BACK IN LONDON came a little occupational therapy for his confused mind: a play with the Cornfords, a gathering of the Apostles and a meet with E. M. Forster, who was also staying at Raymond Buildings with Eddie Marsh. From Gray’s Inn, it was a fleeting visit to see his mother before retiring to his spiritual home, the Old Vicarage. He was glad to discover that God was in his heaven, and indeed all was right with the world – at least this little plot. Mrs Neeve was still there, so was the honey, and his poem had been published in Basileon. Bryn Olivier impressed the family at The Champions when she read it to them over Sunday breakfast; while Eddie Marsh thought it ‘the most human thing you’ve written, the only one that has brought tears to my fine eyes’, and implored him to ‘never write anything so good again without my knowing’. It was admired not only by friends: eminent poets Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson were enraptured, as was the writer and fellow of King’s, G. Lowes Dickinson.

Rupert’s general misery was compounded in July by the news of the death of one of his oldest friends, Hugh Russell-Smith’s brother Denham. He had written quite often to Denham, who usually answered his letters by return of post. The family that had made him envious with their obvious good nature were shattered by his early death in July 1912, aged just twenty-three. It was only after Denham’s death that Rupert confessed, in a letter to James Strachey, to an experimental sexual dalliance that he and the younger Russell-Smith had had at the Orchard in the autumn of 1909.

Of the one-off escapade at the Orchard he wrote, ‘I wanted to have some fun, and, still more, to see what it was like and to do away with the shame (as I thought it was) of being a virgin.’ He was, inevitably, disillusioned by what he believed was going to be a quantum leap from virginity to sexual knowledge. Despite the rushed, unsatisfactory night in his bedroom at the Orchard, the two remained good friends and did not speak of the moment again. As far as can be ascertained it was Brooke’s only real homosexual experience, apart from schoolboy experimentation at Rugby.

In spite of being run-down, taking strong sedations to help him sleep and living with the knowledge that sooner rather than later he must address the situation with Ka, he joined a summer reading party at a hostelry situated on the extreme north-east edge of Salisbury Plain. Maynard Keynes attempted to go one better than the previous year’s camp at Clifford Bridge by taking over the Crown at Everleigh for a few weeks and inviting a mixture of Apostles and Brooke’s neo-pagan/old Bedalian circle. Keynes had recently become interested in riding, so maybe he discovered the Crown via Cobbett’s Rural Rides or, less likely, through the knowledge that the 1897 (and 1898) Grand National winner, Manifesto, came from the stables at the Crown Inn! The Crown Inn at Everleigh was originally built as the Dower House, being converted to its present use around 1790. The journalist and reformer William Cobbett stayed at the Crown on 27 August 1826, commenting in Rural Rides:

The area was once so open that one could ride from Everleigh to Salisbury, a distance of about 10 miles, without jumping a fence or opening a gate.

Among Maynard’s guests were his brother Geoffrey, Daphne, Bryn and Noel Olivier, Justin Brooke, Rupert, James Strachey, Apostles Gerald Shove and Gordon Luce and Frankie Birrell. The company rode, played croquet and walked, as they wished, and read from Jane Austen in the evenings. Noel’s notes about the occasion reveal that Brooke was no horseman, and took no part in the riding side of the activities. The Crown possessing only some five or six bedrooms, the party took over the whole inn with the exception of the small bar for the locals. Maynard, whose inclinations were then exclusively homosexual, seemed disenchanted with the female contingent, and annoyed by Rupert’s overtures to Bryn, confessing in a letter to Duncan Grant,

Rupert’s nerves and emotions, coupled with the heavy medication, contributed to his irrationality and confusion while at Everleigh. He was flirting outrageously with Bryn – inviting her to go boating with him the following month – only to be told, when cornered, that she wanted to take Hugh Popham as well. Rupert’s incredulity forced her to confess to him that she had, in fact, decided to marry Popham. Rupert was distraught, and not only reneged on the boating arrangements but refused to say goodbye to her when she left Everleigh. His feelings seemed to be all over the place as he wrote to Noel from the Crown after her departure.

