VII
1930–1938

“The Fascination of What’s Difficult”

IF DILLY’S INTEREST IN THE ARCOS AFFAIR can be presented only as a series of disconnected clues, that, at least, is appropriate to the late Twenties, the period of the classic detective novel. The “rules” for these novels were drawn up by Ronnie in 1928, and adopted in 1929 as the Solemn Oath of the members of the writers’ Detection Club. The criminal must be mentioned in the first five chapters, and the reader must not have been allowed to know his inner thoughts; only one secret passage is allowed, no unknown poisons, no mysterious Orientals, no lucky chances or unexplained intuitions to help the detective; the detective must “declare” all his clues, so must the “Watson”, or uncomprehending friend; and the detective must not turn out to be the criminal. Agatha Christie, although a founder member of the Detection Club, broke nearly all of these rules, and G. K. Chesterton had broken most of them, but Ronnie was happy with their safe dimensions. A game should be an imitation of life’s dimensions in which the players themselves can decide when to stop and get off.

Between 1926 (The Viaduct Murder) and 1937 (Double Cross Purposes) he wrote six detective stories. All of them, even the earliest, were backward-looking. To feel at home in them, you need to be familiar with Bradshaw’s railway timetables, canoeing on the upper reaches of the Thames, vicarages, gas taps, and country house parties in which the first duty is consideration for one’s hostess. Time has obscured these things, although time may well restore the wish to read about them. The solutions to the mysteries are most scrupulously set out, and page references are given, in case the reader has missed the clues.

As a novelist, Ronnie was not strong on characterization. In 1920, when formidable Aunt Ellen (the college Principal) wrote from Toronto: “I have been trying my hand at a story of Old Canada, and am sending six chapters so that my nephews can put more life and buoyancy into the ‘conversations,’ ” none of them, not even Eddie, was prepared to take on the job. Some of Ronnie’s characters he found to hand, just as he used the familiar scenery of Scotland, Oxford and Herefordshire—the convert clergyman, for instance, in The Three Taps, or Miss Morel, the lady motor-car driver in The Body in the Silo, who was taken from Miss Gompertz. But he was not able to establish a popular detective to carry him through book after book—couldn’t even think of a name for him, but opened his Shropshire Lad and found:

In summertime on Bredon …

In valleys miles away …

Miles Bredon, Ronnie’s investigator, is a stick. He smokes a pipe and plays patience, as both Dilly and Ronnie did, to clear his mental processes, but without coming to life for a single moment. Yet Ronnie had admirable models—Dilly himself (except that flashes of intuition were forbidden by the rules) would have served, and Wilfred would have been even better, though here the pain of the old association stood in the way; and besides, the figure of the wise, ageless, shabby priest who puts the conventionally-minded to shame had been done once and for all, Ronnie thought, by Hugh Benson and Chesterton; no one guessed how soon Graham Greene was going to drag him out again for The Power and the Glory.

Ronnie’s six detective stories, which earned him about four hundred pounds a year each, were written in the vacations at Beaumont to supplement his income from the chaplaincy at Oxford. They made it possible for him to bear most of the expenses of hospitality himself, although it worried him that it might establish a precedent and that all his successors might have to find extra money, and perhaps write novels, as well. Although he was still modestly uncertain as to what the job entailed and whether he was the right man to do it, he left St Edmund’s for Oxford in the Michaelmas of 1926, with sober expectations of success.

The chaplaincy house at Oxford, misleadingly called the Old Palace, is on the corner of St Aldates. It is a very old place, part of it pre-Elizabethan, with the oak beams that support it—“if anything does,” Ronnie said—showing through the plaster. A stream, a tributary of the Isis and once used for a mill stream, runs beneath the whole building into Christ Church Meadows. Different levels, sloping floors and low passages make getting about an achievement; two ancient chimneys go up the whole height of the house, and the drainage system is a study in itself. As a link with the past, the Old Palace could not be improved upon. Bishop King, the first and last Catholic bishop of Oxford, had lived there. As a link with the future, it was less suitable, but Ronnie could not foresee its later metamorphoses, its doors open to down-and-outs and unfortunates, a thriving cafeteria, open debates with all the world’s religions. His vision did not extend so far. He saw it as a centre of exchanged confidences, prayer and peace.

It was also a home. Ronnie became a householder. Before that he had always been in school or college, or a guest, or a lodger. In an essay, “Joys of Householding”, he described the heady sensation; he was sleeping, for the first time, in his own bed: “I could go out and sell it in a shop if I wanted to.” And he could have food because he liked it, not because it was all he would get, or “because it would look so rude if I didn’t.”

Food, however, depended on a good housekeeper. Mrs Lyons—she never married, the “Mrs” was honorary—was an old family retainer supplied by Lady Lovat, who acted for more than ten years as Ronnie’s cook, business manager, almoner, sacristan and clothesmender. Pious and frugal, refusing to give up work until a few days before her death, she was fiercely protective of all priests, and of Ronnie, of course, in particular. With her, his comfort was assured, that of his visitors rather less so, as Mrs Lyons did not take to everybody. Some were in perpetual disfavour. To these the Old Palace became the Den of Lyons.

The move from Ware was easier than he had feared. He chose the blue chintz curtains himself, or thought he did, for every woman guest, including Christina, was consulted. He stood gazing wistfully out into St Aldates, to see whether people were looking at them, and whether they noticed that there were no linings. The Sisters of Nazareth came with a hand-cart to clear away the junk, and Ronnie took possession, as the chaplain’s room, of the long panelled room on the first floor where once again he could sit down on his own fender, with his back to his own fire.

Oxford welcomed him without reserve. One disappointment was the departure of Father Martindale, who had suddenly gone off, with the speed of a whirlwind, and returning only for an occasional sermon to a wider apostolate. Otherwise there were old friends everywhere, and no reproaches at his change of faith. His old college, Trinity, elected him at once to dining rights; this, and the Honorary Fellowship they gave him at the end of his chaplaincy, he felt as two of “the nicest things that ever happened to me”.

He proved himself to be a good, if anxious, organizer, better, though less successful, than Eddie and Dilly, who were able by instinct to find others to organize for them. In 1931 he personally raised and gave six thousand pounds for the building of a new chapel. With none of the folie de pierre which is the last infirmity of so many priests, he dismissed the architect’s Gothic plans and asked for something that “could be turned into tea-rooms later on”, as indeed it was. His main object was to find a reliable routine for the household, the chapel and the University societies, which he hesitantly hoped might become a tradition. In “The Whole Art of Chaplaincy”, a document which he bequeathed to his successors, he gives not only a summary of his pastoral methods but a loving description of loose gas taps, frightful draughts and creaking doors which could, surely, have been put right on the spot. The chapel harmonium had not been tuned for thirteen years; a white stole, picked up in the ruins of Ypres, Ronnie would rather have liked to get rid of, but didn’t. He did not want to change these things, any more than he changed the position of the picture which was hung upside-down in the passage and stayed like that till 1938. He was at Oxford. This was his home. As a Catholic priest, he felt more deeply united with the medieval foundation which, he now felt, had lost its way for a few centuries—but what did that matter at Oxford?—and to which the Faith had now quietly returned.

Writing to his publisher, Tom Burns, about a collection of chaplaincy sermons, Ronnie explained that he wanted to call it The Hidden Stream because of the mill stream that ran beneath the Old Palace. “It is the easiest thing in the world to go down it in a canoe, but I find that my name has become immortal as the intrepid paddlesman who did it. It would draw a parable between this single, unsuspected branch of the Isis and the stream of teaching which goes on at the Old Palace, rather shiftily, quite differently from the main stream of University teaching, etc., etc.” By “rather shiftily” he meant what others might call unobtrusively and profoundly. In that spirit he undertook his new duties.

At Courn’s Wood, Dilly hacked away persistently at the chalky slopes of beechwoods, and planted several acres of trees himself, a gaunt figure in half professorial, half woodlander’s attire, ending in grey flannel trousers tucked into waders.

Two miles from our sombre home in the Chilterns [writes his son Oliver], across a valley, up a broad bridlepath, then down a meandering track left almost invisible, stood the log-cabin built by my father, in a glade surrounded by ash-saplings and willow-herb. He had built this hut with his own hands, sawing and splitting the larchwood, with relentless energy, all day so long as there was any light, every Saturday and Sunday through one summer in the early ’30s. Here one afternoon I returned from some expedition, to hear the murmur of my parents’ conversation. What I heard was disturbing.

