dark, charming, dangerous-looking, with a disposition to fight each other to the death under the nursery table on some point of honour; the “little ones”, fair, Quakerish and much more manageable. All, except poor Ethel, who was somewhat slow and stunted, were clever. All were tenderhearted, but, after babyhood, only Winnie was able to express her feelings with no inhibitions at all. “Enter Winnie, and kisses everybody” was a sardonic stage direction in one of Eddie’s first plays.
The girls were in an ambiguous but familiar position. If the elder brothers regarded them as things of naught, unable to throw a ball overarm or crack nuts with their teeth, yet in times of trouble the boys were eager to champion and comfort them and help them down to the last coin in their pockets. This meant that the girls, readily reduced to tears, were perpetual winners in the war between the sexes.
A singular characteristic of the boys was their insistence on games of which they invented or changed the rules, with the object of making them as difficult, and therefore as worthwhile, as possible. Any one of them who had a birthday was entitled to make his own rules, though these lasted only till the next morning. A game is a classic method of bringing life to order by giving it a fixed attainable objective, so that even if we lose, we are still in control. As time went on, the brothers would try to bring increasingly large areas—logic, ethics, poetry—into the same field as billiards or ludo—ludo, that is, under the Knox rules. Cheating was instantly detected. It was cheating to show fear, cheating to give up. A monstrous rule, superimposed on all the others by Dilly, was that “nothing is impossible”. But, inconveniently enough, the emotions are exempt from rules, and ignore their existence.
They were distinguished, even in a late-Victorian Evangelical household, by their truthfulness. Wilfred—with one possible exception, which will be discussed later—never told a lie at all. Ronnie told his last one in 1897, when he was nine. Social necessity would drive Eddie and Dilly to evasions, but they hated them. Honesty can scarcely, however, be counted a virtue in them; it was simply that they never felt the need for anything else.
Eddie was his mother’s favourite, and this was not resented by the other children, not even by the baby, for he was their favourite, too. Among a courageous group, he was the most daring. It was he who rode Doctor, he who climbed higher and higher, feeling that it would be a glorious death to plunge head-foremost through the tops of green trees, scattering the branches, he who fell off the jetty into deep water on holiday at Penzance. “It was a sad scene,” Winnie wrote, “as for some reason it was considered necessary for the whole party to return home … so out of the sea we were all bidden, five pairs of moist sandy cold feet stuffed into black stockings, five pairs of boots buttoned or laced on, and back the sad procession made its way.” “You’ll never live to be old, Mr Eddie,” threatened the nurse. But Eddie was not born predictable.
Eddie’s fall was known as The Accident. It was not thought that he took it seriously enough. It was known that one of Bishop French’s daughters, their Aunt Ethel, had died because she did not change her wet stockings after the monsoon. But the outing to Penzance, one of many seaside holidays, shows how anxious Edmund Knox was to give his children this new source of happiness and disaster which he had never known. George Knox, indeed, had never looked up a train in his life, but simply went down to the station and complained to the stationmaster if one was not ready for him. Edmund struggled valiantly with the difficulties of early starts and missed connections. As a result of one of these the family, with mountains of luggage, were stranded for hours at Bristol, and Eddie and Dilly seized the opportunity to study the master timetable in the office. Its complications appealed to their ingenious small boys’ minds, and Bradshaw’s Railway Guide joined Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome as a favourite recitation. As soon as humanly possible they taught it to their little brothers. At the age of three, Wilfred, when called upon to recite in company, could reel off the stations between Kibworth and Birmingham and the times of goods and cattle trains, adding
And wounded horses kicking,
And snorting purple foam:
Right well did such a couch befit
A Consular of Rome.
Life for the children at Kibworth was disturbed only when Bishop French came on leave, and impetuously swept his relatives together on holiday, wishing to see them all at once. “It was no small privilege to be his guest,” Edmund wrote, “and to hear him as he discoursed on Scripture, on the Fathers, or the antiquities we were to visit.” The children did not altogether agree. They were embarrassed by the old man’s habit of saying “a few seasonable words” to everyone they met, by his old-fashioned Rugby slang, mixed with phrases of classical Persian, and by his tendency to disappear entirely. On the day when they visited Lindisfarne it rained in torrents, and Edmund Knox thought it right to order a carriage, but “at the time of starting it was discovered that the Bishop had slipped away unnoticed. ” Some three or four miles onward they overtook him “in his shirt-sleeves, dripping wet, his coat over his arm, trudging gallantly onwards.” He had forgotten everything in his desire to be at the scene of the ministry of St Aidan. Worse still, he refused to calculate where, at the end of the day’s walk, they could get tea. The simple people of the country, he said, in the goodness of their hearts, would provide. This sometimes meant no tea at all. And yet it is something to have a saint in the family.
French resigned his bishopric, for reasons of ill-health, at the age of sixty-four. To the C.M.S. he was a “grand old campaigner” more in danger of going native than ever, a man who had friends among both Franciscans and Quakers, and who, during a recent tour of the Middle East, had shared an altar with a Chaldean priest. The Jansens still wondered whether unworldliness could not be carried too far, and were heartily thankful to hear of his retirement in 1889. Even French wondered “if perhaps my dear Lord and Master has no more need of me.” But in the following autumn, after much thought and prayer, he knew he must venture again. The Jansens were appalled to hear that he had been up to London to look at an exhibition of Stanley’s African medicine chest, so that he might choose the same brands himself. With little more than these and his book-bag, which he had carried himself over deserts and mountains and up the stairs at Kibworth Rectory, the old man set out in the November of 1890. He had no authority or backing. His destination was the whole Arab world, simply to tell them, even if no one accepted it, that Christ loved them and had died for them.
In this spirit he reached the holy city of Kairouan, where, dressed as a mullah in cloak, burnous and shawl, he sat down to teach at the outer gate of the Mosque. The Bishop of Jerusalem urged him, for his own safety, to move to Cairo. There he met a young missionary, Alexander Maitland, whom he had ordained himself, and who gave up everything to be with him and to accompany him to the Red Sea coast. They lived on dates and early oranges, and French took a quantity of Bibles in the folds of his burnous, to distribute where he could.
In February they reached Muscat, the capital of Oman, a little gap in a sea-wall of sheer rock, rising to six thousand feet. In that scorching climate, the Arabs say, the sword melts in the scabbard. The British India Company’s steamers called only once a fortnight. French and Maitland were not expected and knew nobody. The consul begged them to leave. They had to take refuge in two dirty rooms over a Portuguese grog-shop, and there they read and prayed together, and Maitland managed as best he could. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he wrote to Mrs French. “I was glad to wash plates for the Bishop.”
Maitland had the heavy responsibility of the old man, who disappeared, as he had done at Lindisfarne, without warning, to preach in the bazaar. Because of the danger of violence and stoning, he would not let his young friend accompany him there. After a month Maitland, who was consumptive, was overcome by the heat and had to go back to Cairo. The servant he had hired soon deserted, and French was left quite alone.
“As a villager told me the other day,” he wrote to his wife, “I am no Englishman but an Arab! I shall be in danger of becoming an alien, not to my own children I trust even then, and grandchildren.
