I met T. E. Lawrence first at a guest-night at All Souls’.
Lawrence had just been given a college fellowship, and it was the first
time for many years that he had worn evening dress. The restlessness
of his eyes was the first thing about him I noticed. He told me that
he had read my poems in Egypt during one of his flying visits from
Arabia; he and my brother Philip had been together in the Intelligence
Department at Cairo, before his part in the Arab revolt had begun,
working out the Turkish order of battle. I knew nothing about his
organization of the Arab revolt, his exploits and sufferings in the
desert, and his final entry into Damascus. He was merely, to me, a
fellow-soldier who had come back to Oxford for a rest after the war.
But I felt a sudden extraordinary sympathy with him. Later, when I was
told that every one was fascinated by Lawrence, I tried to dismiss this
feeling as extravagant. But it remained. Between lectures at Oxford
I now often visited Lawrence at All Souls’. Though he never drank
himself, he used always to send his scout for a silver goblet of audit
ale for me. Audit ale was brewed in the college; it was as soft as
barley-water but of great strength. (A prince once came down to Oxford
to open a new museum and lunched at All Souls’ before the ceremony;
the mildness of the audit ale deceived him—he took it for lager—and he
had to be taken back to the station in a cab with the blinds drawn.)
Nancy and I lunched in Lawrence’s rooms once with Vachel Lindsay, the
American poet, and his mother. Mrs. Lindsay was from Springfield,
Illinois, and, like her son, a prominent member of the Illinois
Anti-Saloon League. When Lawrence told his scout that Mr. Lindsay,
though a poet, was an Anti-Saloon Leaguer, he was scandalized and
asked Lawrence’s permission to lay on Lindsay’s place a copy of verses
composed in 1661 by a fellow of the college. One stanza was:
The poet divine that cannot reach wine,
Because that his money doth many times faile,
Will hit on the vein to make a good strain,
If he be but inspired with a pot of good ale.
Mrs. Lindsay had been warned by friends to comment on nothing unusual
that she met at Oxford. Lawrence had brought out the college gold
service in her honour and this she took to be the ordinary thing at a
university luncheon-party.
His rooms were dark and oak-panelled. A large table and a desk were the
principal furniture. And there were two heavy leather chairs, simply
acquired. An American oil-financier had come in suddenly one day when
I was visiting T. E. and said: ‘I am here from the States, Colonel
Lawrence, to ask you a single question. You are the only man who will
answer it honestly. Do Middle-Eastern conditions justify my putting
any money in South Arabian oil?’ Lawrence, without rising, simply
answered:‘No.’ ‘That’s all I wanted to know; it was worth coming for
that. Thank you, and good day!’ In his brief glance about the room he
had found something missing; on his way home through London he chose
the chairs and had them sent to Lawrence with his card. Other things in
the room were pictures, including Augustus John’s portrait of Feisul,
which Lawrence, I believe, bought from John with the diamond which
he had worn as a mark of honour in his Arab headdress; his books,
including a Kelmscott _Chaucer_, three prayer-rugs, the gift of Arab
leaders who had fought with him, one of them with the sheen on
the nap made with crushed lapis-lazuli; a station bell from the Hedjaz
railway; and on the mantelpiece a four-thousand-year-old toy, a clay
soldier on horseback from a child’s grave at Carchemish, where Lawrence
was digging before the war.
We talked most about poetry. I was working at a book of poems which
appeared later under the title of _The Pier-Glass_. They were poems
that reflected my haunted condition; the _Country Sentiment_ mood was
breaking down. Lawrence made a number of suggestions for improving
these poems and I adopted most of them. He told me of two or three
of his schemes for brightening All Souls’ and Oxford generally. One
was for improving the turf in the quadrangle, which he said was in
a disgraceful condition, nearly rotting away; he had suggested at a
college meeting that it should be manured or treated in some way or
other, but no action had been taken. He now said that he was going
to plant mushrooms on it, so that they would have to re-turf it
altogether. He consulted a mushroom expert in town, but found that it
was difficult to make spawn grow. He would have persisted if he had
not been called away about this time to help Winston Churchill with
the Middle-Eastern settlement. Another scheme, in which I was to have
helped, was to steal the Magdalen College deer. He was going to drive
them into the small inner quadrangle of All Souls’, having persuaded
the college to reply, when Magdalen protested and asked for its deer
back, that it was the All Souls’ herd and had been pastured there from
time immemorial. Great things were expected of this raid. It fell
through for the same reason as the other. But a successful strike
of college-servants for better pay and hours was said to have been
engineered by Lawrence.
