Part 26

The reaction against military discipline between the Armistice and the signing of peace delighted Siegfried and myself. Siegfried had taken a prominent part in the General Election which Lloyd George forced immediately after the Armistice, asking for a warrant for hanging the Kaiser and making a stern peace. He had been supporting Philip Snowden’s candidature on a pacifist platform and had faced a threatening civilian crowd, trusting that his three wound stripes and the mauve and white ribbon of his military cross would give him a privileged hearing. Snowden and Ramsay McDonald were perhaps the two most unpopular men in England at the end of the war. We now half hoped that there would be a general rising of ex-service men against the Coalition Government, but it was not to be. Once back in England the men were content to have a roof over their heads, civilian food, beer that was at least better than French beer, and enough blankets at night. They might find overcrowding in their homes, but this could be nothing to what they had been accustomed to; in France a derelict four-roomed cottage would provide billets for sixty men. They had won the war and they were satisfied. They left the rest to Lloyd George. The only serious outbreak was at Rhyl, where there was a two days’ mutiny of Canadians with much destruction and several deaths. The signal for the outbreak was the cry: ‘Come on, the Bolsheviks.’

When I was well enough to travel, Nancy, I and the baby went up to Harlech, where Nicholson had lent us his house to live in. We were there for a year. I discarded my uniform, having worn nothing else for four and a half years, and looked into my school trunk to see what I had to wear. There was only one suit that was not school uniform and I had grown out of that. I found it difficult to believe that the war was over. When I had last been a civilian I had been still at school, so I had no experience of independent civilian life. The Harlech villagers treated me with the greatest respect. At the Peace Day celebrations in the castle I was asked, as the senior of the officers present who had served overseas, to make a speech about the glorious dead. I have forgotten what I said, but it was in commendation of the Welshman as a fighting man and was loudly cheered. I was still mentally and nervously organized for war; shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight even when Nancy was sharing it with me; strangers in day-time would assume the faces of friends who had been killed. When I was strong enough to climb the hill behind Harlech and revisit my favourite country I found that I could only see it as a prospective battlefield. I would find myself working out tactical problems, planning how I would hold the Northern Artro valley against an attack from the sea, or where I would put a Lewis-gun if I were trying to rush Dolwreiddiog farm from the brow of the hill, and what would be the best position for the rifle-grenade section. I still had the army habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership that I found lying about; also a difficulty in telling the truth—it was always easier for me now when overtaken in any fault to lie my way out. I applied the technique of taking over billets or trenches to a review of my present situation. Food, water supply, possible dangers, communication, sanitation, protection against the weather, fuel and lighting—each item was ticked off as satisfactory. And other loose habits of war-time survived, such as stopping passing motors for a lift, talking without embarrassment to my fellow-travellers in railway carriages, and unbuttoning by the roadside without shame, whoever was about. And I retained the technique of endurance, a brutal persistence in seeing things through, somehow, anyhow, without finesse, satisfied with the main points of any situation. But I modified my language, which had suddenly become foul on the day of Loos and had been foul ever since. The chief difference between war and peace was money. I had never had to worry about that since my first days at Wrexham; I had even put by about £150 of my pay, invested in War Bonds. Neither Nancy nor I knew the value of money and this £150 and my war-bonus of, I think, £250 and a disability pension that I was now drawing of £60 a year, and the occasional money that I got from poetry, seemed a great deal altogether. We engaged a nurse and a general servant and lived as though we had an income of about a thousand a year. Nancy spent much of her time drawing (she was illustrating some poems of mine), and I was busy getting _Country Sentiment_ in order and writing reviews.

I was very thin, very nervous, and had about four years’ loss of sleep to make up. I found that I was suffering from a large sort of intestinal worm which came from drinking bad water in France. I was now waiting until I should be well enough to go to Oxford with the Government educational grant; it seemed the easiest thing to do. I knew that it would be years before I was fit for anything besides a quiet country life. There was no profession that I wished to take up, though for a while I considered school-mastering. My disabilities were many; I could not use a telephone, I was sick every time I travelled in a train, and if I saw more than two new people in a single day it prevented me from sleeping. I was ashamed of myself as a drag on Nancy. I had been much better when I was at Rhyl, but my recent pneumonia had set me back to my condition of 1917.

