The Perfect Summer, page 24
Augustus’s wife Ida, the mother of five of his children, had died after giving birth to their last child in 1907, and he was now living with his long-term mistress Dorelia McNeill, by whom he had another two sons. The extended John family had always shared their father’s exhilaration with the gypsy existence, but travelling the roads in the burnt-out lands of the Mediterranean, as they had the previous year, had begun to lose its charmfor Augustus. ‘There are no green fields here,’ he wrote in August 910 to his friend Ottoline Morrell. ‘Scratch the ground and you come to rock; a green meadow smells sweet to me.’
In August 1911 Doreliawas determined to take the whole family out of London where, as Augustus acknowledged, ‘she tends to get poor’. His impromptu absences had begun to cause her some distress. Nor did she feel that the dusty streets of Chelsea, the airlessness and lack of open spaceswere suitable for the six children under ten who lived with them, David, Caspar, Robin, Edwin, Pyramis and Romilly (Henry, the seventh, had been abducted by his maternal grandmother, to give him what she believed to be a more appropriateway of life). The Church Street housewas claustrophobic, often filled with the unpredictable hangers-on who always sur- rounded Augustus. When one of his gypsy friends who lived with them in Church Street, a Spanish musician named Fabian de Castro, started spitting in the bath, it was the last straw. Fabian was an exotic adventurer, admiringly described by Augustus as having done ‘everything except kill a man’. Dorelia, while acknowledging Fabian’s genius as a guitarist, found the spitting habit intolerable. Fabian persistently ignored the large sign she placed above the bath warning him not to continue with his disgusting habit, and Dorelia began to feel she had put up with him and with life in Church Street for long enough.
On 16 August, three months pregnant with her third child, she moved the whole family out of London to Poole in Dorset, to Alderney Manor, a long, low, pink one-storey house with a tall crenellated sandcastle-like construction at one end. The rent was £50 a year. Shortly after their arrival, their landlady called by, unannounced, to meet her new tenants. Lady Cornelia Wimborne, sister of LordRandolph Churchill and aunt to the Home Secretary, was confronted in the driveway by six small, male, scarlet-and-black- paint-bedaubed naked bodies. The boys had been decorating the gardener’s cottage, and were scrubbing their bodies with turpentine soap to try to remove the dye they were using to paint the walls and furniture. The matriarch Dorelia presented a no less startling appearance in her ‘tight fitting, hand-sewn, canary coloured bodice above a dark gathered flowing skirt, and her hair very black and gleaming, emphasiz[ing] the long silver earrings whichwere her only adornment.’Children’s author Kathleen Hale, who knew Dorelia, thought her the most beautiful woman she had ever seen: ‘her warm brown skin glowed in the whiteness of her softly gathered white bodice.’ But Lady Cornelia was unfazed by such lack of convention. An open-minded woman, she had supported her nephew’s exchange of the Tory benches for the Liberal, and was delighted by the arrival at Alderney of one of England’s most celebrated if controversial artists.
And so it was that the wild and beautiful Englishness of the gardens and surrounding fields of Alderney provided Augustus, Dorelia and the boys with air and freedom, and also with a reassuring stability for which they had perhaps unconsciously been yearning. It soon became clear to Lady Cornelia that the tenancy would last well beyond the holiday season of 1911.
Despite her pregnancy, Dorelia had a lover that summer, Henry Lamb (also a one-time object of Ottoline Morrell’s passion, and friend of Lytton Strachey). The fair, slim painter with pale golden hair was one of Alderney’s first visitors and described the John refuge in a letter to Lytton Strachey as ‘an amazing place’. He wrote enthusiastically of ‘a vast secluded park of prairies, pine woods, birch woods, dells and moors with a house, cottages and a circular walled garden.’ There were only eight rooms, so the life of the house spilled easily into the surrounding country, and Dorelia turned her creative gifts upon the overgrown garden. Her second son Romilly recognised its natural, anarchic beauty. ‘Great masses of lavender, and other smelling plants sprawled outwards from the concentric beds,’ he later wrote, ‘until in some places the pathways were almost concealed. Tangled masses of rose and clematis heaved up into the air or hung droopingly from the wall.’ Delicious smells of Mediterranean, garlic-infused dishes drifted through the open kitchen windows, to the sound of a Mozart duet played by Dorelia and her constant visitor, Henry Lamb.