I took no part in undergraduate life, seldom visiting my college
except to draw my Government grant and exhibition money; I refused to
pay the college games’ subscription, having little interest in St.
John’s and being unfit for games myself. Most of my friends were at
Balliol and Queen’s, and in any case Wadham had a prior claim on my
loyalty. I spent as little time as possible away from Boar’s Hill.
At this time I had little to do with the children; they were in the
hands of Nancy and the nurse—the nurse now also did the cooking and
housework for us. Nancy felt that she wanted some activity besides
drawing, though she could not decide what. One evening in the middle of
the long vacation she suddenly said: ‘I must get away somewhere out of
this for a change. Let’s go off on bicycles somewhere.’ We packed a few
things and rode off in the general direction of Devonshire. The nights
were coldish and we had not brought blankets. We found that the best
way was to bicycle by night and sleep by day. We went over Salisbury
Plain past several deserted army camps; they had a ghostly look. There
was accommodation in these camps for a million men, the number of men
killed in the Imperial Forces during the war. We found ourselves near
Dorchester, so we turned in there to visit Thomas Hardy, whom we had
met not long before when he came up to Oxford to get his honorary
doctor’s degree. We found him active and gay, with none of the aphasia
and wandering of attention that we had noticed in him at Oxford.
I wrote out a record of the conversation we had with him. He welcomed
us as representatives of the post-war generation. He said that he lived
such a quiet life at Dorchester that he feared he was altogether behind
the times. He wanted, for instance, to know whether we had any sympathy
with the Bolshevik regime, and whether he could trust the _Morning
Post’s_ account of the Red Terror. Then he was interested in Nancy’s
hair, which she wore short, in advance of the fashion, and in her
keeping her own name. His comment on the name question was: ‘Why, you
_are_ old-fashioned. I knew an old couple here sixty years ago that did
the same. The woman was called Nanny Priddle (descendant of an ancient
family, the Paradelies, long decayed into peasantry), and she would
never change her name either.’ Then he wanted to know why I no longer
used my army rank. I said it was because I was no longer soldiering.
‘But you have a right to it; I would certainly keep my rank if I had
one. I should be very proud to be called Captain Hardy.’
He told us that he was now engaged in restoring a Norman font in a
church near by. He had only the bowl to work upon, but enjoyed doing
a bit of his old work again. Nancy mentioned that we had not baptized
our children. He was interested, but not scandalized, remarking that
his old mother had always said of baptism that at any rate there was
no harm in it, and that she would not like her children to blame her
in after-life for leaving any duty to them undone. ‘I have usually
found that what my old mother said was right.’ He said that to his
mind the new generation of clergymen were very much better men than
the last.... Though he now only went to church three times a year—one
visit to each of the three neighbouring churches—he could not forget
that the church was in the old days the centre of all the musical,
literary and artistic education in the country village. He talked
about the old string orchestras in Wessex churches, in one of which
his father, grandfather, and he himself had taken part; he regretted
their disappearance. He told us that the clergyman who appears as
old St. Clair in _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ was the man who protested
to the War Office about the Sunday brass-band performances at the
Dorchester Barracks, and was the cause of headquarters no longer being
sent to this once very popular station.
We had tea in the drawing-room, which, like the rest of the house,
was crowded with furniture and ornaments. Hardy had an affection for
old possessions, and Mrs. Hardy was too fond to suggest that anything
at all should be removed. Hardy, his cup of tea in hand, began making
jokes about bishops at the Athenæum Club and imitating their episcopal
tones when they ordered: ‘China tea and a little bread and butter (Yes,
my lord!).’ Apparently he considered bishops were fair game. He was
soon censuring Sir Edmund Gosse, who had recently stayed with them, for
a breach of good taste in imitating his old friend, Henry James, eating
soup. Loyalty to his friends was always a passion with Hardy.
