‘In this world of contention and hostility, what inspires the humble Christian, in his journey through it, with more confidence, tranquillity and joy, than the consoling thought, that the Lord God omnipotent reigneth?’

Rev. John Williams DD of Stroud, Grandfather to A. E. Housman1

‘She that hath borne seven languisheth: she hath given up the ghost; her sun has gone down while it was yet day:’

Jer. 15:9

When Alfred Housman was an old man in his seventies, he lived for much of the time in the seclusion of a neo-Gothic tower in a remote corner of Trinity College, Cambridge. For many years he had been a famous and popular poet, and recognised as one of the great classical scholars of his day. But he was a shy man, who relished his privacy. His more perceptive friends guessed at mysteries in his personal life which he would not reveal; and beyond their circle and that of his acquaintances, men found it hard to understand how the austere classical scholar could have written the beautiful, romantic lyrics of A Shropshire Lad or Last Poems.

Much of his poetry is nostalgic; and as Professor Housman sat after lunch in his rooms, surrounded by books, a pair of boots warming beside the fire in preparation for his afternoon walk, his emotions stirred, perhaps, by a glass or two of his Burgundy, he had only to look around him, or to pull open a drawer or two, to be reminded vividly of the past. There was the silver loving-cup presented by his students at University College, London; on his desk, a Wedgwood medallion presented when he left the Patent Office; on the wall above the fireplace, a picture of Moses Jackson, his friend from Oxford days;2 in a drawer, a photograph of the church in Woodchester where his parents were married, and other documents, including a family tree which traced his ancestry back to his great-grandfather, Robert Housman, ‘the Evangelist of Lancaster’.

Robert, with his great and enduring reputation as a preacher, was the most famous of Alfred’s ancestors. By nature he was a reserved and formal man, so shy that, like his great-grandson, Alfred, he hated being in the company of strangers, and was usually incapable of making first advances. But when he felt that duty demanded it, or that he was in the right, ‘nothing could daunt him’.3 Like Alfred, he also set himself high standards, and was proud of them. His wife inherited a considerable fortune from a distant relative, and in time much of this was passed on to their sons, William, and Thomas, who was to be Alfred’s grandfather. William became a solicitor at Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, but his wealth robbed him of the motivation to work and eventually he ran away to America with an actress, abandoning his wife and seven children. Thomas, a more stable character, followed his father into the church, and chose for his wife Anne Brettell, a woman whose private fortune compensated for her lack of intellect.

Fourteen years after his marriage, Alfred’s grandfather left his vicarage in Kinver, Staffordshire, and moved to Bromsgrove, to be near his elderly parents-in-law. A new church was specially built for him in the neighbouring village of Catshill; and when his mother-in-law died, he and his family moved into nearby Fockbury House, to join Joseph and his unmarried daughter, Mary. When Joseph himself died in 1847, at the age of eighty-eight, half his fortune went to Mary, and the other to Thomas Housman’s wife Anne. Joseph had also left a sum of £1,000 to be divided among Thomas and Anne’s seven surviving children, the eldest of whom, Thomas, was the black sheep of the family having been caught in his youth leaving the nanny’s bedroom; later he became the focus for romantic stories about ‘Uncle Tom’.

Edward, the second son – but effectively the eldest after his brother’s disgrace – spent much of his childhood at Fockbury House, which he came to regard as the family seat. He and his younger brothers became good shots and good anglers, and ‘lived an active county life’, behaving more like young squires than parson’s sons. Edward himself was not a man of great intellect or strong character – though he had enough intelligence to recognise others’ strength – but he enjoyed the life in which he had been brought up, and was a determined Tory, later delighting in telling his children that he had been born in the year of England’s greatest disaster: the First Reform Bill of 1832. His great-uncle, John Adams of Perry Hall, was glad to assist Edward, later Alfred’s father, to become a solicitor. On Adams’s death arrangements were made whereby Edward acquired Perry Hall as a life tenant.

