let my childish eyes
Distort it into paradise …
(this is not a quotation but a thing I have just made up à propos). Anyway there is a walled garden which has a small dogs’ graveyard in it. And whatever it’s like, I shall be ready to be happy there.
Bishopscourt, behind its forbidding gateway and under its mask of soot, was about two miles north of the Cathedral; an electric tram passed within about thirty yards, but you had to be adept—as all the boys were by this time—at jumping off at the right place. There were three acres of garden, “the soil of which,” the Bishop recalled, “was, on the whole, waterlogged, and the surface blackened with coal-dust and fog.” The rooms were ill-arranged, and the butler, who “went” with the house, was offended to find the chaplain working next door to his pantry in a kind of cupboard. “My Lord,” he said, “what is to become of my dignity?” There was, however, plenty of room to entertain visitors on a large scale, from the Ragged School children to the justices of Assize, and to put up ordination candidates; the Bishop was satisfied. Two bathrooms were put in, and the drainage improved, and although the curtains were still being hung in the front rooms as the first Examining Chaplain appeared in the drive, Mrs K. was immediately her charming, welcoming self. Alice, the grumbling cook, and Richmond, the parlour maid, retreated into the cavernous kitchen, and the Bishop entered upon a further twenty years of selfless hospitality.
“What one chiefly remembers of Manchester,” Eddie wrote, “is the great dray-horses bringing loads of cotton to be bleached; they made a tremendous noise, and struck sparks, because of the stone setts.” When they were not at large in the roaring city, the boys took possession of a darkish, dampish study on the ground floor. If they wanted to smoke, they climbed up on to the roof and sat on the top of the glass dome of the entrance hall, where a false step meant a broken neck. The Bishop was unaware of this, and also of some of the scurrilous and wide-ranging discussions in the “boys’ room”. where the brothers could disagree just as fiercely as in the days when they had punched one another in the wind. “In polite and educated circles,” Dr Fowler of Corpus had written, “physical blows are replaced by sarcasm and innuendo, but this refined mode of warfare may give an equal amount of pain.” The brothers, who loved each other, could not resist the temptation to hurt each other at times. Dilly, when roused, was particularly arrogant, always taking, in argument, the extreme position.
The Bishop had understandably determined not to send his second son to Corpus, or even to Oxford. Dillwyn, who seemed equally attracted to classics and mathematics, should try for Cambridge, and sit for a scholarship to Eton’s sister foundation, King’s.
In the December of 1902 the Bishop had received a letter from Canon Bowlby, at Eton, which began: “I cannot imagine a better Christmas present than the report on your two boys.” But the delight and astonishment in young Ronald’s progress became somewhat clouded when he turned to the perplexing Dillwyn, who in his Cambridge exam had done two brilliant papers, one in maths and the other in Greek verse, and had left all the others unfinished. “It is not known whether he has any taste for philosophy or archaeology.” Perhaps Dilly had been asked, but had not replied. The Canon’s letter now takes on the tone of a racehorse trainer as he adds: “As to the Newcastle [scholarship] one can never be sure what D. will do. Only two boys are left who might beat him in classics, Swithinbank and Daniel Macmillan. They are a dangerous pair, no doubt, as they have been improving at the same time as he has.” One feels he might go on to recommend more oats and regular exercise, as, indeed, an Edwardian schoolmaster would not hesitate to do. But Dilly would not compete where he was not interested. His friend Maynard Keynes, who had beaten him the year before in the Tomline Prize, wrote to his father that Knox showed up his work “in a most loathsomely untidy, unintelligible, illegible condition,” forgetting to write down the most necessary steps, and “even in conversation he is wholly incapable of expressing the meaning he intends to convey.” Yet he respected Dilly as a mathematician, and perhaps, as Sir Roy Harrod suggests in his biography of Keynes, “it was precisely the shower of irrelevant ideas impinging on a brain of the very highest quality that produced such successful results.” We recognize the description of genius. So, too, did Nathaniel Wedd, the King’s admissions tutor in classics; he recommended Dillwyn for a scholarship, and said that he “appeared to be capable of indefinite improvement”. This was fortunate for Dilly.
In a certain sense, he had left home already. During his last half at Eton, Dilly had become a ferocious agnostic. He had postponed a confrontation with his father for the familiar reason—not fear, but the fear of giving pain. God once dismissed, Dilly and Maynard Keynes had calmly undertaken experiments, intellectual and sexual, to resolve the question of what things are necessary to life. Pleasure, like morality and duty, was a psychological necessity which must therefore be accepted, but without too much fuss; and just as Dilly had eaten cold porridge at Aston, because the pleasure of eating consisted of the pleasure of filling your belly, so now he declared that one should drink only to get drunk, and that women (to whom he was always timidly and scrupulously polite) existed only for sex. True pleasure came from solving problems: “nothing is impossible”. Happiness was a different matter; it was suspect, as being too static.
Dilly’s Cambridge was liberating in quite a different sense from Eddie’s Oxford. In 1903 it was still a small East Anglian market town with shopkeepers anxious to supply to the great colleges, and not without its share of Victorian eccentrics; old Professor Newton, in his top hat, walked between the rails of the horsetrams and refused to give way to oncoming vehicles. But the spirit of the University was the exposure of truth at all costs, and in that atmosphere, under that remorseless light and in the cold winds of the Fen country, Dilly’s mind was condensed into a harder crystal. By compensation, he developed even wilder notions and a tenderer heart, and made there the friendships of a lifetime.
His rooms, like most of those allocated by King’s to its freshmen, were in The Drain, a row of cramped buildings without running water, and connected with Chetwynd Court by a kind of tunnel. He was obliged to buy crockery and furniture from the last occupant, but, as he wrote to Mrs K., “they look solid, and may last for years … I am doing the room mainly in green,” he added, rather surprisingly, but one could never tell what Dilly would, or would not, notice.
King’s at this time had only a hundred and fifty undergraduates and thirty dons, all unmarried; it was a little world within a world, self-regarding, self-rewarding, and doubtful about how far life outside the boundaries of King’s was worth undertaking. The college finances were depressed, the food uneatable, and Hall so crowded that waiters and diners were in constant collision, but the prevailing air was one of humanism and free intellect, and many felt, as Lowes Dickinson had described it, that “the realisation of a vast world extending outside Christianity was like a door that had once or twice swung ajar, and now opened and let me out.” But across the way their magnificent chapel stood in all its beauty, a perpetual reproach to them.
The Provost, in 1903, was the mighty Henry Bradshaw, the “don’s don”. Bradshaw, a man of ferocious integrity, once faced a visiting preacher who had said that the loss of Christian faith must mean a loss of morals with the words: “Well, you lied, and you know it.” This was the last year of his provostship; in 1904, he was found dead in his chair, with an open book in front of him. Nathaniel Wedd, Dilly’s first tutor, seemed to many people an aggressive man, shocking with his red tie and open blasphemies, but, as his unpublished autobiographical notes show, he had hidden complexities. By origin he was an East Ender, raised in dockland, who had got to Cambridge the hard way; on the other hand, his hard-working cynicism was relieved by strange communications from the unseen world, to which, as time went by, he paid increasing attention.
But the greatest influence upon Dilly was the best-loved and most eccentric of the Fellows, Walter Headlam. Headlam, one of the finest of all interpreters of Greek thought and language, was a purebred scholar, descended from scholars. In 1902 he was thirty-seven years old, and seemed to have only a frail contact with reality. Travelling was difficult because he could not take the right train,
