And the stately ships go on

           to their haven under the hill;

      but oh for the touch of a vanished hand,

          and the sound of a voice that is still.

      Break, break, break

           at the foot of the crags, o Sea;

      but the tender grace of a day that is dead

          will never come back to me.

 

Lines from ‘Break, break, break’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson as quoted in Sabrinae Corolla

On the morning of 26 March 1871, the Housman children still at Perry Hall – Kate, aged eleven, Clem aged nine, Basil aged eight, Laurence aged five, and Herbert aged two – had been taken to church as usual. The first sign that something was wrong came when the mid-day meal was transferred from the dining- to the drawing-room. ‘I asked why’, Laurence recalled, ‘and was told … that it was because I was late in getting ready for church that morning.’ A few minutes after the meal had ended, Clem and Kate were on the front lawn with Herbert, while Laurence was walking with his nurse along the drive. Then Laurence saw their housekeeper cousin, Mary, come out of the front door: ‘She said something I could not hear. I saw my two sisters burst into tears, and throw themselves into her arms.’ Then all the children were taken into the darkened room where their mother had died. Sarah Jane’s body was still lying in bed, her face pale, her eyelids smoothed down; at the foot of the bed lighted candles burned on either side of a crucifix in a wooden shrine. It was a solemn, haunting, and strangely beautiful sight, which explained, more than any words could have done, that their mother was finally dead; and, for those of the children who understood and believed in Christianity, the cross and the candles were a reminder that she had already begun a new life in heaven.

For the moment Alfred was simply overwhelmed. Indeed, Sarah Jane had told her husband that she was afraid that Alfred would lose his faith when she died, and Edward unfortunately implanted this idea in Alfred’s mind by mentioning it to him in the letter giving news of her death that he sent to Woodchester. Alfred’s prayers for his mother’s recovery had, as it seemed to him, been callously ignored.1 Not that there was an immediate rejection of God. But the depth of his feeling is shown by the fact that, for the rest of his life, he carefully preserved every scrap of writing that he had ever received from or about her; and it is from this time that Alfred began to suffer from ‘that most distinctly Romantic feeling — infinite, never appeased longing’2 which was always to weigh heavily upon him.

Wishing to spare his son unnecessary suffering, Edward suggested that Alfred should stay on at Woodchester until after the funeral, a separation of father and son at the very time when shared grief might have brought them closer together; and he was also apart from his brothers and sisters at one of the most important emotional turning-points of all their lives. Instead, Alfred turned for comfort to Miss Becker, and for companionship to Edith Wise. Edith became a very close friend, closer to him than any of his brothers or sisters; and when the sympathetic Miss Becker consoled him, he transferred to her some of the love which he had felt for his mother.3 She was less attractive than his mother had been; but she was witty, and clever, and made much of him, as his mother had done. The understanding which developed between them became, for Alfred, one of the most important relationships in his life; when as an old man he heard of her death, he admitted that he had loved and revered her from youth, ‘his voice faltered, and a look of unutterable sadness suffused his face’.4

By the time that Alfred had returned home to Perry Hall, the moment for shared feelings and confidences with his immediate family had gone. As the eldest son, he felt responsible for putting a brave face on things; and, largely because of his influence, the children never discussed their loss among themselves. Alfred might have talked to Robert, but he was still an exile in Bath, suffering from his asthma. Grief was kept for the secrecy of the bedroom, where Laurence, for one, cried in bed at night for his mother to come back to him, half believing that if he prayed faithfully enough she would. Hiding his feelings became habitual for Alfred. His sister Kate remembered that, from this time on, it was never his way to speak of troubles, and she wrote: ‘He was sensitive and easily wounded, but wounds he bore in silence.’

During her illness, Sarah Jane had withdrawn so much from the daily routine of the household that her death made little outward change. Edward Housman’s younger sister Jane, who had come up for a while to help out, soon returned to Lyme Regis to look after their ailing mother, whose mental control was now so poor that she more than once had to be sent to an asylum for ‘unbalanced condition of mind’.5 Mary Housman stayed on as housekeeper, and apart from a change of governess, family life went on outwardly much as before. But the family was in mourning. The children grieved silently, and wore harsh black stockings; while the tolling bells of Bromsgrove Church, which continued to regulate the hours, were another constant reminder of their mother’s death.

During the next twelve months Alfred thought a great deal about his mother and, in the light of her death, he began to change his ideas about religion. He did not simply ‘lose his faith’ as Sarah Jane had feared. He was too deeply religious not to believe that there was a God; but he became less and less able to believe in the Christian Revelation. If Jesus Christ was the son of God, and really could answer prayers and intervene in the normal working of the Universe, then nothing so pointless and unjust as his mother’s death would have been allowed to happen. Alfred wanted to believe in Christianity, but could not: years later he expressed this feeling in a poem called ‘Easter Hymn’ which, because of its controversial nature, he did not publish during his lifetime:6

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,

You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain….

Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,

At the right hand of majesty on high

You sit, and sitting so remember yet

Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,

Your cross and passion and the life you gave,

Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

(MP 1) (More Poems)

By the time that he was thirteen, Alfred had secretly abandoned Christianity, and learned to think of himself as a Deist, believing that there was a God, but no more than that. Since he was a boy of eight and had looked into Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, he had been fascinated by legends of the pagan gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome; and his reading of these legends, together with his growing love for the beauty of the countryside, brought him closer to being a pagan or pantheist, and offered an escape for his sensitive mind from the bleakness of a Universe in which God is present but indifferent.

