BEFORE SITTING FOR his Tripos in May, Rupert’s thoughts turned to taking rooms out of King’s, a few miles upstream, at Grantchester. The village was a key locality in pre-Roman times, as the River Granta could be forded there, the Fens circumvented and the dense forest leading south-west to the Chilterns avoided. In Roman times the Icknield Way, Ermine Street and Akeman Street all passed close enough to Cambridge to make the crossing of the Granta a position of importance. Grantabrycge is mentioned in a chronicle of 875 AD and is on the site of an early Roman settlement. The small cluster of houses had been known by at least twenty-four names or variants of spelling by the time it acquired its present name during the fourteenth century. A. C. Benson, a friend of Brooke’s and student at Magdalene College, wrote of the village in an article ‘Along the Road’ for the church family newspaper:

Brooke’s intimacy with the Granta was such that he became adept at paddling in a small boat the 3 miles from Cambridge to Grantchester, even on a moonless night and through overgrown stretches of the river. One of his friends Sybil Pye recalled how ‘he would know, he said, when we were nearing home by the sound of a certain poplar tree that grew there: its leaves rustled faintly even on such a night as this, when not a breath seemed to be stirring.’ He had walked there on several occasions and taken tea at the Orchard. First planted in 1868, the Orchard became a popular place for taking tea purely by chance in 1897, after a Cambridge student, having punted up the Granta from the area behind the colleges known as ‘the backs’, asked Mrs Stevenson of Orchard House if she could possibly serve him and some fellow students tea, beneath the apple trees. She assented, and the students, so enjoying the experience, spread the word; and their enthusiasm turned it into a popular ‘up-river resort’ for all the colleges. The late-Victorian students of 1897 weren’t the first to grace the area. For over 700 years Cambridge scholars had ventured to Grantchester by boat, foot, or horse, including such eminent names as Cromwell, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Newton, Darwin, Marlowe and Spenser. A frequent visitor to the Orchard was the philosopher, mathematician and essayist Bertrand Russell who, for ten years, lived two doors away, the other side of the Old Vicarage, at the Mill House; his Austrian pupil, the suicidal Ludwig Wittgenstein, was often to be seen working off his excess mental energy by running along the banks of the river. Rupert idly wondered whether there was a possibility of taking rooms in Grantchester.

In cavalier fashion he wrote to Noel Olivier:

No sooner was the exam over than his romantic side sprang into action. ‘Oh lo! The south! The lakes of Surrey! They call me! And I shall possibly see Noel in the distance! … And then to have to pack a bag! And even that is a ritual of infinite joy and calm splendour.’

His destination was again the Cotterills’ house at Godalming, although Noel and Bedales was his real goal. His infatuation with Noel continued unabated, while she exercised a natural caution and independence. She maintained a distance that continually fuelled his verbal passions and outpourings. He wrote to Noel at Bedales on 28 May 1909:

Noel responded on 1 June, ‘I too always have the fear of you – the outsider – looking a fool and my feeling one; but as the last depends on the first, and the first depends on you, I am willing to risk owning your acquaintance, if you like?’ Her postscript adds, ‘She wishes you weren’t coming; but she daren’t say so outright, for fear of offending your pride!’

Writing from Coombe Field, Godalming, Rupert responded furiously on 2 June:

He wrote as an adolescent lovesick schoolboy, although nearly twenty-two, while Noel, at seventeen, responded with measured adult caution, sometimes her tone being incredibly brusque, as at the end of a letter written to Rupert from Bedales: ‘I’m sorry – I’m in a very bad rage because I’ve been doing easy exams badly – a thing you never did, so you can’t sympathise. Don’t try … from Noel.’

In among the angst there was light relief. The King’s magazine Basileon carried Gerald Shove’s tongue-in-cheek freshers’ guide to the college clubs and societies, including the Carbonari.

The magazine also sent up the first Carbonari Ball, claiming that various unlikely performances would occur during the evening, culminating with the news that ‘Mr RUPERT BROOKE will perform a dream-dance on tiptoe’. The organ also carried two of Brooke’s poems, ‘Day and Night’ and ‘Sonnet’.

