We were at Islip from 1921 until 1925. My mother in renting us the
house had put a clause in the agreement that it was to be used only as
a residence and not for the carrying on of any trade or business. She
wanted to guard against any further commercial enterprise on our part;
she need not have worried. Islip was an agricultural village, and far
enough from Oxford not to be contaminated with the roguery for which
the outskirts of a university town are usually well known. The village
policeman led an easy life. During the whole time we were living there
we never had a thing stolen or ever had a complaint to make against a
native Islip cottager. Once by mistake I left my bicycle at the station
for two days, and, when I recovered it, not only were both lamps, the
pump and the repair outfit still in place, but an anonymous friend had
even cleaned it.
Every Saturday in the winter months, as long as I was at Islip, I
played football for the village team. There had been no football in
Islip for some eighty years; the ex-soldiers had reintroduced it. The
village nonogenarian complained that the game was not what it had been
when he was a boy; he called it unmanly. He pointed across the fields
to two aged willow trees: ‘They used to be our home goals,’ he said.
‘T’other pair was half a mile upstream. Constable stopped our play in
the end. Three men were killed in one game; one was kicked to death,
t’other two drowned each other in a scrimmage. Her was a grand game.’
Islip football, though not unmanly, was ladylike by comparison with the
game as I had played it at Charterhouse. When playing centre-forward I
was often booed now for charging the goalkeeper while he was fumbling
with the shot he had saved. The cheers were reserved for my
inside-left, who spent most of his time stylishly dribbling the ball in
circles round and round the field until he was robbed; he seldom went
anywhere near the goal-mouth. The football club was democratic. The
cricket club was not. I played cricket the first season but left the
club because the selection of the team was not always a selection of
the best eleven men; regular players would be dropped to make room for
visitors to the village who were friends of a club official, one of the
gentry.
At first we had so little money that we did all the work in the house
ourselves, including the washing. I did the cooking, Nancy did the
mending and making the children’s clothes; we shared the rest of the
work. Later money improved: we found it more economical to send the
washing out and get a neighbour in to do some of the heavier cleaning
and scrubbing. In our last year at Islip we even had a decrepit car
which Nancy drove. My part was to wind it up; the energy that I put
into winding was almost equivalent to pushing it for a mile or two. The
friends who gave it to us told us that its name was ‘Dr. Marie,’ and
when we asked ‘Why?’ we were told ‘Because it’s all right in theory.’
One day when Nancy was driving down Foxcombe Hill, the steepest hill
near Oxford, there was a slight jar. Nancy thought it advisable to
stop; when we got out we found that there were only three wheels on the
car. The other, with part of the axle, was retrieved nearly a mile back.
These four years I spent chiefly on housework and being nurse to the
children. Catherine was born in 1922 and Sam in 1924. By the end
of 1925 we had lived for eight successive years in an atmosphere
of teething, minor accidents, epidemics, and perpetual washing of
children’s napkins. I did not dislike this sort of life except
for the money difficulties, I liked my life with the children. But the
strain told on Nancy. She was constantly ill, and often I had to take
charge of everything. She tried occasionally to draw; but by the time
she had got her materials together some alarm from the nursery would
always disturb her. She said at last that she would not start again
until all the children were house-trained and old enough for school.
I kept on writing because the responsibility for making money rested
chiefly on me, and because nothing has ever stopped me writing when I
have had something to write. We kept the cottage cleaned and polished
in a routine that left us little time for anything else. We had
accumulated a number of brass ornaments and utensils and allowed them
to become a tyranny, and our children wore five times as many clean
dresses as our neighbours’ children did.
I found that I had the faculty of working through constant
interruptions. I could recognize the principal varieties of babies’
screams—hunger, indigestion, wetness, pins, boredom, wanting to be
played with—and learned to disregard all but the more important ones.