It was under the friendly auspices of his cousin Lucy that Edward was introduced to her best friend, the daughter of the Rector of Woodchester. Sarah Jane Williams had no money to speak of, and, at twenty-nine, she was nearly three years older than Edward, but she was witty and attractive, with the intellectual strength of Edward’s father, and the physical warmth of his mother. Edward found this combination irresistible; and Sarah in her turn was won over by his easy charm and polished manners, finding him more sympathetic and accomplished than the young men who had previously taken an interest in her. They were soon engaged to be married; and, after the postponement of the ceremony for some months in order to mourn her father’s death, the wedding took place in the lovely old church of Woodchester on 17 June 1858, with Lucy Housman acting as Sarah Jane’s bridesmaid.4

Apart from being a classical scholar, her father was something of a poet and Sarah Jane had inherited her father’s talent for composing verses, writing ‘skits in verse on the people she wanted to ridicule’,5 a harmless practice which sometimes had amusing consequences. Once she composed a mild verse lampoon on village doings which was circulated anonymously among her friends, and created quite a stir in the little village. Eventually, news of it reached the ears of a young curate, who, hoping to impress her, whispered to Sarah Jane at supper one day that he was the author, and that he trusted her to tell no-one!6

If Sarah Jane’s sense of humour was sometimes rather sharp, the tragedies of her family life may have had something to do with it. She was one of twelve children, but few of her brothers and sisters lived into their twenties. Yet she was not the sort of woman to let her mind dwell in an unhealthy way on her family misfortunes, and she had found some consolation in the ceremonies and prayers of the Church of England. However, among its nine hundred inhabitants, Woodchester contained a sizeable and influential Roman Catholic enclave;7 and in moments of real unhappiness Sarah Jane had sometimes cast a longing eye at the comforting rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. Certainly, she did not at all incline towards anything that was low-church; and she was far from puritanical, or even prim.

When Edward and Sarah Jane Housman returned from their honeymoon – with Sarah Jane already pregnant – they moved into the Valley House, in the hamlet of Fockbury, owned by the Rev. Thomas Housman, and only a few hundred yards away from the Clock House where Edward’s parents lived. The Valley House was a picturesque red-brick Georgian farm-house, faced from across the small country road by a fine cedar tree, whose branches almost touched its windows.

Towards the end of March 1859, as the time for their first child to be born drew near, there were some complications which the local doctor did not feel able to deal with, and at Sarah Jane’s request, Edward summoned her old family doctor all the way from Woodchester. The doctor duly arrived; and, twenty-four hours later, on 26 March 1859, Sarah Jane gave birth to a healthy boy. On Easter Sunday, the baby was christened Alfred Edward by his grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Housman, in the red-stone church at Catshill. Sarah Jane’s mother and brother may have been present; certainly many of her Woodchester friends were there, including John Woolwright, who became one of Alfred’s godfathers; and Mrs Wise, the wife of a Woodchester mill-owner, and a special friend of Sarah Jane’s, who became Alfred’s godmother.8 On the Housman side, quite apart from more distant relations, at least five of Alfred’s uncles and aunts attended the ceremony.

When the christening celebrations were over, and the various guests had departed, Edward and Sarah Jane settled down with their baby son into the peace and seclusion of the Valley House. But Edward had become life tenant of Perry Hall in the year of his wedding, and when Alfred was only a few months old the family moved there.

The fine house had been built by John Adams in about 1821 in the grounds of a much earlier building, on the western outskirts of Bromsgrove; but, with its neo-Gothic windows, and a thick coat of ivy over its walls, it looked older than it really was. Inside the front door, on the east side of the house, there was a stone-flagged hall, from which opened a number of large rooms, pleasantly furnished with some of the imposing Tudor and Queen Anne furniture which had come from Dr Williams’s Rectory at Woodchester. There was a huge double kitchen, with two cellars, two coppers, a bread-oven, two or three grinding mills, and a closed-up plate-warmer of vast dimensions; and out in the yard, a beer-cooler left over from the days of home brewing. Edward’s small range of offices ran out from the north side of the house towards the Kidderminster Road, where the entrance to the property lay, and beyond which climbed the way to the church: a sloping path, with wide flights of steps, which has been built by John Adams and was therefore known as Adams’ Hill.9

