RUPERT HAD ALSO to beware of the living, in the shape of Mrs Stevenson at the Orchard, who had been getting increasingly disenchanted with the comings and goings at all hours of Rupert and his friends, and especially with his habit of going barefoot. The landlady and lodger reached an impasse, which concluded in him defecting to the Old Vicarage next door, with his beloved Granta running at the bottom of the garden.

In 1380 Corpus Christi College had appropriated the Rectory at Grantchester, appointing the first vicar, William Wendye, and establishing a building on the site of the Old Vicarage, built on a strip of land that ran down to the river at a place where the locals extracted gravel from a pit called Hog Hunch. The present dwelling was erected in the 1680s and remained as a vicarage until early in the 1820s, when it was advertised to be let, and was taken by the Lilley family who also owned Manor Farm. In the middle of the century Grantchester’s new vicar, William Martin, had a new vicarage built, and the old one was bought by a local market gardener, Samuel Widnall, on the occasion of his marriage to Elizabeth Smith; Widnall lived there until his death in 1894. The house then passed to his sister-in-law and subsequently a niece; she, having decided not to live in the house, installed Henry and Florence Neeve and their son Cyril as tenants. The fourth member of the family was the bull terrier that Brooke nicknamed Pudsey Dawson. The dog seemed equally at home in the Orchard and the Old Vicarage.

No sooner had Rupert moved his things into the Old Vicarage than he announced that he was soon to leave for Germany and would return in May. Before going abroad, though, he returned to Lulworth early in the new year, staying again at Cove Cottage – with Gwen Darwin, Ka Cox and Jacques Raverat, the latter drawing Rupert’s portrait. Ka tried to buy Rupert a belated Christmas present of a book, and when he seemed indifferent as to what it was she was clearly hurt, for he felt compelled to write, ‘Oh tell me that you’re unhurt, for I hurt you in such a way, and I was mean and selfish, and you’re I think one of the most clear and most splendid people in the world.’ On 1 January 1911 he wrote ‘Sonnet Reversed’:

Despite the seemingly one-sided relationship with Noel, Brooke was a frequent visitor to The Champions, where Bryn, Daphne and Margery all enjoyed his company. Prone to more than a little exaggeration on occasion, Rupert wrote to Ka Cox:

Although he would later write to Noel, ‘Limpsfield made me incredibly better. Could you let it get round to your mother how nice I found it?’ Rupert later went through a period where he felt drawn to the sensuality and beauty of Noel’s sister Bryn, but nothing ever came of it and it seemed to be a fleeting fancy. Margery became temporarily obsessed with Rupert, which was attributed to her mental instability and her assumptions that many of the males she met were in love with her.

Rupert went to Europe for three months, writing to various friends, ‘I shall be in Germany at peace’, ‘I shall be in Germany for ever’ and, ‘It is a thousand years since I have seen you and it will be more before I can see you again, for in three days I go to Germany, and from there I shall wander south and east and no one will hear of me more.’ During January, February and March. Rupert resided in Munich, where he learned German, watched Ibsen plays and saw one of the first performances of Strauss’s new opera, Der Rosenkavalier. Through an introduction from the publisher Dent, he stayed for some while with the painter Frau Ewald, through whom he was thrust into the social and artistic circles of the city. There was a part of Brooke, though, that couldn’t shake off England completely, which diminished his ability to enjoy Munich to the full. Despite having been away for some while, he was still much talked about in Cambridge and London, one friend declaring to James Strachey, ‘I’m not surprised people don’t fall in love with Rupert, he’s so beautiful that he’s scarcely human.’ By the end of this period, he had produced an excellent new poem, which he explained to Eddie Marsh. ‘I spent two months over a poem that describes the feelings of a fish, in the metre of “L’Allegro”. It was meant to be a lyric, but has turned into a work of twenty lines with a moral end.’ He copied the original onto two separate postcards, which he sent to Ka; this was the version published later, containing several changes.

The Fish

After Munich he moved south to Vienna, before continuing to Florence to meet up with his godfather and Rugby schoolmaster, Robert Whitelaw, who had journeyed south with Rupert’s younger brother Alfred. From there Brooke wrote to Eddie Marsh, ‘I am thirsting for Grantchester. I am no longer to be at the Orchard, but next door at the Old Vicarage, with a wonderful garden.’ And a letter to Gwen Darwin also showed an element of homesickness: ‘Oh my God! I do long for England!’

