The Knox Brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald
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Year of 1895.
The Newtons, meeting them at the station, gave no sign of dismay, for that would have been unkind, and they were never unkind. The Knox children looked like scarecrows, or remnants from a jumble sale, the girls in all-purpose black frocks, two sizes too large to allow for growth, Ronnie and Wilfred in grotesque black suits, hand-sewn by their grandmother’s maid at Edmundthorpe. The six of them clung together awkwardly, too shy to find the right words. They had known them at Kibworth, but had forgotten them since. For their part, they stared almost in disbelief at the house to which they had been brought. Holmwood was in the highest style of the Arts and Crafts movement, with stone-framed lattice windows and steep slate roofs, the haunt of doves in summer, now deep in snow. Once inside the white-painted hall they saw shining floors, Gimson furniture, Morris chintzes, and a staircase sweeping upward to the glass dome of the house. A blazing wood fire drew out the scent of hothouse plants. And where did the light come from? None of the children had ever seen electric light in a house before. When Wilfred and Ronnie were put to bed they sat in their nightgowns, taking strict turns, as they always did, to turn it on and off, and nobody told them to stop.
At dinnertime, under the glowing lights, the Newton girls wore Liberty gowns of velveteen; they were beautiful, the house was beautiful—in the boys’ terms, “awfully jolly.” Faced unequivocally with beauty, the older children recognized at last a starvation they had never known by name. It was strange territory. They felt humiliated most of all when, as they usually did at home, they began to quarrel, punching and pulling each other’s hair to emphasize their points. The Newtons said nothing in reproach, they simply went away; no one ever quarreled, or even raised their voices, at Holmwood.
“It never occurred to me,” Winnie wrote, “for we had no idea why this treat had come our way, that upstairs slender forms in satin dressing-gowns were slipping in and out of their charming bedrooms to murmur to my future stepmother: ‘Ethel, darling, you can’t possibly face that family.’ But luckily for us expostulations were useless.” Ethel would never have given Edmund Knox encouragement if she had not intended to carry off everything in her stride. She wanted to do this, just as she had wanted to learn Greek. The family never let her forget the entry she made in her diary on her wedding day. Finished the Antigone. Married Bip.
All that could be done in the way of improvement she did, rapidly and tactfully. Her first task was the decoration of St. Philip’s Rectory, a good large house in the very center of Birmingham, but with no garden, only a small backyard. This was a further restriction for the children, and a real sacrifice to the Bishop, an expert gardener. As to the rooms, St. Philip’s would never be much like Holmwood, but it could be painted white, and hung with Morris’s Blackthorn chintz, and good pieces of furniture could be recovered from the shambles at Aston; she added things of her own, china, silver, watercolors, poetry books, French literature. Some of the Knox possessions she never managed to get rid of, the Indian bedspread, for example, brought back by Mrs. French, embroidered with tigers in gold thread with looking-glass eyes, and a steel engraving of “God’s Eye Shut Upon the Heart of the Sinner,” which she finally banished to the lavatory. All the Newtons’ prophecies were falsified. The home was reestablished and the whole family reunited. In the evening Ethel coaxed her dreaded charges into the drawing room and read aloud to them—Stevenson’s Will o’ the Mill and The Wrong Box, Edward Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes—undisturbed by the boys who were winding up their clockwork engines behind the sofa. To them it was keenly interesting that one of the main railway lines ran into the station from a tunnel actually underneath the house. Very well, their stepmother accepted this, just as, to begin with, she accepted everything, except the annual seaside lodgings; instead of these, she hired vacant rectories, in different parts of England and Wales, for their summer holidays. Here she adapted gallantly to the demand for high teas and to long cricket matches, during which Dilly was not allowed to make more than a hundred and fifty runs, and little Ronnie, quite ignoring the game, picked bunches of wild flowers in the deep field and brought them, as an admiring tribute, to his new mother.
