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.
Another poet on Boar’s Hill was Robert Nichols, still another
neurasthenic ex-soldier, with his flame-opal ring, his wide-brimmed
hat, his flapping arms and ‘mournful grandeur’ in repose (the phrase is
from a review by Sir Edmund Gosse). Nichols served only three weeks in
France, in the gunners, and was in no show; but he was highly strung
and the three weeks affected him more than twelve months affected
some people. He was invalided out of the army and went to lecture in
America for the Ministry of Information on British war-poets. He read
Siegfried’s and my poetry, and apparently gave some account of us. A
legend was started of Siegfried, Robert and myself as the new Three
Musketeers. Not only was Robert not in the Royal Welch Fusiliers with
Siegfried and myself, but the three of us have never been together in
the same room in our lives.
[Illustration: 1929 THE SECOND BATTALION, THE ROYAL WELCH FUSILIERS]
That winter George and Ruth Mallory invited Nancy and myself to go
climbing with them. But Nancy could not stand heights and was having
another baby; and, for myself, I realized that my climbing days were
over. My nerves were bad, though possibly still good enough for an
emergency, and beyond improvement. I was, however, drawn into one
foolhardy experience at this time. Nancy and I were visiting my parents
at Harlech. My two younger brothers were at the house. They played
golf and mixed with local society. One evening they arranged a four at
bridge with a young ex-airman and a Canadian colonel who was living
in a house on the plain between Harlech Castle and the sea. The elder
of my brothers got toothache; I said that I would take his place. The
younger, still at Charterhouse, demurred. He was rather ashamed of
me now as a non-golfer, a socialist, and not quite a gentleman.
And my bridge might discredit him. I insisted, because at that time
Canadian colonels interested me, and he made the best of it. I assured
him that I would try not to wound his feelings. The colonel was about
forty-five—tough, nervous, whisky-drinking, a killer. He was out of
sorts; he said that his missus was upstairs with a headache and could
not come down. We played three or four rubbers; I was playing steadily
and not disgracing my brother. The colonel was drinking, the airman
was competing. Finally the colonel said in a temper: ‘By God, this
is the rottenest bridge I’ve ever sat down to. Let’s go bathing!’
It was half-past ten and not warm for January, but we went bathing
and afterwards dried ourselves on pocket handkerchiefs. ‘We’ was the
colonel, myself and my brother. The airman excused himself. The bathe
put the colonel in better humour. ‘Let’s go up to the village now and
raid the concert. Let’s pull some of the girls out and have a bit of
fun.’ The airman gigglingly agreed. My brother seemed embarrassed. The
colonel said: ‘And you, you bloody poet, are you on?’ I said angrily:
‘Not yet. You’ve had your treat, colonel. I went bathing with you and
it was cold. Now it’s my treat. I’m going to take you climbing and make
you warm. I want to see whether you Canucks are all B.S. or not.’ That
diverted him.
I took them up the castle rock from the railway station in the dark.
After the first piece, which was tricky, there would have been little
climbing necessary if I had followed a zig-zag path; but I preferred to
lead the colonel up several fairly stiff pitches. The others kept to
the path. When we reached the top he was out of breath, a bit shaky,
and most affable—almost affectionate. ‘That was a damn good climb you
showed us.’ So I said: ‘We’ve not reached the top yet.’ ‘Where
are we going now?’ he asked. I said: ‘Up that turret.’ We climbed into
the castle and walked through the chapel into the north-western tower.
It was pitch dark. I took them left into the turret which adjoined the
tower but rose some twenty feet higher. The sky showed above, about
the size of an orange. The turret had once had a spiral staircase, but
the central core had been broken down after the Cromwellian siege;
only an edging of stones remained on the walls. This edging did not
become continuous until about the second spiral. We struck matches and
I started up. The colonel swore and sweated, but followed. I showed him
the trick of getting over the worst gap in the stones, which was too
wide to bridge with one’s stride, by crouching, throwing one’s body
forward and catching the next stone with one’s hands; a scramble and he
was there. The airman and my brother remained below. I was glad when we
reached the second spiral. We climbed perhaps a hundred and twenty feet
to the top.
When we were safely down again most of the whisky was gone. So I
said: ‘Now let’s visit the concert party.’ I had heard the audience
dispersing, from the top of the turret. We visited the artistes.
The colonel was most courteous to the women, especially the blonde
soprano, but he took a great dislike to the tenor, a Welshman, and
told him that he was no bloody good as a singer. He cross-examined
him on his military service and was delighted to find that he had
been for some reason or other exempted. He called him a louse and a
bloody skrim-shanker and a lot more until the blonde soprano, who was
his wife, came to the rescue and threatened to chuck the colonel out.
He went out grinning, kissing his hand to the soprano and telling
the tenor to kiss the place where he wore no hat. The tenor turned
courageous and shouted out something about reading the Scriptures
and how morally unjustifiable it was to fight. We all laughed till
we wheezed. Then the colonel said we must get a drink; he knocked up
a hotel barman and even got inside the bar, but the barman refused
to serve him and threatened to call the police. The colonel did not
raid the shelves as he would have done half an hour before when the
whisky was fiercer in him; he merely told the barman what he thought
of the Welsh, broke a glass or two and walked out. ‘Let’s go home and
have some more bridge.’ He walked arm-in-arm with me down the hill
and confided as one family man to another that his nerves were all in
pieces because his missus was in the family way. That was why he had
broken up the bridge-party. He had wanted her to have a good sleep. ‘If
we go back quietly now, she’ll not wake up; we can bid in whispers.’
So we went back and he drank silently and the airman drank silently
and we played silently. I had three or four glasses myself; my brother
abstained. We stopped at three-thirty in the morning. The colonel
paid up and went to sleep on the sofa. I was eighteen shillings and
my brother twelve shillings up at sixpence a hundred. I was sick and
shaking for weeks after this.
In March the second baby was born and we called him David. My mother
was overjoyed. It was the first Graves grandson; my elder brothers had
had only girls; here, at last, was an heir for the Graves family silver
and documents. When Jenny was born my mother had condoled with Nancy:
‘Perhaps it is as well to have a girl first to practise on.’ Nancy had
from the first decided to have four children; they were to be like
the children in her drawings and were to be girl, boy, girl, boy, in
that order. She was going to get it all over quickly; she believed in
young parents and families of three or four children fairly close
together in age. She had the children in the order she intended and
they were all like her drawings. She began to regret our marriage, as
I also did. We wanted somehow to be dis-married—not by divorce, which
was as bad as marriage—and able to live together without any legal or
religious obligation to live together. It was about this time that I
met Dick again, for the last time; I found him merely pleasant and
disagreeable. He was at the university, about to enter the diplomatic
service, and had changed so much that it seemed absurd to have ever
suffered on his account. Yet the caricature likeness remained.