The next few years were happy, contented ones for the Housmans of Perry Hall. As a baby and a small child, Alfred lived at the heart of a well-organised community of family and servants, with a devoted and stimulating mother, and an amiable, kindly, easy-going father. Before he was one-and-a-half years old, Alfred had a baby brother, Robert, so close to him in age that it was not long before they were good company for each other. Alfred later claimed to remember Robert’s christening, and through that experience to have an indirect memory of his own baptism, because during the ceremony the thought struck him: ‘But this is something I’ve seen before; only then they were doing it to me!’ Alfred’s father planted two chestnut trees in the gardens at Perry Hall, one for each of his sons; and by the end of 1862, when Alfred was still only three-and-a-half years old, there were two more chestnut trees: one for Clemence, the other for Katharine.

While Sarah Jane was busily occupied with her young and rapidly expanding family, Edward, often at his father’s side, was making a name for himself in Bromsgrove public life, and both were active in local government.

Sarah Jane’s mother visited the Housmans at Perry Hall from time to time; but in 1862, Sarah Jane’s brother Basil died. She visited him on his deathbed, and knowing how grief had previously made her think of leaving the Church of England, Basil made Sarah Jane promise him never to become a Roman Catholic.

Edward and Sarah Jane still visited Woodchester from time to time. Mrs Williams no longer lived there, and Edward’s Housman cousins had left the village – but their place in Woodchester House had been taken by the Wises, a family with whom they were equally friendly. Edward Wise, now in his fifties, had been running a local cloth mill for the last ten years, and his wife was Alfred’s godmother. Wise had been a churchwarden in Dr Williams’s old church; when this was pulled down and part of the material incorporated in a new church a quarter of a mile away, Sarah Jane took great interest in the work. Her involvement in the new church was not always to the satisfaction of other parishioners. Her memorial window to Dr Williams and his children caused mounting irritation among those who considered that its theme, ‘The Communion of Saints’, had been depicted in an overtly Roman Catholic manner. In October 1863, Edward Wise wrote to Sarah Jane asking for some explanation which he could pass on to the objectors; and Sarah Jane replied in a letter which gives us a very rare glimpse of the mind and personality which were so important to her son Alfred, still at this time a small boy not four years old.

Sarah Jane began very bitingly that she and her mother regretted having to give explanations, but that:

Her letter ended by stating that she and her mother could not afford to be judged unjustly in Woodchester; for, although it was no longer their home, ‘the place and the people will be ever remembered by us with the greatest interest and affection’; and, to ensure that her message did not go unheeded, she had Edward Wise’s letter and her own reply printed and bound together into a small pamphlet for general distribution to the people of the village.

Sarah Jane did not visit Woodchester herself at this time, as she was already six months pregnant with her fifth child, who was born in January 1864 and named Basil in memory of her dead brother. Her sixth child, Laurence, was born in July of the following year; and it was probably in the summer of 1866, when Alfred was seven years old, that Sarah Jane took him with her on a visit to her old home.

Woodchester is a charming village of grey stone houses set along the side of Selsley Hill, just at the edge of the Cotswolds, in beautiful unspoilt countryside; and this happy visit first imprinted on Alfred’s mind the close association between Woodchester, his mother, and the Wise family, which was always to be such an important part of his mental landscape, and which was later to draw him back to Woodchester year after year. This visit was a happy one – but there was an alarming moment for Sarah Jane when Alfred, unknown to her, decided to invent a sort of parachute. She discovered him just in time at the top of a steep ladder, with an umbrella in his hand which he had planned to use to float down to the ground fifteen or twenty feet below!10