Unlike his son, Edward Housman did not turn his back on Christianity; but he did long to move from Perry Hall, where he could only forget his dead wife by indulging in bouts of heavy drinking. However, his professional life tied him to Bromsgrove; and Perry Hall belonged to his father’s estate, so he was not really in a position to sell it. Then, in February 1872, the tenant of Fockbury House died. Edward’s childhood home now belonged jointly to Edward and to his brothers and sisters, Thomas, Mary, Jane and Joseph. Income from the tenancy of Fockbury House helped Edward, who was its Trustee, to run Perry Hall; and he should have found a new paying tenant as soon as possible. But the prospect of a move was too tempting for him, and he decided that he and his family would go to live at Fockbury themselves. He would lose his income, but he planned – almost certainly without the consent of his brothers and sisters – to raise an immediate mortgage of £1,500 on the property, which would provide him with plenty of ready money for the time being.

Edward was a charming man, liked and respected throughout his life by many of the most influential people in Bromsgrove, and he was a leading member of many local societies and governing boards. But in making this move, he had succumbed to his fatal weakness: the wish to live the life of a prosperous country gentleman. His father had been able to live that life, and Edward had been brought up fitted for nothing else. But although he hoped for a great deal of family money in the future, he was not at present rich enough for the role he wanted to play. He never earned much as a solicitor, and had no lands to provide him with the income needed to maintain a large household. However, he would rather have the illusion of prosperity than nothing at all; and, to achieve it, he was quite prepared to sacrifice the future to the present. Photographs of Edward reinforce the impression of a man who has inherited some of his father’s intelligence, but more of his determination than of his judgment. The mouth and the jaw are firm, even obstinate, but the eyes are weak and uncertain.

So Edward felt that a move to Fockbury House would suit him very well; Perry Hall would have to be kept on, but he would continue to use part of it as his offices, and from time to time he managed to let out the main body of the house.7 There remained the problem of his children: Mary Housman was a good housekeeper, but a poor substitute mother; and Edward was lonely after Sarah Jane’s death. After a while he began thinking of Mary’s younger sister, Lucy Housman, who had introduced him to his first wife, and had been Sarah Jane’s bridesmaid at their wedding. Lucy was eight years older than Edward, so that in 1872 she was already forty-nine; but he knew that she had always admired him, and that she was a strong, sensible person who would make a good job of bringing up his children and running his household – and he proposed to her.

Lucy accepted, as Edward had hoped. He confided in Alfred, the only one of his children who had met her; and Alfred, taking on what was really too large a responsibility for a thirteen-year-old boy, wrote at once to assure his future stepmother that he would do everything he could to help her look after his brothers and sisters.

Early in 1873, Lucy visited the family, who were still at Perry Hall. She was not a great beauty, and at times looked rather too earnest; but the children liked her, and the visit was a success. Laurence, in particular, took to her at once; and in their first walk alone together, knowing nothing about his father’s plans, he touchingly proposed marriage himself, telling her that he had five pounds in the Savings Bank, and choosing the small cottage in which they were to start life together. Soon after this visit, Edward moved out to Fockbury with his seven children, who were by now very excited at the thought of life in the country.

As the crow flies, Fockbury House was only a mile and a half from Perry Hall, but it was in a different, more peaceful world. When the day came for the move, most of the baggage and furniture had been sent on ahead in carts, and the family crowded into an open carriage. Their road lay westwards, away from the shadow of Bromsgrove Church and through a countryside of rolling farmland. Then they turned into Perryfields Road, and drove northwards to the slopes around Fockbury House. Up these slopes through narrow lanes the horses drew them, until on their right, at the head of the Valley Road, the children saw their new home. Soon their carriage drew up alongside a picturesque building dating back to the seventeenth century: the lower storey plain brickwork; the upper half-timbered with several gabled windows. Many local people still called it the Clock House, as one of the gables had once held a large clock which gave time to the neighbourhood.

Fockbury House, being an old, unmodernised country home, had no gas, no water taps, and no drainage; but, as Kate pointed out, ‘it was a good place for children’. It was large and rambling and there was also a sizeable garden in which to roam, as well as a range of farm buildings to explore, with rickyards, barns and lofts. In the country round about there were ‘woods and lanes, fields, pools and brooks … friendly farms dotted about the neighbourhood, part of our grandmother’s property, affording us truly exciting playing places’. Close at hand, at the bottom of Fockbury field, they visited a poacher who lived with his four children in a small cottage under a wall of rock, and who told the children: ‘When I can do no more ratting and rabbiting, then I hope the Lord will take me’, while further away, a yeoman farmer named John Daffern, who had once been a family tenant, became a particular favourite — perhaps because they would sometimes be treated to a draught of fresh milk when they called at his farm.