I had tea, sat a little, walked for miles alone, changed – I don’t know what the time is, or where anybody is. There seems nothing to do but write to you … it’s so damned full of you this place. There are many spots where we walked, the lawn where I saw you in so many attitudes, all you, there’s this room – why shouldn’t you swing round the door now? – You did yesterday, this morning, the day before yesterday … Oh Noel if you knew the sick dread with which I face tonight – that bed and those dragging hours – And the pointlessness of tomorrow, the horror that it might just as well be this evening, or Wednesday, for all the pleasure or relief from pain I get out of it. The procession of hopeless hours – That’s what’s so difficult to face; – that’s why one wants to kill oneself. It’s all swept over me. These last few days; and so much stronger and more certain than before – and rather different too. It seems deeper and better – Oh I can’t explain it all … Remember those days on the river: and the little camp at Penshurst, next year – moments then; and Klosters: and the Beaulieu camp: and our evenings by that great elm clump at Grantchester: and bathing in early morning by Oxford: and the heights above Clifford Bridge camp: and a thousand times when we’ve gone hand in hand – as no two other people could … you must see what we are child – I cannot live without you. But remember, I’m not only in love with you, I’m very fond of you. Goodnight, child – in the name of our love.

Fine words, but to write them to Noel, who had watched Rupert openly flirting and making romantic overtures to her sister Bryn during the previous few days, points to him being close to a relapse following his nervous breakdown earlier in the year. In a further letter to Noel, written at the Crown, he reiterates his emotions and feelings for her: ‘Noel, Noel, there’s love between you and me, and you’ve given me such kindness and such sympathy in your own Noel way – I’m wanting your presence so much – I’m leaning on you at this moment, stretching towards you.’ To complicate the issue even further, in the same letter he discussed his impending meeting with Ka, as she was awaiting a decision from him as to their future together. To Noel he confided: ‘I couldn’t ever live with her, I know from experience even, I should go mad, or kill her, in a few months. And – I love someone else. We’ve got to part. I suppose she really knows that by now. But I’ve got to tell her tomorrow.’ And he did. Justin Brooke drove him away from Everleigh, the Crown, the Keynes’ poker games and the croquet to a meeting place by the roadside at Bibury, where Ka was staying at the Swan. She and Rupert went off for three hours to discuss their relationship while Justin waited in his Opel. It was the end. Ka was inconsolable and Rupert riddled with guilt; it was the sour icing on the stale cake of his stay at Everleigh. His state of mind that weekend, and his being at such an all-time low, led to Frances Cornford suggesting that he go abroad for a while. Although he didn’t eventually take her advice until the following May, with beneficial results, he never sank so low again.

Rupert was, though, overcome himself with his own grief and guilt about ending the relationship. He poured his anguish into a letter to Noel.

The visitors’ book from the Crown, containing not only the signatures and comments of Keynes, Brooke and the rest of the party but also those of many other distinguished guests, including Montgomery of Alamein and General de Gaulle, disappeared some two or three years ago under mysterious circumstances.

During August, Rupert ricocheted from place to place like a pinball; from Witney in Oxfordshire he headed back to Rugby, before heading to the Cornfords’ house at Cambridge and then up to Overstrand on the Norfolk coast, where he stayed at Beckwythe Manor, the home of Gilbert and Rosalind Murray. Frances Cornford had introduced them to Brooke during rehearsals for Comus and they had subsequently become friends. On his first day at Overstrand, he wrote to Noel about his possible plans; ‘I spent most of yesterday talking to Frances. She’s Ka’s only decent real friend: she’s good, and, not being a virgin, she understands things. She wants me to go abroad for a year – to Australia or somewhere, and work manually. It’d be better for Ka she thinks.’ Rupert’s only problem in going abroad for a period was his concern that Noel might succumb sexually to one of her other suitors, which now rather bizarrely included James Strachey. At the end of the month Noel drove the final nail into the coffin when she admitted, ‘It was stupid of me even to have shared the little bit of love I had for you, and wicked of me to let you express your love for me … it was last November that I decided and you found out I didn’t love you.’

Justin Brooke’s home at Wotton in Surrey was also on Rupert’s itinerary that August. From Beckwythe Manor he informed Noel, ‘I go on Tuesday to c/o Justin, Leylands, Wotton, Dorking, Surrey, for a few days. You could say if we met what you thought about my retiring to California and how much you’d welcome the respite – yours as you left him, Rupert.’