Most of Alfred’s childhood games and adventures took place in the large gardens of Perry Hall. It was a delightful place for children, made more interesting because it contained parts of the old house which John Adams, Alfred’s great-great-uncle, had knocked down when he built Perry Hall. Near the house, there was an ornamental garden, with lawn and flower-beds and a flowering cherry tree; beyond that, a well-screened fruit and vegetable garden; and, to one side, and most important of all to the children, was the ‘rubbish garden’, with its apples and damsons, and its seclusion from the world of the grown-ups. Certainly, their father encouraged them to share his interests; he was pleased to be in the Bromsgrove Volunteer Rifle Corps, and in the autumn of 1866, when Alfred was seven and Robert was six years old, Edward took a photograph of them standing together just outside Perry Hall, carrying the toy rifles which he had given them (see Plate 7). But it was in the rubbish garden that their real battles took place, over and around a clay hill where the babies of the family made mud pies, and the older children fought ‘in the most militaristic spirit imaginable’.11 Over the next four or five years, Alfred ‘used to try to make a boomerang work’,12 and also invented a number of new instruments of war: the Bath Bridge, which was a drainpipe to swallow and send out lighted candles—‘We got some candle ends’, his brother Laurence later recalled, ‘and tried the experiment; but only a melting mess and no fire came of it’; – the Martin Luther – ‘a species of gatling gun which never gatled’; – and the Flying Torpedo – ‘a stump of wood which he threw. But’, wrote Laurence, ‘if they failed to do much execution, the names made us happy; for Alfred was always able to make us believe that his word-inventions had a meaning, and that the meaning was good.’

Alfred’s delight in words was hardly surprising. With the Evangelist of Lancaster on one side of his family tree, and Dr Williams on the other, he had inherited an aptitude for writing, no doubt stimulated and encouraged by his mother, with her ‘amusing choice of phrase’. Certainly, Alfred was already writing verse ‘at eight or earlier’, which already suggests that he was gifted. He received his first formal education from a governess, before going with his brother Robert to a small ‘dame-school’ in Bromsgrove High Street. Miss Johnson kept order with the help of a slipper, which she may have used rather often, because one day Alfred, showing a good deal of spirit, managed to get hold of it and threw it up on to the school roof, hoping that this would put an end to her punishments. But it is hard to believe that Alfred was ever a really difficult child. He enjoyed learning, and one of his earliest interests, ‘almost as early as I can remember’, was in astronomy. He found ‘a little book we had in the house’, and devoured it greedily.13

Alfred also enjoyed passing on what he had learned to others, for which he had a gift even as a small child. Laurence later remembered how Alfred one day took him and Basil out on to the lawn:

I was the sun, my brother Basil the earth, Alfred the moon. My part in the game was to stay where I was and rotate on my axis; Basil’s was to go round me in a wide circle rotating as he went; Alfred, performing the movements of the moon, skipped round him without rotation. And that is how I have learned, and have ever since remembered, the primary relations, of the sun, the earth, and the moon.

The children were clever, and naturally competitive. In the garden, each had his or her special climbing tree; and one of their family quarrels took place because they each wanted what was best for themselves. It was early one morning, and they were looking out of the night nursery window at clouds beautifully coloured with the light of a winter dawn, and arguing fiercely over which cloud belonged to whom. Sarah Jane came into the room while they were still arguing, and told them never again to take things belonging so much to heaven as their own.

Their mother was a deeply religious woman, and her children were brought up to be good Christians; but, as things turned out, this influence was not always beneficial. In A Modern Antaeus, a semi-autobiographical novel, Laurence described with keen symbolism how ‘his late home … had lain too low, draining an old graveyard’;14 and, indeed, Perry Hall and its gardens lay at the very foot of the hill which supported the massive physical and spiritual weight of Bromsgrove Church. From the front lawn, Alfred and his brothers and sisters looked up over yew, laurel, birch and laburnum to the church tower and its tall spire; and their life was dominated and timed by the sound of the church bells.

Inside the house, there were family prayers in the dining-room before breakfast every day. The cook was excused from this ritual; but the maids were summoned from the kitchen, and stood in a row in front of the sideboard, while the rest of the household, including governess and nurse, assembled by their chairs. When Mr Housman began with the words: ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost’, the family pulled out their chairs and knelt against the seats; while the maids whisked round and knelt with their backs to the family. Then Edward Housman led them all in prayer. Any child who was late had to do without his share of the bacon which the cook had been preparing, and have only porridge and dry bread. At night, too, the children said their prayers before going to sleep. On Sundays, there were church services to be attended, morning and evening. Then the church bells rang for a full half hour, while the children got into their newest boots, brushed their hair, washed their hands, put on their gloves, and were assembled by their governess. When their parents joined them, they all walked down the drive, over the road, up Adams’ Hill, and into the church where, in Laurence’s words, they ‘enjoyed church as much as was reasonable for young things’.