During the summer of 1909, socialising, poetry and the Fabian Society were making such an increasing demand on Brooke’s time that his tutor suggested that he should not only give up Classics to concentrate on English Literature during his fourth year, but also move out of King’s – preferably out of town altogether, away from the temptations of the social scene. So by June, Rupert had fulfilled at least one desire – to take rooms at the Orchard in Grantchester.

Having settled in to his new home, Rupert wrote from there to Noel:

Noel dealt Brooke a curt, sarcastic, down-to-earth response to this latest epistle, which was adorned with exaggerations about his surroundings and lifestyle:

He also wrote to his cousin Erica with a description of his new abode.

That July, the eminent Welsh-born painter Augustus John camped by the Orchard, in the field by the river, prompting Brooke to write to Noel:

The arrival of John, with his gypsy-like countenance, immense stature, earrings and long red beard, caused such a stir in Grantchester and Cambridge that expeditions were organised by the likes of Jacques Raverat to the field in which John was camping. Their intrigue and fascination at the unusual sight moved John to comment: ‘we cause a good deal of astonishment in this well-bred town.’ At a time when gypsies were being persecuted, John was desperately trying to imitate their lifestyle and become a non-blood brother. Eddie Marsh had already bought one of his paintings and Rupert himself was ‘quite sick and faint with passion’ on seeing another of his works, and decided to set aside enough money to buy two A. J. drawings. While Augustus John was causing a stir in the meadows of Grantchester, Rupert was creating his own ripples at King’s. This profile on him appeared in The Granta written by Hugh Dalton:

Rupert Brooke came into residence at Cambridge in October 1906. The populace first became aware of him when they went to see the Greek play of that year, The Eumenides, and many of them have not yet forgotten his playing of the Herald.

He brought with him to Cambridge a reputation both as an athlete and as a poet, a combination supposed by vulgar people to be impossible.

He represented Rugby at cricket and football, rose to high rank in the Volunteer Corps, and was not unknown as a steeplechaser. He also won a prize poem…

At Cambridge he has forsaken a few old friends and entered many new ones. While a Freshman he used on occasions to represent his college in various branches of athletics, but soon dropped the habit, in spite of protests. On his day he is still an irresistible tennis player, preferring to play barefooted, and to pick up the balls with his toes.

As an actor The Eumenides provided him with not only his only triumph. He was one of the founders of the Marlowe Dramatic Society, which still flourishes, and among his later successes may be counted his performances in Marlowe’s Faustus and in Comus during the Milton celebrations.

He has continued to write poems, some of which should be familiar to readers of the Westminster Gazette and the Cambridge Review. But the rest and certain other writings, not in verse, are known as yet only to a few, and mainly to certain King’s Societies of which he is a member.

Some of us hope that the world will one day know more of them.

He is also a politician. His public utterances have indeed been few, though he once made a speech at the joint meeting of the Fabian Society and the Liberal Club, which two ex-presidents of the Union may still remember. But public speaking is not the only function of the politician, though the contrary opinion is sometimes held. For two years he has been a prominent member of the Fabian Society, of which he is now President. He is sometimes credited with having started a new fashion in dress, the chief features of which are the absence of collars and headgear and the continual wearing of slippers.

He will tell you that he did not really begin to live till he went out of college at the end of his third year and took up his residence at the Orchard, Grantchester.

It is said that there he lives the rustic life, broken by occasional visits to Cambridge; that he keeps poultry and a cow, plays simple tunes on a pan pipe, bathes every evening at sunset, and takes all his meals in a rose garden.

On the academic side of his Cambridge activities, Brooke achieved a Second in his Classical Tripos in the summer of 1909, after which, in July, he was off again, ‘restless as a paper scrap that’s tossed down dusty pavements by the wind’, for a second visit to the Fabian summer school at Llanbedr. The general manager of the school was Mary Hankinson, who was very popular with the students but felt that the set-up should be more focused on dancing, sports, walks and pastimes, punctuated by some educational facilities and lectures; Sidney and Beatrice Webb, on the other hand, felt that it should be a learning establishment, with leisure activities available when time allowed. The main thrust of the Webbs’ lectures was centred on the outdated Poor Law of 1834. For months Rupert had read and reread the Fabian Society’s book, The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, which set out the Fabian views. These differed from those in a review which had been set up by Balfour’s government in 1905. The basic Fabian premise was that each case of poverty should be considered on its merit and treated accordingly, unlike the outdated Victorian approach of lumping together the infirm, dissolute, mentally ill, old and unemployed as ‘the poor’.

