IV

My mother took us abroad to stay at my grandfather’s house in Germany

five times between my second and twelfth year. After this he died

and we never went again. He had a big old manor-house ten miles from

Munich; it was called ‘Laufzorn,’ which means ‘Begone, care!’ Our

summers there were easily the best things of my early childhood. Pine

forests and hot sun, red deer and black and red squirrels, acres of

blue-berries and wild strawberries; nine or ten different kinds of

edible mushrooms that we went into the forest to pick, and unfamiliar

flowers in the fields—Munich is high up and there are outcrops of

Alpine flowers here and there—and the farm with all the usual animals

except sheep, and drives through the countryside in a brake behind my

grandfather’s greys. And bathing in the Iser under a waterfall; the

Iser was bright green and said to be the fastest river in Europe. We

used to visit the uncles who had a peacock farm a few miles away, and

a granduncle, Johannes von Ranke, the ethnologist, who lived on the

lakeshore of Tegensee, where every one had buttercup-blonde hair. And

occasionally my Aunt Agnes, Baronin von Aufsess, who lived some hours

away by train, high up in the Bavarian Alps, in Aufsess Castle.

This castle was a wonder; it was built in the ninth century and had

been in the von Aufsess family ever since. The original building was

a keep with only a ladder-entrance half-way up. A medieval castle had

been added. Aufsess was so remote that it had never been sacked, and

its treasures of plate and armour were amazing. Each baron added to the

treasure and none took away. My Uncle Siegfried was the heir. He showed

us children the chapel with its walls hung with enamelled shields

of each Aufsess baron, impaled with the arms of the family into which

he married. These families were always noble. He pointed to a stone

in the floor which pulled up by a ring and said: ‘That is the family

vault where all we Aufsesses go when we die. I’ll go there one day.’ He

scowled comically. (But he was killed in the war as an officer of the

Imperial German Staff and I believe that they never found his body.) He

had a peculiar sense of humour. One day we children found him on the

pebbled garden path, eating the pebbles. He told us to go away, but, of

course, we would not. We sat down and tried to eat pebbles too. He told

us very seriously that eating pebbles was not a thing for children to

do; we should break our teeth. We agreed after trying one or two; so

to get rid of us he found us each a pebble which looked just like all

the other pebbles, but which crushed easily and had a chocolate centre.

But this was only on condition that we went away and left him to his

picking and crunching. When we came back later in the day we searched

and searched, but only found the ordinary hard pebbles. He never once

let us down in a joke.

Among the treasures of the castle were a baby’s lace cap that had

taken two years to make, and a wine glass that my uncle’s old father,

the reigning baron, had found in the Franco-Prussian War standing

upright in the middle of the square in an entirely ruined village. For

dinner when we were there we had enormous trout. My father, who was a

fisherman, was astonished and asked the baron how they came to be that

size. The baron said that there was an underground river that welled up

close to the castle and the fish that came out with it were quite white

from the darkness, of enormous size and stone-blind. They also gave us

jam, made of wild roseberries, which they called ‘Hetchi-Petch.’

The most remarkable thing in the castle was an iron chest in a small

thick-walled white-washed room at the top of the keep. It was a huge

chest, twice the size of the door, and had obviously been made inside

the room—there were no windows but arrow-slits. It had two keys.

I could not say what its date was, but I recall it as twelfth or

thirteenth century work. There was a tradition that it should never be

opened unless the castle were in the most extreme danger. One key was

held by the baron and one by the steward; I believe the stewardship

was a hereditary office. The chest could only be opened by using both

keys, and nobody knew what was inside; it was even considered unlucky

to speculate. Of course we speculated. It might be gold, more likely it

was a store of corn in sealed jars, or even some sort of weapon—Greek

fire, perhaps. From what I know of the Aufsesses and their stewards, it

is inconceivable that the chest ever got the better of their curiosity.

The castle ghost was that of a former baron known as the Red Knight;

his terrifying portrait hung half-way up the turret staircase that took

us to our bedrooms. We slept for the first time in our lives on feather

beds.