My father was talking of the frustrations of life at the Foreign Office, and of the yearnings to return to Cambridge and resume his passionate studies of Greek. My mother was reminding him, low but firmly, of his duty to educate his sons, and of the national importance of his work, and adding, too, that she herself could not bear the thought of returning to the chill wastes of fenland and the inhospitable society of dons.

I didn’t dare to shuffle, or announce my presence, but peeped between the cracks of the timber wall. My father was in his shirtsleeves, holding his saw. His pipe lay neglected on the crude windowsill. For once he wasn’t wearing his horn-rim spectacles, so that his eyes looked unfamiliarly naked.

This was one of the very few times indeed that I saw him looking as though not in control of his destiny.

The yearning prevailed, even though Dilly had become somewhat impatient recently with the wave of supernaturalism which appeared to be invading King’s. Monty James, the scholar of malignant hauntings, had transferred to Eton, but Dilly’s old friend, the historian Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, had been receiving poems from the spirit world dictated by Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke, while his once rational and cynical tutor, Nathaniel Wedd, was attending séances to conjure up the philosopher Ellis McTaggart from the dead. In 1929, indeed, McTaggart apparently did return to a séance in Redhill in the form of a man with a stout walking-stick, which he tried to poke into the ground, repeating “I have loved you all the time”; when Wedd failed to recognize him, the medium told him he had summoned the wrong McTaggart, and declined to enter into any further correspondence. Dilly, in the name of Cambridge, objected bitterly to all this. “Middle age is drifting away,” he told Lytton Strachey, and unbelief seemed to be weakening. Yet Dilly, quite rightly, felt that King’s would in the end resist the temptations of faith, and the discussion about his future was particularly acute because in 1929 he had challenged fate with another scholarly publication, the Loeb Classical Library edition of Herodas.

This was a condensed edition, presenting many new readings and conjectures, and including fragments of Hipponax, Cercidas and the Life of Alexander, which, Dilly characteristically tells us, “was more popular between the 3rd and 12th century in the Greek and Byzantine world than any other book except the New Testament, and is some of the worst poetry ever written.” Its childishness should correct, he says, the mistaken notion that the Greeks were intellectuals. He also, in accordance with the scheme of the Loeb series, provided an English translation, skilfully reproducing the metre as well as the sense of the Greek verse:

But now that there gleam on my head

White hairs but a few at the edge

Still does my summer

Seek for the thing that is fair …

However, he only did this if, in his judgment, the original poems were good enough. Herodas himself, like the Alexander, did not “pass”, so the Mimes appeared translated into prose.

But what prose! There is no trace of what the Loeb editors said to their wayward contributor when they saw this version, designed, in principle, as a key for advanced students. The language of the Mimes is precious, with unpleasant affected archaisms, and an honest translation, it seemed to Dilly, must be the same. Cloistered in his study, with a new, terrifying form of patience which he had invented himself and taught to Ronnie to celebrate his move to the chaplaincy, Dilly worked out his English equivalent to Herodas. “La no reke hath she of what I say, but standeth goggling at me more agape than a crab” is a typical sentence, while “Why can’t you tell me what they cost?” comes out as “Why mumblest ne freetongued descryest the price?” Satisfied, Dilly corrected his proofs; he read the reviews, all of which praised the accuracy of the text but considered the translation a complete failure, with indifference. “If I am unintelligible,” he wrote, “it is because Herodas was.”

Nineteen thirty-one was a year marked out by the Fates for disappointment. The long-dreaded motor-bike accident took place at last, a serious crash, and Dilly’s leg was badly broken. Afterwards he always walked with a slight limp, sometimes on tiptoe, sometimes breaking into a jog-trot, to avoid cramp. Laid up in the Acland Home, at Oxford, he expected Ronnie to visit him, and felt disproportionately hurt when Ronnie never came. True, he might have sent a note round to the Old Palace, but “surely one doesn’t have to write to one’s brothers?” Dilly complained.

A letter arrived from the wife of the distinguished Dutch scholar, also a commentator on Herodas, Professor Grooneboom: “When we hear that our dear Professor Knox is not well, we say to one another that we wish nothing better than that he was among us here.” Dilly put the letter away, with the earlier one offering him the chair of Greek at Leeds. If Olive could not face Cambridge, what would she say to the prospect of Holland or a northern University? She had been in the deepest anxiety over his accident, and she loved him dearly. Sacrifice must be met with sacrifice.

Emerging from hospital, he practised walking round the lawn, following the footsteps of a large tortoise to whose shell he had attached a wooden engine on a string. Its trundling could be heard on summer mornings, and in the winter, when it buried itself, the engine was left above ground to mark the spot. Then, partially recovered, Dilly bought an Austin Seven to cover the five miles to High Wycombe station, which gave him exactly time to recite the whole of Milton’s Lycidas, taking his hand off the wheel now and then to say: “Look! It drives itself!”

Few people were anxious to accept a lift from Dilly; one who did, without the slightest worry, was the artist Gilbert Spencer, Stanley’s brother.

After our marriage [he writes], my wife and I took rooms at Mr Rogers the chairmaker, just at the bottom of the road leading up to Dillwyn’s home in Courn’s Wood … [He] always gave me a lift to the station and used to amuse himself seeing how far he could go downhill with the engine off. He also told me that our terminus (Marylebone) was so out of the way that he was pretty nearly the only passenger, which explained why he was so politely received by the station-master. But we thought it was his highly important position at the Foreign Office.

Since his early friendship with Henry Lamb, Dilly had always liked a certain kind of low-keyed, unassertive, but deeply felt English picture. He did not much care for the large bright Medici prints which hung in his dining room. It was agreed that Spencer, who, with a wife and young baby, needed commissions, should do a portrait. This firm but delicate pencil drawing, an excellent likeness, illustrates another of Spencer’s remarks: “For an artist, not to understand someone does not mean not to know them.”

In another range of Dilly’s sympathies was his Sunday visitor, the impeccable Professor Lobel. As editor of the “laundry lists”, the Oxyrhynchus papyri, Lobel came down with his fragments and problems, not so that they could consult each other, but simply so that they could sit side by side, each in his own Greek world, exchanging perhaps half a sentence. The children were overawed, and hid in the brushwood.

If Edgar Lobel was the most imposing of my father’s friends [Oliver recalls], Frank Birch was the jolliest, most amusing and mondain. When he came down to Courn’s Wood I was slightly ashamed of the cold unworldliness of our home, and vaguely conscious that the half-bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape customarily provided for visitors was not enough.

It was not enough, but Frank Birch produced a magical change in Dilly. The cold and daunting “Why do you say that?” which was his answer to anything muddled or inexact, disappeared into the gaiety which Birch brought with him. Never to be forgotten was Birch’s virtuoso appearance, all but unrecognizable in wig and elastic-sided boots, as the Widow Twankey in Aladdin. It was remarked in King’s that he was the only member of college to appear in pantomime while still a Fellow. For the occasion Dilly treated the family to seats at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and the smaller ones sat laughing, half in terror, as the Widow found a baby mixed up with the washing. “Quite spoiled, isn’t he? Never be the same again!”

Otherwise, Dilly came up to London only for work and cricket, which also worked a transformation. To Oliver,

an outing to a Test Match was a spree, almost, on which we were alone together. My father’s metropolitan manners came as a surprise. To begin with, he took a taxi from Marylebone; unheard-of extravagance. Then he forgot to collect our change at the turnstiles, and waved aside more change for a score-card, in his hurry to watch the game. Such carefree behaviour seemed a far cry from the thrift and sobriety of Courn’s Wood.

The fates did not give Dilly a daughter, before whom, very likely, he would have been as helpless as he was without his spectacles. To his niece, confined for what seemed an eternity to a boarding school at nearby High Wycombe, where the girls, although their anatomy made it impracticable, were obliged to play cricket, Dilly was the kindest of visiting uncles. Agitated at having brought her back late in the Baby Austin, which seemed to spring and bounce along the roads like a fawn, he bravely entered the precincts, blinking in the bright light, confronting the outraged housemistress, who said “Rules are made to be kept,” with the answer: “But they are defined only by being broken.”

For his fiftieth birthday, in 1934, Dilly resolved to entertain his brothers and sisters to lunch. Eddie, when he was fifty, had given an elegant family lunch at the Café Royal; Dilly decided on the Spread Eagle at Thame.