For this and the previous summer, the summer school had proved so popular that a further Llanbedr house was secured. Caer-meddyg (the doctor’s house in the field) was relatively new, having been built in 1905 as a retreat for the elderly and infirm, as the on-site spring allegedly possessed restorative properties. Were there no ailing ageds during the Fabian occupation, or was the good doctor’s apparent altruism temporarily affected by hard Fabian cash? It was here that the famous photograph of Brooke and other young Fabians clustered around an ornate fireplace was taken. There were strict rules governing meals, lecture times, ‘lights out’, noise after hours and times that musical instruments and phonography could be played, and there was a total ban on alcohol. Owen, the gardener at the other summer-school house at Pen-yr-Allt, would have been a familiar sight to Rupert, as he undertook odd jobs, as well as ensuring that the garden was in good order for the early morning Swedish drill classes that were held before the morning dew had evaporated. The activities of the Fabians worried the locals, who were concerned that a revolutionary uprising was being organised in their village. The ghost of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, from whom the society took its name, would have been proud – as long as the uprising was non-confrontational. Sexual segregation was the order of the day, although Beatrice Webb was becoming increasingly alarmed by the close friendship between H. G. Wells and the brilliant young Cambridge student Amber Reeves. Amber would, however, eventually marry another Fabian, ‘Blanco’ Rivers White. The Utopian ideal of the summer school was beginning to tarnish a little in the Webbs’ eyes, especially as news of evening parodies of daytime lectures reached the ears of Beatrice. Lytton Strachey recalled that he and Brooke upset her as they ‘tried to explain Moore’s ideas to Mrs Webb while she tried to convince us of the efficacy of prayer’.

After a surfeit of talks, lectures and discussions on the Welsh coast, Rupert headed south, to a riverside camp in Kent. An idyllic location had been discovered by a close neighbour and friend of the Oliviers, David Garnett, who had found it when cycling with Bryn and Daphne Olivier to Penshurst for a picnic, with colleagues Godwin Baynes, the giant rowing blue later to become a physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and fellow student doctor Maitland Radford, who late in life would become Chief Medical Officer of Health for St Pancras in London. Garnett recalled the outing in his autobiography The Golden Echo:

Over the field stood the magnificent Penshurst Place, built during the first half of the fourteenth century for the wealthy John de Pulteney (four times Lord Mayor of London) on his recently acquired 4,000-acre estate at Penshurst, which had belonged to Sir Stephen de Penchester in the previous century. By the early part of the fifteenth century Henry IV’s third son John, Duke of Bedford, was in residence, the property on his death passing to his younger brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, founder of the Bodleian library at Oxford. The next incumbent Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, entertained Henry VIII there, the King repaying his host’s hospitality by beheading him and letting Anne Boleyn’s brother run the property. Henry VIII’s successor Edward VI eventually bequeathed the house and estate to his tutor and steward of his household Sir William Sidney. It soon passed to his son Henry who, although related by marriage to the doomed Guildford Dudley and Lady Jane Grey, escaped implication in the plot against the eventual Queen Mary. Henry Sidney’s first child was Philip Sidney, later to become Sir Philip, soldier, scholar, poet and the personification of everything that was virtuous, chivalrous and noble. After Brooke’s death, his name would often be linked with that of Sidney; both poets died while serving as soldiers. The family built a London house, twice the size of Penshurst, but it was a white elephant pulled down 100 years later; the Empire, Leicester Square, now stands on the site. Many years later Sir Bysshe Shelley married into the family, his grandson Percy Bysshe Shelley becoming one of England’s most famous poets, who, like Brooke and Sidney, was to die tragically young.