When they first arrived at Fockbury, only a few hundred yards along the road from the house where Alfred was born, the children found on an attic floor the remains of a library dating from the time of Caxton. Most of this valuable collection had been destroyed through the astonishing carelessnesss of their grandmother, who had allowed her offspring to tear up the covers to use as wads for their muzzle-loading sporting guns; the insides of the books she had sold for butter paper.8 Alfred later commented tartly that: ‘our grandmother of course had no brains at all that I could discover; but our grandfather ought to have been ashamed of himself’. However, several works of interest had survived, including a botanical collection made by the Holdens in the 1690s, and ‘an emblazoned pedigree showing two lines of Holden descent’ dating back to the reign of Henry II.

Edward, relaxing into life as a country gentleman, greatly enjoyed the distinguished family connection with the countryside, which meant that he was sometimes spoken of locally as ‘the Squire’. Alfred shared his father’s enjoyment. He was fascinated by the pedigree, while the botanical collection stimulated his interest in nature; and he began to make walking through the surrounding countryside his chief recreation.

Towards the end of June, Edward, now aged forty-two, married his fifty-year-old cousin, Lucy, in London; and a month later he brought his new wife home. It was a nervous moment for Lucy, despite the success of her earlier visit; but the children, gathered in the entrance hall with their governess, greeted her warmly: only Laurence, remembering his earlier proposal, felt embarrassed when ‘my father gave me a roguish look, which meant, I suppose, Cut you out, my boy!’ That evening, Lucy discussed with the children what they were to call her – they decided upon Mamma.

Alfred had something more serious to discuss with his stepmother. The new governess, Mrs Cooper, had disgusted him by her immoral behaviour, behaviour which she had managed to conceal from his father. Alfred told Lucy plainly that Mrs Cooper was not fit to be looking after his sisters, and then had to explain about her promiscuity which must have embarrassed him considerably.9 Mrs Cooper was livid with Alfred when she was forced to leave the household, spitting out vicious comments whose gist was that Alfred, though no longer a child, was not yet a mature adult. This unpleasant episode helped to make Alfred think of sex between men and women as something rather repulsive; an impression which was confirmed by the guidance of sexual matters which was given to him at about this time by his father, who appears to have concentrated on warning him about the dangers of giving way to sexual desires.10

Not long after this, at a time when Alfred was at least fourteen, Edward took it into his head to have all the boys in his family circumcised. Alfred’s sister Kate later commented:11

Severe treatment indeed, particularly traumatic for boys well out of infancy, and treatment which once again must have helped to make sexual activity seem dirty to Alfred.

Meanwhile, at Bromsgrove School, Alfred was doing well. Dr Blore, who remained as headmaster until the summer of 1873, later described Alfred as the sort of boy he was always afraid would ask him some question which he could not answer; and although quiet and studious, Alfred was not downtrodden by any of the other boys for long. On the contrary, he developed into quite ‘a determined personality, able to take his own way, and yet to avoid troubles’.

In term time, his younger brothers and sisters saw comparatively little of him. Robert was still away in Bath; and the other children were taught by the governess who came to replace Mrs Cooper. Alfred had to be up early for a six o’clock breakfast before walking to school, down the lanes to Perryfields Road, across country to Bromsgrove, and through the town to the school, where in the summer work began at seven.

When he was only fourteen Alfred, who had remembered his mother’s talent for writing verse,12 entered the school verse competition with a poem about Sir Walter Raleigh. He did not win but he felt pleased with his efforts, and, as he afterwards protested, considered them much better than his later prize poems.13 Some of the lines are similar in form and in imaginative power to the best of Tolkien:14

From land to land like night he flees

The playmate of the stormy breeze

Before his prow the shade of fear …

He flies to other lands afar

The lands beneath the evening star

Where fairer constellations rise

And shed their light from bluer skies

Where undiscovered treasure shines

Locked in the dim and gloomy mines

And red volcanoes howl and glare

Like daemons on the midnight air.

While Alfred made no lasting friends at school, he got on well enough with his class mates. Much to his relief, as a day-boy he was not forced to take part in games or athletics like the boarders, and during the long mid-day interval on whole school days, he worked quietly in one of their study-rooms.

In the autumn of 1873, a new headmaster came to Bromsgrove, Herbert Millington, who was later said to resemble certain portraits of Matthew Arnold, with his handsome features and his eager, intellectual expression. Millington had some failings, of which the chief were his class prejudice, and his contempt for those who did not see things as he did. He was a forceful man, and in his dislike of ‘the trade element’ he made life hard for many of the day-boys, even encouraging the use of insulting nicknames such as ‘Bacon’ and ‘Carthorse’ for the sons of a grocer and a farmer. However, he was a good teacher of clever boys;15 and he made his influence felt throughout the school, particularly in the way in which he encouraged his pupils to adopt his own interests. One of these was botany, for which Alfred had already shown an inclination.

Afternoon school was usually from 4 to 6 p.m., so that Alfred was not home at Fockbury until nearly seven; and then he dined late with his father and stepmother, and worked alone. But he had not forgotten his promise to help Lucy with the upbringing of the rest of the family: when on half-holidays the children met her in the drawing-room for their ‘customary hour’, Alfred would join them in cards, games and glee singing.

During the holidays, Alfred took a more active role, encouraging his brothers and sisters to draw, paint, take part in games, and write stories. He very much enjoyed the nonsense verse of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and sometimes amused his brothers and sisters with nonsense rhymes of his own:16

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet

    Opening her mouth very wide.

There came a great spider; she opened it wider

    And the spider ran down her inside.

