ON 27 DECEMBER 1911, Rupert and the others descended on Lulworth. Brooke himself stayed with Mrs Carter at Churchfield House, a dwelling that began as a simple cottage and was converted in the early seventeenth century by Lawrence Randall, in whose family it stayed until 1870. In the 1750s it became the Red Lion – the name being taken from the coat of arms of the local Duberville family. George III dined there in 1802 and sang its praises. After 1870 it became Churchfield House.

This was to be Rupert’s most traumatic stay in Lulworth. Lytton Strachey was there, too, while others were at Cove Cottage; Henry Lamb arriving later, from Corfe, allegedly at Lytton’s behest, as there seemed to be a potential dalliance in the air between Lamb and Ka Cox. Rupert was uncommunicative and reclusive, becoming increasingly paranoid as Ka revealed to him her feelings for Henry Lamb. Despite an understanding with Noel Olivier, Brooke’s relationship with her seemed to be standing still, if not becoming cooler. Even so, Ka’s revelations were not designed to provoke any latent jealousy in Rupert. They not only provoked but inflamed him swiftly, to the point of unreasonable paranoia; Brooke suddenly believed himself in love with Ka much in the same way that Lysander seemingly irrationally transferred his affections from Hermia to Helena in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But who was the mischievous Puck at Lulworth? Rupert for a long time, and in retrospect unfairly, blamed Lytton Strachey for plotting the whole Ka Cox/Henry Lamb saga. In reality it was Lamb’s weakness for women and overt flirtatiousness combined with Ka’s susceptibility.

In depressed state he walked with James Strachey from Lulworth over the Purbeck Hills to Corfe Castle, where James caught a train to London and Brooke walked on further to Studland, before returning to Lulworth. His state of mind worsened to such an extent that he had a nervous breakdown of sorts and became temporarily obsessed by Ka. He wrote from Churchfield House to Noel on 6 January:

Only the week before he had written to Noel proclaiming, ‘I love you: any how. I love you. I love you. I wish you were here.’

In this run-down state, he was taken to Dr Craig, a Harley Street specialist, who recommended rest, a special diet and a holiday. Dr Craig confirmed his diagnosis to Mrs Brooke – ‘Your son was obviously in a state of severe breakdown when I saw him. He was hypersensitive and introspective.’ He was due to join his mother in Cannes anyway, but first he flew to Noel in Limpsfield, this time to counsel her about Ka. Breaking his journey to the south of France in Paris, he was looked after by his friend Elizabeth Van Rysselbergh, before heading to Cannes and the Hotel du Pavillion to join his mother. Rather than letting things lie, taking his time and regaining his mental equilibrium, he proceeded to bombard Ka with letters padded with declamatory overtures: ‘Love me! Love me! Love me! … I love you so much’; ‘I love you so … I kiss your lips’; ‘I’m all reaching out to you, body and mind.’ He described to her the view from his balcony overlooking the Mediterranean; ‘Outside there are large numbers of tropical palms, a fountain, laden orange trees and roses. There’s an opal sea and jagged hills with amazing sunsets behind.’ He was also very descriptive about a moment some eighteen months earlier when he’d first seen Ka in a different light:

Would he have had such a sudden physical fixation for her were it not for her interest in Henry Lamb? Probably not, but he convinced her to meet him in Munich where they could be together: sleep together. In the meantime, he had to rub along with Mendelssohn, Ravel, Mozart and Saint-Saëns at Cannes concerts.

Suspicious of the increasing correspondence arriving for Rupert, Mrs Brooke soon realised something was afoot. She felt he should spend more time recuperating and that he was not yet fit to travel, but her protestations fell on stony ground. Despite some ‘awful scenes with the Ranee’, it was arranged that Ka would meet him off the train at Verona and they would return a few days later to where she was staying in Munich. In the event they also visited Salzburg and Starnberg. In his agitated condition, which erupted spasmodically during their time there, he was becoming more and more dependent upon her, growing stronger from her supportive presence, while she became increasingly strained. They were clearly not ‘in love’, he desiring her for release from physical pressures and as a cushion, while she was willing to be submissive. Because of Rupert’s delicate mental balance, she had to pick her moment to let him know that she had, in fact, been seeing Henry Lamb while Rupert was recuperating in Cannes.

He was unwittingly the cause of Rupert and Ka being forced together in a way that wasn’t right for either of them. He liked her as a friend, and ended up believing he was in love with her, his protestations of love while his mind was a little unbalanced eventually convincing her. He soon realised that he did not really want the security of Ka but it was too late for her – she now believed that Rupert was the man for her and it was only his mental state that would make it sometimes appear otherwise.