But most of the books that I wrote in these years betray the conditions
under which I worked; they are scrappy, not properly considered and
obviously written out of reach of a proper reference-library. Only
poetry did not suffer. When I was working at a poem nothing else
mattered; I went on doing my mechanical tasks in a trance until I had
time to sit down to write it out. At one period I only allowed myself
half an hour’s writing a day, but once I did write I always had too
much to put down; I never sat chewing my pen. My poetry-writing has
always been a painful process of continual corrections and corrections
on top of corrections and persistent dissatisfaction. I have never
written a poem in less than three drafts; the greatest number I recall
is thirty-five (_The Troll’s Nosegay_). The average at this time was
eight; it is now six or seven.
The children were all healthy and gave us little trouble. Nancy had
strong views about giving them no meat or tea, putting them to bed
early, making them rest in the afternoon and giving them as much fruit
as they wanted. We did our best to keep them from the mistakes of our
own childhood. But it was impossible for them when they went to the
village school to avoid formal religion, class snobbery, political
prejudice, and mystifying fairy stories about the facts of sex. I never
felt any possessive feeling about them as Nancy did. To me they were
close friends with the claims of friendship and liable to the accidents
of friendship. We both made a point of punishing them in a disciplinary
way as little as possible. If we lost our temper with them it was
a different matter. Islip was as good a place as any for the happy
childhood that we wanted to give them. The river was close and we had
the loan of a canoe. There were fields to play about in, and animals,
and plenty of children of their own age. They liked school.
After so much shifting about during the war I disliked leaving home,
except to visit some well-ordered house where I could expect reasonable
comfort. But Nancy was always proposing sudden ‘bursts for freedom,’
and I used to come with her and usually enjoy them. In 1922 we used a
derelict baker’s van for a caravan ride down to the south-coast. We had
three children with us, Catherine as a four-months-old baby. It rained
every single day for the month we were away—and the problem of washing
and drying the baby’s napkins whenever we camped for the night—and the
problem of finding a farmer who would not mistake us for gypsies
and would be willing to let us pull into his field—and then the shaft
that twice dropped off when we were on hills—and twice the back of the
cart flew open and a child fell out on the road—and the difficulty of
getting oats for the horse (which had been five years on grass as being
too old for work) on country roads organized for motor traffic—and
cooking to be done in the open with usually a high wind and always rain
and the primus stove sputtering and flaring up. It was near Lewes that
we drew up on a strip of public land alongside the horse and van of a
Mr. Hicks, a travelling showman from Brighton. He told us many tricks
of the road and also the story of his life: ‘Yes, I saw the Reverend
Powers, Cantab, of Rodmell last week, and he, knowing my history, said:
“Well, Mr. Hicks, I suppose that in addressing you I should be right in
putting the letters b.a. after your name?” I said: “I have the
right to it certainly, but when a man’s down, you know how it is, he
does not like attaching a handle to his name.” For you must know, I was
once a master at Ardingly College.’
‘Indeed, Mr. Hicks, and where were you b.a.?’
‘Didn’t I just tell you, at Ardingly? I won a scholarship at the
beginning and they gave me the choice of going to Oxford or Winchester
or Cambridge or Eton. And I chose Winchester. But I was only there
a twelvemonth. No, I couldn’t stand it any longer owing to the
disgraceful corruption of the junior clergy and the undergraduates—you
understand, of course. I rub up a bit of the classic now and then, but
I like to forget those times. The other day, though, me and a young
Jew-boy who had cleaned up seventy-five pounds at the race meeting with
photographing and one thing and another, had a fine lark. I got out two
old mortarboards and a couple of gowns from the box in the van
where I keep them, and you should have seen us swaggering down Brighton
Pier, my boy.’ A few days later we stopped at a large mansion in
Hampshire, rented by Sir Lionel Philips, the South African financier,
whom Nancy knew. I found myself in an argument with him about socialist
economics, and he told me a story which I liked even better than Mr.
Hicks’. ‘I visited Kimberley recently and realized what a deep hole I
had made. Where, as a young man, I tore the first turf off with my bare
hands, they were now mining down half a mile.’
In the end we got back safely.
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.