He also encouraged them to write more serious verses, giving as much help as was needed, so that Laurence later wrote: ‘When I was a small child he did persuade me that I had written a sonnet which was really his; and he wrote it down as mine in the family album.’17 They were competitive and possessive children, and Alfred made use of this in the way that he taught them. When studying trees, for example, they each had to choose a favourite — Alfred’s choice was the beech — but they all had to choose a different one. In the same way, he encouraged them to share his interest in Gothic architecture by making them choose particular Gothic cathedrals as their favourites. ‘We found great fun in all this’, Kate wrote later, ‘for Alfred had a way of making things he did amusing as well as interesting. Our gatherings were generally hilarious.’ However, the extra responsibility which Alfred had assumed put a real distance between him and the other children, and made his family life anything but normal.

Lucy herself read to the family almost every day, especially during the winter months and school holidays: she began with the narrative poems of Scott, and eventually read her way through most of Shakespeare. In the evenings Edward sometimes read to them from Dickens, and he also encouraged his children to take an interest in one of his own numerous hobbies: shooting, fishing, music, photography, gardening, and even firework-making. Alfred did not join in with his father’s arrangements, but spent the time instead in reading or walking; partly because he no longer felt that he was one of the children; and partly, as Kate later explained, because his ‘sense of some pleasures was acute, and seemed exercised best alone. It was alone that he liked to tramp to enjoy the sight and smell of woodlands, or to gaze on a setting sun or a starry sky.’

From Fockbury House, he would often walk into narrow Worms Ash Lane, which, set between high banks of reddish rock and gnarled tree roots, leads up westwards over the side of a small hill. From the top of the lane, on a fine day, he could see as far as the Clent and Lickey hills. But usually he turned into a field at the side of the lane, and a few more paces brought him to the top of the hill. Southwards lay Bromsgrove, its church spire standing out clearly above the town; and to the west Alfred looked out over a peaceful land of small wooded hills and hamlets to the distant Shropshire hills. This beautiful view became for him a powerful image associated with some of his deepest feelings. In daylight, it was a symbol of hope: flowing with milk and honey, like the Promised Land of the Israelites; and in fact the other Housman children, remembering the story of Moses going up from the plains of Moab nicknamed the hill ‘Mount Pisgah’. In the evening, Alfred came here to meditate upon his troubles and upon greater mysteries: a fifteen-year-old boy standing alone on a hill-top watching the last of the day, while:

The scene is perhaps more Romantic than Biblical, with Alfred as the Romantic idea of the Bard, seeking the truth ‘alone in a wide natural landscape high above the rest of humanity’.18

The Housman family now lived in the parish of Catshill; and summer and winter, they walked the mile to church twice every Sunday. They went in arm-in-arm pairs, with Edward and Lucy leading the way. Alfred and Robert should have followed, but even when Robert returned from Bath, he did not join his brother. They had grown apart in those three years of separation, and Alfred, unable to confide in him, kept Robert at a distance. Besides, at the age of thirteen Clem was not only taller, but cleverer than Robert, and a more entertaining companion for her eldest brother. Robert, aged fourteen, was left to walk with twelve-year-old Kate, who was cheerful, but hated lessons, and was therefore considered rather a dunce by the rest of the family. Then came an ill-assorted pair: ten-year-old Basil, who with his orderly studious mind was most like Alfred, and a favourite of his; and the irrepressible Laurence, who at the age of nine was always in one scrape or another – though Clem kept an eye on him when she could. Last came the governess, hand-in-hand with six-year-old Herbert.19 They all walked down the Valley Road, past the house where Alfred had been born, and then north-eastwards over the fields to Catshill Church.

At Catshill, the rustic congregation consisted mainly of yeoman farmers and labourers, dressed in the clean smocks which they would wear for the rest of the week – some of them even sported old-fashioned beaver hats. The vicar of Catshill, the Rev. James Kidd, was a great countryman, and Alfred liked talking to him about botany, but in church he was very dull. The Housmans enjoyed listening to their father reading the Lesson, which he often did; but under Kidd’s ministry, as Laurence later recalled, ‘the bread of the gospel turned to stone’.

When the service was over, Alfred sometimes wandered down to the southern corner of the churchyard, where a decorated stone cross marked his mother’s grave. She had been buried not far from the Rev. Thomas Housman; and, remembering the inscription on Thomas’s more imposing monument, which began: ‘To whom was first entrusted this church, this God’s acre …’, Alfred was later to write bitterly:

There’s empty acres west and east,

But aye ’tis God’s that bears the least:

This hopeless garden that they sow

With the seeds that never grow.

(AP 11) (Additional Poems)

Lucy Housman had won the affection of her adopted family, but she was a stronger figure than they had at first recognised, and in time the children stopped calling her ‘Mamma’, and called her ‘Mater’ instead. She was rather puritanical, gradually weeding out the high-church tendencies which had been implanted by their mother. Lucy disapproved particularly of holidays on Saints’ days, allowed by Sarah Jane, and kept watch until one Saint’s day, out of term, they failed to go to church – and that was the end of the special holidays. She followed up this victory by reading on Sunday afternoons ‘an awful life of Luther, in two big volumes, translated from the German’.

