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:
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.