IN THE SPRING of 1931 poets from many countries gathered on Skyros as the memorial to Brooke was unveiled. The bronze figure, fashioned by a Greek sculptor, was unveiled by the Greek Premier, M. Venezelos, and was erected through the efforts of the International Rupert Brooke Memorial Committee. Among those present were the British Minister in Greece, the Hon Patrick Ramsey, Rupert’s friend, the poet Lascelles Abercrombie, the Belgian author, Professor Louis Pier and the Belgian Professor, Paul Vauderborghet. Both the books about Brooke and Skyros feature the woodcut illustrations of a young lady called Phyllis Gardner. Until 2000, she appears as little more than a footnote in Brooke’s life, but their brief romance remained a secret for ninety years.

In 1948, a leather case of papers formerly belonging to Irish Wolfhound breeder, painter and wood engraver, Phyllis Gardner was deposited with the British Library by her sister Delphis, with a caveat that the material was to remain sealed for fifty years. Having accepted the gift, the British Museum, of which the Library was then a part, were told that the material was of a ‘very intimate character’. The leather case contained a memoir written three years after Brooke’s death in 1915 and fifty letters.

Although they were de-reserved in 1998, the letters weren’t opened until 2000, to reveal an almost unknown relationship between Phyllis and Rupert.

The Museum Curators also discovered the ninety-page unpublished memoir from 1918. The daughter of eminent archaeologist Ernest Arthur Gardner, the 21-year-old first encountered Brooke on 11 November 1911 while having tea with her mother in the refreshment room at King’s Cross station. As Mrs Gardner pointed out his resemblance to a family friend, Phyllis was immediately captivated: ‘He had a mop of silky golden hair that he ran his fingers through … and his face appealed to me as being at once rather innocent and babyish and inspired with an almost fierce life and interest and keenness.’ She would later describe him as a ‘this strong and brilliant creature … this rushing whirlwind.’ An accomplished artist and still at art school, she sketched him on the train journey to Cambridge, admitting, ‘the more I drew him the better I liked him’. It was a friend who later identified him as King’s College student Rupert Brooke.

As we’ve already seen, following his emotional breakdown at Lulworth Cove, he had been making overtures to Ka Cox. During his recovery period in Cannes, he’d become so fixated with her that he wrote of his desire for her in their correspondence. There was also a large part of him still very much infatuated with Noel Olivier, and he couldn’t help revealing his jealousy of former Bedalian, Ferenc Bekassy, who also had a passion for her. At the same time he was naively writing to Ka Cox about his feelings for yet another girl he knew.

There was more than a hint of a romance in that letter he wrote to Ka from Cannes in January 1912:

Phyllis’s mother was trying to help her lovesick daughter with a little gentle matchmaking.

That June, Phyllis’s mother, Mary, invited Brooke to a lunch party at her club in London on the grounds that she had enjoyed his poetry and would like to meet him. Of course, the real reason behind the offer was her daughter’s increasing infatuation. ‘I could not get him out of my head,’ she wrote. ‘I felt as if I knew him well, wonderfully well, as if I had always known him. I felt that here was a person cut out on a colossal scale.’

Brooke, in return, seemed struck by her beauty and intrigued by her personality. After a meeting at his friend Eddie Marsh’s flat in London, in September 1912, he made a visit to the Gardner family home in Tadworth, Surrey. The young couple lay in hammocks under a row of elm trees and talked about their lives. Phyllis showed him her drawings, while Brooke read poetry to her. ‘His voice was such an exquisite instrument,’ wrote Phyllis in her memoir, ‘and the feeling for the poetry so exact.’

Brooke and Phyllis wrote many letters to one another, one of Rupert’s running:

Phyllis replied:

Rupert wrote to Francis Cornford at the end of September, ‘One can’t … I can’t be properly and permanently all right till I’m married. Marriage is the only thing. But, oh dear! One’s very reluctant to go into it without love … the full business.’ Despite the revelation of their ‘acquaintanceship’, as Phyllis termed it, only one item of correspondence between them appeared in The Letters of Rupert Brooke, edited by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. It was written from Tahiti in March 1914, and began, ‘You may be dead … or married to a peer, or anything’. It also included general pleasantries, such as, ‘In any case I hope you’re flourishing, working hard and happy,’ and ending, ‘And may you be happy and prosperous,’ relationships with Cathleen Nesbitt and Taatamata having eliminated any previous feelings for the girl who’d fallen in love at first sight on King’s Cross station, almost two and a half years earlier. Phyllis said that she was so overcome by Rupert’s physical beauty and extraordinary presence, that he made her feel as if she had ‘stepped into some amazing fairy tale’. At Grantchester, she and Rupert went naked together into the river, Phyllis noting that, ‘He looked like a beautiful statue … and I could keep away from him no longer.’

Later that month, Brooke wrote to her from the Old Vicarage, telling her how beautiful she looked when she was naked:

After Brooke returned from Germany in the early summer of 1912, they met again at Marsh’s flat, in Grays Inn. After Brooke read Phyllis a new poem, ‘The Night Journey’, she confessed to having ‘a strange gripping of my heart … and the feel of him made my blood run fire.’ She later wrote, ‘“You don’t know how your touch burns me,” I said; and for answer he rose up a little and put his arms round me.’ Phyllis’s diary fails to declare the level of intimacy, but she vividly recalled the electric light in the ceiling, the table by the window and the zebra skin on the floor. But chiefly she remembered the man of whom she was enamoured: ‘things in a sort of rainbow whirl … the chief part of the picture is himself, radiant, beautiful, at once pathetically helpless and full of a wild irresistible driving force.’ Phyllis didn’t remember how or when she left the flat, but she clearly displayed those tell-tale signs, because her mother asked her whether she had been in an accident. ‘No’ she replied.