Alfred was unaffected by his stepmother’s Lutheran teachings; but, as he was painfully aware in later life, he grew up with something of her class prejudice. Of course, there were in those days such inequalities between the various classes that is was easy to believe that the lower orders of society were naturally inferior. In church, the Housmans sat in the very front pew as a sign of their social status; and while the Housman children were getting a good education, other local children were being taught in a primitive dame school at Catshill. At Fockbury House itself, the servants were not overworked, and they were paid fair wages; but Lucy treated them as being in some ways less human than herself. When a weeping maid asked for permission to visit her dying mother, Lucy agreed, but then commented to her children: ‘They make a great fuss, but they don’t feel about these things as we do.’

Since his mother’s death, Alfred had corresponded regularly with his godmother and with Sophie Becker, writing mainly on family matters, with family jokes such as references to the possibility of Mrs Wise becoming a Roman Catholic. Sometimes he would even write in French, addressing Mrs Wise as Madame Guise of Masion de Chestre à bois, and signing himself ‘Alfred Edouard Maisonhomme’. He also went to stay at Woodchester whenever possible, though at least once he had to decline an invitation, regretting that: ‘Mr. Millington has set his heart on some very wonderful achievements on the part of the school at next Midsummer … I am chained to my books.’20

In the summer of 1874, when Alfred was fifteen, the Wises and Miss Becker came to Fockbury House for a few days; and Miss Becker, Edith and Minnie posed for a photograph as part of a group in fancy dress, with Sophie Becker as Queen of the Night, Alfred as an archbishop, and his ten-year-old brother Basil in military uniform.21 Miss Becker was judged ‘shrewd, sensible, and brightly humorous’; but Alfred’s family did not recognise the strength of his attachment for her. On the other hand, his friendship with Edith Wise was plain enough. Alfred’s brothers and sisters decided that he was secretly in love with her; and, even when she became engaged to the curate of Woodchester, they teased Alfred with a reference to his rambles with her on Selsley Hill:22

Alfred Edward solemn and wise

Opens his mouth and rolls his eyes

But when chasing Selsley slopes

opes his eyes and eyes his ’opes.

They were not surprised when he failed to react angrily; his weapon in the family, when he needed one, was scorn and aloofness. Once, when Robert smacked his cheek, Alfred simply assumed an exaggerated air of superiority, and turned his face like a good Christian for another smack. When Robert hit him again, he did retaliate, but not fiercely, and Robert soon gave way – perhaps because, as Laurence later recalled, ‘it would have been almost like fighting against a parent or an uncle to have stood against Alfred at that time as man to man’.

In school, good places in form, prizes and praise continued to come to him; and indeed, his success at school was an important factor in making him feel that there was something worth while left in life after his mother’s death. He was proud of his successes; and years later, when Kate read an account by Laurence of Alfred’s early life, she wrote rather crossly: ‘It is news to me that he was ever a modest little boy … I never saw him troubled by modesty of any sort–as a boy or afterwards.’23 It was in the summer of 1874, shortly before the Wises visited Fockbury, that Alfred won the school verse prize for the first time. In fact, his poem, on the Death of Socrates, was inferior to his imaginative verses about Raleigh the previous year. But he had produced what was required, a sort of conventional sub-Swinburnian echo, so perhaps he deserved to win for that alone.

During the Christmas holidays, Alfred’s stepmother decided that it was time for his outlook to be broadened a little, and she sent him off to London for a few days, in the care of her sister Mary. The steam-engine which pulled their train into London brought Alfred and his elderly cousin to a thriving city of some four millions – a city much closer to nature than it is today. Sheep and cows were still driven through the mud to be slaughtered at Smithfield; in the suburbs pigs and goats were kept in back gardens, and even allowed on to the streets to forage for food. ‘I am serenaded every morning by some cocks who crow as if their life depended upon it. If they were in my hands,’ Alfred wrote with grim humour to his stepmother, ‘their life would depend upon it.’

Alfred enjoyed himself tremendously. He saw Trafalgar Square, which as a provincial boy he found ‘magical’; admired the view from Westminster Bridge; toured the main London streets, and visited Westminster Abbey, where he heard an anthem like a boa constrictor – very long and very ugly’ – and visited Poets’ comer. In St Paul’s Cathedral, which he liked better than the Abbey, he went up to the Golden Gallery, leaving his nervous cousin safely behind on terra firma; at the Albert Hall he stood for a performance of Haydn’s Creation; and in the British Museum he visited the zoological gallery, where he was reminded of a famous book by Jules Verne, and came to the conclusion, ‘which you may tell the readers of “The Centre of the Earth”, that if the Mastodon and Megatherium were to fight it would decidedly be a very bad job for the Megatherium …’.

But in the British Museum Alfred’s passion for the ancient world led him to spend most of his time ‘among the Greeks and Romans’. As might have been expected, Alfred did not have any particular feeling for the female statues. He had hardly been encouraged to view sexual relations with women with joyful anticipation, and perhaps already harboured the distaste later to be intellectualised into his scornful attitude towards most of the female sex. However, he did find the male statues fascinating. At home in Worcestershire, he had read and enjoyed stories of Gods and heroes, and of firm friendships between comrades-in-arms; and he had looked in his imagination for a heroic friend:

Certainly, Alfred did not at all care for the Towneley Venus, which Lucy had recommended to him; instead, he wrote to her that ‘what delighted me most was the Farnese Mercury’. Alfred had in his mind a picture of the Roman world, its civilisation bound together by marching legions, full of individual heroes. When he saw the finely uniformed men of the Grenadier Guards and the 1st Life Guards in St James’s Park, he wrote: ‘I think of all I have seen, what has most impressed me is – the Guards. This may be barbarian, but it is true.’