After tea we went into the garden, and Hardy asked to see some of my
recent poems. I showed him one, and he asked if he might make some
suggestions. He objected to the phrase the ‘scent of thyme,’ which he
said was one of the _clichés_ which the poets of his generation studied
to avoid. I replied that they had avoided it so well that it could be
used again now without offence, and he withdrew the objection. He asked
whether I wrote easily, and I said that this poem was in its sixth
draft and would probably be finished in two more. ‘Why!’ he said, ‘I
have never in my life taken more than three, or perhaps four, drafts
for a poem. I am afraid of it losing its freshness.’ He said that he
had been able to sit down and write novels by time-table, but that
poetry was always accidental, and perhaps it was for that reason
that he prized it more highly.
He spoke disparagingly of his novels, though admitting that there were
chapters in them that he had enjoyed writing. We were walking round the
garden, and Hardy paused at a spot near the greenhouse. He said that he
had once been pruning a tree here when an idea suddenly had come into
his head for a story, the best story that he had ever thought of. It
came complete with characters, setting, and even some of the dialogue.
But as he had no pencil and paper with him, and was anxious to finish
pruning the tree before it rained, he had let it go. By the time he sat
down to recall it, all was utterly gone. ‘Always carry a pencil and
paper,’ he said. He added: ‘Of course, even if I could remember that
story now, I couldn’t write it. I am past novel-writing. But I often
wonder what it was.’
At dinner that night he grew enthusiastic in praise of cider, which
he had drunk since a boy, and which, he said, was the finest medicine
he knew. I suggested that in the _Message to the American People_,
which he had been asked to write, he might take the opportunity of
recommending cider.
He began complaining of autograph-hunters and their persistence. He
disliked leaving letters unanswered, and yet if he did not write these
people pestered him the more; he had been upset that morning by a
letter from an autograph-fiend which began:
Dear Mr. Hardy,—I am interested to know why the devil you
don’t reply to my request....
He asked me for my advice, and was grateful for the suggestion that a
mythical secretary should reply offering his autograph at one or
two guineas, the amount to be sent to a hospital (‘Swanage Children’s
Hospital,’ put in Hardy), which would forward a receipt.
He said that he regarded professional critics as parasites no less
noxious than autograph-hunters, and wished the world rid of them. He
also wished that he had not listened to them when he was a young man;
on their advice he had cut out dialect-words from his early poems,
though they had no exact synonyms to fit the context. And still the
critics were plaguing him. One of them recently complained of a poem
of his where he had written ‘his shape _smalled_ in the distance.’
Now what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed
a little and said that once or twice recently he had looked up a word
in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and had
found it there right enough—only to read on and find that the sole
authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of
early literary influences, and said that he had none at all, for he
did not come of literary stock. Then he corrected himself and said
that a friend, a fellow-apprentice in the architect’s office where he
worked as a young man, used to lend him books. (His taste in literature
was certainly most unexpected. Once when Lawrence had ventured to say
something disparaging against Homer’s _Iliad_, he protested: ‘Oh, but I
admire the _Iliad_ greatly. Why, it’s in the _Marmion_ class!’ Lawrence
could not at first believe that Hardy was not making a little joke.)
We went off the next day, but there was more talk at breakfast before
we went. Hardy was at the critics again. He was complaining that they
accused him of pessimism. One man had recently singled out as an
example of gloom a poem he had written about a woman whose house was
burned down on her wedding-night. ‘Of course it is a humorous
piece,’ said Hardy, ‘and the man must have been thick-witted not to see
that. When I read his criticism I went through my last collection of
poems with a pencil, marking them S, N, and C, according as they were
sad, neutral or cheerful. I found them as nearly as possible in equal
proportions; which nobody could call pessimism.’ In his opinion _vers
libre_ could come to nothing in England. ‘All we can do is to write on
the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than
those who went before us.’ About his own poems he said that once they
were written he cared very little what happened to them.
