V
I spent a good part of my early life at Wimbledon. My mother and father did not get rid of the house, a big one near the Common, until some time about the end of the war; yet of all the time I spent in it I can recall little or nothing of significance. But after the age of eleven or twelve I was away at school, and in the spring and summer holidays we were all in the country, so that I was only at Wimbledon in the Christmas holidays and for a day or two at the beginning and end of the other holidays. London was only a half-hour away and yet we seldom went there. My mother and father never took us to the theatre, not even to pantomimes, and until the middle of the war I had only been to the theatre twice in my life, and then only to children’s plays, taken by an aunt. My mother wished to bring us up to be serious and to benefit humanity in some practical way. She allowed us no hint of its dirtiness and intrigue and lustfulness, believing that innocence was the surest protection against them. Our reading was carefully censored by her. I was destined to be ‘if not a great man at least a good man.’ Our treats were educational or æsthetic, to Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, the Zoo, the British Museum, or the Natural History Museum. I remember my mother, in the treasure room at the British Museum, telling us with shining eyes that all these treasures were ours. We looked at her astonished. She said: ‘Yes, they belong to us as members of the public. We can look at them, admire them, and study them for as long as we like. If we had them back at home we couldn’t do more.’
We read more books than most children do. There must have been four or five thousand books in the house. They consisted of an old-fashioned scholar’s library bequeathed to my father by my namesake, whom I have mentioned as a friend of Wordsworth, but who had a far more tender friendship with Felicia Hemans; to this was added my father’s own collection of books, mostly poetry, with a particular cupboard for Anglo-Irish literature; devotional works contributed by my mother; educational books sent to my father by their publishers in the hope that he would recommend them for use in Government schools; and novels and adventure books brought into the house by my elder brothers and sisters.
My mother used to tell us stories about inventors and doctors who gave their lives for the suffering, and poor boys who struggled to the top of the tree, and saintly men who made examples of themselves. There was also the parable of the king who had a very beautiful garden which he threw open to the public. Two students entered; and one, who was the person of whom my mother spoke with a slight sneer in her voice, noticed occasional weeds even in the tulip-beds, but the other, and there she brightened up, found beautiful flowers growing even on rubbish heaps. She kept off the subject of war as much as possible; she always had difficulty in explaining to us how it was that God permitted wars. The Boer War clouded my early childhood; Philip, my eldest brother (who also called himself a Fenian), was a pro-Boer and there was great tension at the breakfast-table between him and my father, whose political views were always orthodox.
The sale of the Wimbledon house solved a good many problems; it was getting too full. My mother hated throwing away anything that could possibly, in the most remote contingency, be of any service to anyone. The medicine cupboard was perhaps the most significant corner of the house. Nobody could say that it was untidy, exactly; all the bottles had stoppers, but they were so crowded together that it was impossible for anybody except my mother, who had a long memory, to know what was at the back. Every few years, no doubt, she went through this cupboard. If there was any doubtful bottle she would tentatively re-label it. ‘This must be Alfred’s old bunion salve,’ and another, ‘Strychnine—query?’ Even special medicines prescribed for scarlet-fever or whooping-cough were kept, in case of re-infection. She was always an energetic labeller. She wrote in one of my school prizes: ‘Robert Ranke Graves won this book as a prize for being first in his class in the term’s work and second in examinations. He also won a special prize for divinity, though the youngest boy in the class. Written by his affectionate mother, Amy Graves. Summer, 1908.’ Home-made jam used always to arrive at table well labelled; one small pot read: ‘Gooseberry, lemon and rhubarb—a little shop gooseberry added—Nelly re-boiled.’
In a recent book, Mrs. Fisher, I moralized on three sayings and a favourite story of my mother’s. I ascribed them there for the argument’s sake to my Danish grandmother. They were these:
‘Children, I command you, as your mother, never to swing objects around in your hands. The King of Hanover put out his eye by swinging a bead purse.’
‘Children, I command you, as your mother, to be careful when you carry your candles up to bed. The candle is a little cup of grease.’
‘There was a man once, a Frenchman, who died of grief because he could never become a mother.’
And the story told in candlelight:
‘There was once a peasant family living in Schleswig-Holstein, where they all have crooked mouths, and one night they wished to blow out the candle. The father’s mouth was twisted to the left, so! and he tried to blow out the candle, so! but he was too proud to stand anywhere but directly before the candle, and he puffed and he puffed, but could not blow the candle out. And then the mother tried, but her mouth was twisted to the right, so! and she tried to blow, so! and she was too proud to stand anywhere but directly before the candle, and she puffed and puffed, but could not blow the candle out. Then there was the brother with mouth twisted outward, so! and the sister with the mouth twisted downward, so! and they tried each in their turn, so! and so! and the idiot baby with his mouth twisted in an eternal grin tried, so! And at last the maid, a beautiful girl from Copenhagen with a perfectly formed mouth, put it out with her shoe. So! Flap!’
These quotations make it clear how much more I owe, as a writer, to my mother than to my father. She also taught me to ‘speak the truth and shame the devil!’ Her favourite biblical exhortation was ‘My son, whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.’
I always felt that Wimbledon was a wrong place, neither town nor country. It was at its worst on Wednesdays, my mother’s ‘At Home’ day. Tea was in the drawing-room. We were called down in our Sunday clothes to eat cakes, be kissed, and be polite. My sisters were made to recite. Around Christmas, celebrated in the German style, came a dozen or so children’s parties; we used to make ourselves sick with excitement. I do not like thinking of Wimbledon. Every spring and summer after my third year, unless we happened to go to Germany, or to France as we did once, we went to Harlech in North Wales. My mother had built a house there.
