Forever England by Mike Read Read Free Book Online Page A

church. They want to tell me what the sermon was about.
    Rupert was spared the fifty dull years, as within eight, he, Hugh and Hugh’s brother Denham, would all be dead, and Brockenhurst church where the Russell-Smiths worshipped would fill rapidly with First World War graves. For now, though, no shadow cast itself over the exuberant years of youth, where the summers seemed longer than the winters, and the countryside was there for the taking.
    His travels around the south of England during the summer of 1907 included a stay with the Cotterills at Godalming. In his bedroom there he found a copy of William Morris’s Utopian classic,
News From Nowhere or an Epoch of Rest
, a book which he had never read, but which had been on his list to track down ever since fellow student Ben Keeling had told him that a poster in his rooms at Cambridge had been inspired by it. The poster depicted a workerwith clenched fist and the legend, ‘Forward the Day is Breaking’. Morris’s book and the piece of vivid artwork and slogan were to inspire Brooke to write in 1908 his only socialist poem, ‘Second Best’.
    Second Best
    Here in the dark, O heart;
    Alone with the enduring Earth, and Night,
    And Silence, and the warm strange smell of clover;
    Clear-visioned, though it break you; far apart
    From the dead best, the dear and old delight;
    Throw down your dreams of immortality,
    O faithful, O foolish lover!
    Here’s peace for you, and surety; here the one
    Wisdom – the truth – ‘All day the good glad sun
    Showers love and labour on you, wine and song;
    The greenwood laughs, the wind blows, all day long
    Till night.’ And night ends all things.
    Then shall be
    No lamp relumed in heaven, no voices crying,
    Or changing lights, or dreams and forms that hover!
    (And, heart, for all your sighing,
    That gladness and those tears are over, over…)
    And has the truth brought no new hope at all,
    Heart, that you’re weeping yet for Paradise?
    Do they still whisper, the old weary cries?
    â€˜â€™Mid youth and song, feasting and carnival,
    Through laughter, through the roses, as of old
    Comes Death, on shadowy and relentless feet,
    Death, unappeasable by prayer or gold;
    Death is the end, the end!’
    Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greet
    Death as a friend!
    Exile of immortality, strongly wise,
    Strain through the dark with undesirous eyes
    To what may lie beyond it. Sets your star,
    O heart, for ever! Yet, behind the night,
    Waits for the great unborn, somewhere afar,
    Some white tremendous daybreak. And the light,
    Returning, shall give back the golden hours,
    Ocean a windless level, Earth a lawn
    Spacious and full of sunlit dancing-places,
    And laughter, and music, and, among the flowers,
    The gay child-hearts of men, and the child-faces,
    O heart, in the great dawn!
    Of William Morris’s book he said, ‘I found
News From Nowhere
in my room and read it on and on all through the night till I don’t know what time! And ever since I’ve been a devoted admirer of Morris and a socialist, and all sorts of things!’ Rupert was allowed to keep his uncle’s copy. Although the Utopian ideas it embraced were delightfully idealistic, he wholeheartedly embraced Morris’s socialist ideology in his day-to-day life.

Chapter 3
Apostle or Apollo?
    R UPERT’S RETURN TO King’s in the autumn of 1907 saw his pen in vitriolic mood towards the university town: ‘Cambridge is less tolerable than ever’; ‘I pine to be out of Cambridge, which I loathe’, ‘Cambridge is a bog’, ‘in Cambridge the hard streets are paven with brass and glass and tired wounded feet of pilgrims flutter aimlessly upon them’. In a letter to his cousin Erica he was also disparaging about George Bernard Shaw: ‘[I]t was the same speech as he made the night before in London and the night after, somewhere. Mostly about the formation of a “middle-class party” in Parliament: which didn’t