‘Has R. been making love to you, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that,’ wrote Phyllis, ‘was all that was said.’ Making love then however was not taken to mean sexual intercourse.

The couple sometimes met at Eddie’s flat at Raymond Buildings, Brooke flattering her beautiful body – ‘just like a rather pretty boy’ – but by the end of 1912, Phyllis became concerned about his odd thought process. She was puzzled as why he thought that cranes were about to drop blocks of stone on the pedestrians below or that the bundles of straw under Chelsea Bridge, height markers for barges, were the scalps of evil-doers. Flights of fancy that would have been no stranger to his close friends, but Phyllis, completely in love with him, failed to see or understand the complexities of the man. When he travelled home to Rugby in December 1912, she clearly couldn’t bear to be parted from him – ‘My eyes were blinded with tears’. As she was pining though, she had no idea that Brooke had met actress Cathleen Nesbitt on 20 December at a gathering at Eddie Marsh’s flat. His feelings, romantic ideals and hormones were, as usual, in disarray, as he wrote to Eddie Marsh on Christmas Eve saying that he’d tidied up the flat, left the key, ‘and my heart all over the place,’ later declaring, ‘What else could a young man say with his eyes full of sleep and his heart full of Cathleen?’ By the end of January he is taking steps to become better acquainted with her. With feminine intuition, Phyllis sensed that all was not well. In her memoir she wrote, ‘And now, not for the first time, a sickening fear came upon me … I knew that he had been drawn into a vortex of would-be original people, who to satisfy their own base natures had made inconstancy a principle.’

By February 1913, Brooke was not yet in a relationship with Cathleen Nesbitt and possibly going through the motions a little with Phyllis Gardner. One suspects that the basis of the ensuing argument was that he wanted sex while she wanted marriage. Phyllis believed life to consist of ‘some sort of striving after nobleness’, while perceiving his philosophy was ‘an opportunity for pleasure-seeking’. It had reached the point where the flattery had stopped and mild contempt had taken over. Meeting at Raymond Buildings, Brooke gave her the key, but she couldn’t turn the lock and gave it back to him. As it is with doors, there’s often a knack. Asking him why it opened so easily for him, he replied, ‘That’s because you’re a rotten female … all women are beasts! And they want a vote – but they’ll never get it!’ This, of course, was a pattern for Brooke; romantic in pursuit; offhand in retreat. She refused when Brooke suggested spending the whole night together, later recalling, ‘My heart sank within me … where was my castle in the air, where my visionary child?’

He wrote to her saying that there were two ways of living - the normal and wandering:

He was backing off … unless of course there was intercourse involved. She remained resolute: ‘I wish you wouldn’t accept hedonism with acquiescence,’ she wrote to Brooke. ‘If you commit yourself to it, though, I’m afraid I’ll have to say I won’t see you … If you think I don’t care, you’re very wrong. It’s about the hardest thing to say I’ve ever said. It’d be less trouble to be dead.’ With the situation appearing to have made her ill, her mother sent Brooke a stern letter. It was a guilty young man who wrote to Phyllis’s mother in the early spring of 1913. ‘You hate me for my general character and for my behaviour towards her … rightly, I suppose … And if she is ill, in any way through me, I have failed; and deserve any blame.’ On 21 May, he wrote to Phyllis to tell her he was leaving England. ‘I gather you think me evil,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m sorry. And I think you’re wrong … But if I have hurt you: if you have suffered pain on account of me, I am very deeply sorry.’ Brooke then set off for America, from where he would travel to Canada and the South Seas, writing to her in November 1913 that she was made for marriage while declaring himself a wanderer and insisting, ‘Child, don’t love me.’

Not only was Cathleen Nesbitt on the scene, but early in 1913 he’d become friendly with the Prime Minister’s daughter, Violet Asquith, had a full sexual relationship with Taatamata during his time in Tahiti and on return from the South Seas had become close to Lady Eileen Wellesley.

Rupert’s final meeting with Phyllis was again orchestrated by a mother distressed at seeing her lovesick daughter pining for an unfulfilled relationship. In November 1914, Phyllis, her mother and Brooke met at a café in Charing Cross, Phyllis noting that he looked ill and tired. The conversation was light and trivial, Phyllis unable to put her feelings into words. ‘It might have been different if we had known this would be the last time we should see one another,’ she wrote. ‘I would have dearly liked to take him in my arms and say: “Poor boy, I’m so sorry for you.”’

A few months later, Phyllis suddenly felt so anxious she wrote in her diary, ‘Is R. all right?’ On 3 May 1915, her mother received a letter from Eddie Marsh telling her the news of Brooke’s death, from septicaemia, on April 23, on a hospital ship just off the coast of Skyros.

The news of her lover’s death seems to have unhinged Phyllis. ‘If R. wanted me I must come, but by what method I know not,’ she wrote, ‘and the sign was to be if I actually saw a waking vision of him.’ One night she was sitting on her mother’s bed, when the light cast by the gas onto the ceiling seemed to take his form, before melting away. ‘Therefore I am here to tell the tale,’ she wrote.

After Brooke’s death, Phyllis worked in Admiralty Intelligence during the war, then later as a wood engraver and a breeder of Irish wolfhounds. By the mid-1920s the family had moved to Maidenhead. She never married, and died, age forty-eight, on 16 February 1939, from breast cancer. Although little is known about her today, her legacy, through her unpublished memoir and letters, lives on.

‘Yes, some day I’ll die: so will you,’ she wrote to Brooke, in November 1912,

In 1921, eleven of Phyllis’s woodcut illustrations adorned Stanley Casson’s publication, Rupert Brooke and Skyros, with one of them, Trebuki Bay, also being featured in the Imperial War Museum’s 1991 book, Rupert Brooke’s Death and Burial.