He told us of his work during the war, and said that he was glad to
have been chairman of the Anti-Profiteering Committee, and to have
succeeded in bringing a number of rascally Dorchester tradesmen to
book. ‘It made me unpopular, of course,’ he said, ‘but it was a hundred
times better than sitting on a military tribunal and sending young men
to the war who did not want to go.’
This was the last time we saw Hardy, though we had a standing
invitation to come and visit him.
From Dorchester we bicycled to Tiverton in Devonshire, where Nancy’s
old nurse kept a fancy-goods shop. Nancy helped her dress the
shop-window and advised her about framing the prints that she was
selling. She also gave the shop a good turn-out, dusted the stock,
and took her turn behind the counter. As a result of Nancy’s work the
week’s receipts went up several shillings and continued at the improved
figure for a week or two after we were gone. This gave Nancy the idea
of starting a shop herself on Boar’s Hill. It was a large residential
district with no shop nearer than three miles away. She said that we
should buy a second-hand army-hut, stock it with confectionery,
groceries, tobacco, hardware, medicines, and all the other things
that one finds in a village shop, run it tidily and economically and
make our fortune. I undertook to help her while the vacation lasted
and became quite excited about the idea myself. She decided to take
a neighbour, the Hon. Mrs. Michael Howard, into partnership. Neither
Nancy nor Mrs. Howard had any experience of shop-management or
commercial book-keeping. But Mrs. Howard undertook to keep the books
while Nancy did most of the other work. Nancy was anxious to start the
shop six weeks after the original decision, but army huts were not
obtainable at any reasonable price (the timber-merchants were in a
ring); so it was decided to employ a local carpenter to build a shop
to Nancy’s design. A neighbour rented us a corner of his field close
to the Masefields’ house. The work was finished in time and the stock
bought. The _Daily Mirror_ advertised the opening on its front page
with the heading ‘Shop-Keeping on Parnassus,’ and crowds came
up from Oxford to look at us. We soon realized that it had either to be
a big general shop which made Boar’s Hill more or less independent of
Oxford (and of the unsatisfactory system of vans calling at the door
and bringing stuff of inferior quality with ‘take it or leave it’)
or it had to be a small sweet and tobacco shop making no challenge
to the Oxford tradesmen. We decided on the challenge. The building
had to be enlarged and two or three hundred pounds’ worth of stock
purchased. Mrs. Howard was not able to give much of her time to the
work, having children to look after and no nurse; most of it fell on
Nancy and myself. I used to serve in the shop several hours of the
day while she went round to the big houses for the daily orders. The
term had now begun and I was supposed to be attending lectures in
Oxford. Another caricature scene: myself, wearing a green-baize apron
this time, with flushed face and disordered hair, selling a packet of
Bird’s Eye tobacco to the Poet Laureate with one hand and with the
other weighing out half a pound of brown sugar for Sir Arthur Evans’
gardener’s wife.
The gross weekly takings were now £60 a week and Nancy, though she had
given up her drawing, still had the house and children to consider.
We had no car, and constant emergency bicycle-rides had to be made to
Oxford to get new stock from the wholesalers; we made a point of always
being able to supply whatever was asked for. We engaged a shop-boy to
call for orders, but the work was still too heavy. Mrs. Howard went out
of partnership and Nancy and I found great difficulty in understanding
her accounts. I was fairly good at conventional book-keeping; the
keeping of company accounts had been part of my lecture-syllabus when I
was instructing cadets. But that did not help me with these, which were
on a novel system.
The shop business finally ousted everything, not only Nancy’s painting,
but my writing, my university work, and Nancy’s proper supervision of
the house and children. We had the custom of every resident of Boar’s
Hill but two or three. One of those whom we courted unsuccessfully was
Mrs. Masefield. The proximity of the shop to her house did not please
her. And her housekeeper, she said, preferred to deal with a provision
merchant in Oxford and she could not override this arrangement.