Although it wasn’t immediately apparent, Rupert began to cool by degrees towards Ka from the end of their time together in Germany. His manner towards her became more matter of fact and at times off-hand, and, although he wrote to her five times in one weekend during March, from the Mermaid Inn at Rye, Kent, the letters had a different tone from those written in Cannes, and Noel’s name crept into them more than once.

His feelings of guilt towards Ka, that he had used her, were to be with him for the rest of his life, but in the short term he played along with the façade until he was forced to be honest about his feelings later in the year. In May he was to confide to Jacques:

Before Rye, Rupert repaired to Rugby. Ka came to stay with him and great plans were laid to avoid Mrs Brooke’s suspicions of a relationship or that they had met in Germany. Edward Marsh and Geoffrey Keynes also arrived, Rupert impressing on Keynes the importance of not letting his mother know too much about his personal life: ‘Relations between the Ranee and me are very peculiar.’ Then Rupert went to the Mermaid with James Strachey, a friend of Richard Aldington, the owner’s son, who was to become an eminent poet and writer.

The famous inn, which probably dates from 1156, certainly ‘stood on this present site, built of wattle, daub, lath and plaster’ in 1300, when the Mermaid brewed its own ale and charged a penny a night for lodging. It was rebuilt in 1920 using ships’ timbers and baulks of Sussex oak, the fireplaces being carved from French stone ballast rescued from the harbour. Long associated with smugglers, it would now be referred to as a ‘no-go’ area, especially during the eighteenth century, when the 600-strong Hawkhurst gang openly flaunted their illicit activities without fear of reprisals, with consummate ease. By 1912, however, life at the Mermaid was a little more civilised, as Brooke revealed in one of his letters to Ka.

The following day (Sunday) he wrote again to Ka. ‘I’m just out a walk to Winchelsea’, obviously so mentally overwrought that he omitted the ‘for’. He ends the letter, ‘You’d better marry me before we leave England, you know. I’ll accept the responsibility. And the fineness to come.’ In yet another epistle written on Mermaid notepaper to Ka on the Sunday evening he complained: ‘Oh God, we’ve been searching for rooms in Winchelsea. No luck,’ but extolled the virtues of Rye’s neighbour: ‘Oh, and Winchelsea’s so lovely. On the road back we met a small lady who was lost, and I was (nervously) kind to her and restored her, practically to her Mother. Ha! I read The Way of All Flesh, and talk to James and think of you.’ Brooke’s walk to Winchelsea, 2 miles of marshland away from Rye, ran between the road and the railway. Elsie M. Jacobs described it in 1947:

Brooke also described to Ka an evening foray to Lamb House, just around the corner from the Mermaid in West Street.

Despite Brooke’s intriguing description of the mysterious scenario, the American author Henry James was actually in London at the time – at the Reform Club – so his life was never in danger from the chain-rattling whistler!

The arrival of Henry James at Lamb House in 1896 had seemed to herald the birth of a literary era for Rye, as his visitors included distinguished English contemporary writers Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and G. K. Chesterton, as well as French anglophile Hilaire Belloc and American literary luminaries Edith Wharton and Stephen Crane. The younger literati, not of his peer group, came too in the shape of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf (Virginia Stephen had by this time married Leonard Woolf), E. M. Forster and E. F. Benson – the latter eventually taking the property on three years after James’s death in 1916.

Albert Edward Aldington, the owner of the Mermaid, wasn’t actually a colonel; Anabel was Arabella – a nickname only, her real name was Dorothy Yorke – an American girlfriend of Dick’s who lived until her eightieth year. He called her Dolikins. Even Dick was an adopted name, Edward Godfrey Aldington calling himself that from an early age. The mother, Jessie May, to whom Brooke refers, wrote five novels and two books of poems between 1905 and 1917, while the youngest daughter Patricia was only four years old at the time and spent her days in the garden, where the car park is now, climbing the big old tree that used to stand there. Patricia Aldington still lives in Rye, where she used to take an active role in the running of the museum, and still remembers Brooke’s visit.

In 1919 Dick Aldington wrote to a friend:

The disparaging attitude that he had about Brooke’s war poems was not entirely fair, as Aldington was to see the war out and therefore be in a position to write a more balanced view – a chance not afforded to Rupert.

On 31 March, Rupert wrote to Jacques Raverat; ‘I leave here tomorrow evening. I go to Noel’s then to Ka Wednesday evening? Till Friday? Then I don’t know where: Winchelsea or the New Forest.’

He determined to call at Limpsfield Chart to see Noel, before going on to Ka at Woking. Still uncertain of his feelings, he also wrote to Noel from the Mermaid. ‘There is no doubt you’re the finest person in the world. How dare I see you.’ But Rupert wasn’t Noel’s only suitor. As well as Ferenc Bekassy, Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf ’s brother, was now making overtures to Noel and appeared at The Champions. From Ka’s house Rupert wrote to Jacques Raverat: ‘I’m going tomorrow to c/o Mrs Primmer, Beech Shade, Bank, Lyndhurst. I’m going to leave Ka alone till she’s rested and ready for Germany. I found her (I came yesterday) pretty bad.’