As head of the household, it was Edward Housman’s duty to take family prayers, and to see that his children went to church; but he was much more kindly and good-natured towards his children – who worshipped him15 – than many a Victorian father. He would not punish them at all until they were seven or eight, and then only lightly. If he heard an outcry in the nursery at tea, instead of finding out what the fuss was about, and punishing whoever he thought was in the wrong, ‘he would come and without inquiry put sugar on our bread and butter’. If they were ever upstairs and heard him going down, the children would rush from their rooms, and put their legs through the banisters to have their toes pulled as he passed below; and, in the garden, they all knew that the cry of ‘Grubs, grubs, grubs!’ meant that their father was waiting for them with some of the fruit which he had just picked for the house.

Sometimes, in those happy days, there would be ‘a delicious hour before bed-time; dim gas-lights burned on the landing, and turned low in the bedrooms, curtained to a fire-light glow’. This was the time, between six and seven o’clock, when their parents were dining, and the maids were doing the downstairs rooms for the night. John Adams had fitted Perry Hall with elaborate precautions against burglary, including swing-bells on the passage doors, and an alarm in the roof; and every evening the house was filled with the rumbling of shutters, which rose up from the ground and had to be locked into place with cross-bars and screws. At this hour, the children had the run of the upstairs rooms, and played hide-and-seek or other games; and then, tired and almost ready for bed, they would be allowed to go down to the dining-room to join the grown-ups for dessert. Here they would find Edward and Sarah Jane – perhaps wearing her brown muslin dress, dotted with silken disks – sitting with the governess at the table; and they would be given a biscuit or a piece of fruit, and a sip of wine, before bidding their parents goodnight.

The Housmans of Perry Hall were a happy family, and might have expected to be prosperous – though not because of Edward Housman’s work as a solicitor. His practice brought in some useful income, but he had been brought up as a country gentleman, and unfortunately he took his many hobbies rather more seriously than his work. In fact, none of the Housmans had earned much money since the previous century. Nor had Edward added to the inherited wealth when he married Sarah Jane; but he must have expected that, in time, he would acquire a considerable sum from his parents. Indeed, in 1867, when Alfred was a boy of eight, still more unearned wealth poured into the family coffers, when Alfred’s great-aunt, Mary Brettell, died.

Thomas Housman was now seventy-two, but he conducted Mary’s funeral service at Catshill Church, although he had retired as vicar three years before. He had then been presented with a signed memorial, thanking him for his ‘unbounded liberality to poorer neighbours of all denominations’, and adding:16

To the female members of your family, we are also greatly indebted, for their untiring, willing, and efficient services in all matters tending to promote the interest, comfort, and well-being of the residents in this district; and it is our ardent hope that your official separation from us will not be the means of our losing their valuable and much needed charitable assistance.

This had encouraged him to remain in the area; and he had continued to be active in Bromsgrove public life. But now that Mary Brettell was dead, and his son Edward had been well established in the town, Thomas began to think about giving up his local commitments, and moving south to enjoy some years of a more complete retirement.

While he was preparing for this move, he found that he needed to raise a sum of money to settle a debt, and for other expenses. Seeing no reason why he should not now benefit directly from his share of John Adams’s bequest, Perry Hall, which he had allowed his son Edward to occupy as life tenant, he came to an arrangement by which a mortgage of £1,100 was raised on the property, in Edward’s name, and the capital sum was paid to Thomas. This left Edward with the responsibility of paying the interest on the mortgage, as a sort of rent.17 Later in the year, Alfred’s grandparents, with their daughters, let Fockbury House, and moved to a cottage at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast.

