The Knox Brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald
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Their lack of understanding of industrial and social problems was absolute.
On the other hand, they were most successful as hosts to young children, perhaps because they had never left childhood behind. The atmosphere at Edmundthorpe was quite unlike Waddon or even Kibworth; it was a sweet and primitive Evangelicalism, where Christ was felt as “the unseen guest” at every meal, and to be distressed if your umbrella was missing was “a sin of angry thought.” When Ronnie won fivepence at ludo—which, in a sense, was gaming—he felt it was tainted money, and put it in the collection. There were no harsh words; the motive power was always love. And Uncle Lindsey, like Mr. Dick, had quite definite ideas as to what to do with a small boy, if one came his way: amuse it; wash it; feed it. With their uncle they collected honey, made bonfires of autumn leaves and jumped over them, and slid on the ice in winter. He also conceived the idea of starting their education, and crammed into his small nephews, aged six and four, an amazing quantity of Latin and Greek. He saw no difficulty in this, and in fact there was none. Ronnie was an exceedingly bright little boy, and Wilfred, who in some ways had the better brain of the two, was gifted with an exceptional memory. He could read through the Times leader once, shut his eyes, and repeat it word for word.
Ronnie accepted the régime in a less critical spirit than Wilfred, who had a sharper temper than his brother. But both of them were happy, and, above all, happy with each other. They shared all their games, all their confidences, and grew up, Winnie thought, “in absolute dependence on each other.” It was an alliance against fate, which, it seemed, Time would never have power to break.
It was during the four years at Edmundthorpe that Wilfred told, or rather implied, his only lie. While Ronnie and he were ambushing each other in the garden they had the bad luck to break off a branch of the flowering Judas tree. Wilfred dared not confess—not for fear of punishment, for there was none at Edmundthorpe, but because the Aunts were so fond of the tree. By bedtime he had still said nothing, and that night there was a storm, which scattered twigs and branches everywhere. All the damage was put down to the wind, but Wilfred’s conscience ached.
During the school holidays the children all went back to Aston for a noisy reunion. Different backgrounds had made them adjust differently, and they quarreled, but at the approach of authority, all made an impenetrable common front together. Eddie and Dilly were particularly glad to see each other—“I can’t think what I’m going to do without you, you lazy hound,” Eddie wrote to Eastbourne—and disagreed particularly fiercely. Their father, coming home to uproar, was driven distracted. “It was specially painful to me,” he recalled, “to feel increasingly as each holiday came round the bereavement that I had sustained.” The doctor suggested a visit to the seaside, even if it could only be a shadow of their happiness at Penzance.
Aunt Emily, protesting feebly, embarked with them to Bridlington. They immediately escaped from her care, rushed down to the sea (which the doctor had forbidden), and for the first time in their lives saw a theater, or rather a nigger minstrels’ fit-up, where Uncle Sam was clacking the bones, and inviting the audience to join in singing
Can’t get away
To marry yer today—
My wife won’t let me!
When their father arrived he could hardly credit the vulgar gaiety, so different is the measure of heartbreak in adults and children. He hastily inaugurated new amusements—cricket on the sands, as far as possible from Uncle Sam, and expeditions to neighboring churches. The next year Aunt Emily’s nerves and health failed, and he had to take them himself to the Isle of Man. “But of course,” he wrote, “it was evident that while I might be able to manage a parish, I was a poor hand at controlling the high spirits and caring for the costumes and manners of so charming and irresponsible a party. ‘Garters’ I remember as a special trial. They were always missing!”
Although Knox’s pastoral work flourished, the rectory at Aston grew more seedy and neglected with every passing month. The furniture was engrained with soot, the drawing room shut up, the cupboards full of mislaid or broken articles. The boys were beginning to resemble savages, speaking Latin and Greek. There was no help for it, the home would have to be broken up. At this point the Bishop of Worcester, Perowne, an old friend of Bishop French, sent for Knox and offered him a new appointment—the parish of St. Philip’s, Birmingham, with the post of Bishop Suffragan of Coventry.
It would be a considerable responsibility—another vast district, a diocese with only one minister to every five thousand of the population. In his own words, “it became evident that I must marry again.” The whole rich supporting background of Victorian churchgoing—the parish workers, the lay readers, the churchwardens, the Gospel Temperance meetings, the missions, the men’s Bible classes—everyone, up to the Bishop himself, knew that Knox could not go on without a wife.
She would have to be vicarage born and bred, or she could hardly face the huge city diocese, administered from Coventry, as Knox knew, “by the most charming of old-fashioned clergy, whose interest in Birmingham was, to say the best, tepid.” All the work and duty would be his. As a husband, he was now a man of forty-seven, growing bald and very stout, his natural geniality under a cloud, barely solvent as a result of his many charities and building activities, and chronically overworked. He would never marry without love and respect, and that meant respect, also, for his uncouth children. Many, however, were undaunted. Out of the unmarried lady church workers of Aston, few would have refused the new Suffragan Bishop. Here was another difficulty. From this aspect, Edmund Knox was in need of rescue.
Through Bishop Perowne, he was invited several times to meet Canon Newton, the Vicar of Redditch—a kind of vicar quite outside Knox’s experience, because he had inherited an absurdly large sum of money and had not given it away, but lived in comfort, even luxury. Horace Newton went deer-stalking every year on his own moor in the West Highlands, traveling from Glasgow on his own steam-yacht; he built a vast holiday mansion there, Glencrippsdale, and, since the vicarage was much too small for him, another one at Redditch. This house, Holmwood, had been designed for him by Temple Moore at the beginning of his career as an architect.
At Holmwood there was ample room for his six daughters and his long-wished-for son, and the handsome family moved like the Shining Ones in this appropriate setting. In Scotland the girls rode and fished, but always gallantly and high-heartedly, enjoying risk, but not taking it seriously. As vicar’s daughters, and sincere Christians, they undertook the parish duties, but admitted frankly that they found them very boring. They remained serene, never pretending. They had style.
The eldest of them, Ethel Mary, was a graceful and handsome young woman with blue eyes, an airily penetrating blue gaze before which affectation collapsed. Her uncle, Richard Wilton, a minor Victorian poet, wrote a sonnet on her photograph:
Since through the open window of the eye
The unconscious secret of the soul we trace
And character is written on the face,
In this sun-picture what do we descry? . . .
Courage, certainly. Wilton also refers to “the gentle current of thy days,” but this was soon to be interrupted.
In 1894 Ethel was twenty-seven, with many admirers, one of them a wealthy cousin. She could certainly have “looked above” Edmund Knox. This was in spite of the fact that Canon Newton settled no money at all on his daughters when they married. Why should he? His own wife, their mother, had been penniless, and they were perfectly happy. He did not give the girls any formal education either. They were taught music and languages, spoke French, and picked up the rest of their knowledge from the books in the library. Ethel had learned classical Greek, but simply because she wanted to.
Was it possible that she would consider marriage with Edmund? Not much less romantic than the day when he bought the rose on the station platform, he decided that if Ethel accepted an invitation to his consecration at St. Paul’s Cathedral, that would mean that she had given him encouragement to hope. “It proved,” he wrote, “that I was right, to my own unspeakable gain.”
But would it be a gain for Ethel? She had not yet met the children, to whom, after all, she must be stepmother.