However, to show that there was no ill-feeling, she used to come once
a week to the shop and buy a tin of Vim and a packet of Lux, for which
she paid money down from a cash-box which she carried with her. The
moral problems of trade interested me. Nancy and I both found that
it was very difficult at this time of fluctuating prices to be really
honest; we could not resist the temptation of undercharging the poor
villagers of Wootton, who were frequent customers, and recovering our
money from the richer residents. Playing at Robin Hood came easily to
me. Nobody ever caught us out; it was as easy as shelling peas, the
shop-boy said, who also took his turn behind the counter. We found that
most people bought tea by price and not by quality. If we happened to
be out of the tea selling at ninepence a quarter which Mrs. So-and-so
always bought, refusing the eightpenny tea, and Mrs. So-and-so asked
for it in a hurry, the only thing to do was to make up a pound of the
sevenpenny, which was the same colour as the ninepenny, and charge it
at ninepence; the difference would not be noticed. We were sorry for
the commercial travellers who came sweating up the hill with their
heavy bags of samples, usually on foot, and had to be sent away without
any orders. They would pitch a hard-luck tale and often we would relent
and get in more stock than we needed. In gratitude they would tell us
some of the tricks of the trade, advising us, for instance, never to
cut cheese or bacon exactly to weight, but to make it an ounce or two
more and overcharge for this extra piece. ‘There’s few can do the sum
before you take the stuff off the scales and there’s fewer still who
will take the trouble to weigh up again when they get back home.’
The shop lasted six months. Nancy suddenly dismissed the nurse. Nancy
had always practised the most up-to-date methods of training and
feeding children, and the nurse, over-devoted to the children, had
recently disobeyed her instructions. Nancy put the children before
everything. She decided that there was nothing to be done but to take
them and the house over herself, and to find a manager for the
shop. At this point I caught influenza and took a long time to recover
from it.
War horror overcame me again. The political situation in Europe seemed
to be going from bad to worse. There was already trouble in Ireland,
Russia and the Near East. The papers promised new and deadlier poison
gases for the next war. There was a rumour that Lord Berkeley’s house
on Boar’s Hill was to become an experimental laboratory for making
them. I had bad nights. I thought that perhaps I owed it to Nancy to go
to a psychiatrist to be cured; yet I was not sure. Somehow I thought
that the power of writing poetry, which was more important to me than
anything else I did, would disappear if I allowed myself to get cured;
my _Pier-Glass_ haunting would end and I would become merely a dull
easy writer. It seemed to me less important to be well than to be a
good poet. I also had a strong repugnance against allowing anyone to
have the power over me that psychiatrists always seemed to win over
their patients. I had always refused to allow myself to be hypnotized
by anyone in any way.
I decided to see as few people as possible, stop all outside work, and
cure myself. I would read the modern psychological books and apply them
to my case. I had already learned the rudiments of morbid psychology
from talks with Rivers, and from his colleague, Dr. Henry Head, the
neurologist, under whose care Robert Nichols had been. I liked Head’s
scientific integrity. Once when he was testing a man whom he suspected
of homicidal mania he had made some suggestion to him which came within
the danger-area of his insanity; the man picked up a heavy knife from
his consulting table and rushed threateningly at Head. Head, not
at all quick on his legs and dodging round the table, exclaimed:
‘Typical, typical! Capital, capital!’ and, only as an afterthought:
‘Help! Help!’ He had great knowledge of the geography of the brain and
the peculiar delusions and maladjustments that followed lesions in
the different parts. He told me, at different times, exactly what was
wrong with Mr. Jingle in _Pickwick Papers_, why some otherwise literate
people found it impossible to spell, and why some others saw ghosts
standing by their bedside. He said about the bedside ghosts: ‘They
always come to the same side of the bed, and if you turn the bed round
you turn the ghost round with it. They come to the contrary side of the
lesion.’
A manager was found for the shop. But as soon as it was known that
Nancy and I were no longer behind the counter the weekly receipts
immediately began to fall; they were soon down to £20, and still
falling steadily. The manager’s salary was more than our profits.
