The Knox Brothers. Richard Holmes
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Esther Waters. On the other hand Winnie, dreamily adolescent when she was not energetically bicycling, escaped into Malory, into William Morris and the stained-glass colouring of the Ages of Faith, and, safe in the airing cupboard, read aloud to Ronnie from the poems of Christina Rossetti.
The family were still conscious, if threatened, of a solid front against intruders. “We imagined other people might think we were peculiar, and yet we were quite sure that our family standpoint on almost any question was absolutely and unanswerably right.” No passage of time would ever destroy this feeling, but neither would it ever bring back the unity of 1900.
For the dimensions of earthly happiness, Ronnie always had to turn back to his childhood, and in particular to Eton. From the moment he arrived in College, was gowned and told “Sis bonus puer”, he gave the school his wholehearted devotion, and it offered him in return the certainty, the sense of belonging, and the discreet respect for brilliance which he so much needed. This was so in spite of the early days of bewilderment, which were not made much easier by Dilly, descending, when he remembered, like a vaguely amiable god, from his room to see how his “minor” was doing.
Sept 23 1900
Dear Mother,
I don’t quite understand the way the forms go, but Dilly says I am in the bottom division of Fifth Form as a matter of course. I hope this letter will reach you early, but I am only writing at 18 3/4 minutes past 8 p.m.… Yesterday I played in a game of Eton field game. I was put to hold a person up on one side, then someone threw the ball in among us, and by the time we were all sitting on top of one another the ball was far away.
We won apparently by three to none. I am very happy here. My love to Winnie,
your very sleepy son,
R. A. Knox
P.S. Floreat Etona.
He was possessed by a kind of pleasurable anxiety to do the right thing, and yet not to waste money at home, asking diffidently for a Liberty’s armchair for his room “to get something in accordance with the rules of taste. Mr Goodhart [the Master in College] is always calling chairs ‘horrible!’, because he makes little expeditions into one’s room just as one is getting into bed, and remarks on pictures and things. He told me the picture of Rembrandt was the sort of thing you could look at for hours. I’ve never tried.” But if Ronnie was eager to conform, he felt free to be happy at Eton. The romantic in him, the inconvenient love of mystery and beauty—inconvenient, that is, to one who thought he mistrusted enthusiasm and only valued a reasonable faith—began to spread its wings. He felt a devotion to Henry VI, the Sorrowful King, the Founder of Eton, which merged, in his thirteenth year, with his feeling for the poetry of the Rossettis and for the splendour of the west window at St Philip’s, the Burne-Jones window through whose ruby-red glass the light streamed in at evensong.
To outward appearances he was still the brilliant, dutiful and rather delicate prizewinner, petted by the Matron in College and still kept firmly in order by his brothers. As the cold of winter approached, Wilfred had “borrowed” his gloves, Dillwyn his cherished new overcoat, which he had christened Alitat, the name of a goddess in Herodotus. Alitat was returned, but Ronnie was often in the sickroom. He meditated anxiously on his resources. “I have bought all my birthday presents, expending 10/- on the whole lot,” he wrote home in June 1902. “I shall have to send Eddie his to-morrow; I have got him a knife-sharpener and strop combined, and also a little pendant for his watch chain.”
Eddie’s departure to Oxford meant that the first of the Bishop’s sons was at University, and he could not help recalling his own achievements there and Bishop Chavasse’s letter to him: “Thank God, thank God, dear old boy, that you have got a First.” Might not this very real triumph be repeated, in four years’ time? Corpus was the Bishop’s own college, and the President, Dr Thomas Fowler, was an old friend. Fowler was one of the great men of the University, a grammar-school boy from Lincolnshire who had become Professor of Logic, but valued philosophy principally as a means of training character; in his famous “private hours” he drew out his young men, and made them apply thought to conduct. To parents he made the terrifying observation, that if they failed to give their children a good education they were no better than the parents in primitive societies, who were permitted to put their children to death. He was both conscientious and sympathetic, and the terrible responsibility of choosing undergraduates for commissions for the Boer Wars was said to have shortened his life.
Eddie went up to Corpus not only as a good classical scholar, but as an Edwardian elegant. He had never bought any clothes for himself before he was sixteen. Mrs K. made large orders at the drapers and outfitters as required, while in the “girls’ room” Winnie pinned and sewed, with Dilly intervening to adapt the sewing-machine to steam power. But the Bishop, who had suffered himself from reach-me-down clothes and “boots heeled, and, I think, tipped with iron—in vain did I attempt to deaden the hateful noises that attended my movements”—was sympathetic to his own boys, all of whom, except the lounging Dilly, had the instincts of a dandy. Eddie was made an allowance of a hundred pounds per annum, to be deducted from his share of the money left in trust by their mother. To the awe of the younger ones, he opened an account with a Birmingham tailor and a cigar merchant, and indulged his good taste in eau-de-Cologne and silk handkerchiefs.
The Oxford to which he went up, on the other hand, was still a slumbrous place where the old eccentrics, whom Lewis Carroll had compared to caterpillars and fantastic birds, emerged from the “sets” which they had occupied for some forty years, complaining at the disturbance of young bloods. The University was still slowly digesting the Commission of 1877, aimed at diverting wealth from the colleges, to expanding the sciences and giving increased chances to poorer students. In 1893 the mighty Jowett had died, glad to have lived to interpret the ideas of Plato to the world, and Corpus itself, which up to 1850 had never had more than twenty undergraduates, had cautiously followed the times, and had expanded into Merton Street. The college remained small, all the members could be gathered at once on the secluded green lawn under the old mulberry tree, and the record of scholarship, as always, stood high.
The idea that a son of Bishop Knox could be “frivolous and extravagant” did not cross Dr Fowler’s mind. But the President’s regulations, even by the standards which Edwardian Oxford tried to impose, were strict to excess. He had a horror of even the mildest forms of gambling, and imposed penalties on the undergraduates for playing the dreaded new game of “Bridge” and for attending the theatre in gowns “on the pretext that they thought the play was by Shakespeare”. Eddie could not conform. He stayed out late. The most difficult route for climbing in at night was across the wall from Merton, where the less agile were sometimes impaled on revolving iron spikes; he became an expert, only damaging his wrists during the last few feet when his friends dragged his light weight across the windowsill.
With these friends, and in particular with Alan Barlow, later Secretary of the Treasury and Trustee of the National Gallery, Eddie passed golden hours. He was the unobtrusive wit of the dining clubs, organized races in hansom cabs, and introduced Miss Mabel Love, a music-hall performer, into the college. But he was aware of a document headed Communication to Mr E.V. Knox, Scholar, after complaints by the Tutors on his Idleness, and of the bitter disappointment that this was likely to cause at home. The summer of 1901 was spent at Glencrippsdale, where in the course of damp picnics and fishing expeditions Eddie fell into the melancholy which lay in wait for all the brothers. In an elegant version of the Greek Anthology, not the less true because it was a commonplace, he wrote,
Leaf and bud, ah quick, how quick returning
Here is visaged immortality;
Freshly from the dark soil sunward yearning
Lifts the ageless green; and must I die?
The natural confidante for these moods would be a young woman, in this case a girl called Evelyn Stevenson, who was also staying at Glencrippsdale, a spirited creature who played billiards and tramped over the heather in an “artistically simple” outfit from Liberty’s. “Do you know, I actually read your letter right through?” she wrote to him. “Awfully good of me, wasn’t it? I hope you are taking a generally less gloomy