The famous inn was still under the management of John Fothergill, who has described in his Innkeeper’s Diary his successes as a host, but not the trials of the guests, which increased towards the end of his heyday at Thame. As mine host he still looked welcoming as he stood at the door, a figure left over from the Beardsley era, with copper buckles at his knee, and in chilly weather wearing a sealskin cap made out of his mother’s muff. His grand manner remained, but dining at the Spread Eagle had become unpredictable. There were long delays, and Fothergill had barred off all the lavatories in the house, so that guests had to pick their way through the long wet grass of the orchard to relieve themselves, often pursued by vindictive bees, said to have been brought from Hymettus.

Dilly made an anxious host, though Fothergill was apparently ready to honour them, and bowed over Christina’s hand with the strange compliment, “Madame, I admire your teeth.” You did not order on these occasions; Fothergill provided. After they had sat some time, he returned bearing in his own hands a small dish of perfectly plain boiled potatoes, with an explanation which only he could have given: “You must not think I would insult you by serving anything with them.”

When poor Fothergill departed to Market Harborough (“a Midland desert not fit for a pigsty,” he wrote to Eddie), Dilly entered a farewell verse in his private notebook:

Long the Spread Eagle host has ranked

His very privy sacrosanct;

Now all things shall be free to use,

Nor need we mind our pees and qs.

But relaxations, even unsuccessful ones, were not so characteristic as an intense concentration and withdrawal, when, as Olive told her son, “your father is miles away.” “It was years after his death before I knew what he did,” Oliver said; “to his work he referred not at all, any enquiries in that respect being met with the dismaying device of total silence.”

During the Thirties, finding that smoking and patience were not sufficient as alternative tranquillizer and counter-irritant to the active mind, Dilly suddenly produced a new way of writing poetry. A devoted reader of Sylvie and Bruno, he particularly valued Lewis Carroll’s notion that “if you have a long tedious evening ahead, why not store up the useless hours for some other occasion when you need extra time?” The hours spent at Naphill dinner parties seemed now to be turned to account in the fastnesses of the study, from which he emerged every now and then with a poem in his hand. These were, perhaps, an attempt at wholeness, that is, at uniting the two sides of himself, the relentless “Why do you say that?” with the unpredictable visits of intuition.

The rules, Dilly claimed, were transparently simple; each line must end with a word of the same form, but with a different vowel, the vowels “of course” coming in their proper order, a, e, i, o, u, or the equivalent sounds in English. One of his earliest examples was:

Just look at my father	A
And mother together!	E
I fancy that neither	I
Would very much bother	O
If rid of the other.	U

Irrelevant proper names could not be allowed. Wanting a more difficult rhyme-word, he had tried:

And waiting in a sad row

For the head-waiter, Pedro,

The inmates of the hydro

Longed for their tea and cod-roe,

And talked of Wilson (Woodrow).

That wouldn’t do, Dilly thought. The situation was improbable. There was no rationale. Why should they talk about Woodrow Wilson? Might they not, however, have been driven mad by the Peace Treaty? And after all, why not write poetry about food and drink? Why should a life spent in eating and drinking be considered baser than a life devoted to sex? Sex, it was true, was a kind of communication with other human beings. But then, drink helped one to forget them.

It was suggested to him that the Pentelopes, as he called his fiveline verses, were an acquired taste, that not very many people would appreciate them, and that (like Gerard Manley Hopkins) he was making poetry too difficult to write. And it would be almost impossible, under these new rules, to convey emotion. About whom or what? Dilly asked. Why do you say that?—Well, for example, A. E. Housman had recently died. What epitaph could be appropriate for him, except, “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead …”?

The pain and restraint, the hesitation on the part of the messengers which the repetition in the first line suggests, surely these couldn’t be expressed under the new “rules”? It turned out that Dilly had done so, on the very morning that he heard of Housman’s death:

Sad though the news, how sad

Of thee, the poet, dead!

But still thy poems abide—

There Death, the unsparing god

Himself dare not intrude.

He agreed that it would scarcely do to show this condensed version to his brothers. It was put away in his tin box, where the pile of Pentelopes grew, awaiting the day when the new system would be acclaimed as the easiest and most obvious form of reducing poetry to a game.

Two years earlier than this, in 1934, a wave of intense depression had led Dilly to try and make over the whole of his wooded estates to King’s. It would have been an ingenious solution.

My dear Dillwyn [Maynard Keynes had replied], the college is in fact already in the timber business on a certain scale, and is not unduly unsuccessful, but there are great difficulties in the way of the college going in for it on a large scale. But all this does not mean that we should not like you to come up and talk about it.

Once again, the appeal of Cambridge was strongly heard. Nevertheless, in 1936, for the first time, Dilly began to refuse his invitations to Founder’s Feast. The reason was simple; the dinner was noted, even among Cambridge colleges, for its hospitality and its fine wines, and, in consequence, for the occasional indiscretions of the guests. These, to be sure, were heard by Kingsmen only, but the time had come when Dilly could not risk even the hint of a shadow of a reference to what he was doing. He had started work on a new problem.

The importance of this problem was the cause of his erratic behaviour, the sudden gloom and exhilaration, the obsession with the obstinate five vowels of the alphabet which emerged in the queer poems. His department was face to face with difficulties far beyond the imagination of Room 40.

Since the end of the Great War every government which had something to hide, and could afford to hide it, had been in the market for an electromechanical system of encipherment which would avoid repetitions, and so make the old methods of solution through letter frequencies almost impossible. During the Thirties, cipher machines were patented by the ingenious which generated their own alphabets by the million, printed or indicated the letters, and could be put into reverse to decipher them for the receiver. Each type had its advantages—compactness, ease of operation, accuracy. France, Italy, and later the United States, chose the Swedish Hagelin. The Soviet Union had its own. Germany bought the Enigma. The keys, the settings and the method of operation were all secret. It was the business of the Foreign Office’s Department of Communications to solve Enigma and, later, the Enigma Variations.

At the beginning of the Thirties Wilfred was quite alone at Oratory House, except for the daily visits of Mr Smith, the gardener. But in 1933 he was joined there by Dr Alec Vidler. The arrival of this great priest, theologian, and natural administrator and organizer, a man whose horizon widened year by year, was of untold value to Wilfred, always fortunate in his friends. A certain shyness had held him apart from the University. An Oxford man to the very depths, he felt doubtful of his reception in the bright windswept fenland city. He had no access to the University libraries. Students came to consult him, he was supremely at ease with the fruit-pickers, but he was seen very little in the colleges. As a scholar, he was a member of the New Testament Seminar conducted by F. C. Burkitt, but he seemed almost afraid of social distractions. Alec Vidler put an end to all this, drew him out and dusted him off, induced him to take steps to get his Doctorate of Divinity, and introduced him to the heads of colleges. He was pleased when Wilfred was invited to give the University sermon (although, owing to the rapid, quiet delivery, not many people could hear it), and delighted when he was made a Canon of Ely. At a deeper level, he confirmed Wilfred’s vision, in the true spirit of the Good Shepherd, of a universal Christianity, with total authority, but without sectarian bitterness. Then he introduced him to the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose social ethics, based on his experience in industrial cities, made a direct appeal to Wilfred; only, by temperament, he could not quite admit this at once, but let several months pass before saying that he had found Niebuhr “quite interesting”.

His natural tendency to broadness of spirit could be judged by his services on the Committee for Christian Doctrine, which met during those years to find a basis of common doctrine for the whole Church. No Roman Catholics attended, but Wilfred was invited as a representative of Anglo-Catholic opinion, which, it was thought, would mean extreme Conservatism. Many were disconcerted when he spoke out in favour of the tolerance of birth control and civil divorce. If his first draft manifesto had gone out, he told his old friend Stephen Langton, “it would have produced the headline ‘ANGLO-CATHOLICS CALL FOR CONTRACEPTIVES’ (Daily Mirror). Then we should have cut some ice. Thine, Wilfred.”

The strength of this came from Wilfred’s serene inner certainty. When faith was discussed he was the most consistent and even conservative of them all. On the essential beliefs of Christianity he was as firm as a rock, nor did he care if most people, or indeed if everyone, found them too difficult. “At the end of the day, God is still where He was.” But on the necessity of recognizing the human needs of this world, Wilfred was also firm.

As a matter of fact the Committee’s summing-up, when it eventually appeared in 1938, was greeted in the daily press as CHURCH SAYS SEX NOT EVIL. The report, in consequence, sold surprisingly well, and the Committee had to school themselves to patience and hope that their painstaking summary of the faith would make its way in time.