Siegfried had gone to live at Oxford as soon as he was demobilized, expecting me to join him. But after being there for a term or so he became literary editor of the newly-published _Daily Herald_. He gave me books to review for it. In these days the _Daily Herald_ was not respectable. It was violent. It was anti-militarist. It was the only daily paper that protested against the Versailles Treaty and the blockade of Russia by the British Fleet. The Versailles Treaty shocked me; it seemed to lead certainly to another war and yet nobody cared. When the most critical decisions were being taken at Paris, public interest was concentrated entirely on three home-news items: Hawker’s Atlantic flight and rescue, the marriage of Lady Diana Manners, and a marvellous horse called The Panther, which was the Derby favourite and came in nowhere. The _Herald_ spoilt our breakfast for us every morning. We read in it of unemployment all over the country, due to the closing of munition factories, of ex-service men refused re-instatement in the jobs that they had left in the early stages of the war, of market-rigging, lockouts, and abortive strikes. I began to hear news, too, of my mother’s relatives in Germany and the penury to which they had been reduced, particularly those who were retired officials and whose pension, by the collapse of the mark, was reduced to a few shillings a week. Nancy and I took all this to heart; we now called ourselves socialists.

The attitude of my family was doubtful. I had fought gallantly for my country—indeed I was the only one of my father’s five sons of military age who had seen active service—and was entitled to every consideration because of my shell-shocked condition; but my socialism and sympathy for the Bolsheviks outraged them. I once more forfeited the goodwill of my Uncle Charles. My father tried to talk me over, reminding me that my brother Philip had once been a pro-Boer and a Fenian, but had recovered from his youthful revolutionary idealism and come out all right in the end. Most of the elder members of my family were in the Near East, either married to British officials or British officials themselves. My father hoped that when I was recovered I would go to Egypt, perhaps in the consular service, where the family influence would be of great service to me, and there get over my revolutionary idealism. Socialism with Nancy was rather a means to a single end. The most important thing to her was judicial equality of the sexes; she held that all the wrong in the world was caused by male domination and narrowness. She refused to see my experiences in the war as in any way comparable with the sufferings that millions of married women of the working-class went through. This at least had the effect of putting the war into the background for me; I was devoted to Nancy and respected her views in so far as they were impersonal. Male stupidity and callousness became an obsession with her and she found it difficult not to include me in her universal condemnation of men. It came to the point later when she could not bear a newspaper in the house. She was afraid of coming across something that would horrify her, some paragraph about the necessity of keeping up the population, or about women’s intelligence, or about the modern girl, or anything at all about women written by clergymen. We became members of the newly formed Constructive Birth Control Society and distributed its literature among the village women, to the scandal of my family.

It was a great grief to my parents that Jenny was not baptized. My father wrote to Nancy’s godfather, who also happened to be my publisher, asking him to use his influence with Nancy, for whose religion he had promised at the font to be responsible, to make her give the child Christian baptism. They were scandalized too that Nancy, finding that it was legal to keep her own name for all purposes, refused to allow herself to be called Mrs. Graves in any circumstances. At first I had been doubtful about this, thinking that perhaps it was not worth the trouble and suspicion that it caused; but when I saw that Nancy was now treated as being without personal validity I was converted. At that time there was no equal guardianship and the children were the sole property of the father; the mother was not legally a parent. We worked it out later that our children were to be thought of as solely hers, but that since I looked after them so much the boys should take the name of Graves—the girls taking Nicholson. This of course has always baffled my parents. Nor could they understand then the intimacy of our relations with the nurse and the maid. They were both women to whom we had given a job because they were in bad luck. One of them was a girl who had had a child during the war by a soldier to whom she was engaged, who got killed in France shortly afterwards. Generosity to a woman like this was Christian, but intimacy seemed merely eccentric.

XXVII

In October 1919 I went up to Oxford at last. The lease of the Harlech house was ended and Nicholson gave us the furniture to take with us. The city was overcrowded; the lodging-house keepers, some of whom had nearly starved during the war, now had their rooms booked up terms ahead and charged accordingly. Keble College had put up army huts for its surplus students. There was not an unfurnished house to be had anywhere within the three-mile radius. I solved the difficulty by getting permission from my college authorities to live five miles out, on Boar’s Hill; I pleaded my lungs. John Masefield, who liked my poetry, offered to rent us a cottage at the bottom of his garden.