Laufzorn, which my grandfather had bought and restored from a ruinous

state, had nothing to compare with the Aufsess tradition, though it had

for a time been a shooting-lodge of the kings of Bavaria. Still, there

were two ghosts that went with the place; the farm labourers used to

see them frequently. One of them was a carriage which drove furiously

along without any horses, and before the days of motor-cars this was

frightening enough. And the banqueting hall was magnificent. I have

not been there since I was a child, so it is impossible for me to

recall its true dimensions. It seemed as big as a cathedral, and its

bare boards were only furnished at the four corners with little islands

of tables and chairs. The windows were of stained glass, and there were

swallows’ nests all along where the walls joined the ceiling. Roundels

of coloured light from the stained-glass windows, the many-tined

stags’ heads (that my grandfather had shot) mounted on the wall,

swallow-droppings on the floor under the nests and a little harmonium

in one corner where we sang German songs; these concentrate my memories

of Laufzorn. It was in three divisions. The bottom storey was part of

the farm. A carriage-drive went right through it, and there was also

a wide, covered courtyard—originally these had served for driving the

cattle to safety in times of baronial feud. On one side of the drive

was the estate steward’s quarters, on the other the farm servants’ inn

and kitchen. In the middle storey lived my grandfather and his family.

The top storey was a store-place for corn and apples and other farm

produce. It was up here that my cousin Wilhelm, who was killed in an

air-fight during the war, used to lie for hours shooting mice with an

air-gun. (I learned that he was shot down by a schoolfellow of mine.)

The best part of Germany was the food. There was a richness and

spiciness about it that we missed in England. We liked the rye

bread, the black honey (black, I believe, because it came from the

combs of the previous year), the huge ice-cream puddings made with

fresh raspberry juice, and the venison, and the honey cakes, and the

pastries, and particularly the sauces made with different sorts of

mushrooms. And the bretzels, and carrots cooked with sugar, and summer

pudding of cranberries and blue-berries. There was an orchard close to

the house, and we could eat as many apples, pears, and greengages

as we liked. There were rows of blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes. The

estate, in spite of the recency of my grandfather’s tenure, and his

liberalism and experiments in modern agricultural methods, was still

feudalistic. The farm servants, because they talked a dialect that

we could not understand and because they were Catholics and poor and

sweaty and savage-looking, frightened us. They were lower even than the

servants at home; and as for the colony of Italians settled about half

a mile from the house, imported from Italy by my grandfather as cheap

labour for his brick-making factory, we associated them in our minds

with the ‘gypsies in the wood’ of the song. My grandfather took us over

the factory one day; he made me taste a lump of Italian _polenta_. My

mother told us afterwards (when a milk pudding at Wimbledon came to

table burnt and we complained about it), ‘Those poor Italians at the

factory used to burn their _polenta_ on purpose sometimes just for a

change of flavour.’

There were other unusual things at Laufzorn. There was a large pond

full of carp; it was netted every three or four years. The last year

we were there we were allowed to help. It was good to see the net

pulled closer and closer to the shallow landing corner. It bulged with

wriggling carp, and a big pike was threshing about among them. I was

allowed to wade in to help, and came out with six leeches, like black

rubber tubes, fastened to my legs; salt had to be put on them to make

them leave go. I do not remember that it hurt much. The farm labourers

were excited, and one of them, called The Jackal, gutted a fish with

his thumbs and ate it raw. And there was the truck line between the

railway station, two miles away, and the brick-yard. There was a fall

of perhaps one in a hundred from the factory to the station. The

Italians used to load up the trucks with bricks, and a squad of them

would give the trucks a hard push and run along the track pushing for

about twenty or thirty yards; and then the trucks used to sail off

all by themselves to the station. There was a big hay-barn where we

were allowed to climb up on the rafters and jump down into the springy

hay; we gradually increased the height of the jumps. It was exciting

to feel our insides left behind us in the air. Then the cellar, not

the ordinary beer cellar, but another that you went down into from the

courtyard. It was quite dark there except for a little slit-window; and

there was a heap of potatoes on the floor. To get to the light they had

put out long white feelers—a twisted mass. In one corner there was a

dark hole closed by a gate: it was a secret passage out of the house to

a ruined monastery, a mile or two away. My uncles had once been down

some way, but the air got bad and they had to come back. The gate had

been put up to prevent anyone else trying it and being overcome.