At Penshurst the party in the long meadows flanking the river Eden was soon joined by Noel Olivier, when her summer term at Bedales ended, and then by Brooke and Dudley Ward, Rupert again knowing fully Noel’s movements. It was the first meeting between Brooke and Garnett, whom Rupert nicknamed ‘Bunny’. Garnett’s memory of his encounter with Brooke remained crystal clear:

The meadows by the River Eden, where the young Edwardians laughed, swam, talked and walked as July turned into August in that summer of 1909, were approached by turning off the Penshurst Road along the lane to Salman’s Farm. Just before the hill leading to the farm itself, a small bridge crossed the River Eden, to the left of which some 50 yards away the river opened out into an ideal spot for bathing just above the old weirhouse. During his sojourn there Brooke went for walks along the river with Noel and they all swam, even at night, by the light of bicycle lamps, amid, in Garnett’s words, ‘the smell of new-mown hay, of the river and weeds’. He recalled vividly this time at Penshurst in his autobiography:

Intrigued by the spectacle of a group of young people behaving in what they would deem an erratic, and probably erotic, manner, the locals lined the little bridge by the wider part of the river where they were about to bathe. Undeterred, they continued to swim, Noel picking her way through the assembly on the bridge to effect a perfect dive into the Eden.

In a letter to Brooke, written some eighteen months later, on 10 February 1911, Noel admitted:

The delightful spot by the River Eden that so enchanted Garnett, and where Noel’s feelings for Rupert were at their height, remains unchanged, with its tranquil meadows, winding waterway soon to flow into the River Medway views to Penshurst Palace and little arched bridge. The weirhouse has disappeared, although the weir still falls, and in the wide pool where Brooke and his friends swam, the occasional fisherman waits patiently for an obliging dace or chub.

The round of summer activity continued, as Rupert, his family and his friends headed west. A part of Avon since the shuffling of the counties in 1976, Clevedon, on the Severn Estuary was firmly in the more delightfully named Somerset in the summer of 1909, when Brooke persuaded his parents to rent a large Victorian vicarage there. Clevedon was once referred to as ‘the brain-workers’ paradise’; local postcards proudly proclaimed its best features as ‘unrivalled sunsets, daily steamer services to Devon and delightful inland and coastal scenery’. The literati had always been drawn to the town. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the first poet to write about the area when he resided in Old Church Road, describing the cottage and the view from Dial Hill in the ‘Valley of Seclusion’: ‘dim coasts, and cloud-like hills, and shoreless ocean’. Minor poets associated with the area include Charles Abraham Elton (of the Elton family of Clevedon Court), Alfred Lord Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam (buried in the Elton vaults), H. D. Rawnsley and Hallam’s second cousin Charles Isaac Elton, who wrote the following lines on Clevedon in 1885 about his childhood memories of the place:

Clevedon’s literary magnetism is borne out in the street names, acknowledging the likes of Thackeray, Tennyson, Hallam and Coleridge. The literary history of the area would have appealed to Brooke, who would undoubtedly have been familiar with the poem, ‘In Memoriam’, Tennyson’s poetic epitaph to his friend Arthur Hallam.

It was to All Saints Vicarage in Coleridge Road that the Brookes came that summer. The incumbent, the Reverend Richard A. Arden-Davis, had taken up his position seven years earlier in 1902, five years after the building was erected. In a letter dated 10 November 1902, Miss Elizabeth Teulon, writing to her daughter Margaret, asked, ‘Have I described the new vicar? I think not. He is short, very bald, with quite light hair, a well-developed forehead and penetrating eyes, no nose worth mentioning, an expressive mouth, and chin denoting power and will. He has a most pleasant voice and I like him very much.’