The University was very quiet. The returned soldiers had little temptation to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and races with the bulldogs as before the war. The boys straight from the public schools were quiet too. They had had the war preached at them continually for four years, had been told that they must carry on loyally at home while their brothers were serving in the trenches, and must make themselves worthy of such sacrifices. The boys had been leaving for the cadet-battalions at the age of seventeen, so that the masters had it all their own way; trouble at public schools nearly always comes from the eighteen-year-olds. G. N. Clarke, a history don at Oriel, who had been up at Oxford just before the war and had meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany, told me: ‘I can’t make out my pupils at all. They are all “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and they scribble away in their notebooks like lunatics. I can’t remember a single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-war days.’ The ex-service men—they included scores of captains, majors, colonels, and even a one-armed twenty-five-year-old brigadier—though not rowdy, were insistent on their rights. At St. John’s they formed what they called a Soviet, demanding an entire revision of the college catering system; they won their point and an undergraduate representative was chosen to sit on the kitchen-committee. The elder dons whom I had often seen during the war trembling in fear of an invasion of Oxford, with the sacking and firing of the colleges and the rape of the Woodstock and Banbury Roads, and who had regarded all soldiers, myself included, as their noble saviours, now recovered their pre-war self-possession. I was amused at the difference in manner to me that some of them showed. My moral tutor, however, though he no longer saluted me when we met, remained a friend; he prevailed on the college to allow me to change my course from Classics to English Language and Literature and to take up my £60 Classical Exhibition notwithstanding. I was glad now that it was an exhibition, though in 1913 I had been disappointed that it was not a scholarship: college regulations permitted exhibitioners to be married, scholars had to remain single.

I used to bicycle down from Boar’s Hill every morning to my lectures. On the way down I would collect Edmund Blunden, who was attending the same course. He too had permission to live on the hill, on account of gassed lungs. I had been in correspondence with Edmund some time before he came to Oxford. Siegfried, when literary editor of the _Herald_, had been among the first to recognize him as a poet, and now I was helping him get his _Waggoner_ through the press. Edmund had war-shock as badly as myself, and we would talk each other into an almost hysterical state about the trenches. We agreed that we would not be right until we got all that talk on to paper. He was first with _Undertones of War_, published in 1928.

Edmund and Mary his wife rented two rooms of a cottage belonging to Mrs. Delilah Becker, locally known as the Jubilee Murderess. She was a fine-looking old lady and used to read her prayer-book and Bible aloud to herself every night, sitting at the open window. The prayer-book was out of date: she used to pray for the Prince Consort and Adelaide, the Queen Dowager. She was said to have murdered her husband. In Jubilee year she had gone away for a holiday, leaving her husband in the cottage with a half-witted servant-girl. News came to her that he had got the servant-girl into trouble. She wrote to him: ‘Dear husband, if I find you in my cottage when I come back you shall be no more.’ He did not believe her and she found him in the cottage, and sure enough he was no more. She told the police that he had gone away when he saw how angry with him she was; but no one had seen him go. He had even left his silver watch behind, ticking on a nail on the bedroom wall. The neighbours swore that she had buried him in the garden. Mary Blunden said that it was more probable that he was buried somewhere in their part of the cottage, which was semi-detached. ‘There’s an awfully funny smell about here sometimes,’ she said. Old Delilah said to Mary once: ‘I have often wondered what has happened to the old pepper-and-salt suit he had on when he was—when he went away.’ Whenever she went out she took the carving-knife out of the drawer and laid it on the kitchen-table, where it could be seen by them when they went past her window. I liked Delilah very much and sent her a pound of tea every year until her death. Her comment on life in general was: ‘Fair play’s good sport, and we’re all mortal worms.’ She also used to say: ‘While there’s wind and water a man’s all right.’

I found the English Literature course tedious, especially eighteenth-century poets. My tutor, Mr. Percy Simpson, the editor of Ben Jonson’s plays, sympathized. He said that he had once suffered for his preference for the Romantic revivalists. He had been beaten by his schoolmaster for having a Shelley in his possession. He had protested between the blows: ‘Shelley is beautiful! Shelley is beautiful!’ But he warned me that I must on no account disparage the eighteenth century when I sat for my final examination. It was also difficult for me, too, to concentrate on cases and genders and irregular verbs in Anglo-Saxon grammar. The Anglo-Saxon lecturer was candid about his subject. He said that it was of purely linguistic interest, that there was hardly a line of Anglo-Saxon extant of the slightest literary merit. I disagreed; _Beowulf_ and _Judith_ seemed good poems to me. Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a _promenade_ to Holofernes’s staff-tent; and _Brunanburgh_ with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting—all this was closer to most of us at the time than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere of the eighteenth century. Edmund and I found ourselves translating everything into trench-warfare terms. The war was not yet over for us. In the middle of a lecture I would have a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Béthune-La Bassée road; the men would be singing and French children would be running along beside them, calling out: ‘Tommee, Tommee, give me bullee beef’; and I would smell the stench of the knacker’s yard just outside the town. Or I would be in Laventie High Street, passing a company billet; an N.C.O. would roar out, ‘Party, ’shun!’ and the Second Battalion men in shorts, with brown knees and brown expressionless faces, would spring to their feet from the broken steps where they were sitting. Or I would be in a barn with my first platoon of the Welsh Regiment, watching them play nap by the light of dirty candle stumps. Or it would be a deep dug-out at Cambrin, where I was talking to a signaller; I would look up the shaft and see somebody’s muddy legs coming down the steps, and there would be a crash and the tobacco-smoke in the dug-out would shake with the concussion and twist about in patterns like the marbling on books. These day-dreams persisted like an alternate life. Indeed they did not leave me until well on in 1928. I noticed that the scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; it seemed as though the emotion-recording apparatus had failed after Loos.

