Hill. The church must have a tower and not a spire. And we can only afford ten shillings a week unfurnished.’ There were other details that I took down about soil, sanitation, windows, stairs and kitchen sinks, and then I went off on my bicycle. I had first laid a ruler across the Oxford ordnance-map and found four or five villages that corresponded in general direction and distance and were on the river. By inquiry I found that two had shops; that, of these two, one had a towered church and the other a spired church. I therefore went to a firm of house-agents in Oxford and said: ‘Have you any cottages to let unfurnished?’ The house-agent laughed politely. So I said: ‘What I want is a cottage at Islip with a walled garden, six rooms, water in the house, just outside the village, with a beamed attic, and rent ten shillings a week.’ The house-agent said: ‘Oh, you mean the World’s End Cottage? But that is for sale, not for renting. It has failed to find a purchaser for two years, and I think that the owner will let it go now at five hundred pounds, which is only half what he originally asked.’ So I went back and next day Nancy came with me; she looked round and said: ‘Yes, this is the cottage all right, but I shall have to cut down those cypress trees and change those window-panes. We’ll move in on quarter-day.’ I said: ‘But the money! We haven’t the money.’ Nancy answered: ‘If we could find the exact house, surely to goodness we can find a mere lump sum of money.’ She was right, for my mother was good enough to buy the cottage and rent it to us at the rate of ten shillings a week.
Islip was a name of good omen to me: it was associated with Abbot Islip, a poor boy of the village who had become Abbot of Westminster and befriended John Skelton when he took sanctuary in the Abbey from the anger of Wolsey. I had come more and more to associate myself with Skelton, discovering a curious affinity. Whenever I wanted a motto for a new 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.