Further away, in the untamed woodland, the boys would run naked into the frog-filled pond, climb trees, and make a cart-horse of one of the pedigree saddleback pigs, harnessing its broad bristly haunches to the tin bath. As the pig pulled the tub with its human cargo through the bushes, the boys’ shrieks could be heard as far away as the house. There were other animals, cows that provided them with caramel-tasting cream, donkeys, ponies, cats, and hives of vicious bees. The boys had long, blond hair with, Romilly also remembered, ‘a fringe in front that came down to our eyebrows’, and wore matching outfits designed by Dorelia, described by Romilly as ‘pink pinafores reaching to just below the waist and leaving our necks bare; brown corduroy knickers, red socks and black boots.’ They would play for hours in the nearby brickyard, pushing miniature trolleys along the miniature railway lines – it was almost the only railway in the country operating that week. After supper they would join in with their father as he sang gypsy songs around a camp-fire, then collapse in exhausted contentment in wigwams in the orchard. Neither cloud nor rain marred those carefree days, and Augustus John’s sons found themselves living the sort of Peter Pan-like existence that J.M. Barrie’s play had made so bewitching. If you were under ten years old, Alderney was Neverland made real, and Augustus recorded those weeks in his paintings ‘Washing Day’ and ‘The Blue Pool’.
Augustus attracted women that summer as he had all his life, and during his less frequent but still solo caravan absences from the family unknown girls would arrive on the Alderney doorstep, only to be charmingly turned away by Dorelia. While at Alderney, however, Augustus determined to impose some academic discipline on his sons even during that holiday time, and hired a tutor. John Hope-Johnstone, an impoverished dilettante in his late twenties, arrived at Alderney on 6 August pushing a pram filled with grammar books and much-read editions of the works of the metaphysical poets, possessed of an eager willingness to adapt to the John way of life. Even his name gave a double emphasis to his suit-ability: John Hope-Johnstone seemed perfect for Alderney. He was eager to learn, and his enthusiasm for knowledge made him ‘an excellent and charming youth’ in Augustus’s eyes, as well as an ideal tutor. Adopting his own Alderney style of dress – corduroy frock-coat, black felt hat and a coloured neckerchief, with a pair of distinctive horn-rimmed glasses – he began his day alone at dawn with a private seminar for himself on four-dimensional geometry. By the time he had finished, the children would have vanished into the open country, and (with the complicit encouragement of Dorelia) lessons were abandoned before they had begun. Instead Hope-Johnstone would conduct mysterious evil-smelling experiments with coloured liquids in a home-made laboratory in the kitchen of a nearby empty cottage, or help Dorelia in the garden. Occasionally he would corral the boys for long enough to teach them the names of the Hebrew kings, or encourage them to memorise chunks of the Book of Job.
But Augustus eventually tired of Hope-Johnstone’s exhaustive repertoire, and became bored by his relish for an argument. ‘He’s a garrulous creature and extremely irritating sometimes,’ he grumbled to Dorelia. The boys were fed up with the way he hogged the cream at lunch, the ‘accidental’ spilling into his own pudding plate of most of the contents of the jug. Books began to disappear from Augustus’s library, and Hope-Johnstone proved quite inept at operating the expensive camera he had persuaded Augustus to buy, promising to photograph his paintings with it. As the young man’s popularity began to wane, so Augustus himself became less inclined to insist on lessons, leaving the boys more time to revel in summer-holiday freedom. Quite soon Hope-Johnstone found no discouraging voices raised against his often-expressed ambition to visit Outer Mongolia.