Ronnie, for his part, analysed the report in several despairing articles. “Nobody who reads it can fail to be impressed by the goodwill of the signatories,” he wrote, “or by their learning in certain fields. But their whole conception of faith differs so completely from ours, that no bridge of understanding seems, at present, to be possible. There is nothing to be prayed for except a revolution in their whole method of thought.”

When Dilly came over on his increasingly rare visits to Cambridge he usually saw Wilfred, paid a visit to the Oratory, and told his brother that he could no longer be surprised by the vagaries to which Christianity led. Yet he was not quite unsympathetic to Wilfred’s studies, because they were concentrated on the one saint whom Dilly could tolerate, the recklessly determined St Paul, to whom nothing was impossible.

If Meditation and Mental Prayer is the most accessible of Wilfred’s books, where his speaking voice can still be heard, St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles is the one by which fellow historians and theologians remember him. In it he set out to reconstruct the mind of the Hellenized society of the first century, when Jew influenced Greek and Greek influenced Jew under the uneasy Roman peace. The Gospels were not the only biography produced in the first century, nor was Paul the only man who wrote letters. Only by understanding the climate in which they were written can we hope to estimate whether they are true or not, and Wilfred is scrupulous in not doing this for us. “The fact of Paul’s experience may have been no more than an illusion, but for him it was a matter of immediate certainty. It followed from this that nothing else mattered.” Each chapter then explains a different aspect of the Greek religious and philosophical notions which Paul had to use and to adapt by hook or by crook, if anyone in Corinth or Ephesus was to be got to listen to the truth. Wilfred’s knowledge of the sources, from classical literature to magical papyri, went deep and wide and has rarely been equalled. He knew his own Greek world, that is, as well as Dilly and Headlam knew theirs. Through all his weight of learning, it emerges unmistakably as a place of fear, craving for either a practical guide or a magical formula, and dominated by the power of the stars, in which, we are reminded, Paul himself believed, when he set out to fight against them in their courses.

Wilfred’s work is scholarship for scholars, but, in his approach to it, he never forgot those who were not. The widening gap between theologians and anyone else to whom Christianity might be of interest was of great concern to him. “If we read a great deal of theology,” he said, “we shall need a great deal of faith.” The Gospels and Epistles were disintegrating in the devoted hands of twentieth-century structural analysts. Christ was left with no Life, and St Paul with very few Letters. The popular religious best sellers of the Thirties took no notice whatever of these developments, and Wilfred was shrewd enough not to despise them. H. V. Morton’s tour of the Holy Land, In the Steps of the Master, a consistent best seller, treated every place and event in the Gospels as simple fact. It was followed by the equally popular In the Steps of St. Paul. But if Morton were to write “In the Steps of the Theologians”, Wilfred said, we should pretty soon find ourselves in the desert.

Once again, this did not mean that he had any idea of compromise, which would have been false to his character, and totally false to his vocation. There is only one truth, but he believed it was the business of scholars to preserve it and defend it.

In the summer vacations, Eddie and Wilfred still met in the Welsh Border country, but now they fished not the Arrow, but another tributary of the Wye, the Lug. They shared (unequally) the rent of a thatched cottage in the very small village of Knill.

Knill is at the bottom of a valley, and memory associates it always with summer heat, sheep standing stuffily in the high bracken, the fumes of cider apples, and a haze of warmth at the farm where the enormous featherbed, in the room sometimes let out to visitors, almost suffocated them. A team of cart horses stood ready for the fields or to pull an unwary motorist out of the ford, which ran across the road to join the stream. Mr Davies, the farmer, was of course not idyllic but practical. As the years passed he sold the team, inspected the sheep from a Ford van, and replaced the thatch on the cottage with slates. But in the 1930s the thick straw still projected over the eaves, raucous with birds and insects. In Wilfred’s small room, known as the “prophet’s chamber”, the chirping and rustling were deafening. Downstairs, magpies’ nests fell down the chimney, and rabbits invaded the vegetable garden which Wilfred had carefully laid out.

It was felt that he needed looking after when Eddie and Christina were not there, and this was undertaken by Mrs Moses, the wife of the water-bailiff on the Lug. George Wozencroft, the head gardener from the big house, Knill Place, came to work at the cottage in his spare time, not without some clashes with Wilfred over the direction of affairs in the tiny garden. They understood each other perfectly. When Wilfred’s unmanageable dog Tim flew at Wozencroft, fastening his teeth on his old stained moleskin breeches, Wilfred watched dispassionately. “Your dog’s chewing the seat of my trousers, Canon.” “So I see; I don’t feel tempted to follow his example.” In fact, no dog would have been a match for Wozencroft’s moleskins.

In the tiny village church, cared for by Mrs Davies, Wilfred took duty for the incumbent, who had a scattered parish. His sermons are still remembered there, although they were not always well adapted to their listeners. Once, when he was ill, the sermon was entrusted to a lay reader, who had to begin, in the soft Herefordshire accent: “We read in Plotinus …”

In the 1920s Eddie had been asked by a reporter what he would like to be. He had replied—a Prince Archbishop (enjoy yourself in this world, absolve yourself for the next), or a Tartar, riding thirty horses a day, and making butter by swinging milk in a goatskin bag at the saddle, or, perhaps, a potboy at the Mermaid Tavern with a good memory. But in 1931 he became an editor; he was offered the editorship of Punch.

The hints to Sir Owen Seaman that it might be time to quit the stage had at last been understood. For some time he had apparently thought that the Company Chairman must be talking of himself—“Surely you’re not thinking of retiring, Lawrence?” This was his mind’s defence against the unacceptable truth that his twenty-six years’ pastoral care of the paper and of the Conservative Party must draw to a close. His sense of loss was a measure of the standing of Punch. In spite of recent criticisms, to be editor of Punch was still to be “King of Fleet Street”.

Certainly Seaman could never have wandered round the office, as Ross did round The New Yorker after the markets crashed, asking: “Are we important?” and demanding the answer: “No, we’re only a fifteen-cent magazine!” As the day of his retirement drew closer, Seaman published a depressing poem (15 July 1931) to “Mr. Punch on His Ninetieth Birthday”, addressing Punch as “Master and Friend”, and praising him as “changing not his style” and holding fast to standards proven long ago, no matter

If we grow old and go our ways

For you will still be there

With other service at your call.

Eddie was to be the “other service”, receiving the formidable bequest of a paper which had apparently become a semi-religious institution. In November 1932, when Seaman presided at the Table for the last time, he prepared a Valete card giving his apostolic blessing to “the friend and colleague who succeeds me.” Jokes were neither mentioned nor thought of. Still, Eddie, at the age of fifty-two, could feel that he had reached the top of his profession. He had reversed his father’s bitter disappointment when he had failed to take his degree, and he had justified the confidence of Christina.

The details had been settled on a weekend at Littlecourt, the Agnews’ country home; Eddie was to get £3,000 a year, inclusive of his contributions as “Evoe”, with thirty guineas extra for the Summer Number and the Christmas Almanack. The position would be reviewed in ten years, and, for the first time in the history of Punch, there would be an editorial pension. He was not offered, neither did he expect, any travel or entertainment allowances, a car, a flat, or a staff of copy editors to do the day-to-day work. An editor in 1932 went straight to his desk, dealt personally with the contributors and the printers, and put the paper to bed himself.

There had been other aspirants, not to say disappointed claimants, for the job. One of the first to write, with his usual good grace, was A. A. Milne (“I am indeed very glad”)—then, when paragraphs appeared about the new appointment, an astonishing number of congratulations, and of jokes about a new Seaman at the helm, came in from England, Europe and America. Old Uncle Lindsey struck a warning note. “I fear that there may be a great deal of extra work, and going into and receiving society.” To a true Evangelical, such things were perilous. Rudyard Kipling wrote:

As to Punch—I’ve seen him … in all sorts of out-of-the-way places where he represents England in all its varieties to men who, because they are far removed, see and remember it more keenly … it is perfectly true that he has become urbane, which he was not, even as late as the sixties (see files), or thirty years back, when he used to whack me on the head on general principles. But he can bite quite hard enough when he likes … only give us subscribers every shade and detail of our queer facing-both-ways national outlook on all things; and when the wind changes, as it will in the next few years, stand by to allay the panic. To which you will justly answer: ‘Who the deuce made you an Editor?’ But I never was. I was only a sub-editor and, of course, in that capacity, thought I knew more than my Chief. You may have noticed that all subordinates do.