In the summer of 1868, Sarah Jane’s last child, George Herbert, was born; and a seventh chestnut tree was planted in the gardens of Perry Hall. Alfred was now nine years old, and so far he had enjoyed a wonderfully happy childhood; but already the days of his greatest happiness were drawing to a close; in the autumn of 1869 Sarah Jane was found to have cancer in both breasts, and as the months went by she gradually became an invalid.18

At the beginning of 1870, the Rev. Thomas Housman also fell ill, and realised that he ought to settle his affairs. The mortgage on Perry Hall was in Edward’s name; and Edward had recently spent a considerable sum of his father’s money on enlarging and improving the house. Thomas did not wish to favour Edward more than his other children, and now had a legal document drawn up which made it clear that Perry Hall really belonged to Thomas, though it was agreed that Edward and his heirs should be allowed to hold Perry Hall in trust for Thomas’s heirs.19 Then Thomas made his will. Twelve days after signing it, he died, and his family went into mourning. Alfred, then ten, attended the funeral service and watched as his grandfather was committed to the ground, ‘in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life’.

Edward Housman, who had always depended on the strength of those around him, had suffered a great loss when his father left for Lyme Regis; but at least his forceful wife, Sarah Jane, had been in good health. Now his father was not just remote, but dead; and his wife’s health was slowly deteriorating; Edward simply did not have the strength to cope. Instead of trying to make the children’s lives as normal as possible, in his anxiety he became forgetful and withdrawn, and began drinking.

Unprotected by their father, a great burden of worry descended on the children: Alfred, aged eleven; Robert, ten; Clem, eight; Kate, seven; Basil, six; Laurence, four; and Herbert, two. The younger children, living from day to day, probably did not feel their mother’s gradual decline so strongly, but for the older ones, and especially for Alfred, Robert, and Clem, it was a dreadful period in their lives. Robert had a weak chest, and in the worry about his mother his asthma became so bad that in the autumn of 1870 he was sent away to spend three years at a school in Bath, where it was hoped that the climate would be good for him. Laurence’s health also gave cause for alarm: he had a long illness which left his legs very weak.

In this worrying year, there was the problem of deciding what to do about Alfred’s education. Edward Housman had great expectations, but not much ready cash; and with the expense of interest repayments on the mortgage of Perry Hall, and the additional burden of paying for Robert’s fees at a boarding school, he might have found it difficult to send Alfred as a fee-paying pupil to the local school which he himself had once attended: King Edward’s School, Bromsgrove.

There had always been a place at the school for twelve free scholars, ‘Blue Boys’, so called because they had to wear a coarse, blue coat reaching to the knees, blue breeches and stockings, and a mushroom-like cap with a big cloth button on the top, but by 1869 the endowment to support them had dwindled to a pittance. However, in 1868, a reforming headmaster, the Rev. George John Blore, a brilliant classicist and a dedicated schoolmaster, took over the school. Within a year he had formally abolished the Blue Coat School. Instead, there were to be twelve foundation scholars, day-boys who were to be admitted on complete educational equality with the boarders.20 In this way the door was opened almost at the last minute to Alfred Housman, who was elected as one of the new scholars in July 1870, and entered the school as a day-boy in September that year.

Bromsgrove School – which Alfred attended, like all the other pupils, wearing a black mortar-board – was only a few hundred yards from Perry Hall. After going down through the southern end of the town, over a bridge crossing the stream which had powered John Adams’s Indigo Mill, Alfred would walk a few yards along the Worcester Road. Here, at the head of a short slope, facing back westwards towards Bromsgrove Church, stood Cookes building, a dominating pile of brickwork which dated back to the seventeenth century, and housed a classroom, a dining hall, and a library. Behind what was now an architectural monstrosity, a pleasantly built Regency wing containing the headmaster’s house ran eastwards. From here, the headmaster could look across a lawn to the chapel – his view unimpeded by passing boys, for whom a tunnel had been built from Cookes building to just beside the chapel – and he could also see a further range of buildings. Beyond these again, there was a large walled playground, with plenty of room in it for the sixty or seventy boys who made up the school.21

Alfred settled down quickly, and enjoyed his work at school; but he missed the companionship of his brother Robert, and of Edwin Grey, a carpenter’s son who lived close to Perry Hall, and who had been a friend of his until he went to Bromsgrove School.22 Besides this, his mother was very ill; so it is not surprising that, when he first arrived at his new school, he was so solemn and quiet that ‘he was nicknamed “Mouse”, and the other boys, knowing nothing about his mother’s illness, would according to Katherine Symons, sometimes ‘tread on him, pretending they had not seen him’.