His trip to London was not Alfred’s first contact with the larger world. His father subscribed to an illustrated weekly, the Graphic, which reported all the international and national news of any importance, from details of the Ashanti war to the clashes between Disraeli and Gladstone. Edward Housman particularly encouraged an interest in politics and, in the evenings, when the children joined him and Lucy for a sip of wine after dinner, he would sometimes call out a toast of ‘Up with the Tories, and down with the Radicals!’, which they would all shout together.

When Alfred returned from London, it was to find that some of his family had caught scarlet fever, so he boarded at school for a while. He had enjoyed his holiday, but this prolonged separation from his family made him homesick. One afternoon he walked across the town, and up the long slope to Bromsgrove churchyard. From here he could look northwards, beyond the gravestones and the young lime trees, in the direction of Fockbury. He could see his home clearly, ‘especially’, he wrote to Lucy, ‘the window of your room’. He was in the churchyard

A few days later, on a half-holiday, he followed up this letter by actually walking over to Fockbury, and calling to his family from an adjacent meadow.

Before long, the children recovered and Alfred returned home; when, a few months later, it was Lucy’s turn to be away from Fockbury for a short holiday with her mother, Alfred wrote her an amusing letter in rhyming couplets. Alfred’s Aunt Mary, Edward’s sister, was staying with them; and he wrote that the weather had been:

And would not, until the evening, when:

while the stout Aunt Mary became:

Alfred was still busy organising his brothers and sisters; and was now making them contribute to a family magazine, that he wrote out himself and circulated among friends and relations. He also encouraged play-acting, and would announce in the morning what they were to perform that evening, tell them the plot and assign the parts. It was at about this time in the spring of 1875 that the children acted a parody of Hamlet. Laurence, who used to complain that Alfred kept the best jokes for himself in these entertainments, later wrote:

Alfred’s successes continued at school, where during the summer of 1875 he again won the verse prize – this time with a poem entitled ‘Paul on Mars Hill’. It was no worse than his ‘Death of Socrates’, but writing these prize poems badly affected the style of at least one private poem, in which the morbid and heavily laboured couplet

comes perilously close to farce. But there is real beauty in some lines on ‘The Ruins of Rome’; and one can find in them a less pessimistic attitude, showing that Alfred’s inner gloom was lightening, and that he was coming to terms with his mother’s death:

But, before long, there were fresh worries to occupy Alfred’s mind. The first of them concerned his friend Edith Wise. She had been happily engaged to the curate of Woodchester Church for some time now; but, when plans were made for their marriage, the curate, who had always thought of the Wises as a well-to-do family, was not at all satisfied with the marriage settlement, and broke off the engagement in disgust. It was humiliating for Edith to realise that the curate had been mainly interested in her money; and, to add to her unhappiness, shortly after this incident her father died. Very much to their surprise, the family found that they had been living off their capital, and they were not nearly so wealthy as they had imagined. Kate wrote later that her brother Alfred ‘shared in the sorrows of that bitter time’.24

The other worry which affected Alfred was much closer to home, but was also pecuniary – in this case, with Edward Housman’s financial mismanagement. The story is a rather complicated one, but worth telling for the light which it throws on Edward’s character, and on Alfred’s family life.

Edward, as Trustee of his father’s estate, had failed to share out a sum of £1,000 which Thomas had left to be divided among his children; and Edward had also taken out mortgages on Perry Hall, and on his mother’s cottage in Lyme Regis, neither of which properties he owned. When he moved to Fockbury, he had raised a further supply of ready money by mortgaging that property also; but the move had simultaneously reduced his income and increased his expenditure. Now, after two years of being a country gentleman, his funds were running low. With no more family properties to mortgage, he fell behind with interest payments, and when on 5 June 1875 he finally conveyed Roseville Cottage to his mother, he also passed on a mortgage debt of £1,500 for which he expected her to assume responsibility.

This was more than his brothers and sisters could stand; and within twelve days, Mary, Jane, and the Reverend Joseph had joined their mother to file a Bill of Complaint addressed to the Lord High Chancellor.25 Soon afterwards, Edward received a summons.

Then on 26 June, the Court of Chancery ordered that Thomas Housman’s will should be put into effect; but at the same time it ordered enquiries into fourteen related points, and adjourned the case indefinitely. The only really effective action which it took was to insist that the sum of just over £400 which Edward admitted that he still possessed of his father’s money should be paid into Court pending a final settlement.26

This payment left Edward very short of money; and he was now being pressed for payment by Daniel Weaver, to whom he had mortgaged Perry Hall. Weaver was tired of receiving no interest, and on 11 August he informed Edward, through his solicitors, that he would exercise his power of sale unless the mortgage was paid off. Edward replied that Perry Hall, as a part of Thomas Housman’s estate, was in Chancery, and that under those circumstances he was not prepared to pay; but he did not object to Weaver exercising his power of sale. Of course, as Trustee, Edward should have objected to a sale; but if no sale took place, he would still owe Weaver £1,100; and even if he raised this money, Perry Hall would still be in Chancery, and would probably be taken away from him. So he wanted the house to be sold; but this was part of a larger plan: he had already enlisted the help of the young Edward Wise of Woodchester, in an ingenious scheme to defraud Thomas Housman’s estate.