In the days before motor traffic began around the North Welsh coast, Harlech was a very quiet place and little known, even as a golf centre. It was in three parts. First, the village itself, five hundred feet up on a steep range of hills; it had granite houses with slate roofs and ugly windows and gables, chapels of seven or eight different denominations, enough shops to make it the shopping centre of the smaller villages around, and the castle, a favourite playground of ours. Then there was the Morfa, a flat plain from which the sea had receded; part of this was the golf links, but to the north was a stretch of wild country which we used to visit in the spring in search of plovers’ eggs. The sea was beyond the links—good hard sand stretching for miles, safe bathing, and sandhills for hide and seek.
The third part of Harlech, which became the most important to us, was never visited by golfers or the few other summer visitors or by the village people themselves; this was the desolate rocky hill-country at the back of the village. As we grew older we spent more and more of our time up there and less and less on the beach and the links, which were the most obvious attractions of the place. There were occasional farms, or rather crofts, in these hills, but one could easily walk fifteen or twenty miles without crossing a road or passing close to a farm. Originally we went up there with some practical excuse. For the blue-berries on the hills near Maesygarnedd; or for the cranberries at Gwlawllyn; or to find bits of Roman hypocaust tiling (with the potter’s thumb-marks still on them) in the ruined Roman villas by Castell Tomenymur; or for globe-flowers in the upper Artro; or to catch a sight of the wild goats that lived at the back of Rhinog Fawr, the biggest of the hills of the next range; or to get raspberries from the thickets near Cwmbychan Lake; or to find white heather on a hill that we did not know the name of away to the north of the Roman Steps. But after a time we walked about those hills simply because they were good to walk about on. They had a penny plain quality about them that was even better that the twopence coloured quality of the Bavarian Alps. My best friend at the time was my sister Rosaleen, who was one year older than myself.
I suppose what I liked about this country (and I know no country like it) was its independence of formal nature. The passage of the seasons was hardly noticed there; the wind always seemed to be blowing and the grass always seemed to be withered and the small streams were always cold and clear, running over black stones. Sheep were the only animals about, but they were not nature, except in the lambing season; they were too close to the granite boulders covered with grey lichen that lay about everywhere. There were few trees except a few nut bushes, rowans, stunted oaks and thorn bushes in the valleys. The winters were always mild, so that last year’s bracken and last year’s heather lasted in a faded way through to the next spring. There were almost no birds except an occasional buzzard and curlews crying in the distance; and wherever we went we felt that the rocky skeleton of the hill was only an inch or two under the turf. Once, when I came home on leave from the war, I spent about a week of my ten days walking about on these hills to restore my sanity. I tried to do the same after I was wounded, but by that time the immediate horror of death was too strong for the indifference of the hills to relieve it.
I am glad that it was Wales and not Ireland. We never went to Ireland, except once when I was an infant in arms. We had no Welsh blood in us and did not like the Harlech villagers much. We had no temptation to learn Welsh or to pretend ourselves Welsh. We knew that country as a quite ungeographical region; any stray sheep-farmers that we met who belonged to the place we resented somehow as intruders on our privacy. Clarissa, Rosaleen and I were once out on the remotest hills and had not seen a soul all day. At last we came to a waterfall and two trout lying on the bank beside it; ten yards away was the fisherman. He was disentangling his line from a thorn-bush and had not seen us. So we crept up quietly to the fish and put a sprig of white bell-heather (which we had found that afternoon) in the mouth of each. We hurried back to cover, and I said: ‘Shall we watch?’ but Clarissa said: ‘No, don’t spoil it.’ So we came home and never spoke of it again even to each other: and never knew the sequel.... If it had been Ireland we would have self-consciously learned Irish and the local legends. Instead we came to know the country more purely, as a place whose history was too old for local legends; when we were up walking there we made our own. We decided who was buried under the Standing Stone and who had lived in the ruined round-hut encampment and in the caves of the valley where the big rowans were. On our visits to Germany I had felt a sense of home in my blood in a natural human way, but on the hills behind Harlech I found a personal harmony independent of history or geography. The first poem I wrote as myself concerned that hill-country. (The first poem I wrote as a Graves was a free translation of a satire by Catullus).
My father was always too busy and absent-minded to worry much about us children; my mother did worry. Yet she allowed us to go off immediately after breakfast into the hills and did not complain much when we came back long after supper-time. Though she had a terror of heights herself she never restrained us from climbing about in dangerous places; so we never got hurt. I had a bad head for heights and trained myself deliberately and painfully to overcome it. We used to go climbing in the turrets and towers of Harlech Castle. I have worked hard on myself in defining and dispersing terrors. The simple fear of heights was the most obvious to overcome. There was a quarry-face in the garden of our Harlech house. It provided one or two easy climbs, but gradually I invented more and more difficult ones for myself. After each new success I had to lie down, shaking with nervousness, in the safe meadow grass at the top. Once I lost my foothold on a ledge and should have been killed; but it seemed as though I improvised a foothold in the air and kicked myself up to safety from it. When I examined the place afterwards it was almost as if the Devil had given me what he had offered Christ in the Temptation, the freedom to cast myself down from the rock and be restored to safety by the angels. Yet such events are not uncommon in mountain climbing. George Mallory, for instance, did an inexplicable climb on Snowdon once. He had left his pipe on a ledge half-way down one of the precipices and scrambled back by a short cut to retrieve it, then up again by the same way. No one saw just how he did the climb, but when they came to examine it the next day for official record, they found that it was an impossible overhang nearly all the way. The rule of the Climbers’ Club was that climbs should not be called after their inventors, but after natural features. An exception was made in this case; the climb was recorded something like this: ‘Mallory’s Pipe, a variation on Route 2; see adjoining map. This climb is totally impossible. It has been performed once, in failing light, by Mr. G. H. L. Mallory.’