Although Noel and Rupert were technically engaged, there now seemed to be a gulf between them preventing any real relationship from developing. Rupert had been in Munich mingling with painters, psychologists and poets, while Noel was mending underclothes with Miss Middlemore or making dresses and blouses under the watchful eye of Miss Rice. While she attended school dancing classes, and practised Irish jigs and Morris dancing, Rupert was revelling at the ‘Bacchus-Fest’ and having a romantic dalliance with Elizabeth Van Rysselbergh, the daughter of a neo-impressionist painter. But on 10 February 1911, Noel’s last letter to Rupert before leaving Bedales shows that she had grown to understand him more and, although putting a disclaimer on any jealousy on her part, following his other flirtations, and writing about him in the third person, she does open up more about her feelings. Doubtless her refusal to become involved in a physical relationship, or even display interest in that direction, coupled with Brooke’s own sexual frustration, led to his affair with Elizabeth in Munich. She wrote:

So what happened? Rupert and Noel both approached the relationship from angles alien to the other; they did not always communicate with ease; and Noel never really opened up until later in life – by which time Rupert was dead, and she declared that she knew then she would ‘never marry for love!’. Her school, Bedales, continues to thrive; many eminent citizens and household names emanating from the establishment founded by the still spiritually present J. H. Badley, 300 feet above the Rother Valley, where Noel Olivier received those tortuous love letters from Rupert.

By May he was back at Grantchester and settled in at the Old Vicarage, seeking solace in the tranquil atmosphere, and trying to sort out his emotions. In June he gave vent to his feelings in a letter to Ka. ‘How many people can one love? How many people should one love? What is love? If I love at 6 p.m. do I therefore love at 7?’ During May and June, Rupert was writing regularly from the Old Vicarage to both Noel and Ka. To Noel: ‘Oh it is the only place, here. It’s such a nice breezy first glorious morning and I’m having a hurried breakfast, half dressed in the garden, and writing to you. What cocoa! What a garden! What a you!’ And to Ka: ‘You must come this weekend. Then we’ll talk: and laugh … Come! and talk! And love me – a little.’ He also sent her his list of

   (1) Lust
  (2) Love
  (3) Keats
  (4) go
  (4 ½) Weather
  (5) Truth
  (5 ½) guts
  (6) Marrons glacés
  (7) Ka…
  (29) Rupert

During the third week of July, Rupert visited Oxford to see Noel, who was staying off the Banbury road, in north Oxford, at 2 Rawlinson Road, a large bulky house that Noel considered ugly. As inconsistent as Rupert in her own way, now the warm side of her feelings for him shone through in the invitation, which, uniquely, began, ‘Rupert, darling!’ and continued, ‘so please, if you come, be stern with me, because I should hate to find myself drifting into a relationship that I can not maintain with you.’ And of Ka she says, ‘Oh it would have been so much better, if you had married her ages ago!’ While staying at Rawlinson Road, Rupert rose early, bathed in the Cherwell and worked in the Bodleian Library.

July saw the usual stream of visitors to the Old Vicarage, including Eddie Marsh, to whom Rupert wrote an exaggerated account of his primitive lifestyle of simple food, bathing, reading, talking and sleeping. The ‘simple’ lifestyle, though, did include beginning his dissertation and seeing in the Russian Ballet at Covent Garden performing Scheherazade.

During the summer of 1911, Virginia Stephen came to the Old Vicarage to spend five days with Rupert, and to revise her novel, begun in 1907 as Melymbrosia, and eventually published in 1915 as The Voyage Out. In between playing host to Virginia – the anticipation of her visiting having, by his own admission, made him a little nervous – he worked on his thesis and collection of poems.

Gwen Darwin captured the magic of the Grantchester era and even at the time wept for their impending and inevitable adulthood.

In less than a year Rupert would capture those feelings in what would become one of the most endearing and enduring poems of the twentieth century.

