The Knox Brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald
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the absence of a tie. “Dr. James walked up and down,” as Eddie remembered him; “if it was the Upper Bench, round and round, because it was a turret room. He walked like a Red Indian, placing one foot exactly in front of the other. He kept a small private notebook in which he put favourable remarks about a boy, but a quotation from the Lays of Ancient Rome would gain at least five marks a go.” This was fortunate for the Knoxes, reared since nursery days on the Lays. The finest scholar on the staff, however, was Robert Whitelaw, Rupert Brooke’s godfather, who taught classics to the Twenty, the form below the VIth. He is described as looking like a bird of prey, and was unable to correct examinations without listening to the music of a barrel organ, which he hired to play underneath his widow. “I don’t think I ever felt so grand,” Eddie thought, “as when we were set to translate a poem of Matthew Arnold’s into Latin, and I hit on the same couplet as Whitelaw.” Eccentrics scarcely disturbed the late-Victorian schoolboy, who, however, had a rare sense of quality, and recognized the expert.
Undoubtedly Rugby could claim to “harden.” The boys worked an eleven-hour day, with two hours for prep. Hacking, scragging, mauling and tripping were supposed to have disappeared under The Bodger’s rule, but the prefects punished by making a wrongdoer run past an open door three times while they aimed a kick at him. Ribs got broken that way. At breakfast, rolls flew through the air and butter was flicked onto the ceiling, to fall, when the icy atmosphere had thawed out, onto the masters’ heads. There was a strong faction in favor of the Boers during the South African War, and strikes against the horrible food; to counter them, Dr. James was obliged to eat a plateful, in furious indignation, in front of the whole school, but then, furious indignation was his usual attitude. All the notices he put up ended with the words THIS MUST STOP.
The tradition of Arnold was continued with frequent compulsory chapels, but Eddie, and later Wilfred, were less influenced by these than by another boy in School House, “a rotund, ridiculous, good-natured boy, who had from the start the sort of quiet purpose that earned respect—rather grudging, I suppose.” This was Billy Temple, the future Archbishop of Canterbury.
Eddie liked Rugby well enough and accepted its routine, though he particularly enjoyed the moments when it was interrupted. One midday a boy threw a squash ball which exactly struck the hands of the great clock that set the time for the whole school, and stopped it. Masters and boys, drawing their watches out of their pockets as they hurried across the yard, to compare the false with the true, were thrown into utter confusion. It turned out that the boy, who confessed at once, had been practicing the shot for two years. The Bodger called this “un-English.” Eddie did not agree. The patient, self-contained, self-imposed pursuit of an entirely personal solution seemed to him most characteristically English.
At St. Philip’s, Mrs. K. was undismayed by the routine of the diocese. She taught herself shorthand to deal with her husband’s correspondence, gave heart to the shy chaplains, charmed the ordinands, and managed surprisingly well on an inadequate stipend, though the housekeeping was somewhat haphazard, and the wine was cheap and sometimes undrinkable. Perhaps only Mrs. K. could have tamed Alice, the cook (though in those days it was assumed that all cooks were ill-tempered), but charm, energy and devotion carried all before them. With such a wife, it was clear that Edmund Knox would soon be more than a Suffragan Bishop.
The holiday expeditions continued, but now with much wider range, with the advent of bicycles. A Coventry firm presented a machine to the Bishop; Mrs. K., although as a horsewoman she mistrusted the contraption, learned quicker than her portly husband, who was, he said, “an ardent devotee, until, one day, the bar snapped and let me down”; the children all followed, teaching themselves on Raleighs paid for by old Mrs. Knox. Eddie and Dilly were soon rapidly skimming through the Birmingham traffic, the girls pedaling gamely along in hats and white cotton gloves, the little boys doing the best they could, before the days of freewheel, their short legs turning rapidly. Rules were immediately invented, and it became a point of honor among the four brothers never to get off even up the steepest hill. Pale with fatigue, Wilfred and Ronnie toiled upward, Eddie describing wide circles around them, until he brought them to a halt by the wayside, with the words THIS MUST STOP.