This was good advice and Eddie tried to follow it. Most tributes, including his election to the Athenaeum under the alarming Rule B, for people of special eminence, he took “simply as something due to the position of the paper, nothing to do with me.”

The new Punch offices, built in 1930, were still in the narrow canyon of Bouverie Street, but were now seven floors tall, with lifts and red carpets. The statue of Mr Punch looked down from its niche above the world of the Press. Eddie, as well as several of the artists, had warned the management that the figure was not correctly scaled to be seen from below, but it went up, the stomach looked far too prominent, and the building became known as the Paunch Office. In Eddie’s view, the whole place was rather too grand and serious.

He had a staunch friend in the enormous ex-sergeant-major who presided in the entrance hall. On the third floor was Advertising, where Jean Lyon, Raven Hill’s wife, reigned undisputed. The income from space had long since exceeded the revenue from sales, and the third floor was a place of fierce, puritanical power. Miss Lyon charged high, but it was a long while before she would allow advertisements for alcohol in Punch, even though the paper kept its original 1841 cover design, which showed the red-nosed hunchback decidedly the worse for drink. Any editor had to begin by standing up to Jean Lyon, and Eddie, in his courteous way, did so successfully.

The fourth floor was Editorial, with windows looking straight across the street into the News of the World, so that you could watch the “Rape Committee”, a group of solemn-looking executives bending over the sex-outrage stories for next Sunday. The Punch furnishings were also solemn, of good quality, like those of the Queen Mary. Eddie occupied the traditional swivel chair. The handsome wastepaper basket, however, caught fire so often in the first few weeks (he smoked cigarettes now instead of a pipe) that the sergeant-major replaced it with a metal one.

Eddie settled down to edit his paper. As soon as possible he selected his own young assistant staff, finding the most loyal of assistant editors, Humphrey Ellis, who had come to the job from school teaching, and was the author of Assistant Masters: Are They Insane? Among the old hands, Eddie was most at home with the artists, who made an agreeable link with the past. Bernard Partridge, still the senior cartoonist, had acted with Henry Irving, and had been Bernard Shaw’s original Sergius in Arms and the Man. He never said much, and yet half an hour’s conversation with him was enough to show how vain it is for modern actors to attempt Shaw or Wilde. George Stampa, the artist of London’s street life, had helped the boozy Phil May in and out of his cabs. Ernest Shepard, whose airy, graceful drawings seemed to blow across the pages, had been trained at the Royal Academy Schools in 1896. W. Bird, the Irish artist, who could give, within the tiny oblong of an ass-and-cart joke, the whole atmosphere and the distant horizons of County Sligo, was in fact Jack Yeats, the poet’s brother. Eddie appreciated these links with the past, the paper’s and his own, knowing that human beings, like wines, have their vintages. He loved Punch’s history, and, quite deliberately, was the last editor on Fleet Street to call the illustrations “cuts”, a reminiscence of the old days of wood engraving. But Eddie was also an accessible editor, anxious to find and encourage new talent.

An early reaction to his appointment was a wild rush of aspiring contributors and illustrators. They were desperate, times being hard. The seasons, for free-lance humorous artists, were divided into spring (courting couples), summer (misadventures of campers and hikers, bathers attacked by crabs), autumn (jokes about fog and slipping on fallen leaves), winter (people falling through the ice). A rumour had also gone round that the new editor would consider rather broader jokes; portfolios never before opened in the Punch office were furtively brought out. All these callers were dealt with patiently. The overmatter was already an accumulation, left by Seaman, of hiking and skating jokes. As to sex jokes, Eddie, like his contemporary Ross of The New Yorker, decided that the time would come, but was not yet.

He was, however, as has been said, a seeker and finder, particularly on his own chosen ground of fantasy and poetry. He pleaded with Ernest Rhys, the editor of Everyman editions, to support modern poets, having discovered at the Poetry Bookshop that “only Eliot is bought at all.” He sought out, with some difficulty, the short-story writer A. E. Coppard, whose indefinable moonlight oddness appealed to him, as though reality had slipped one notch or more, or, as Coppard put it, “some essential part had been detached from the obviously vital part.” Rowland Emmett, whose drawings showed the latent poetry of old engines and old steamboats, he put under contract for as long as he could. The reviewing of cinema, books and theatre, and the Parliamentary Reports, all came to life for the first time under the new editor.

The effect of this kind of thing on the readership is best illustrated by the matter of the Hippo Joke. In July 1937 Punch printed a drawing by Paul Crum, which showed, in a few lines, two hippos almost submerged in an open swamp, miles away from anywhere; one is saying to the other: “I keep thinking it’s Tuesday.” This joke proved a breaking point for many subscribers, while it rallied others. “We are told that a sense of humour is the greatest gift of all,” Eddie wrote in What Life Has Taught Me, “yet I find that everybody has it.” “Sir, I flatter myself on my sense of humour,” he quoted from the Hippo correspondence, “but neither I nor any of my friends can see the point of the joke at the bottom of page 173. We are still trying hard, but if we do not succeed in a few days, we shall give up the attempt.” Another says, “DEAR SIR—I can boast that I know a good joke when I see one, and as soon as I looked at the bottom of page 173 I burst into such a roar of merriment that the whole house shook. When my friends had seen it we made such a noise that the neighbours threatened us with violence, and the police were called in.” Nevertheless, the total circulation of the paper continued, as it did throughout his editorship, to rise.

Eddie brought Punch forward, gently, apparently casually, into the twentieth century. He saw competitors rise, and sometimes fall; The Humorist, which, when Punch still sold at a shilling, boldly advertised itself as “is worth of humour for 6d”; The New Yorker, with which friendly relations were always maintained; the short-lived Night and Day, started in imitation of The New Yorker, shipwrecked over a libel case brought by the employers of Shirley Temple. Punch was a survivor. Eddie loved the paper, understood it, worried over it, stayed up half the night at the Mount Pleasant works arguing with the head printer, Mr Goby; ideas for it came to him at any time, often in the middle of the night. Praise or blame, although he might not show it, affected him deeply.

When you employed one of the four Knox brothers, you got absolute integrity. No one was printed in Eddie’s Punch because they were a friend or relation or because they had tried to offer him a favour. On the other hand, beginners were sure of his attention. Impossible to forget his own early days, when it was an anxious matter to lay out money for a cab to the Punch office. It was this quality of true politeness which struck D. H. Barber, a hopeful contributor, who in 1933 was a young man of twenty-five, living over a fried-fish shop and “at the lowest ebb of my fortunes”.

When two more little articles had been accepted I bought a new suit at the Fifty-shilling Tailors and a ninepenny cigar, and frittered away another ninepence on a taxicab from Ludgate Circus to Bouverie Street to call on the Editor. In those days I thought it gave a man a wealthy and aristocratic air to arrive in a taxicab. All this vast expenditure, of course, was quite unnecessary, for there never lived a more unsnobbish or unvulgar man than ‘Evoe’, or a man who placed less value on externals.

The Punch office seemed to me unnervingly palatial. I tottered across a marble vestibule to a graceful wide staircase, up which I marched in nervous bravado, cigar in mouth (it had of course long gone out). Large paintings of past editors in great gilt frames glared down at me. I knocked tremblingly at the Editorial door, and a quiet voice bade me enter. The room seemed as big as St Paul’s Cathedral, and a thinnish man sat behind an enormous table-desk.

I sank, perspiring freely, into the chair to which he waved me, and blurted out gruffly:

‘Meeting you, sir, is rather like meeting God!’

He smiled gently.

‘Any resemblance,’ he said, ‘is purely coincidental.’

He was no doubt very busy, and had I been self-assured and dressed by Savile Row he would probably have given me five minutes, but because I was gauche and poor and nervous he gave me forty, and gently led me on to talk about myself, which is everybody’s best subject … He gave me tips about the best length to write, and suggested some ideas. I think he liked me, and personally I left him feeling that I now really knew how gentlemen behaved on business occasions.

Barber also perceived that his editor was at heart a poet, and “poets think in terms of centuries, not of years or even decades,” but, as a wit, Eddie was politically minded. On two issues of the Thirties, the paper was adamant. When the economic situation showed a hint of improvement, Punch urged the case of the unemployed, and steadily, remorselessly, and at one time unfashionably, it attacked the dictators. In the April of 1933, when he was still settling into the editorial chair, Eddie’s senior cartoon showed Hitler as a fool on All Fools’ Day, smashing the windows of Jewish shops, and in May Bernard Partridge produced a fine design of Hitler treading the Jews underfoot, although the management, who liked everything made very clear, thought the words ANTI-JEWISH CAMPAIGN ought to be written across the sky.

