begun his schooldays! May they be days he will look back upon with happy thankfulness and joy hereafter …”
The ink dried, he added, before he could put pen to paper; he was living “like a sparrow on the housetops”. Occasionally he found a listener, who would stay for a reading of the gospel. He was trying to lay in a little store of biscuits “so as not to be at the mercy of the people I may be amongst”.
It was true that schooldays had started at Kibworth. While their sisters studied with a governess, and lay down every day on a blackboard to give them a good posture, Eddie and Dilly walked over to Mr Rogers’s school in the village. Eddie had begun on Kennedy’s Latin grammar; there were more inexplicable runes for Wilfred to repeat in the nursery: “Caesar adsum jam forte—Caesar had some jam for tea.”
Dilly was the mathematician, to the amazement of his father, who had not been able to make head or tail of the Merton College accounts. Dilly could not balance his accounts (twopence a week pocket-money) either, but he did not have to “do” sums, he “saw” them.
Meanwhile, the tender messages from their grandfather had ceased. No more letters came from Muscat. It was only later that they were able to follow his last wanderings, from Muttrah up the coast to Sib, from which place he hoped to journey into the interior. He had set out in a fishing-boat, under the blazing sun, with his book-bag. Agents of the Sultan, who deeply respected the strange old fakir, were deputed to keep watch over him, but they could do nothing when they found him insensible, still with a book in his hand. When they picked him up to bring him back to Muscat they found he weighed almost nothing. He died on 14 May; his body was prepared for burial by a group of Goanese Catholics, who had heard of him and his mission, although he did not know them.
“God had not left him the measure of strength he hoped to have,” Maitland wrote to Mrs Knox, “but that could only be proved by experience.” He arranged for the burial in the northernmost of the two coves of the Bay of Muscat, at the foot of the cliffs. It was wild and barren, but a kind of shrub with pink flowers grew there. He painted on the gravestone the words: He endured as seeing Him who is invisible. French’s biographer noted that “the grave is under the protection of a British gunboat, so there is little likelihood it will ever meet with neglect.”
At Kibworth the children were put into black clothes, and a new game—Caves in Arabia—was added to the nursery, played by any one of them who wanted to get away from the others. The effect on their mother of her father’s lonely death was profound. It led directly to an upheaval and to the end of their first happy period of childhood.
II 1891–1901 The Sterner Realities of Life
EDMUND KNOX HAD TAKEN ORDERS because he felt God called him to do so. But to enter the mid-Victorian Church meant both more and less than this. “The plain fact is,” his son Ronnie wrote, half a century later, “that while England led the world, and the Church of England was the expression of its national life, there was a monumental quality about the partnership which, do what you would, laid hold of the imagination. Anglicanism fitted into the landscape, was part of the body politic.”
To become one of its ministers was to join a legal establishment which influenced those who governed, to take responsibility for the souls of a great empire, and to make effective judgments in peace and war. That might mean a disputed loyalty. Knox, the scholarship boy whose education had cost one shilling, was a passionate supporter of free education, but a stout opponent of the government’s long-drawn-out attack on the Church schools. Again, when he became rector of Kibworth, it was assumed that, as a mild Tory, he would settle down comfortably in that heavy clay country and become a squire’s parson. But nothing of the kind happened.
Edmund’s heart sank when he saw the farm-labourers, in their smocks and tall hats, waiting outside the church so that “the quality” could go in first. He did not feel at ease with such a system, and longed for a wider scope, if not abroad, then in one of the great industrial cities. In 1891 he received from the Trustees of Aston-juxta-Birmingham (who were mostly Evangelicals) an offer of preferment. Aston was a huge, built-over, crowded industrial district, known to the world only through its football team, Aston Villa.
On a preliminary visit he found the vicarage, after making a number of inquiries, “in a dark and narrow street, set in a maze of smoke-begrimed small houses.” Edmund was more than doubtful about what the effect of the “air”, to which nineteenth-century doctors and patients attached so much importance, would be on his wife’s health. She had never quite recovered from the birth of Ronnie, when she had had a long and difficult labour. But Ellen was not afraid of the sulphur-laden air of Birmingham. She was her father’s daughter, and his last lonely mission had inspired her to do something, no matter how little, that would be worthy of him. She herself had never been to India, and had followed all his wanderings through his frequent letters to her. In the very last of them, written from Muscat two weeks before his death, he had congratulated them both on their resolution to take on the new difficult work. His only sorrow was that “I shall never be able again to offer to take a Sunday for you and set you free for needed rest.” “Your children will miss the beautiful lawn and the pleasant strolls in the country,” he added; “they have to enter on the sterner realities of life.”
If forty-two thousand souls of Birmingham’s workforce could live in the smoke and darkness of Aston parish, so, obviously enough, could their priest. Edmund threw himself into organization and visiting, Ellen into work for the schools—Sunday schools, reading classes for adults, and what were still called the Ragged Schools. They were full of confidence. When they left Kibworth a well-wisher, looking at Edmund’s solid form, had said: “Those shoulders are broad enough for anything.”
The six children had arrived at Aston with the girls in tears at parting with Doctor and at the sight of the tiny, soot-blackened garden. The boys, however, were stopped in their tracks by the sight of a new and instantly attractive form of transport, trams. “I was early fascinated by those gigantic steam-kettles in two sections, which used to ply between Aston and Birmingham,” Ronnie wrote. The cable past Snow Hill, where you could peer down a slit at the endless cable, gave the brothers the concept of perpetual motion. The trams were kings of the road; in Lancashire they were known as “cars”. Bicycles skidded on the lines, one breakdown held up the whole system, and old ladies were marooned in the middle of the street and had to be rescued. The years to come were never to bring any form of transport that they loved quite so well. They became trammers from that first day.
One advantage of Aston was the schools. By tram the girls could go to Edgbaston Ladies’ College, and Eddie and Dilly to day school. Edmund Knox did not like boarding schools, which he considered unnatural, and he wanted to undertake the family religious instruction himself, at home. Here a certain unevenness of response had already appeared. The girls were devout, so were the little boys, Ronnie in particular; dressed in Ethel’s pinafore for a surplice, he conducted the funerals of pet birds in the grimy flower-beds. On Eddie, as he put it himself, “Church did not seem to rub off properly,” though he conformed for his mother’s sake. Dilly held his counsel.
Leaving the question of doctrine aside, all the instruction they received from their parents was positive and humanitarian—not so, however, the grim warnings of Nurse and Cook, whose villain was that horror-figure, the Pope, “always laying snares,” Winnie remembered, “in far-off Italy to entrap our nursery in especial, and in general, into the evil lures of his superstition.” Old Nurse said she could smell a Papist a mile off, and was much preoccupied with the imminence of the Last Trump, which she hoped might come when they were all at prayer, and if possible in clean underclothes. But the children were born with the power of discrimination. Even the girls were able to discount Old Nurse, and “in such homes as ours,” Winnie thought, “we surely experienced something of the
