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 pedalling 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 honour 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 mitres 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 instalments), 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 five dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. 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 until they were too old to give trouble. Knox was an exception. Rejecting, to the relief of his family, the offer of the bishopric of Madras, he fought on until “dignified Worcester and placid Coventry began to look upon Birmingham as something more than a rather heathen shopping town.” In 1896 the last of the lovely Burne-Jones windows were installed at St Philip’s, and the church was worthy of becoming what it now is, the Cathedral of Birmingham.
Preoccupied as he often was, deep in church affairs to the exclusion of all others, he remained a family man, confident of his children’s support. He could be, and often was, exceedingly angry with them, and sometimes cuffed the elder boys all the way round his study, but he was perfectly tolerant of their jokes at the expense of his dignity. One Sunday his private chapel was mysteriously full of the scent of Popish incense; once, when he was on a visitation, he found that his hostess had been told (by Eddie) to be sure to supply him with a bottle of whisky—“the Bishop could not do with less”—and with a pair of black silk stockings, in case he had forgotten his own. Once a representative of the press called at their holiday rectory, and since there were no servants and Mrs K. felt that the family might be considered too informal, Winnie and Ethel obligingly did duty as cook and parlour maid; only Eddie told the reporter that both of them were deaf and dumb, and could be addressed only in sign language; this caused Winnie to drop the soup. The Bishop marvelled, thinking of his own industrious and obedient boyhood, at where such ideas could come from.
St Philip’s Rectory never became completely settled territory. There was always an unpredictable element. But the boys were going ahead unchecked, maintaining their early promise. All were winning prizes and scholarships, and their father was accustomed to measure progress by such things. As soon as it was dark, wherever they were, there was a cry, as though from the Inferno, for lamps and candles, so that the children could get down to their studies. Beyond his knowledge, however, there were stirrings, intimations of nature and poetry and human weakness, which could never be confided either in him or in Mrs K., who, in Eddie’s phrase, in spite of her sterling qualities, seemed to them “rather drawing-roomy”. There were certain aspects of sea and cloud and open country that brought to them, as it did to Housman’s Shropshire Lad, “into my heart an air that kills”—certain poetry, too, that would always have the power to bring them together, Sylvie and Bruno, Catullus, Matthew Arnold, Housman himself, Cory’s epitaph:
They told