Ronnie sometimes stayed behind. He had become fascinated with dictionaries. He threatened, in spite of a rule that no one must speak a language that the others did not understand, to learn Sanskrit and Welsh. “I can still see Ronnie,” Winnie wrote, “on the seat by the Welsh driver of the waggonette which conveyed us all to church, making out a Welsh Bible with the aid of this friend, while the horse wandered along unnoticed, and my father predicted we should all be late for the service.”
At home, Eddie took charge of the family newspaper, The Bolliday Bango. It was the voice of Scholesia—their name for the world of the shabby schoolroom. Eddie levied the contributions, sometimes by force, copied them out in ink, and did the illustrations. There are action pictures of the bicycles, of a peculiar form of football played in the tiny yard, and, more fancifully, of a synod of bishops playing billiards with their crosiers, and hanging up their miters on the pegs. It was Eddie’s first venture into journalism, and in its handwritten pages Dilly produced his first document in cipher (though the editor refused further installments), and Ronnie, at the age of eight, his first Latin play.
In time, however, the editor and sub-editor became interested in other things. Developing a keenly critical spirit, they detected a number of inaccuracies, even downright contradictions, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and sent a list of them to Conan Doyle in an envelope with four dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in The Sign of Four. Eddie acquired photographs of a number of music-hall actresses who had appeared, or were appearing, on the Birmingham stage. Then he and Dilly acquired pipes and tins of Tortoiseshell Mixture. Clouds of smoke began to float round Scholesia, already frequently plunged in darkness while Wilfred tried to develop his photographic plates. Mrs. K. heroically avoided noticing the haunting whiffs of tobacco. The Bolliday Bango ceased publication, and Ronnie, still in his sanctum underneath the table, tried to produce a magazine on his own, but the impetus was gone as he became the last one left in childhood.
His consolation was a book—not one of the borrowed dictionaries, but the first book that had ever been truly his own, not to be touched by any of the others without his permission. It was a present, and the pencil mark inside showed that it had cost five shillings: Natural History, by the Rev. J. C. Wood.
The influence of this book, which gave him his first glimpse of independence, was disproportionate. From the first picture (of a man raising a bottle to his lips, contrasted with a noble lion, and titled: “Between man and brutes there is an impassable barrier, over which man can never fall, or beasts hope to climb”), Ronnie was as if hypnotized. When, sixty years later, he went to Africa, he judged both flora and fauna by the steel engravings in Wood. He knew the whole book by heart, and professed to believe it all; the animals were all graded by their usefulness to man, which meant that the Labrador came top (“many must have perished but for its timely aid”). Yet, as he said himself, in spite of the years at Edmundthorpe, outside the book he could not tell a bullfinch from a chaffinch.
Absurd though it may seem, Wood had an even deeper effect on Ronnie; this was because of his praise of reason. “It were an easy task to prove the unity of mankind by scriptural proofs,” Wood wrote in his introduction, “but I thought it better to use rational arguments.” This went deep. Ronnie told Eddie that there were “rational arguments” why he should be allowed to join the brothers’ inner group—the St. Philip’s Pioneering and Military Tramway Society; they were not accepted, he had to pass the set tests, but Ronnie remained convinced of the supreme saving power of reason.
Ronnie could not help knowing that he was clever for his age, and that much was expected of him, and he hoped not to disappoint anybody. Meanwhile his elders, the fixed stars of his firmament, sometimes praised him, and sometimes took him to a football match; for sheer quality of happiness, he did not think one could beat the moments when Aston Villa won at home, and his brothers allowed him to wave a flag.
The Bishop’s tasks multiplied. Queen Victoria did not take kindly to Evangelicals, and tried to exclude them from high responsibilities