When we drove out with my grandfather he was acclaimed by the principal

personages of every village we went through. At each village there

was a big inn with a rumbling skittle-alley and always a tall Maypole

banded like a barber’s pole with blue and white, the Bavarian national

colours. The roads were lined with fruit trees. The idea of these

unguarded public fruit trees astonished us. We could not understand

why there was any fruit left on them. Even the horse-chestnut trees on

Wimbledon Common were pelted with sticks and stones, long before the

chestnuts were ripe and in defiance of an energetic common keeper. The

only things that we could not quite get accustomed to in Bavaria were

the wayside crucifixes with the realistic blood and wounds, and

the _ex-voto_ pictures, like sign-boards, of naked souls in purgatory,

grinning with anguish in the middle of high red and yellow flames. We

had been taught to believe in hell, but did not like to be reminded of

it. Munich we found sinister—disgusting fumes of beer and cigar smoke

and intense sounds of eating, the hotly dressed, enormously stout

population in the trams and trains, the ferocious officials, the wanton

crowds at the art shops and picture galleries. Then there was the

Morgue. We were not allowed inside because we were children, but it was

bad enough to be told about it. Any notable who died was taken to the

Morgue and put in a chair, sitting in state for a day or two, and if he

was a general he had his uniform on, or if she was a burgomaster’s wife

she had on her silks and jewels; and strings were tied to their fingers

and the slightest movement of one of the strings would ring a great

bell, in case there was any life left in the corpse after all. I have

never verified the truth of all this, but it was true enough to me.

When my grandfather died about a year after our last visit I thought

of him there in the Morgue with his bushy white hair, and his morning

coat and striped trousers and his decorations and his stethoscope, and

perhaps, I thought, his silk hat, gloves, and cane on a table beside

the chair. Trying, in a nightmare, to be alive but knowing himself dead.

The headmaster who caned me on the hand was a lover of German culture,

and impressed this feeling on the school, so that it was to my credit

that I could speak German and had been to Germany. At my other

preparatory schools this German connection was regarded as something

at least excusable and perhaps even interesting. It was not until I

went to Charterhouse that I was made to see it as a social offence. My

history from the age of fourteen, when I went to Charterhouse, to

just before the end of the war, when I began to realize things better,

was a forced rejection of the German in me. In all that first period I

used to insist indignantly that I was Irish and deliberately cultivate

Irish sentiment. I took my self-protective stand on the technical point

that it was the father’s nationality that counted. Of course I also

accepted the whole patriarchal system of things. It is difficult now

to recall how completely I believed in the natural supremacy of male

over female. I never heard it even questioned until I met Nancy, when I

was about twenty-two, towards the end of the war. The surprising sense

of ease that I got from her frank statement of equality between the

sexes was among my chief reasons for liking her. My mother had always

taken the ‘love, honour, and obey’ contract literally; my sisters

were brought up to wish themselves boys, to be shocked at the idea of

woman’s suffrage, and not to expect as expensive an education as their

brothers. The final decision in any domestic matter always rested with

my father. My mother would say: ‘If two ride together one must ride

behind.’ Nancy’s crude summary, ‘God is a man, so it must be all rot,’

took a load off my shoulders.

We children did not talk German well; our genders and minor parts of

speech were shaky, and we never learned to read Gothic characters

or script. Yet we had the feel of German so strongly that I would

say now that I know German far better than French, though I can read

French almost as fast as I can read English and can only read a German

book very painfully and slowly, with the help of a dictionary. I use

different parts of my mind for the two languages. French is a surface

acquirement and I could forget it quite easily if I had no reason to

use it every now and then.

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.’