Long associated with the Evelyn family since the days of the famous seventeenth-century English diarist, Wotton is undoubtedly still as much a piece of Old England as it was then, thanks to the arboricultural efforts of John Evelyn, whose passion for planting trees rapidly spread to the owners of other large country homes. During the Victorian era other eminent men brought their families to settle on the slopes of Leith Hill, with its stunning views across the Weald to the South Downs and its bracing ‘Swiss’ air, where the Evelyns live to this day.

In 1885 Arthur Brooke and his family acquired the expansive Leylands estate, having single-handedly built up his Manchester grocer’s shop until they had become one of the largest tea merchants in Britain – Brooke Bond. Brooke and his wife Alice already had two daughters and five sons by the time they moved in, with a third daughter, Aline, arriving later. Their sixth youngest, Justin, became close friends with Rupert Brooke at Cambridge, initially through the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club – both Brookes eventually becoming part of the group of friends that revelled in camping, swimming, walking and reading parties. As a good friend of Justin (who, coincidentally, had an older brother called Rupert), Rupert was always welcome at Leylands, where the walks, woods, views and tennis courts were major attractions.

A keen walker and lover of the English countryside, Rupert would surely have walked the short distance from the house, on the south-west corner of Leith Hill, to the tower – at 965 feet the highest point in south-east England with its views to the South Downs and English Channel to the south and the entire London skyline and the Dunstable hills to the north. Built in 1765, the folly was erected by the altruistic Hull for his own pleasure, and for that of everyone else who wanted to take in the wonderful views. It is hard to believe that Brooke resisted the lure of the patchwork-quilt panorama, or the short walk to the secluded lake at Friday Street. Another draw in the area would have been Polesden Lacey, the playwright Sheridan’s sometime home and then owned by the Hon. Ronald and Mrs Greville, she being one of the legendary Edwardian hostesses. Again commanding fine southerly views, the late classic house built in 1824 on the North Downs was sufficiently close to writer George Meredith’s old home on Box Hill for Brooke to take them both in during his visits to Leylands. Although Meredith had died in 1909, just as Brooke came to know the area, he may still have gone, as he was one of the young poet’s influences and he had a high regard for his writing, except for his later work. Meredith had immortalised the forest near Wotton in ‘The Woods of Westermain’.

The tennis lawn at Leylands where Rupert, a keen player, would have spent many hours, is still there, only now the hard court close to it is used in preference; and the chimney stack on the north-east corner of the house, on the left of the photograph, has been demolished, but otherwise the house is much the same at it was, apart from occasional additions, and a fire damage which affected a section of the building in 1907–8. The ha-ha which still faces the house across what was the tennis lawn no longer has the floral display that greeted the house’s occupants each morning with Alexander Pope’s words from ‘An Essay on Man’: ‘Hope springs eternal.’ There was obviously neither the space, nor a patient enough gardener, to continue with the rest of the quotation: ‘in the human breast; Man never is, but always to be blest.’ The house went out of the hands of Justin Brooke’s family after the First World War, when his father Arthur retired, and it was bought by people called Hicks before being purchased by a Commander Whitworth. Whitworth eventually sold it to Justin’s younger sister Aline (by then Arrowsmith-Brown) who moved back into her childhood home in her old age with her memories of the young poet Rupert Brooke and the days before the estate was split up in the 1930s.

Brooke’s second cousin, Winifred Kinsman, whose grandmother Lucy Hoare was his mother’s sister, also has a vivid recollection of Rupert, from the summer of 1912, even though she was not yet four years old:

Another port of call was the house of the poet and novelist John Masefield and his wife Constance, which they took jointly with their friend Isabel Fry. Rectory Farm at Great Hampden in the Chilterns was described by Masefield in 1909 as ‘a lovely little farm in Buckinghamshire, high up on a chalk hill surrounded by beechwoods and common land, a very fresh, pretty, but rather bare and cold country like most chalk hills’. Writing to Ka from there during a visit, Rupert wrote, ‘I sit in front of the cottage writing … Mr Masefield is inside, singing sea shanties to the baby [their son Lewis].’ Heaven knows what a two-year-old made of the ‘sea shanties’, as most of his nautical writings, like those in his 1902 collection, Salt Water Ballads, dealt with suffering and death, as in the last lines of ‘The Turn of the Tide’: ‘An’ the ship can have my blessing and the Lord can have my life / For it’s time I quit the deck and went aloft.’