This stay at Bank, in April 1912, found him in a totally different mood to the lovestruck 22-year-old who had gone ‘dancing and leaping through the New Forest’ in 1909. His nervous breakdown following the jealousy and paranoia over Ka Cox’s dalliance with Henry Lamb, and his own subsequent affair with her, had left his nerves taut, his behaviour erratic and his state of mind irrational. Their love-making in Germany resulted in Ka becoming pregnant with Brooke’s child, but a subsequent miscarriage circumvented any hurried talk of marriage plans; in any case, he continued to feel disenchanted with the relationship, seeing Ka as a ‘fallen woman’.

Ka was attempting to be philosophical about the situation, while her friends feared for her general well-being. The relationship between Rupert and Ka was to be awkward for some time while before the channels of communication became a little more open. The potential threat of extramarital parenthood with all its implications, although now averted, was clearly pushing him towards a second breakdown, causing him to escape to the solitude and happy memories of Beech Shade with the loyal James Strachey. On 6 April he wrote to Noel:

The black hut stood, until recent times, on a clearing near the house, and the holly-bush – which grew nearby – remained until it was taken down as late as the 1950s when the track was metalled. To Ka he wrote a more factual, conversational note.

Despite his apparent joy at the solitude that was now his, in reality he didn’t want to be left alone, and following James’s departure, his anxious entreaties to Bryn Olivier brought her to Bank – probably more out of concern for his state of mind than any other reason. Whether in a cry for help or a dramatic pose, he talked of suicide and of buying a revolver, apparently searching the shops at Brockenhurst for a suitable firearm, treading the pathway towards insanity one moment and relapsing into a sentimental lassitude the next. Almost as an automaton he wrote to Hugh Dalton:

Probably kept sane by the excellent home cooking of Mrs Primmer, he waxed lyrical about her culinary expertise in a letter from Beech Shade to Maynard Keynes: ‘I’m here, under the charge of Brynhild at present. Most charming. And about my intellectual level … Oh! Oh! Mrs Primmer’s five-course dinner is on the table – funny she should be the best cook in England. Brynhild, a little nervously, sends you her love.’ His black mood also came through in a letter to the poet James Elroy Flecker: ‘I galloped downhill for months and then took the abyss with a leap … nine days I lay without sleep or food. Monsters of the darkest Hell nibbled my soul.’

April also brought the gloomy news that he had failed to obtain his fellowship. Rupert later confided to Bryn, ‘I’d been infinitely wretched and ill, wretcheder than I’d thought possible. And then for a few days it all dropped away and – oh! – how lovely Bank was!’ During those days at Bank, he must have seen her as a lifeline in his hour of need, and felt that closeness that a patient in hospital so often does with their nurse.

‘The best cook in England’ outlived Brooke by thirty years and her husband by twenty, Mrs Primmer passing away in 1945 at Bridport, while Beech Shade and the rest of the hamlet of Gritnam nearly became a victim of the motor age when Royal Blue Coaches attempted to buy the clearing in which the handful of cottages stood, in order to demolish it and create a coach park. Fortunately the Gritnam Trust was formed which put paid to the plan, but Beech Shade and the adjoining cottage were pulled down and rebuilt in the late thirties after falling into the hands of the Forestry Commission. The new house bears the name of its predecessor and, although not dissimilar in style, is different - the best example of how Beech Shade looked during Brooke’s day is its near neighbour Woodbine Cottage.

In a rootless and agitated frame of mind Rupert returned briefly to Limpsfield Chart, before heading to the anonymity of London. Ka was now convinced that Rupert’s feelings for her were cooling. They met in Trafalgar Square, close to where he was staying at the National Liberal Club. She was in tears and he was comforting, but undoubtedly going through the motions of consoling her, as the beginnings of guilt gnawed at him. He escaped to Berlin to stay with Dudley Ward, who was about to marry his girlfriend Anne Marie Von der Planitz, on 11 May in Munich, but he did ask Ka to go and visit. No doubt her pragmatism detected a faint demurring in his suggestion. Nevertheless she agreed to join him at some point.