Ted Wise attended the auction of Perry Hall in November 1875, and the property was knocked down to him for £1,275, but Wise was acting as Housman’s agent. By the end of February 1876 the property had been conveyed to Wise as Trustee for Housman. Ted Wise did not have to dig into his own pocket, and could not have done so even if he had wanted to. £1,100 was found by agreeing a new mortgage with Weaver, who had found Housman an unsatisfactory client, but was prepared to deal with Housman and Wise together; while the balance came from Housman’s pocket. Edward thus effectively removed Perry Hall from his father’s estate and from Chancery and got it into his own hands for the sum of £175, less than a sixth of what the house was worth.27 With his title to the property now secure, he was able to pay the balance of £175 and to cover his other immediate needs by taking out a second mortgage on Perry Hall for £500 with a certain Martha Perkins, who must have had more money than sense.28

Edward Housman had gained a breathing-space; but he must have realised that his days of living as the ‘squire’ of Fockbury were numbered; and, as the real world pressed in upon the illusion which he had created, and was still desperately trying to sustain, he again began drinking too much and his health suffered. The first sign of this was that his appearance at church became less regular, and Alfred agreed to read the lessons at Catshill when his father was feeling too ill to do so.

Alfred did not know the details of his father’s financial dealings; but an advertisement for the auction of Perry Hall had been prominently displayed in the local press, and he must have been told something of what was happening. The long-term future was still quite hopeful, because whatever his father did with his share of the family money, there was a great deal more wealth in the wider family, and Alfred and his brothers and sisters were the only children of their generation, and so would presumably inherit it. But there would clearly be a period when the immediate family would become increasingly poor. The establishment at Fockbury was gradually reduced, until at last they only had one horse in the stables, and one maid in the house.29 Luckily Robert and Laurence, who had joined Alfred at school, were both scholars; but their outfits were often shabby, and Laurence grew to hate and fear Mr Millington, who humiliated him in front of his class by telling him to come to school better dressed. Laurence solved this problem, at least for a time, by getting up very early and wearing his Sunday best to school without Lucy knowing; but as Alfred started to realise that the immediate future looked uncertain, he began to suffer from silent, introspective moods which alarmed the rest of his family.

Alfred’s worries, about the Wises and about his own family, destroyed the delicate growth of optimism which had been appearing during the summer of 1875. Alfred, now aged sixteen-and-a-half, began to fill the first of several notebooks with copies of poems which were all about sorrow, separation, or death. He copied from Milton and Matthew Arnold, as well as from many of the great Romantics: Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats. But the poet from whom he copied most often was G. A. Simcox,30 a writer of sentimental romantic verse of which this is a fair sample:

Men only have I tried

    And they have shallow hearts and so have I.

    I will be away from them before I die

And be a little child, and taste the summer tide.

I will away; the sunny world is wide, –

‘And desolate’, her aching heart replied.

Alfred’s own aching heart was soothed by only one thing: academic success. In the New Year of 1876, he passed into the sixth form, where he came under the personal tuition of the headmaster. Alfred was clever, he was good at classics, and he found his headmaster’s enthusiasm infectious; as did others.

For Alfred, an important moment came when, in the summer following his seventeenth birthday, he had won a prize; and Millington presented him with a copy of Sabrinae Corolla (‘a small garland of the Severn’). This was a volume of translations into Latin or Greek verse from English, German, and Italian, edited and contributed to by the classical scholar B. H. Kennedy. He was the Headmaster of Shrewsbury School, and all of the eighty or ninety scholars who contributed to the book were former pupils. It was the gift of Sabrinae Corolla which Housman later said first turned his mind to classical studies, ‘and implanted in me a genuine liking for Greek and Latin’.31

Among the first fruits of this liking were his own Latin poems, including a translation of Dryden’s ‘Fairest Isle, all isles excelling’.32

Alfred was not only writing Latin verse, but the most informal English verse. During summer visits to Woodchester, when Mrs Wise set him to work to cover jam pots, he would often write amusing couplets on the labels;33 and when, this year, he spent part of his Christmas holidays at Woodchester House, he turned his attention to the Visitors’ Book, and wrote in it a long prophecy for the year 1877, part of which runs:34

Alfred made no prophecies about himself, though his schooldays were drawing to a brilliant close. By the summer of 1877, he was at the head of Bromsgrove School, and the winner of prizes for English verse, freehand drawing, and French, as well as for Latin and Greek verse. A photograph taken at the time shows him looking alert, self-confident–perhaps even a little arrogant. In January he had failed to win a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford,35 but on 15 June, a telegram arrived at Fockbury House announcing Alfred’s success in winning an open scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford;36 worth £100 a year, it would be just enough for him to manage on during term-time. Kate later recalled that this was ‘one of the happiest events’ in her brother’s life.