In the adjoining county of Somerset, the Bloomsbury hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell was spending her holidays with her MP husband Philip near Frome, in the village of Mells. The Elizabethan Mells, home of the Horner family for more than 350 years, had a ‘lovely medieval garden with its grass paths and flower beds within its frame of grey walls’.
Ottoline was feeling inadequate. Nothing about the visit was going well. She had packed her best dresses, only to decide that ‘when shaken out and worn they seemed absurdly fantastic and unfitting for the company and the surroundings.’Wearing one of the ridiculous outfits while sitting on the terrace in a creaky wicker basket-chair beside Raymond Asquith – son of the Prime Minister, Horner son-in-law and acknowledged leader of the formidable Corrupt Coterie – she was conscious of her companion’s superior intellectual stature. Raymond was reading the just-published novel The White Peacock by D.H. Lawrence, son of a Nottinghamshire miner. From time to time he commented aloud on the book: though admirable in parts, it was quite inauthentic, since it was unlikely that ‘peasants could talk as Lawrence made them talk’ and could not possibly be expected to have opinions on either art or music. He was quite forgetting Lawrence’s own origins. Ottoline remained silent, hating herself for having ‘entirely failed in courage to express what I really thought’ – for one found Raymond too daunting to contradict. Her sense of inadequacy drove her to escape up to her own room, where she would cry out loud ‘Oh to be free, free!’ before returning ‘sedately’ to her creaky chair. An uneasy feeling overtook her as she watched the Asquiths and Horners basking ‘in the sunshine and peace and beauty of this lovely English garden and smoking cigarettes and scheming, planning, doubting, criticising.’ She felt that there was a nearby voice whispering ‘Your dreams and efforts are but as the smoke of your cigarettes’. None of them could hope to capture and hold the precious, elusive evanescence of an English summer’s day for ever.
Ottoline’s Bloomsbury neighbour Virginia Stephen was trying to concentrate on her first book Night and Day while spending a few more days in Grantchester with Rupert Brooke. She wrote to her sister Vanessa on 16 August that ‘It is the greatest difficulty to get pen and paper here because Rupert apparently writes all his poems in pencil on the back of envelopes.’
In 1911 the seaside provided an experience that most could share, irrespective of income. A little further down the English coast from Poole, Alfred Leslie Rowse was looking forward to spending some time at the beach. He was always known by his second name after his adored elder sister had a crush on a teacher named Leslie; he was eight years old, and lived with his parents at the family village shop at Tregonissey, in Cornwall. His father was a clay worker and his mother, before her marriage, had been in service at St Michael’s Mount, a house in Leslie’s view the ‘most romantic in its associations and memories of all places in Cornish history’. One year, on Midsummer’s Day, Leslie’s mother and the other maids left the white of an egg in a glass of water overnight on a window sill, in accordance with an age-old local myth; by the next morning it had formed a shape resembling rigging, which they took to mean that they would all marry sailors.
Leslie craved solitude, and his favourite activities were very different from the boisterous games of the John boys at Alderney. Leslie found joy in ‘an occasional seagull passing over, or a cruising rook’ or a day spent as uninterrupted as possible at the beach. In 1911 the attitude to the sea and to sea-water was ambivalent: a stretch of sand or shingle promised pleasure or fear, depending on association. In her thick black silk coat with a large stiff black ribbon tied at the neck in a bow, Leslie’s grandmother made no concessions either to the weather or to the ten years that had elapsed since the death of Queen Victoria. She lived near her grandson at Crinnis Beach, on the curve of St Austell Bay, ‘the magnificent stretch of white, glistening sand almost a mile long, with the red-brown, tin-and-copper-stained cliffs enclosing it.’ Granny Vanson did not trust this beautiful deserted place, and would not allow her grandchildren go to there unaccompanied. Her husband’s brother Christopher had been drowned there and a cousin, Uncle Rowse’s brother Joe, disillusioned with life and sotted with drink, had chosen Crinnis Beach as the place from which to give up altogether on his miserable existence. The occasional chaperoned trip to this ‘melancholy place’was never much fun for Leslie. The Rowses would team up with another family that included girls – in itself, Leslie felt, a deterrent to enjoyment. Even without girls, Leslie found the ‘vast spaces’ of Crinnis Beach ‘shapeless’ and ‘positively forbidding . . . the small groups of picnickers were lost in its immense perspectives’.