Sometimes, sitting in El Vino’s with a friend of long standing, Johnny Morton, “Beachcomber” of the Express, Eddie would agree that humour had had its day, because the state of the world was such that nothing was too absurd or too unpleasant to come true.

The atmosphere of the Punch office had radically changed.

It became casual, deliberately rather slapdash [says Richard Price in his History of Punch], a place for long conversations on any subject under the sun, for a good deal of snoozing and reading and daydreaming. Sometimes there would be nobody in it, everyone being at a club or a pub or away in the country. Press night became an agony. Week after week it seemed impossible that the Editor would ever get down to the proofs. A lengthy dinner was given by a small dining-circle collected in order to prevent Evoe from disappearing altogether. Then suddenly he would get down to work and the paper would appear for another week …

Casual as he was, Eddie had the quality without which an editor is nothing: flair. He was able to find new contributors, and having found them, to give them their heads. The convenient modern practice of commissioning nearly the whole paper in advance would have been as unacceptable to him as canned wine. A good deal of Punch was still dead, and he knew it; he had to consider the older readership. But he created a new climate in which good jokes could arise spontaneously.

Evoe’s strength was in creating this atmosphere among his immediate colleagues, the younger men who loved him, appreciated his gentleness and kindness, found his company stimulating and enjoyed his odd, oblique humour. He was often infuriating: the urgent article was hidden under a pile of papers, the decision required a month ahead was given when it was really too late so that a solution to the problem had to be fudged, and the major issue was left undiscussed while some fascinating by-way was explored at great length. As an Editor, Evoe had the defects of his qualities … But on looking back one can see beside the old growths, new growths, something Punch had not seen for many years …

When Seaman went, Punch did not look like having a future. If Evoe’s editorship had not left behind it something healthy and capable of growth, no amount of galvanising and altering would have saved the paper (changing a paper is traditionally in Fleet Street the penultimate stage before going bust).

Sometimes Eddie lost his temper. This was an alarming family characteristic. To the younger brothers, trained as priests, it happened less often, but it did happen. Ronnie was more likely to be incensed by breakdowns in transport, which he felt was invented, after all, to work for him. Wilfred was partly drawn to the character of St. Paul because the saint’s temper was so bad; and Alec Vidler thought that Wilfred needed grace to control his. Both Dilly and Eddie, when they encountered dishonesty or meanness, or simply at times when they were struck by the inveterate hostility of things, razor blades and collar studs in particular, could sweep clean, like a volcano. They never raised their voices; they jingled the money in their pockets, and with quiet concentration proclaimed the pointlessness of existence in a society where such idiocy could flourish; then their office staff would withdraw, their families would disappear for the time being; even Dilly’s dog James, even the witless Tim, would hide in terror.

Nobody’s feelings were ever permanently hurt. In Eddie’s case it was truly said that those who knew him best loved him best. That was proved, if proof was ever necessary, in 1935, when, only three years after his appointment as editor, he had to face the greatest mortal blow that could be imagined for him, the loss of Christina.

In 1933 they had moved from 34 Well Walk, where they had had so much happiness, where the floors were uneven and the children had grown up and there was not quite enough room for anything, to a large, dank, charmless house in Regent’s Park. There was no garden. Neither of them much liked Clarence Terrace, neither of them wanted to leave Hampstead, but, as Uncle Lindsey had said, the editorship meant more going into society and receiving it, and they thought the move necessary. However, they had not given many dinner parties in the tall rooms overlooking the park when Christina began to suffer from her final illness. Like Eddie’s mother, forty years before, she was moved from one nursing home to another, finally to the south coast. In the summer of 1935, she died.

It was many years before Eddie could bring himself to mention her name directly, even to his own son and daughter. At the time, he asked the proprietors of Punch for a short leave of absence, and an understanding that he would not be writing any funny pieces for the paper that year.

Even on such a wretched occasion as Christina’s funeral, it was a memorable thing to see all the four brothers together. Wilfred took the service, Dilly, who rarely entered a church, stood in silent misery at the back, Ronnie, who had not been to an Anglican service for nearly twenty years, knelt in the aisle. Those who saw him, not cut off from the human grief around him, but totally absorbed in communion with God, felt that they had seen prayer manifest.

There were other losses. In January 1937, Mrs K.’s calm voice was heard on the telephone in the desolate house in Clarence Terrace: “Please tell Mr Knox that his father died ten minutes ago.” Almost to the last the Bishop had carved at his own table, with hands so palsied that the silver knife-rests shook and danced, but never making a mistake; in his study, a last book exposing the errors of Newman was in preparation. He died as he lived, a stout warrior. Mrs K. remained, to all appearance, as tranquil and unhurried as when she had entered in her diary: “Finished the Antigone. Married Bip.” As the four brothers came away down the leaf-strewn drive, Dilly, in his anxious stammer, suggested that perhaps she did not feel much at all; “one has to be glad of that.” The others disagreed, Ronnie in particular, but what and how much she felt, they could not tell. Mrs K. returned to the companionship of poor Ethel through the long winter evenings.

Almost exactly a year earlier George V had died. Preaching at Oxford to his student congregation, asking for their prayers for the dead king, Ronnie told them that he did not want to depress them, or to draw obvious lessons about the shortness of human life. The death of a ruler did not mean much when you experienced it for the first time. “It is different,” he added, “when you can remember a small boy in an Eton collar and jacket who helped to line the road when Queen Victoria took her last journey to Frogmore, and that boy was you; can remember an undergraduate in his fourth year who woke up one May morning to hear the bell of St Giles tolling for Edward the Seventh, and that that undergraduate was you. Like the women in Homer, who wept not for Patroclus but for their own griefs, you regret the passing of your own life in the passing of a king.”

It was a curious fact that to the youngest brother the past meant most. At the age of forty he deliberately began the process of turning himself into an anachronism, not by admitting defeat, but by politely rejecting most of what he saw around him. At the time of his conversion to Catholicism, G. K. Chesterton had written to Ronnie about his sense of lost innocence: “I am concerned about what has become of a little boy whose father showed him a toy theatre, and schoolboy whom nobody ever heard of.” These were not Ronnie’s worries. He knew, only too clearly, where his childhood had gone. It was still with him, too much so, at times, for his own comfort.

The chaplaincy, from which he had hoped so much, had proved, by the mid 1930s, a disappointment. He was disappointed, that is, not with Oxford, but with himself.

It was not that he had expected the undergraduates to be like those he had known before the war. In their memory, he still passed every Armistice Day “in decent quiet and solitude, rereading a pile of letters, scrawled in violet pencil.” The letters were Guy Lawrence’s. Such a generation would not return, but Ronnie made no comparisons. He regarded himself, he said, as medieval rather than middle-aged, a man who refused to fly or go to the cinema and whose idea of the last really good invention was the toast-rack. Oxford, of all places, was prepared to tolerate such an attitude.

In contrast, he had one of the most agile minds and one of the warmest hearts that Oxford was ever likely to know. And yet although the twelve years of his chaplaincy became, in their own way, legendary, very few recalled him as ever looking quite happy.

His state of mind could not be properly judged in Lent, when he gave up smoking his pipe, and was described by Eddie as looking actually pale green with suffering. But spring, even when Lent was over, was a trial. March was the cruellest month. “Yes, the term’s not being so bad now,” he wrote to Ethel, thanking her for one of innumerable knitted grey scarves, “but we’re just getting those early crocus days when the sun starts shining and one always feels rather cheap. At least I do.” This was as early as 1928, when Ronnie was forty, and when the reviewers, as he pointed out, had ceased to say that he “showed promise”, and mentioned with apparent surprise that Evoe of Punch was his elder brother, “as if I hadn’t spent most of my early years fetching his boots for him.” His indigestion made it impossible for him ever to drink brown sherry again. In serious matters also he paused to take stock.