During the winter months Alfred and Clemence – whose ninth birthday was in November – began to spend more and more time with their mother, Alfred often writing letters for her, and Clem helping the nurse to care for her.23 As she grew physically weaker, and finally bed-ridden, Sarah Jane’s love for all her children grew more fierce and more possessive. Particularly, she clung to the company of her eldest son, almost as if she was trying to pour some of herself into him before she died. Her mind centred to an unhealthy extent on memories, and on prayer; Alfred and Clem, who were so close to her during this period, suffered a deeply disturbing emotional experience, from whose effects neither of them ever fully recovered.

Sometimes, talking to Alfred as though he were a grown-up, his mother ranged nostalgically through her memories of days at Woodchester, telling him many stories about her life there as a girl.24 At other times – despite the fact that she had already written a letter to her friend Mrs Wise, telling her it was certain that she would not live to see her children grow up, she would pray with Alfred for her recovery, thus fixing in his impressionable mind the idea that she could be saved, that, if there was a God, He would save her. And as she turned to religion for comfort, her old doubts and uncertainties about the Church of England returned. Her own mother had died not many months ago, and there was now no member of the Williams family left alive to reproach her for thinking about becoming a Roman Catholic. She told Edward what was in her mind, but he refused to let her see a Roman Catholic priest, only allowing her to talk to a certain high church Anglican. How much Sarah Jane said to Alfred about all this is unknown; but, in later life, Alfred used to assert that high-church Anglicanism was the best religion ever invented.

By March 1871, it was clear that Sarah Jane had not long to live, and one day, admitting this to Clemence, she asked her to ‘Take care of little Laurence. His legs are weak, and he will need you.’ For some time, Sarah Jane’s responsibilities in the household had been taken over by Edward’s cousin Mary Housman, an elder sister of the Lucy Housman who had been his wife’s bridesmaid. More recently, Sarah Jane’s bed had been moved downstairs into a room which led off from the dining-room, so that she could join in family prayers. The strain on Alfred of watching his mother get worse and worse, in spite of his prayers, became almost unbearable; and on 19 March his family at last had the sense to send him away to his godmother, Mrs Wise, and her family in Woodchester.

From the station building, a short road ran up westwards over a bridge, from which Alfred could look down at the stream which flowed along the valley, powering the local cloth mills. At the top of the road, a lane ran north and south to the two scattered halves of the village; and to the north, only twenty-five yards away, were two stone pillars which marked the entrance to the Wise’s property. Through this gateway, a drive ran round in a long slow curve to the left, with fields on either side of it; then past a carriage house and stable block, and up through trees to where the Wise family lived, in a delightful eighteenth-century family home, solidly built in grey stone to a formal but unpretentious design. From the front of the house, one looked south across unspoilt countryside; at the back, there was a small lawn, and a rise in the ground hid North Woodchester from view, so that only distant slopes were visible beyond the shrubs and trees of the garden. It was a peaceful, secluded, and happy place. This was the Woodchester to which Alfred was later to return so often and whose occupants were to afford him so much solace.

A feature of the house was the impressive hallway which ran the length of the building, with four main rooms, including the kitchen, leading off from it. On the next floor were the family bedrooms and, above them, the servants’ quarters. The master of the household, Edward Wise, was now in his sixties, and the decline of the woollen industry in Gloucestershire had recently forced him to close his two mills; but he appeared to have other interests, and to remain comfortably off.25 Mrs Wise, a sympathetic and practical woman of almost the same age as Alfred’s mother, had already promised Sarah Jane that she would keep a special eye on Alfred, and she did her best to make him feel at home. Her own children were rather older than Alfred: Edward Tuppen, or ‘Ted’ Wise, was already nineteen, but her two daughters, Edith and Wilhelmina, or ‘Minnie’, were, at sixteen and thirteen, not too old to enjoy Alfred’s company. The girls were both taught by Sophie Becker, a warm-hearted German governess then in her early thirties. Alfred’s sister Kate, who met Miss Becker a few times, described her as: ‘small and dark and sallow, not exactly ugly, but not good-looking. She was a shrewd, cheerful, capable person, much valued in the Wise family.’26 She was also witty and amusing, and she drew Alfred into their games and conversations, and their rambles through the surrounding countryside, and so began what was to become a life-long relationship of mutual admiration and sympathy.