But if he was discouraged and disinclined to bathe in this ‘crooel sea’, this ‘ungry sea’, the excitement of a busy day at Porthpean, two miles from the town of St Austell, was not to be surpassed. Shy, slightly overweight and self-conscious, Leslie was never happier than when, bootless and stocking-free, he and the other men and boys rolled up their trouser-legs and paddled. They climbed on the rocks. They sat in the sand with the rest of his family and made sandcastles. They ate homemade pasties from the shop at lunchtime and later, at tea time, ravenous from the sea air, devoured ‘an enormous round saffron bun corrugated with currants and flavoured with lemon peel.’The return journey home by donkey and trap was all part of the excitement of the day. Inhaling the scent of warm summer rain ‘upon the pines and fuchsias, soaking into the thirsty summer earth’, they travelled back ‘through the mysterious and lovely shadow of Gewings Wood’. Later in the evening, in bed, Leslie had the delicious illusory sensation that his feet were still planted firmly on the beach and he could still feel the ‘exquisite print of the sand and shingle underwater, luxuriously hurting’. These seaside days represented for A.L. Rowse ‘the high-water mark of childhood’.
The simplicity of a day at the beach that Leslie Rowse and his family enjoyed was not enough to satisfy all holidaymakers. The countryside motor-bus service which had been running for the past eight years gave Cornish adventurers in 1911 the opportunity to go a little further than the Rowse donkey and trap would allow.With petrol at 3d. a gallon and the expensive replacement of tyres there were costs to be met and the tickets were not cheap, but the bus was always packed. The front seat was reserved strictly for smokers, to discourage the ladies who were otherwise apt to engage Mr Charles Bolton, the worn-out driver, in ceaseless conversation.
Until the national network of railway lines opened up in the Victorian age mankind had never been able to move faster on land than on horseback. Trains represented speed, adventure and freedom. Arriving at King’s Cross Station, Margaret Schlegel in E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End felt exhilarated by ‘those two great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering beneath them an unlovely clock’ because she knew they were ‘fit portals for some eternal adventure’. Improvements were being made to the railway service all the time. As recently as May 1911 picture windows had been installed for the first time, allowing passengers a magnificent view of the countryside. The current handbook for the SouthEastern and Chatham Railway announced that Vestibule Car Trains ran a first-class service, with carriages exquisitely furnished in the style of Louis XV, featuring richly upholstered chairs, lounges or settees on Axminster carpets and hung with genuine oil paintings and plate-glass mirrors. All cars were fitted with lavatories, and bells to summon attendants.
With the end of the rail strike the southern seaside resorts were left with twelve days of August in which to pull out all the stops for visitors, although there was still some disruptive after-shock to the services in the north. On 21 August the Daily Telegraph reported hundreds of people travelling to and from Blackpool by motor drays and furniture vans. Taxicabs, revelling in the opportunity to raise their fares, charged £5 for a journey from Blackpool to Manchester. Happily for schoolboy Brian Calkin, however, the Eastern branch line to Felixstowe Beach from Broad Street via Ipswich reported no delays.
Brian, the young chorister who had sung for the King and the Kaiser in Westminster Abbey on the day of the Coronation, was excited. His family owned a holiday house in Felixstowe, and every August they prepared to leave London for the coast, cramming the five-foot portable tin bath with boots, tennis rackets, stumps, kites, model yachts and roller skates. Brian’s brother John had designed an ingenious smooth-fitting lid which slotted over the top of the bath and was tied in place with rope. Perched on top of the dome-topped trunks the bath was wheeled by the Calkins’ valet Carrey on a trolley through the streets to the Finchley Road station. There Carrey would meet the Calkin family, who had travelled to the station in one of the few remaining horse-drawn buses, before they boarded the train for the Suffolk coast.