He felt, as Bishop French had so often done, “an unprofitable servant”, believing that he had lost the secret of encouraging young men in their faith. To make himself accessible (since he could not face having a telephone) he followed an unvarying routine; every afternoon, rain or shine, he could be found walking in the Christ Church Meadows; after four, he was always in his room, waiting, in case anybody wanted to call. That was the time for giving advice, but “I am conscious,” he wrote in “The Whole Art”, “that all through my time here I have failed in this duty, owing to shyness and fear of saying the wrong thing.” Four generations of Oxford undergraduates remembered things otherwise, but, in retrospect, this was how they seemed to Ronnie.

What went wrong? Or what made him think it had gone wrong? To begin with, it was not altogether a successful idea to take in lodgers at the Old Palace. The plan arose partly from Ronnie’s generosity—he made no profit at all—partly from the embarrassing request by certain Catholic parents, that their sons (like Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited) should be kept an eye on. It was never clear to him why so many of the lodgers grew restive. It didn’t strike him as awkward that he had installed both the baths in one bathroom, but only one could be filled at once. Again, after dinner parties, Ronnie frankly hoped that guests would leave by ten. “From ten, when the house has to be locked up (if there are lodgers) by proctor’s orders, I have not encouraged callers. This may be quite wrong; Fr Martindale once expressed himself surprised that undergraduates did not drop in to call at an hour when, he assures me, they are at their most communicative. But we have not all the same talents.”

Supervision of the unwilling was a torment. So, too, were the slight rejections which seemed to outweigh all his fame and success. Whole days passed, sometimes, without a caller. His nephews and niece were now, at intervals, coming up to Oxford, but even they were elusive. Winnie’s eldest son, a brilliant philosopher at Trinity, tactfully declined an invitation to a canoe trip upriver because it appeared to him a waste of time to tie up under the willows without what was called in the Thirties “some female”. And yet Ronnie was such a familiar sight on the river that every reach of the Isis must still expect to see him, in semi-clerical white shirt and black trousers, at ease in the summer moments when the passage of time, which oppressed him, seemed suspended. “Mint and meadowsweet and lying hay blended their scents in that most delicate of all mediums, the smell of clean river-water,” he wrote in The Footsteps at the Lock. Just as Wilfred and Eddie fished the Arrow, with a discriminating love of the water itself, Ronnie stirred the ripples and reflections of the Isis. Many who did not go with him, finding what seemed to be better things to do, regretted it later. But Ronnie, they felt, was an Oxford institution; he would always be there, there would always be another summer.

In his chaplaincy sermons, Ronnie was hampered by feeling himself obliged to give a continuous course of Catholic apologetics, beginning with the five frowsty and unacceptable classical “proofs” of the existence of God. He did his best to vary them, but confessed that he was grateful that revelation had been granted to mankind to back up the “proofs”, particularly when (as often happened nowadays) he woke up at four in the morning and was unable to get to sleep again.

His personal conferences, on the other hand, were full of denunciations of the idleness, drunkenness and spiritual slackness of his charges, their poor attendance at chapel, their pose of languor, “about as attractive as a piece of wet sponge,” and, as the Thirties advanced, warnings that they were unlikely to find employment and that they would be members of a second-class nation. These remarks were called “Ronnie’s rockets” and were, he complained, expected from him and largely ignored. The trouble was that the students of the Thirties were preoccupied with three subjects: sex, travel and European politics. Shyness and his own scrupulous purity of mind made him avoid the subject of sex whenever possible. Travel he considered (as all four brothers did) an overrated activity, and would greet returning undergraduates who wished to boast about the opera at Salzburg or an expedition to Tibet with the question: “Let me see; which country are you boring about now?” Politics he avoided, believing that his business was with the spiritual debate of the twentieth century. Even there, the fashionable language was alien to him. W. H. Auden’s remark that in detective stories only one is guilty, all the others innocent, but that in the Thirties all were guilty, and only the crime was uncertain, seemed to Ronnie nothing but an escape into vagueness.

How effective he could have been as a political speaker was shown in the early days of his chaplaincy, when he was invited to Glasgow to speak at the Peace Rally of 1928. He arrived to find a crowd of two thousand troublemakers, some Communists, some Protestants, waiting, as the police put it, to get at him. The organizers were anxious for him to leave, and Ronnie decided to stay. “I am so little accustomed to being taken seriously,” he began, “that I never anticipated my presence would make trouble.” He had consented to speak about peace because it seemed to him the only worthy response to the sacrifice of the dead. “Progress may have softened all other human relationships; war it has only made more destructive.” And the row going on outside only confirmed what he had wanted to say anyway; that a peace movement could never be sectarian. “It takes all sorts to make a world,” he told them, “even my world.”

But at Oxford—where, as the years advanced, he was still the most brilliant speaker at Union debates, and increasingly, like other monuments, something for passing visitors to have seen—what had happened to his cure of souls? “Roughly nothing,” he considered, “that’s the trouble. What I find depressing is just the averageness of it all.” The attendance figures at mass remained much the same, or slightly less. There were no notable scandals, no notable gains. What was it his duty to do? Even the springs of his writing seemed to be drying up, and yet, he wrote to an old friend, “It’s difficult to get over the feeling one was meant to write.” Ought he to go? He waited (for ever since childhood he had attached great importance to such things) for a sign.

A pattern which a novelist would have hesitated to invent now showed itself in Ronnie’s life. In 1930, when he had gone on a Hellenic cruise with Lady Lovat, he had remembered not the siege of Troy, but his friends who had died at Gallipoli. Now, in 1937, on another cruise to the same haunted coasts, he found a new friendship to revive his hopes. Ronnie, in spite of a wistful leaning to unpopular causes, had always wanted to do things with somebody else—to reform the Church of England with Wilfred, to dedicate himself side by side with Guy Lawrence, who had written “You must be quick and become a priest,” and, in these last years, to find some sort of way into the minds of the hundred and fifty young men in his charge. All these beginnings had been checked in a way that Ronnie accepted with humility, and yet he felt an emptiness, “an air that kills”. He went on the cruise because his doctor had thought that, after several heavy attacks of flu, it might do him good. He was to lecture on classical civilization to the comfortable passengers (uneasily remembering that Father Martindale had refused to do this, and had gone into the boiler room to say mass for the stokers); he had no expectation at all of enjoying himself. There are no second chances in life, but Ronnie came very near to one on that summer voyage, when he became a close friend of Lady Acton.

Lady Acton was a strong-minded, handsome young woman of twenty-six, the granddaughter of one of the most high-minded of the Souls, and the daughter of Lord Rayleigh, a scientist and agnostic. She had shown her independence of mind when, at the age of twenty, and against family opposition, she had married the eldest son of an old Catholic family, Lord Acton. Five years after her marriage, and not till then, she decided to receive instruction. She had been introduced to Ronnie, and joined a family party on this particular cruise with the idea of getting to know him better before he undertook any formal preparation. Within the first week the two of them were deep in an exceptional and particular friendship, spiritual, intellectual and emotional.

For Ronnie it came as a totally unexpected blessing which it must be wrong to waste. For the other paying customers on the ship, who had expected to make the acquaintance of the famous Monsignor and hear him make witty remarks, it was something rather more than a disappointment to find him spending all his time with Lady Acton. They could not tell how much he needed to be needed—this was exactly his trouble at Oxford—how much he wanted inspiration, or what it meant to him to have the company of a sympathetic young woman. Perhaps, indeed, only Winnie ever realized that. “There was that terrible break in 1914,” she thought, “when I was in Edinburgh having babies. I knew he missed me, and letters couldn’t be the same.” She understood in what sense his heart was empty.

“The fact that [Lady Acton] was remarkably attractive while he was now approaching his fiftieth year might so easily have become a source of spiritual trouble to him and of embarrassment to her,” wrote Father Thomas Corbishley in Ronald Knox the Priest. This was impossible, however, with two sensitive people so much more scrupulous on their own behalf than their friends could ever be. In his struggles to bring home to his hearers at the chaplaincy the Proof of the Supreme Excellency of God, Ronnie had spoken of “the pull of human love, which points to something beyond it.” That was what he felt now. Both of them confided in the wisest Benedictine they knew, who was human enough to feel a mild irritation with the excessive anxieties of both of them. He advised them to pray more, to forget about other people’s experience and theory, not to rationalize what they felt, and to take themselves as they were before God, without fooling themselves. Painfully Ronnie became convinced that, for once, it was not necessary for him to do the most difficult thing. Lady Acton was received into the Church in April 1938, while he became, for the time being, almost completely absorbed in this new friendship.

