Part 29

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.