As they, Brooke and Ka Cox, became closer, Brooke would often visit her home, Hook Hill Cottage just outside Woking in Surrey, with its panoramic vista of the North Downs to the Hog’s Back and Stag Hill – the latter to become the site for Guildford Cathedral. Although a cottage in name, it was a sizeable dwelling, built in 1910 by Horace Field, who was responsible for erecting several of the neighbouring houses; Field himself lived next door at South Hill. Ka’s father Henry Fisher-Cox, a wealthy stockbroker and a member of the Fabian Society, lived at Hook Hill House, which had been built in 1723 as a public house by the men working on the ladies’ prison at Knaphill; the Yew Tree that had given the inn its name still stands to this day. Following Ka’s mother’s early death her father remarried, and he and her stepmother Edith and Ka and her two sisters Margaret and Hester lived there, until he too died suddenly in 1905 when Ka was just eighteen, leaving her a financially independent young woman when she went up to Cambridge, with her own home on the lower slopes of the old family house.

Brooke increasingly turned to Ka in his troubled moments or when he needed a comforting shoulder, and by the second half of 1910, Ka having been supplanted in Jacques Raverat’s affections by Gwen Darwin, Rupert began to see the emotionally devastated woman in a new light. The platonic relationship began very gradually to develop into something more romantic in Rupert’s mind, as her mature manner gave the volatile young poet a certain security and warmth – virtues that had been lacking in Noel. He wrote to Ka at Woking:

He also went down to Woking in person to ask her to join an imminent summer camp in Devon, having already persuaded Virginia Stephen. Being worn down a little by Noel’s continual rejections, he began to lean more towards Ka, with her down-to-earth, straight-forward manner. His confidence, though, in her feelings towards him would be shattered by the events at Lulworth Cove at the tail-end of 1911 and the New Year of 1912.

The Chaplain at King’s had put a young Swedish student, Estrid Linder, in touch with Brooke, suggesting that he help her with the colloquial English she needed for her translation of Swedish plays. The assistance turned out to be reciprocal, as she was to introduce him to, and help translate, the plays of Strindberg, which he came to adore.

Another positive meeting during the summer was with the publisher Frank Sidgwick, who was sufficiently impressed with Rupert’s poems to agree to publication. The deal was to be 15 per cent for the publisher, with the author bearing the printing costs, which would amount to a little under £10, for 500 copies. Brooke’s mother, rather decently, footed the bill, but there would be a small difference of opinion between Sidgwick and Brooke over some of the contents. As Rupert pointed out to Ka, he drove himself hard to achieve the desired result: ‘I’ve been working for ten days alone at this beastly poetry. Working at poetry isn’t like reading hard. It doesn’t just tire and exhaust you. The only effect is that your nerves and your brain go … I had reached the lowest depths possible to man.’

At the end of August 1911 Rupert and several of his friends, including Justin Brooke, Oscar Eckhardt, James Strachey, Geoffrey and Maynard Keynes, Maitland Radford, Daphne, Bryn and Noel Olivier, Gerald Shove and others set up camp in a meadow at Clifford Bridge, Devon, on the banks of the River Teign. Ka Cox and Virginia Stephen joined them later. In fact, they turned up to find no welcoming party, as the others had gone to Crediton, leaving them only mouldy fruit pie for supper. One of the party, Paul Montague (known as Pauly), a zoologist and accomplished musician, had suggested they all go over to his parents at Crediton some 10 miles to the north-east for afternoon tea, and the whole crowd of them descended on the residence of Colonel and Mrs Montague.

The Montagues’ home, Penton (formerly Panton or Painton), a Georgian stucco house with superb south-eastern views over the town, had its origins in a dwelling owned by John Burrington in 1685, the property becoming the area’s first Bluecoat School from 1804 to 1854. In 1860, Penton was rebuilt and enlarged by the Reverend George Porter, the property including parcels of land with the intriguing names of Three Cornered Close, Lame John’s Field, Barn Close and Shooting Close. In 1878, Pauly Montague’s grandfather Arthur purchased the estate, which passed to his son Leopold in 1887. A Justice of the Peace, Leopold rose to the rank of colonel; he also wrote plays which were performed in the double drawing-room, one end serving as a stage, and was a revered writer of Victorian farce. Colonel Montague was not at home when the Clifford Bridge campers arrived at Penton, but Mrs Montague received them and provided them with tea in the dining-room. It was this occasion that inspired Rupert Brooke to write ‘Dining-Room Tea’ – one of his finest poems – where he, the observer, encapsulated a moment in time through the eyes of the writer. While the others are talking, laughing and eating, he takes a literary photograph, freezing a fleeting, but ultimately blissful, moment in his life – withdrawing to an objective plane before returning to the reality and normality of the situation. At the centrepiece of the poem were his feelings for Noel Olivier, and the security of a circle of friends who he loved, captured in a cameo that, ideally, he would have liked to have preserved for ever:

Dining-Room Tea

The paving stones, laid by Napoleonic prisoners of war a century before, still lead up to the house, dappled by the shade from the magnificent beech trees high above Crediton. The postal facilities at Clifford Bridge being nonexistent, it has been deemed over the years most likely that Brooke posted his package of poems to publisher Frank Sidgwick from Crediton, thereby dating the ‘Dining Room Tea’ episode as 30 August ex silentio. They proved to be the only collection of his poems he saw published in his lifetime.

In the evening at Penton, Miss Montague suggested they all went to Crediton Fair, where a version of the popular drama The Lyons Mail was to be performed. The party took up the entire front row at a shilling a ticket, before moving on to the fair, where they saw a girl who looked uncannily like Ka Cox – who at that moment was making her way with Virginia to the Clifford Bridge camp. Pauly Montague’s sister Ruth, who was present at the tea, recalled:

Ruth was later befriended by Ka Cox while at the Slade School of Art, and Justin Brooke would propose to her but withdraw the offer after she decided she needed time to think about it. She married another, becoming Mrs Pickwoad, and surviving her brother Paul (who was killed in the First World War) by some seventy-odd years, passing away in the late 1980s at the age of ninety.

Today, the Beeches is much as it was in 1911, apart from having being divided in two by Maurice Webber in the mid-1950s; the dining-room is intact, complete with its fireplace – and the alabaster Buddhas, squatting on the mantelpiece in the old picture, still preside over meal times.

Not everyone was a lover of the principles of Bedalian-style expeditions. James Strachey disappeared, to join his brother Lytton at nearby Becky Falls, after one night huddled in a blanket, sitting up especially to see the sun rise in an attempt to get into the mood of the camp. Rupert wrote the following couplet allegedly about him, although Noel Olivier felt it was written about Gerald Shove – either way it demonstrates that not all were willing or natural neo-pagans: ‘In the late evening he was out of place / And utterly irrelevant at dawn.’

The more enthusiastic embarked on a 32-mile round walk to Yes Tor, to the north-west of the camp, and organised a manhunt on the return journey, in which Bryn Olivier became the quarry and succeeded in gaining the camp without being caught. At night there were songs around the fire as Pauly Montague played his Elizabethan gittern, possibly inspiring Rupert in his dissertation on ‘John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama’ at which he was working by day. Brooke used an apt quote for one at that time living a rough and ready outdoor existence, from Webster’s Appius and Virginia: ‘I wake in the wet trench, loaded with more cold iron than a gaol would give a murderer, while the General sleeps in a field-bed, and to mock our hunger feeds us with the scent of the most curious fare. That makes his tables crack!’ His dissertation argued both for and against Appius and Virginia being the work of John Webster, eventually reaching the conclusion that it was, in his opinion, from the pen of Thomas Heywood. The work, partly written in the meadow by the Teign at Clifford Bridge, won him his fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, and was published in book form in Britain and America in 1916.

Today the Clifford Bridge camp site plays host to far more than the handful of neo-pagan tents of 1911. The tranquil and idyllic area where Brooke read Webster, Keats’s letters to Fanny Browne, and crafted ‘Dining-Room Tea’ now bustles with holidaying families.

Rupert arrived back at the Old Vicarage to discover that Frank Sidgwick of Sidgwick and Jackson, who had agreed to publish his first book of poetry, was objecting to the title of one of the poems. ‘Lust’ wasn’t the first of the works intended for inclusion that had raised Sidgwick’s eyebrows. ‘The Seasick Lover’, which had originally been ‘A Shakespearean Love Sonnet’, he also found faintly objectionable. Against his better judgement, and having argued his points, Rupert conceded that if it were absolutely necessary the title ‘Libido’ could be substituted for ‘Lust’. ‘The Seasick Lover’ became ‘A Channel Passage’. He complained to friends of the enforced changes, but seemed to accept them with a degree of equanimity if any other course meant losing sales. The excitement of having his first volume of poetry published was tempered by Dudley Ward’s betrothal to his German girlfriend Anne Marie, as this meant, in his eyes, that yet another friend was shedding their skin of youth to become domesticated. Francis and Frances Cornford were an item; so were Jacques Raverat and Gwen Darwin. His thoughts turned to Ka, as he still imagined Noel to be out of his reach – at least physically – while Ka might just not be…