According to Evelyn Waugh, Lady Acton, during the course of the cruise, threw a copy of Ronnie’s last detective story, Double Cross Purposes, overboard, together with her lipstick. (Ronnie disliked make-up; he sometimes described young women as “really pretty, without paint.” Wilfred and Dilly were easily deceived into not noticing it, while Eddie had no objection to anything that made women look well.)

It was the sign of a pact. The detective stories (to which Ronnie’s bishop had also objected) were to go, because he was to undertake in future only what was worthwhile. He had the exhilarating sensation of being persuaded to do something he very much wanted to do anyway. Lady Acton confirmed his half-formed decision to leave the chaplaincy, and, certain of her sympathetic encouragement, he told her what it was that, in late middle age, he hoped and dreamed to write—a new translation, for Catholics, of the entire Bible.

Once again, it was a task in which Newman had been frustrated, and one which, ever since his conversion, had been particularly close to Ronnie. The Authorized Version had been his birthright, although he had lost it. Couldn’t one—in his own words—“produce something decent” which Catholics might love and remember in something of the same way? Generous always, he hoped to give part at least of the inheritance of his childhood to the Church of his adoption.

The official Roman Catholic text was the Vulgate; in 1526 the Council of Trent specified that it must be used for all public readings. There followed nearly seventy years of frenzied editing by the Vatican—at one point Cardinal Sixtus was reduced to sending out correction slips to be pasted over earlier mistakes—to establish the Sixto-Clementine version, without variant readings. The Catholic English translation was the Douai, made in exile by William Allen, an Oxford scholar who could not accept the Elizabethan Settlement. Allen’s work had much of the beauty of the King James version and was closely related to it, but because he “presumed not to mollify the hard words, for fear of missing the sense of the Holy Ghost” (the Lord’s Prayer, for instance, appears as Give us this day our supersubstantial bread), there was need of revision; this was undertaken in 1750 by the saintly Bishop Challoner. To replace Douai-Challoner, or even to suggest replacing it, seemed a bold step, with its long ancestry and touching association with the Catholic exiles—the last annotation on Come Lord Jesus is a prayer for their return to England—it was dear to the hearts of millions. Or was it, Ronnie wondered, only the thought of it that was dear? Did anyone read it much, in private, at all? He had noticed that when, as a visiting preacher, he asked the Parish Priest for a Bible to verify his text, “there was generally an ominous pause of twenty minutes or so before he returned, banging the leaves of the sacred volume and visibly blowing on the top.” If that was so, might it not be replaced by a version that brought out the meaning—which Douai, particularly in the Epistles of St Paul, notoriously didn’t—which would be in “timeless English”, and, though he would never have claimed this himself, equally beautiful?

But, if the scheme was accepted, why not bypass the Vulgate and translate directly from the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts? St Jerome had access to some sources which are now lost, but we possess many others which he knew nothing about. These texts are a matter for international scholars, who have divided the manuscript copies of the New Testament alone into five “families”, on which forty years’ work is but a day; every word, for example, must be checked against its use in the Greek papyri as they come to hand—Professor Lobel’s “laundry lists”; it was in fact in these lists that the word was found in an ordinary household account-book and finally established as meaning “daily” and not “supersubstantial” bread. From other translators the reader asks for illusion, but from the Bible-translator he wants truth. He must know “what the Bible really says”. The Vatican had acknowledged this, and while Ronnie was at the Old Palace, the English Westminster Version, taken directly from the manuscripts, was being prepared under the editorship of a Jesuit, Father Cuthbert Lattey. This was for scholars, and was not authorized for public use, but the way was open for a clean start, a twentieth-century popular Catholic Bible which would challenge the newest and most accurate Protestant versions.

But Ronnie stuck to the Vulgate. Any new suggestions, after a close study of the originals, would have to go into footnotes. His own need was not for freedom, but for authority, and, as a convert, he felt he should never presume too far. Undoubtedly his diffidence over the matter lost him a great opportunity.

His brothers were somewhat surprised to hear of Ronnie’s new venture. “A bad text,” Dilly remarked, “and he doesn’t know very much Greek.” “Or theology,” Wilfred added, “except what I’ve taught him.” And indeed, from their point of view, he did not. Their criticisms were in no way unkindly meant. They were proud of Ronnie, but they did not really consider him a scholar.

By 1938, however, the project was accepted in principle by the Hierarchy, though they felt he should have the help of a committee. Their next and most unwelcome proposal, that he should return to St Edmund’s as President, was easily circumvented. He would need seclusion, protection and peace, and Lady Acton, catching enthusiastically at the idea, offered all these. Ronnie could come to Aldenham, the family seat in Shropshire, as chaplain. Outside his duties, and his preaching engagements, his whole time could be given to what Cardinal Hinsley (who had succeeded in 1935) called “the great work of the pen-apostolate”. In arranging matters, Lady Acton, like Lady Lovat, showed herself a true descendant of the Souls. She was confident of finding a cottage and a housekeeper for him—Ronnie, as Eddie pointed out, was the only member of the family, apart from Ethel, who never in his whole life had to wash up a teaspoon for himself—and he would be free from the tedious routine of everyday.

Unquestionably Ronnie became somewhat obsessed at this time with the details of the household at Aldenham. The younger generation of Knoxes could not quite reconcile his spiritual force with the continual discussion of “carriage folk”. They felt he was in danger of getting a little like one of the recurrent characters in the glossy period films of those days, a clerical figure shyly entering the salon—“Why, Abbé Liszt, have you been writing anything new?” All this was quite unfair. They did not understand the priestly life, and underestimated the amount of happiness necessary to someone of fifty. As usual, Winnie understood him best. “I wish I could make this clear,” she wrote after his death; to her he was still “the hopeless romantic”, even the small boy who had played at Caves in Arabia, and now needed, above all things, rescue and retreat.

Whatever misgivings his family might have, they could not fail to recognize the unique quality of the book which Lady Acton inspired him to write, and which he finished in 1938—his last Oxford book, his farewell, indeed, to Oxford—Let Dons Delight. It is dedicated to her, as the friend who gave him heart to begin again.

Of everything he wrote—and he lost count himself of the titles—this was Ronnie’s favourite book. Its framework is a dream, taking us back through time in the Senior Common Room of Simon Magus, a college ironically named after the magician who tried to bribe St Peter. The changing styles of English conversational prose have surely never been better imitated than here, as the centuries pass, and the generations of dons discuss and comfortably disagree. But the true spirit of Oxford is seen to rest with the Catholic recusants, who leave her to go into exile. From 1588 to 1838, from the days of Tudor persecution to the days of Newman, these exiles go reluctantly. “You have reproached me, Mr Provost,” says Mr Lee, a martyr of 1588, “for that I go lightly overseas; do you think that I have not understood what thing it is that I leave behind?” Three centuries later Newman’s converts remember the walks and gardens of Oxford “only as better things—no, not better things, though more companionable things.” It was time, also, for Ronnie to go. He had resigned the chaplaincy, and only Nuffield, he thought, could be happy in Oxford without a job connected with the University. But one could not take leave without a long look backward.

In Let Dons Delight, the college Fellows, over their port, always predict wrongly. “You will not teach the potato to grow in Ireland,” and, in 1788, “The Frenchman will not revolt.” But in 1938 the scientists and materialists left in the Common Room are saying: “The next world war is scheduled to break out next July, isn’t it?” Ronnie, presumably, trusted that they would be wrong once again.

In the autumn of 1938 he was ready to transfer himself to Aldenham. “I am leaving Oxford,” he told the new generation of undergraduates, “because the conditions of life give me no time to do the job the Hierarchy, in their great kindness, have entrusted to me.” “Whoever comes after me,” he adjured them, “don’t let him feel as lonely as at times you have made me feel.”

After the Munich Conference and the abandonment of Czechoslovakia, Eddie wrote, for the Christmas of 1938, with a sense of bitter humiliation, a “Hymn to the Dictators”:

O well beloved leaders

And potentates sublime,

We come to you as pleaders

Because it’s Christmas time.

Illustrious banditti,

Contemptuous of our codes,

Look down to-day in pity

On democratic toads.

All the systems evolved by human beings for living on this earth were now shown to be either delusory, destructive, sadly outdated, or at risk. Wilfred, realizing that when war broke out Oratory House would probably have to shut down, wondered where his duty would lie. Dilly was not well. Cancer was suspected, and he had already had a preliminary operation. Without much comment on this, he returned to his office, and to Enigma. He had the advantage of knowing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. But so far he was getting nowhere.