Rupert and his friends’ predilection for walking and the open road would have been truly sated by the coastal clifftop path leading to Portishead, with its wide distant views to South Wales. But Rupert affected a dislike of the place: ‘Clevedon is insufferable. I have followed up all the rivers for miles around and they are all ditches.’ For the first fortnight of the holiday Rupert was ill: Dudley Ward kicked him by accident, and the injury laid him up. His chums started arriving in dribs and drabs, as was his plan in suggesting the Cleveland Vicarage; it enabled him to invite his friends down as opposed to being subjected to obligatory seclusion at home in Rugby. Paradoxically, though, he enjoyed the role of one appearing to sequester himself from the world, while really encouraging visitors. A mixed assortment of Cambridge friends and associates appeared for varying lengths of time, including Margery and Bryn Olivier, Dudley Ward, Maynard Keynes, Gerald Shove, Hugh Dalton, Francis Birrell, Gwen Darwin (who was to marry Jacques Raverat), A. Y. Campbell, Eva Spielman, Bill Hubback and Eddie Marsh. Mrs Brooke clearly was not sure what to make of Rupert’s new friends, commenting, ‘I have never met so many brilliant and conceited young men’.

She was none too pleased at their bad timekeeping and general behaviour; Rupert wrote to Ka Cox from the Vicarage, ‘Oh, poor Mother’s Experiment of having some of my Acquaintances in a House in the Country this Summer! They’ve come and gone, singly and in batches, and the Elder Generation couldn’t stand any of them.’ Mrs Brooke was generally aware of several of her son’s friends, especially the Olivier girls, Bryn, Margery Daphne and Noel, about whom an acquaintance had exclaimed, ‘My, yes, the Oliviers! They’d do anything, those girls!’ Her major misgiving was about the attitude of Bryn (who, she wrongly assumed, was the object of Rupert’s affection) and her seemingly deliberate flaunting of normal convention and etiquette, although her attitude was in accordance with the freedom of her upbringing and education. In reality it was, of course, Noel who inflamed Rupert’s passion, but Margery ensured that Noel didn’t come to Clevedon and went as far as to tell him on arrival that his feelings weren’t returned – clearly out of a mixture of jealousy, complicity and concern on Margery’s part.

Of the girls in Rupert’s circle, his mother admitted:

Despite these shortcomings, Daphne co-founded the first Steiner School in England and Noel became an eminent physician.

Margery and Bryn Olivier, Dudley Ward and Bill Hubback joined Rupert on one particular walk along the cliffs to Portishead, where, looking out over the Severn Estuary, the company fell into conversation about the poet John Davidson, who had recently drowned himself in Cornwall at the age of fifty-one, and conjectured as to whether he had merely faked death to escape to another life elsewhere. Davidson’s dictum that life on the road to anywhere was preferable to a long-drawn-out downhill slide into old age appealed to the five friends. Discussing it during the walk back to Clevedon, they made a pact to cast off their old lives at a certain point in the future and start afresh elsewhere, thereby denying any of their acquaintances the opportunity of watching them slip into senility. The plan was firmed up – to meet on 1 May 1933, the venue the dining-room, Basle station, where they would meet for breakfast. Back at the All Saints Vicarage they decided on others who would get the call and be an essential part of their plan; these included Godwin Baynes, Ka Cox and Jacques Raverat. Rupert wrote to the latter:

Twenty-one years old when they made the Clevedon pact, Rupert would have been forty-five if he had made it to Basle station in 1933.

During the sojourn at Clevedon, the English Review, vol. III no. 2, September 1909, published five of Brooke’s poems – ‘Blue Evening’, ‘Song of the Beasts’, ‘Sleeping Out’, ‘Full Moon’ and ‘Finding’.

Of ‘Blue Evening’, the American George Edward Woodberry, who would later write the preface for Brooke’s first ever book of Collected Poems, was moved to comment:

While at Clevedon, Rupert discussed his love for Noel with her sister Margery, who later touched on the subject in a letter to him: ‘Do be sensible! … she is so young … You are so young.’ She also informed him that women shouldn’t marry before twenty-six or twenty-seven, that Rupert was to be shut out of Noel’s existence and warned him, ‘if you bring this great terrible, terrible, all absorbing thing into Noel’s life now … it will stop her intellectual development’. Margery was soon to begin suffering from delusions, during which she would invariably imagine every young man she met to be in love with her. Sadly she became increasingly unmanageable, and was eventually, in 1922, committed to an institution.

The Vicarage in Coleridge Road has been less affected by the ravages of time, although the tennis lawn on which Brooke and his friends played in the summer of 1909 has reverted to its natural state, and the only plans drawn up today are those for the Sunday sermon.