The little ones, naturally, were the first to be won over and the most dear to her; the girls had begun to turn to her from the first evening at Holmwood. The older boys, Eddie in particular, were a challenge. She saw that the trouble lay partly in names, and told them to call her Mrs. K. But a slight barrier remained. She was reluctant, for example, to discuss health matters, her own or anyone else’s. Eddie’s nervous indigestion was dismissed as “the gulps.” He could not quite lower his defenses, even when she took him to Glencrippsdale, and taught him to fish.
The civilizing process had to be gradual. In the main, it was assumed in those days that it was sufficient amusement for brothers and sisters simply to be together. So, indeed, it was. But Mrs. K. would look into the schoolroom and note that all was well, the girls banging out a duet on the piano, the little boys quietly playing, Eddie and Dilly sarcastically reading to each other out of Smiles’s Self-Help, then be summoned urgently a few minutes later to find Self-Help sailing out of the window, Eddie and Dilly locked in a death grapple, Wilfred and Ronnie cowering in corners with their hands folded over their bellies to protect their most valuable possession, their wind. At other times the boys disappeared completely for long periods to avoid being made to “pay calls.”
On the subject of education—perhaps because her own had been so casual, partly perhaps because of the maniacal scenes in the schoolroom—Mrs. K. stood firm. The boys must go to boarding schools. Their father was still doubtful and would have liked to keep them at home, but was induced to agree. Of course, they would have to win scholarships or the fees could not be met, and it would be a mistake for those nearest in age to compete with each other, so Eddie and Wilfred were entered for Rugby, and Dilly and Ronnie for Eton.
Meantime, Eddie was sent to a distant preparatory school, Locker’s Park, in Hemel Hempstead; Dilly went, at the age of eleven, to Summer Fields (then still called Summer Field), near Oxford. Mrs. McLaren, the formidable manager, was, it appears, unwilling to admit him at such a late age, for she liked to catch them young, but changed her tune when she heard that Ronnie, already reading Virgil at the age of six, would soon be joining him. Dilly needed only a year’s coaching to take his Eton scholarship. As for Ronnie, the little boy who had been asked at four years old what he liked doing and had replied, “I think all day, and at night I think about the past,” was already a natural philosopher. He made a docile and friendly pupil, saved from any temptation to vanity by his relentless elder brothers.
Neither he nor Dilly remembered Summer Fields with much pleasure, except for the chance to swim in the river under the willow trees on sunny afternoons. In middle age, Ronnie used to recall deliberately what it was like to be beaten for having an untidy locker, to remind himself “how much better it is to be forty than eight.” The preparation of the children for scholarships was so intensive as to be only just over the borderline of sanity. Before the Eton exam Dr. Williams, the headmaster, used to take a room in the White Horse Hotel in Windsor and walk the candidates up and down to steady them while he crammed in a few last showy bits of information. Many of them never reached such a high standard of learning again. Fortunately Ronnie’s sparkling intelligence, and Dilly’s dispassionate view of adults, enabled them both to survive.
In 1896, the year that Ronnie arrived at Summer Fields, Eddie won his scholarship to Rugby. Thomas French had been there in the days of Arnold, although he had been quite unmoved by the great Doctor, whose teaching was “not the Gospel as he had been accustomed to receive it.” The headmaster was now Dr. H. A. James, known as The Bodger. In comparison with Eton it was a rougher, more countrified, more eccentric, more rigidly classical, less elegant and sentimental establishment. There were the usual bewildering regulations, much more binding than the official rules; only certain boys, the “swells,” could wear white straw hats, all first-year boys must answer to a call of “fag” and run to see what the “swell” required, it was a crime to walk with your hands in your pockets until your fourth year, one hand was allowed in the third year, and so forth, proscriptions being multiplied, as in all primitive societies. The younger boys got up at five forty-five and took turns in the cold baths. Eddie, who was in School House, could consider himself lucky to get a “den” at the end of his first year, overlooking the seventeen green acres of the famous Close.
Divinity