The area was full of happy associations for Alfred. His mother’s stories about her childhood were still fresh in his mind, and he could also remember his last visit to Woodchester with her, when she was in good health. From the drive, a footpath ran northwards down a slope, and then up again to the new church, where Alfred could see the memorial windows to his grandfather and uncle Basil. Beyond the church, and across the main street, he could examine the Elizabethan rectory where his mother had lived; or he could walk down the lane which led to the remains of the church where his parents had been married, and to the churchyard where a previous rector of Woodchester had discovered a remarkable Roman mosaic pavement.

With Edith and Minnie and Miss Becker, he sometimes climbed the steep main street, which ran up westward to the oddly shaped slopes and hollows of Selsley Common. From these heights, bare of trees, he could look back down to the village, or further westward across miles of farmland towards the River Severn and the distant Welsh hills.

Then, on Sunday 26 March, he celebrated his twelfth birthday among his friends. Soon afterwards a letter arrived from his rather to tell him of his mother’s death: by a cruel coincidence which haunted Alfred for the rest of his life, she had died on his birthday.

Notes

In order to avoid weighing down the book with detailed footnotes, I have throughout this section listed initially those works from which I have drawn the bulk of my references for the chapter in question; the remaining notes will normally be to lesser-known and less accessible sources. All unpublished sources will be given. Unless otherwise indicated, most of the background information in this chapter comes from: AEH: Recollections; My Brother: AEH; Pugh; Unexpected Years.

1 A sermon preached in London before the Continental Society for Diffusing Religious Knowledge over the Continent of Europe. A copy of this rare pamphlet may be seen in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (G Pamph 1033 (b)).

2 Trinity, Add MS 71–31: letter from Laurence Housman, 22 September 1937.

3 Robert Fletcher, The Life and Remains of the Reverend Robert Housman, quoted in Watson, p. 34.

4 Congress, RHP Box 2: Mrs K. E. Symons to Grant Richards, 21 February 1937.

5 Congress, LHMS: Laurence Housman to Maude Hawkins, 24 October 1950.

6 K. E. Symons, More Memories.

7 Little, A History of Woodchester, 1922; rewritten by Rev. W. N. R. J. Black, 1972; see passim, particularly Appendix 14.

8 Lilly, Carter correspondence, 11 September 1956: letter from Ellinor M. Allen of Inchdene, Woodchester.

9 JPP, Mrs K. E. Symons, ‘How the Housman Family came to Bromsgrove’.

10 More Memories.

11 Street; Laurence Housman to Sarah Clark, 15 February 1917.

12 Trinity, Add MS 71–40.

13 Letters, p. 328, 5 February to Maurice Pollet.

14 Laurence Housman, A Modern Antaeus, London, John Murray, 1901, p. 8.

15 Congress, LHMS: Laurence Housman to Maude Hawkins, 24 October 1950.

16 Among the papers at University College London.

17 JPP, indenture between Edward Housman and the Rev. Thomas Housman.

18 Congress, LHMS: from Laurence Housman’s answers to a questionnaire about Alfred.

19 JPP, indenture between Edward Housman and the Rev. Thomas Housman, 10 January 1870.

20 H.E.M. Icely, Bromsgrove School through Four Centuries, Oxford, Blackwell, 1953, pp. 81–4.

21 Ibid., passim.

22 Watson, p. 47. For another mention of Edwin Grey see Letters, p. 269.

23 From a conversation between the present author and Phyllis Symons, Kate’s daughter-in-law, 5 May 1976.

24 Laurence Housman in John O’London’s Weekly, 16 October 1936.

25 See A History of Woodchester, Appendices 16 and 17. The mills were conveyed to Wise in 1868, but closed within two years. Wise’s ‘other interests’ are unknown, and it may be that he simply lived off his capital for the remaining five years of his life.

26 Congress, RHP Box 2: K. E. Symons to Grant Richards, 8 June 1942.