Near the station in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg, the Café des Westens was where Brooke took to sitting, reading and writing, well away from the wedding preparations, and leaving Dudley space to write his articles for The Economist. The café proved the unlikely setting for two major trains of thought for Rupert. First, a friend of Dudley’s told him a tale there. The action had allegedly taken place in Lithuania the previous year. A boy who had run away from there at the age of thirteen, returned as a man, unrecognised by his own family. They put him up for the night, and the daughter, encouraged by the parents, killed him for his money. When the truth was revealed, they were overcome with grief and remorse. Whether true or apocryphal, and the story is an old one, it was to sow the seed for his only play, Lithuania, which would be produced three and a half years later in America. The other work that germinated at the Café des Westens was the poem that eventually became ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. Initially entitled ‘Home’, it then became ‘Fragments of a Poem to be Entitled “The Sentimental Exile”’.

He was homesick not for England in general – after all, he had only just completed the circuitous route of Rugby, Rye, Limpsfield Chart, Bank, Limpsfield Chart, Rugby and London – but for Grantchester. In a letter to Ka on the train to Germany he admitted his unashamed nostalgia for the Old Vicarage, as fragments and ideas for a poem were clearly beginning to form themselves in his mind. ‘I fancy you may be, just now, in Grantchester. I envy you, frightfully. That river and the chestnuts come back to me a lot. Tea on the lawn. Just wire to me and we’ll spend the Summer there.’ At the Café des Westens his ideas became notes, the notes became couplets and the couplets began to form what was to become one of his two most famous and enduring poems. On its completion he dispatched it to the editor of the King’s magazine, Basileon, preceded by a telegram: ‘A masterpiece on its way.’

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

ειθε γενοιμην … would I were

In Grantchester, in Grantchester! –

Some, it may be, can get in touch

With Nature there, or Earth, or such.

And clever modern men have seen

A Faun a-peeping through the green,

And felt the Classics were not dead,

To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,

Or hear the Goat-foot piping low…

But these are things I do not know.

I only know that you may lie

Day-long and watch the Cambridge sky,

And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,

Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,

Until the centuries blend and blur

In Grantchester, in Grantchester…

Still in the dawnlit waters cool

His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,

And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,

Long learnt on Hellespoint, or Styx.

Dan Chaucer hears his river still

Chatter beneath a phantom mill.

Tennyson notes with studious eye,

How Cambridge waters hurry by…

And in that garden, black and white,

Creep whispers through the grass all night;

And spectral dance, before the dawn,

A hundred Vicars down the lawn;

Curates, long dust, will come and go

On lissom, clerical, printless toe;

And oft between the boughs is seen

The sly shade of a Rural Dean…

Till, at a shiver in the skies,

Vanishing with Satanic cries,

The prim ecclesiastic rout

Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,

Grey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls,

The falling house that never falls.

God! I will pack, and take a train,

And get me to England once again!

For England’s the one land, I know,

Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;

And Cambridgeshire, of all England,

The shire for Men who Understand;

And of that district I prefer

The lovely hamlet Grantchester.

For Cambridgeshire people rarely smile,

Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;

And Royston men in the far South

Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;

At Over they fling oaths at one,

And worse than oaths at Trumpington,

And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,

And there’s none in Harston under thirty,

And folks in Shelford and those parts

Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,

And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,

And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,

And things are done you’d not believe

At Madingley on Christmas Eve.

Strong men have run for miles and miles,

When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;

Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,

Rather than send them to St Ives;

Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,

To hear what happened at Babraham.

But Grantchester! Ah, Grantchester!

There’s peace and holy quiet there,

Great clouds along pacific skies,

And men and women with straight eyes,

Lithe children lovelier than a dream,

A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,

And little kindly winds that creep

Round twilight corners, half asleep.

In Grantchester their skins are white;

They bathe by day, they bathe by night;

The women there do all they ought;

The men observe the Rules of Thought.

They love the Good; they worship Truth;

They laugh uproariously in youth;

(And when they get to feeling old,

They up and shoot themselves, I’m told)…

Ka joined Rupert in Berlin, but his physical passion for her was no longer there, as he told Dudley:

Ka fell ill in Germany, and Rupert’s mental equilibrium was still inharmonious and out of kilter, causing them to put the future on hold. She returned to her sister Hester in London, while Rupert, in a state of torpor, wrote to Jacques Raverat, ‘my love for Ka was pretty well at an end – poisoned, dead – before I discovered she was after all in love with me.’ Despite the finality of his feeling when writing to friends, his communications with Ka still gave her hope: ‘Hadn’t we better fix a date? The end of July? Would that do? It’s madness for me to make up my mind now, isn’t it?’ He also confesses to a ‘mechanical dull drifting through the days’. He felt, though, that he owed her something and was going through the motions of what he imagined to be doing the right thing by her.

James Strachey joined Rupert in Berlin and the two of them journeyed to the Hague. Rupert eagerly devouring Hilaire Belloc’s new book The Four Men at the Hotel des Indes where they were staying. The tale – a journey under the downs of Sussex – was to have a profound effect on him, the verses at the end of the work eventually inspiring his most quoted poem, ‘The Soldier’.