The conversation between the two poets would probably have touched upon a problem with Masefield’s newly published tragedy, The Widow in the Bye Street, a lengthy work of almost 500 verses. A strike had resulted in 2,000 of the 3,000 copies printed being held up for several weeks at London docks, having arrived by sea from Edinburgh. The publishers were Sidgwick and Jackson, who had also published Brooke’s poems. It would appear that Rupert was initially slightly jealous of Masefield’s success, although the latter was his senior by almost a decade. Masefield, however, was never less than generous in his advice to Brooke and was happy to be counselled. Rupert asked him about a photographer called Murchisan, who wanted to take some photographs of him. Masefield duly gave him his advice, which ended with the telling words, ‘Remember that if you become as famous as we all expect of you, he will be able to make a lot of money out of your portrait.’ He was certainly right in terms of fame and longevity, as Brooke’s likeness is still admired eighty-five years on.

At the end of August, Rupert was once again fraught with tension and in a state of collapse, when a fellow Apostle from Cambridge, Harry Norton, whisked him off to relax on a tour in Scotland. Among the places they stayed were the Annandale Arms Hotel at Moffat, near Galloway, and Sanquhar, in Dumfries, from where he wrote to Noel declaring his intentions once again of visiting Justin Brooke at Leylands and taking her to task over her admission to not loving him: ‘You lie, Noel. You may have persuaded yourself you don’t love me, or engineered yourself into not loving me, now. But you lie when you say you never did – Penshurst and Grantchester and a thousand times. I know you did and you know it. And you could.’ Noel replied:

Forever optimistic, Rupert agreed, but on meeting her at The Champions he realised it was all to no avail.

Avoiding Rugby, he visited Leonard and Virginia Woolf in London, and stayed at the National Liberal Club and then with Eddie Marsh at Raymond Buildings, where they hatched the idea of an anthology of verse, with contributions from contemporary poets. The seeds of the idea were sown on 12 September. While in bed there, Brooke hit upon a scheme of publishing a book of poetry that would include a selection of work from twelve different writers – six men and six women; he would write all the poems under pseudonyms. This led to Marsh and Brooke deciding they might just as well use the work of existing poets, and, fired by the idea, they invited Wilfred Gibson, John Drinkwater, Harold Monro and Arundel de Re (the latter two being editor and sub-editor of the Poetry Review) to 5 Raymond Buildings to discuss the plan, the following day, the consequence of which was to be the publication of Georgian Poetry 1911–12.

From his base at Raymond Buildings, Marsh introduced him to London society, Brooke becoming friendly with Asquith, the then Prime Minister, and his family, as well as meeting fellow writers Walter de la Mare, Drinkwater, Gibson and W. H. Davies, among others whose acquaintance he had already made including Henry James, John Masefield and W. B. Yeats.

Two days after conceiving the Georgian Poets scheme Brooke went to the first night of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, where he became rather taken with actress Cathleen Nesbitt, who was playing the part of Perdita; maybe it was possible to love again.

A week later actor/manager Henry Ainley took her to a supper party given by Eddie Marsh at Raymond Buildings, where she was eager to meet the writer Gilbert Cannan, for whom she had great admiration. She found Cannan uncommunicative, but did strike up conversation with Rupert.

The meeting culminated in Brooke asking her to lunch, and the two of them becoming closer, although gradually, as they had both recently emerged from unhappy love affairs – Rupert with Ka, and Cathleen with Henry Ainley. She understood from Brooke that he was feeling ‘neurotic, depressed and against love altogether’.

During September, Rupert was back seeking sanctuary under the chestnuts at Grantchester. ‘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 was almost a mouthing idiot.’ Rupert was to leave his beloved Old Vicarage later in 1912, and the days of the Grantchester summers would be over for ever.

The first book of Georgian Poetry was printed and ready to be published in December, with contributions from Brooke, Lascelles, Abercrombie, G. K. Chesterton, John Masefield and Wilfred Gibson. It would sell for 3s 6d.