Edward Housman had at last been forced into selling Fockbury House, and a few weeks after the news of Alfred’s scholarship, the Housmans were returning to live in Perry Hall; although the family was poor, for the next few years Alfred’s own position was quite secure; and in the long term he could reasonably assume that he would inherit enough family money to be comfortably off. He seemed to have had no more ambition to be a solicitor than his father had had; nor was he making the mistake of training for a career which he despised. Instead, he was going up to Oxford to study classics. This was not a course which Alfred intended should turn him into a teacher or a don; Oxford was simply to be a part of his education as a gentleman, and a natural extension of his successful career at school.

One of Alfred’s last poems as a schoolboy was a song which he felt Lady Jane Grey might have sung in captivity, it is charming but melancholy, and begins:37

Breathe, my lute, beneath my fingers

    One regretful breath

One lament for life that lingers

    Round the doors of death

Alfred’s childhood had not been an easy one for a sensitive boy. The absence for three years of Robert, his brother and childhood friend; the death of his mother, to whom he had been so closely attached; the curious position which he had occupied in his stepmother’s household, neither boy nor adult; these had driven him into a lonely inner world of lost faith and Romantic meditation in which he longed for a heroic friend. Yet his only real intimates were two women whom he saw infrequently: Edith Wise, already at twenty-one well on her way to becoming an old maid; and Sophie Becker, who was fourteen or fifteen years his senior, and wrote to him in maternal fashion as ‘My dear boy’.38 However, Alfred had much to be proud of, and, when he left Bromsgrove for his first term at Oxford, he had everything to hope for.

Notes

Unless indicated by a separate note, the main sources for the information in this chapter are AEH: Recollections; Letters; My Brother: AEH; Pugh; Unexpected Years.

1 Congress, RHP Box 2: from notes made by Grant Richards after interviewing Mrs K. E. Symons.

2 J. L. Talmon, Romanticism and Revolt, London, Thames & Hudson, 1967, p. 149.

3 Trinity, Add MS 71–48: letters from Mrs K. E. Symons, 7 February 1937.

4 Withers, p.14.

5 Lilly, Carter correspondence: Hilda Fletcher to G. L. Watson, 19 May 1957.

6 Alfred was to win a prize for French at school; one wonders whether during his time in the sixth form or thereafter, he read any of the poems by Alfred de Vigny. Some lines from de Vigny’s ‘Le Mont des Oliviers’ seem relevant here:

Si le Ciel nous laissa comme un monde avorte,  

Le juste opposera le dedain a l’absence  

Et ne repondra plus que par un froid silence  

Au silence éternel de la Divinité.

7 Congress, RHP Box 2: Mrs K. E. Symons to Grant Richards, 27 May 1941.

8 JPP, extract from an article by Mrs K. E. Symons, Birmingham Post, 4 June 1932.

9 Ibid. Congress, RHP Box 2: notes made by Grant Richards after interviewing Mrs K. E. Symons and correspondence of 5 December 1939.

10 JPP, extracts from notes for a book to be called ‘A Housman Patchwork’ on which Mrs K. E. Symons was working shortly before her death.

11 Ibid.

12 K. E. Symons, More Memories.

13 Catalogue of the Housman Centenary Exhibition 1959, at University College London; assembled by John Carter and Joseph W. Scott; see item 22; see also My Brother: AEH, p. 30.

14 Trinity, Add MS a72/3.

15 Gow, p. 3.

16 K. E. Symons, ‘Memories of A. E. Housman’, the Edwardian (the magazine of King Edward’s School, Bath), vol. 17, no. 3, September 1936.

17 Columbia: Laurence Housman to Cyril Clemens, 16 July 1949.

18 Romanticism and Revolt, p. 137.

19 Trinity, Add MS 71–39.

20 The information in this paragraph comes from Sotheby’s Catalogue, 15 December 1970, p. 147.

21 Congress, LHMS: Laurence Housman to Maude Hawkins, 10 November 1949.

22 Watson, p. 61.

23 Trinity, Add MS 71–53; letter from Mrs K. E. Symons, 28 December 1936.

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

25 JPP, A Bill of Complaint, 17 June 1875.

26 JPP.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.; information from a draft deed of confirmation of the conveyance of Perry Hall between Edward Housman and Rev. J. B. Housman dated 11 February 1879.

29 Maude Hawkins, A. E. Housman: Man behind a Mask, Chicago University Press, 1958, p. 64. See also AEH: Recollections, p. 30 for mention of ‘an increasing restriction of means’.

30 Norman Marlow, A. E. Housman: Scholar and Poet, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958; see particularly Chapter 1.

31 A. E. Housman, The Confines of Criticism, Cambridge University Press, 1969; Inaugural Lecture 1911 with notes by John Carter. See p. 17.

32    O, quot fert Thetis, insularum ocelle,  
   O, domus venerum cupidinumque,  
   Haec sibi Cytherea vindicabit  
   Templa posthabita colenda Cypro.
Catalogue of the Housman Centenary Exhibition 1959 at University College London; assembled by John Carter and Joseph W. Scott (see item 23).

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

34 Lilly; Housman, Alfred Edward Prophecy for the year 1877, from Visitors’ Book of the Wise family at Woodchester, 1883–99.

35 JPP, extracts from the diaries of Mrs Edward Housman, 10 January 1877.

36 Ibid.; 15 June.

37 Trinity, Add MS 72–9. ?Also quoted in My Brother AEH.

38 Congress, LHMS: Laurence Housman to Maude Hawkins, 10 November 1949.