The increasingly domiciliary attitude of his friends seemed only to fuel his restlessness; he implored Ka to join him doing something romantically exciting and interesting: ‘I am getting excited. Lincolnshire? The Peaks? The Fens? East London? Lulworth, if you like, but somewhere.’ In another spirited outburst to Ka, he declared that ‘I’m determined to live like a motor car, or a needle, Mr Bennett [Arnold Bennett], or a planetary system, or whatever else is always at the keenest and wildest pitch of activity’. At the same time, he was still professing his love to an ostensibly ambivalent Noel.

In October 1911 he wrote to Ka Cox of a drama at the Old Vicarage, which happened in the middle of a letter he was writing to her:

During October, Rupert was becoming increasingly stressed, worrying about the lack of work he felt he had put into his dissertation on Webster, being in love in different ways with both Noel and Ka, and rushing backwards and forwards between Rugby, Grantchester, Cambridge and London. In the capital, he walked Hampstead Heath, stayed with James Strachey in Belsize Park, saw Wagner’s Ring Cycle, ate at the National Liberal Club, talked with Eddie Marsh and moved into the second floor of the studio of the Strachey’s cousin, the artist Duncan Grant, at 21 Fitzroy Square. He also took time to correct the proofs of his forthcoming poetry book.

Bizarrely, for someone not musically gifted, Rupert decided he would like to have singing lessons and asked Clive Carey, with whom he had worked on various Cambridge productions, if he would be available: ‘If I was taught singing by some sensible person who understood all the time that I couldn’t ever sing properly whatever happened, I might gain anyhow two things. 1. Be able to hear music … 2. Have a better and more manageable reading voice.’ As late as 1957, while adjudicating at Bournemouth at a Music Competition Festival, Carey spoke warmly of Brooke and again in the 1960s commented, ‘he was a very close friend of mine and a wonderful person in all respects’. He declined to comment on Rupert’s singing ability, but did once persuade him to air his voice among others and take the part of a slave in a Cambridge production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Despite not being comfortable on stage, Rupert certainly worked hard on any role he had to take. There are two photographs of him reciting Faustus at the Old Vicarage to Jacques Raverat and Dudley Ward, who appear to be testing him on his lines. On another occasion he sat up in one of the chestnut trees reading aloud to Noel Olivier and Sybil Pye. Sybil remembered those moments with fondness.

The romance of the house itself was tempered by the presence of an army of woodlice, about which Rupert was once moved to comment:

Brooke’s volume of poems was published in November, although he was in no mood to be excited about the prospect, as the long hours put in revising his dissertation on Webster had worn him out, and left him feeling rundown. His book didn’t set the literary world on fire immediately, but from a humble start it went on to sell almost 100,000 copies in the next twenty years alone.

A reading party was being organised at Lulworth Cove to begin after Christmas 1911 and run into the new year. The circle included Lytton and James Strachey, Ka Cox, Justin Brooke, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and an old Bedalian and King’s man, Ferenc Bekassy, a Hungarian with more than a passing passion for Noel. Henry Lamb was to join the party, but he was staying locally in Corfe Castle.

Before Lulworth, Rupert slept a night at Ka’s flat at 76 Charlotte Street in London, before joining his mother in the Beachy Head Hotel high up on the cliffs looking down on Eastbourne, Sussex. It was here he completed his dissertation on Webster, but his restless mental state, workload and general ill-health were taking their toll. He was jaded and overwrought, and suffered from insomnia while staying at Beachy Head – a strangely wild, windy and remote setting for a December break.

Brooke’s literary mentor Eddie Marsh was now Private Secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and as such was becoming increasingly influential. So it was good news that he was enamoured with Rupert’s volume of poems: ‘I had always in the trembling hope reposed that I should like the poems … but at my wildest I never looked forward to such magnificence … you have brought back into English poetry the rapturous beautiful grotesque of the seventeenth century.’ Rupert was delighted, writing to Marsh from his mother’s house in Rugby just before Christmas, ‘God! It’s so cheering to find someone who likes the modern stuff, and appreciates what one’s at. You can’t think how your remarks and liking thrilled me.’