The eighteenth century was unpopular because it was French. Anti-French feeling among most ex-soldiers amounted almost to an obsession. Edmund, shaking with nerves, used to say at this time: ‘No more wars for me at any price. Except against the French. If there’s ever a war with them I’ll go like a shot.’ Pro-German feeling was increasing. Now that the war was over and the German armies had been beaten, it was possible to give the German soldier credit for being the best fighting-man in Europe. I often heard it said that it was only the blockade that had beaten them; that in Haig’s last push they never really broke, and that their machine-gun sections had held us up for as long as was needed to cover the withdrawal of the main forces. And even that we had been fighting on the wrong side; our natural enemies were the French.

At the end of my first term’s work I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed and said a little stiffly: ‘I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays that you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others.’

There were a number of poets living on Boar’s Hill; too many, Edmund and I agreed. It had become almost a tourist centre. There was the Poet Laureate, with his bright eye, abrupt challenging manner, a flower in his buttonhole; he was one of the first men of letters to sign the Oxford recantation of war-time hatred against the Germans—indeed it was for the most part written by him. There was Gilbert Murray, too, gentle-voiced and with the spiritual look of the strict vegetarian, doing preliminary propaganda work for the League of Nations. Once, while I was sitting talking to him in his study about Aristotle’s _Poetics_, and he was walking up and down the room, I suddenly asked him: ‘Exactly what is the principle of that walk of yours? Are you trying to avoid the flowers on the rug or are you trying to keep to the squares?’ I had compulsion-neuroses of this sort myself so it was easy to notice one in him. He wheeled round sharply: ‘You’re the first person who has caught me out,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not the flowers or the squares; it’s a habit that I have got into of doing things in sevens. I take seven steps, you see, then I change direction and go another seven steps, than I turn round. I asked Browne, the professor of Psychology, about it the other day, but he assured me it wasn’t a dangerous habit. He said: “When you find it getting into multiples of seven, come to me again.”’

I saw most of John Masefield, a nervous, generous person, very sensitive to criticism, who seemed to have suffered greatly in the war, when an orderly in a Red Cross unit; he was now working at _Reynard the Fox_. He wrote in a hut in his garden surrounded by tall gorse-bushes and only appeared at meal-times. In the evening he used to read his day’s work over to Mrs. Masefield and they would correct it together. Masefield was at the height of his reputation at the time, and there was a constant flow of American visitors to his door. Mrs. Masefield protected Jan. She was from the North of Ireland, a careful manager, and put a necessary brake on Jan’s generosity and sociability. We admired the way that she stood up for her rights where less resolute people would have shrunk back. The tale of Mrs. Masefield and the rabbit. Some neighbours of ours had a particularly stupid Airedale; they were taking it for a walk past the Masefields’ house when a wild rabbit ran across the road from the Masefields’ gorse plantation. The Airedale dashed at it and missed as usual. The rabbit, not giving it sufficient credit for stupidity and slowness, doubled back; but found the dog had not yet recovered from its mistake and ran right into its jaws. The dog’s owners were delighted at the brilliance performance of their pet, recovered the rabbit, which was a small and inexperienced one, and took it home for the pot. Mrs. Masefield had seen the business through the plantation fence. It was not, strictly, a public road and the rabbit was, therefore, legally hers. That evening there came a knock at the door. ‘Come in, oh, do come in, Mrs. Masefield.’ It was Mrs. Masefield coming for the skin of her rabbit. Rabbit-skins were worth a lot in 1920. Mrs. Masefield’s one extravagance was bridge; she used to play at a halfpenny a hundred, to steady her play, she told us. She kept goats which used to be tethered near our cottage and which bleated. She was a good landlord to us, and advised Nancy to keep up with me intellectually if she wished to hold my affections.