The initial edition of Georgian Poetry included five of Brooke’s poems: ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, ‘Dust’, ‘The Fish’, ‘Dining-Room Tea’ and ‘Town and Country’.

The year 1912 also saw Brooke’s first poem being published in the United States, when ‘Second Best’ was included in Thomas Bird Mosher’s Amphoria, A Collection of Prose and Verse Chosen by the Editor of Bibelot.

Early in October, Rupert was discussing more poetry, this time near Chichester. Between September and November 1912, 23-year-old John Middleton Murry, the editor of Rhythm, an avant-garde magazine of art literature and music, and his girlfriend of nine months, the 24-year-old New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield, rented Runcton Cottage at Runcton, West Sussex. A Queen Anne house, the dwelling was situated in the heart of a small hamlet that centred around the Manor and the Mill House, the latter being worked by the waters of Pagham Rife, which flowed from Vinnetrow, one of the dozen or so lakes to the north-east of the cluster of houses and past Runcton Cottage before emptying into the English Channel at Little Welbourne in Pagham harbour, 2 miles to the south. Brooke and Murry would walk for miles across the marshes, talking, discussing poetry and singing songs.

Rupert came to know Murry, a classical Oxford scholar, through Rhythm, which had first been mooted at Christmas 1910 by Murry and the painter J. D. Ferguson. The first issue appeared in June 1911. Murry’s Oxford chum Frederick Goodyear wrote the manifesto and the publication attracted many illustrious contributors. During its two-year existence, before transmogrifying into the Blue Review, its pages were graced by the works of Wilfred Gibson, W. H. Davies, Frank Swinnerton, Frank Harris, John Drinkwater, Duncan Grant, Brooke and dozens of others from the world of art, literature and music. Brooke visited Murry and Katherine Mansfield on more than one occasion while they were living at Runcton Cottage, once arriving with Eddie Marsh, having affected the initial introduction between Marsh and Murry and Frederick Goodyear.

Brooke was certainly at Runcton in early October 1912, writing a letter to Marsh on 4 October: ‘I’m going to Runcton Cottage tomorrow for the weekend … I suppose the Tigers [as he called them] won’t want me longer than till Monday.’ Rupert stayed for several days with Murry and Katherine Mansfield at the house that could barely be described as a cottage, considering its size. Here they talked and discussed the future of Rhythm, blissfully unaware of the fact that ‘Stephen Swift’, the publisher of the organ, was about to abscond, leaving a debt of £400, which Murry and Mansfield had to shoulder. During his stay at Runcton, Rupert shocked his host and hostess with a tale of an old woman who had sat motionless by her open window for so long that neighbours decided to force an entry, whereupon they discovered that all her lower half had been eaten by her cats! When Brooke left Runcton on Tuesday 8 October, he sent his love to ‘the Tigers when you see them’ in a letter to Eddie Marsh from Berlin the following month.

Brooke’s enthusiasm for Rhythm was still very evident in a letter to E. J. Dent in February 1913, in which he tried (successfully) to enlist him as a music critic for the magazine: ‘Rhythm, which is being reorganised on a fuller basis, but equally advanced, is having occasional articles on music – not so much reviews of concerts, as enlightenment on modern or ancient good things … They don’t pay! But they’re doing good work – if you’re again in London we might talk.’ His friend from Rugby and Cambridge, Denis Browne, was the music critic for both Rhythm and the Blue Review, as well as the New Statesman. To Gwen Raverat, unconvinced about contributing, despite being a close friend, he wrote: ‘it’s by people who do good work and are under thirty-five. It shows there are such, and that they’re different from and better than the Yellow Book or the Pre-Raphaelites or any other body.’

Murry and Katherine Mansfield left Runcton in November 1912 for Chancery Lane. Later they rented the Gables at Cholesbury in Buckinghamshire, with John commuting to London and often staying in Brooke’s old room at Eddie Marsh’s; Rupert eventually relinquished his keys to Murry in March. Brooke would write to Marsh on 10 March 1913, ‘I grow Maudlin … I gave up my keys to Jack Tiger with a curse of jealousy.’

After a spell with Dudley and Anne Marie Ward in Berlin, he was back in Rugby for Christmas, from where he confessed to Eddie Marsh that his eyes were full of sleep and his heart was full of Cathleen Nesbitt.