brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
I wept when I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
They knew that this was nothing more than an inaccurate translation from the Greek, made by an Eton schoolmaster to help out his class; later, they knew that the schoolmaster had had to leave Eton under a cloud, and take a different name. But the power of the two verses to remind them of each other, across time and space, was beyond this, and indeed beyond “rational argument”.
Still, every morning, at family prayers, the whole household knelt down together, while the ancient coffee-machine simmered ferociously in the background, and the unity and peace, like that of England itself, seemed unlikely to be broken.
III 1901–1907 “We imagined other people might think we were peculiar”
ON THEIR SUMMER HOLIDAY OF 1900, the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign, the Knoxes lost their holdall, containing all their waterproofs, umbrellas, fishing rods and tweed coats. Mrs K. believed, with a serene optimism which the years never dimmed, that it would turn up, perhaps on the next train. The boys, with their inborn melancholy and natural relish for disaster, declared that it would not, and it did not.
The holiday that year was in a large house on the desolate fringe of Dartmoor. “We should have been warned,” Winnie wrote, “by the low rent demanded, but this my father held was due to its being in so remote a spot, so far from any railway station.” They arrived in two open waggonettes through the Devonshire lanes thick with honeysuckle, all of them drenched with rain, Ronnie with a pitiful cough on which he had decided to write a treatise. In the damp house itself, mice ran over the girls as they knelt at their evening prayers, and Ronnie, still coughing, had to meow like a cat (he had a talent for animal imitations) to keep them at bay. In the morning spirits revived, and Eddie and Wilfred went down to the rushing stream to fish, but there was a sensation, not to be shaken off, of something coming to an end. The family was dividing into children and those whose childhood was past.
Eddie was nineteen, Dilly seventeen, two pipe-smoking, Norfolk-jacketed young men. The sight of them, both unattached, was maddening to local hostesses in this remote district; “calls” had to be paid and returned. But Ronnie at twelve still clung to childhood, while Wilfred, fourteen, imperturbably arranged his Bits of Old Churches. These were souvenirs, stones and chippings which must genuinely have fallen off and been honestly picked up, otherwise they did not “count”, though Eddie and Dilly sometimes assisted with a good hard blow at the church wall which Wilfred never suspected. Dilly handed over to Ronnie his collection of 231 railway tickets; they no longer interested him.
In the autumn Eddie would be going to Corpus and Ronnie to Eton. In this family which breathed the air of scholarship, but had constant difficulty in making ends meet, education was the key to the future, and the Bishop believed that he could look forward with sober confidence. Although it was clear that Ethel, increasingly deaf and much slower than the others, would never leave home, Winnie was destined for University and, surely, for a brilliant clerical marriage, the three elder boys for the Civil Service, Ronnie for the Evangelical ministry. The Bishop was exceedingly busy, both with his pastorate and with the immense task of raising £100,000 for church extension. It is probable that he did not notice certain disturbing undercurrents, and that Mrs K. did not like to mention them. Neither Eddie nor Dilly felt certain any longer about the truth of Christianity. Their bookboxes contained not only classical texts but also The Golden Bough, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and George Moore’s Esther Waters. On the other hand Winnie, dreamily adolescent when she was not energetically bicycling, escaped into Malory, into William Morris and the stained-glass colouring of the Ages of Faith, and, safe in the airing cupboard, read aloud to Ronnie from the poems of Christina Rossetti.
The family were still conscious, if threatened, of a solid front against intruders. “We imagined other people might think we were peculiar, and yet we were quite sure that our family standpoint on almost any question was absolutely and unanswerably right.” No passage of time would ever destroy this feeling, but neither would it ever bring back the unity of 1900.
For the dimensions of earthly happiness, Ronnie always had to turn back to his childhood, and in particular to Eton. From the moment he arrived in College, was gowned and told “Sis bonus puer”, he gave the school his wholehearted devotion, and it offered him in return the certainty, the sense of belonging, and the discreet respect for brilliance which he so much needed. This was so in spite of the early days of bewilderment, which were not made much easier by Dilly, descending, when he remembered, like a vaguely amiable god, from his room to see how his “minor” was doing.
Sept 23 1900
Dear Mother,
I don’t quite understand the way the forms go, but Dilly says I am in the bottom division of Fifth Form as a matter of course. I hope this letter will reach you early, but I am only writing at 18 3/4 minutes past 8 p.m.… Yesterday I played in a game of Eton field game. I was put to hold a person up on one side, then someone threw the ball in among us, and by the time we were all sitting on top of one another the ball was far away.
We won apparently by three to none. I am very happy here. My love to Winnie,
your very sleepy son,
R. A. Knox
P.S. Floreat Etona.
He was possessed by a kind of pleasurable anxiety to do the right thing, and yet not to waste money at home, asking diffidently for a Liberty’s armchair for his room “to get something in accordance with the rules of taste. Mr Goodhart [the Master in College] is always calling chairs ‘horrible!’, because he makes little expeditions into one’s room just as one is getting into bed, and remarks on pictures and things. He told me the picture of Rembrandt was the sort of thing you could look at for hours. I’ve never tried.” But if Ronnie was eager to conform, he felt free to be happy at Eton. The romantic in him, the inconvenient love of mystery and beauty—inconvenient, that is, to one who thought he mistrusted enthusiasm and only valued a reasonable faith—began to spread its wings. He felt a devotion to Henry VI, the Sorrowful King, the Founder of Eton, which merged, in his thirteenth year, with his feeling for the poetry of the Rossettis and for the splendour of the west window at St Philip’s, the Burne-Jones window through whose ruby-red glass the light streamed in at evensong.
To outward appearances he was still the brilliant, dutiful and rather delicate prizewinner, petted by the Matron in College and still kept firmly in order by his brothers. As the cold of winter approached, Wilfred had “borrowed” his gloves, Dillwyn his cherished new overcoat, which he had christened Alitat, the name of a goddess in Herodotus. Alitat was returned, but Ronnie was often in the sickroom. He meditated anxiously on his resources. “I have bought all my birthday presents, expending 10/- on the whole lot,” he wrote home in June 1902. “I shall have to send Eddie his to-morrow; I have got him a knife-sharpener and strop combined, and also a little pendant for his watch chain.”
Eddie’s departure to Oxford meant that the first of the Bishop’s sons was at University, and he could not help