Prices were now falling, too, at the rate of about five per cent,
every week, so that the stock on our shelves had depreciated greatly
in value. And we had let one or two of the Wootton villagers run up
bad debts. When we came to reckon things up we realized that it was
wisest to cut the losses and sell out. We hoped to recoup our original
expenditure and even to be in pocket on the whole transaction by
selling the shop and the goodwill to a big firm of Oxford grocers that
wished to buy it as a branch establishment. Unfortunately, the site was
not ours and the landlord was prevailed upon by an interested neighbour
not to let any ordinary business firm take over the shop from us and
spoil the local amenities. No other site was available, so there was
nothing to do but sell off what stock remained at bankrupt prices
to the wholesalers and find a buyer for the building. Unfortunately
again, the building was not made in bolted sections, and could not
be sold to be put up again elsewhere; its only value was as timber, and
in these six months the corner in timber had also been broken and the
prices fallen to very little. We recovered twenty pounds of the two
hundred that had been spent on it. Nancy and I were so disgusted that
we decided to leave Boar’s Hill. We were about five hundred pounds in
debt to the wholesalers and others. A lawyer took the whole matter in
hand, disposed of our assets for us, and the debt was finally reduced
to about three hundred pounds. Nancy’s father sent her a hundred-pound
note (in a match-box) as his contribution, and the remainder was
unexpectedly contributed by Lawrence. He gave me four chapters of
_Seven Pillars of Wisdom_, his history of the Arab revolt, to sell for
serial publication in the United States. It was a point of honour with
him not to make any money out of the revolt even in the most indirect
way; but if it could help a poet in difficulties, there seemed no harm
in that.
We gave the Masefields notice that we were leaving the cottage at the
end of the June quarter 1921. We had no idea where we were going or
what we were going to do. We decided that we must get another cottage
somewhere and live very quietly, looking after the children ourselves,
and that we must try to make what money we needed by writing and
drawing. Nancy, who had taken charge of everything when I was ill, now
gave me the task of finding a cottage. It had to be found in about
three weeks’ time. I said: ‘But you know that there are no cottages
anywhere to be had.’ She said: ‘I know, but we are going to get one.’
I said ironically: ‘Describe it in detail; since there are no cottages
we might as well have a no-cottage that we really like.’ She said:
‘Well, it must have six rooms, water in the house, a beamed
attic, a walled-in garden, and it must be near the river. It must be
in a village with shops and yet a little removed from the village. The
village must be five or six miles from Oxford in the opposite direction
from Boar’s Hill. The church must have a tower and not a spire. And we
can only afford ten shillings a week unfurnished.’ There were other
details that I took down about soil, sanitation, windows, stairs and
kitchen sinks, and then I went off on my bicycle. I had first laid a
ruler across the Oxford ordnance-map and found four or five villages
that corresponded in general direction and distance and were on the
river. By inquiry I found that two had shops; that, of these two, one
had a towered church and the other a spired church. I therefore
went to a firm of house-agents in Oxford and said: ‘Have you
any cottages to let unfurnished?’ The house-agent laughed politely.
So I said: ‘What I want is a cottage at Islip with a walled garden,
six rooms, water in the house, just outside the village, with a beamed
attic, and rent ten shillings a week.’ The house-agent said: ‘Oh, you
mean the World’s End Cottage? But that is for sale, not for renting.
It has failed to find a purchaser for two years, and I think that the
owner will let it go now at five hundred pounds, which is only half
what he originally asked.’ So I went back and next day Nancy came with
me; she looked round and said: ‘Yes, this is the cottage all right,
but I shall have to cut down those cypress trees and change those
window-panes. We’ll move in on quarter-day.’ I said: ‘But the money! We
haven’t the money.’ Nancy answered: ‘If we could find the exact house,
surely to goodness we can find a mere lump sum of money.’ She was
right, for my mother was good enough to buy the cottage and rent it to
us at the rate of ten shillings a week.
Islip was a name of good omen to me: it was associated with Abbot
Islip, a poor boy of the village who had become Abbot of Westminster
and befriended John Skelton when he took sanctuary in the Abbey from
the anger of Wolsey. I had come more and more to associate myself with
Skelton, discovering a curious affinity. Whenever I wanted a motto for
a new book I always found exactly the right one somewhere or other in
Skelton’s poems. We moved into the Islip cottage and a new chapter
started. I did not sit for my finals.