was provided for them by their Aunt Beatrice. Back in Birmingham he looked around for something better. He thought of Mrs Faulkner who lived in Duchess Road behind the Oratory. She gave musical soirées which several of the Fathers attended, and she also let rooms. He decided that her house might be a more pleasant home for Ronald and Hilary. Mrs Faulkner agreed to take them, and early in 1908 the boys moved to 37 Duchess Road.
It was a gloomy creeper-covered house, hung with dingy lace curtains. Ronald and Hilary were given a room on the second floor. The other occupants of the house were Mrs Faulkner’s husband Louis (a wine-merchant with a taste for his own wares), their daughter Helen, Annie the maid, and another lodger, a girl of nineteen who lived on the first floor beneath the boys’ bedroom and spent most of her time at her sewing-machine. Her name was Edith Bratt.
She was remarkably pretty, small and slim, with grey eyes, firm clear features and short dark hair. The boys learnt that she too was an orphan, her mother having died five years previously and her father some time before that. In fact she was illegitimate. Her mother, Frances Bratt, had given birth to Edith on 21 January 1889 in Gloucester, where she had perhaps gone to avoid scandal, for her home was in Wolverhampton where her family owned a boot and shoe manufacturing business. Frances was aged thirty at the time of Edith’s birth. Afterwards she returned to the Birmingham district to brave the gossip of the neighbours and to bring up her daughter in the suburb of Handsworth. Frances Bratt never married, and the child’s father was not named on the birth certificate, though Frances preserved his photograph, and his identity was known to the Bratt family. But if Edith knew the name of her father, she never passed it on to her own children.
Edith’s childhood had been moderately happy. She was brought up in Handsworth by her mother and her cousin Jennie Grove. The Grove connection was much prized by the Bratts, for it linked them with the renowned Sir George Grove, editor of the musical dictionary. Edith herself proved to have a talent for music. She played the piano very well, and when her mother died she was sent to a girls’ boarding-school that specialised in music. By the time she left school she was expected to be able to make a career as a piano teacher or just possibly a concert pianist. But her guardian, the family solicitor, did not seem to know what he should do next. He found a room for her at Mrs Faulkner’s, supposing that her landlady’s fondness for music would provide a sympathetic atmosphere as well as a piano for practising. But he had no further ideas; nor was there any urgency, for Edith had inherited a small amount of land in various parts of Birmingham, and this produced just enough income to keep her. Nothing more need be done for the moment; and nothing was done. Edith stayed on at Mrs Faulkner’s, but she soon found that while her landlady was delighted to have a lodger who could play and accompany soloists at her soirées, the question of actually practising the piano was quite different. ‘Now Edith dear,’ Mrs Faulkner would say, sweeping into the room as soon as the scales and arpeggios began, ‘that’s enough for now!’ And Edith would go back sadly to her room and her sewing-machine.
Then the Tolkien brothers arrived in the house. She found them very pleasant. In particular she liked Ronald, with his serious face and perfect manners; while Ronald, though he was acquainted with few girls of his age, discovered that familiarity soon conquered any nervousness on his part. He and Edith struck up a friendship.
True, he was sixteen and she was nineteen. But he was old for his age and she looked young for hers, and she was neat and small and exceptionally pretty. Certainly she did not share his interest in languages, and she had received only a rather limited education. But her manner was very engaging. They became allies against ‘the Old Lady’, as they called Mrs Faulkner. Edith would persuade Annie the maid to smuggle titbits of food from the kitchen to the hungry boys on the second floor, and when the Old Lady was out, the boys would go to Edith’s room for secret feasts.
Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham tea-shops, especially one that had a balcony overlooking the pavement. There they would sit and throw sugar-lumps into the hats of passers-by, moving to the next table when the sugar-bowl was empty. Later they invented a private whistle-call. When Ronald heard it in the early morning or at bedtime he would go to his window and lean out to see Edith waiting at her own window below.
With two people of their personalities and in their position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909 they decided that they were in love.
Writing to Edith long afterwards, Ronald recalled ‘my first kiss to you and your first kiss to me (which was almost accidental) – and our goodnights when sometimes you were in your little white night-gown, and our absurd long window talks; and how we watched the sun come up over town through the mist and Big Ben toll hour after hour, and the moths almost used to frighten you away – and our whistle-call – and our cycle-rides – and the fire talks – and the three great kisses.’
Ronald was now supposed to be working for an Oxford scholarship, but it was hard to concentrate on classical texts when one half of his mind was occupied with language-inventing and the other with Edith. There was also a new attraction for him at school: the Debating Society, highly popular with the senior boys. He had not yet spoken in debates, perhaps because of his still-squeaky adolescent voice and his reputation, already acquired, as an indistinct talker. But this term, spurred on by a new-found confidence, he made his maiden speech on a motion supporting the objects and tactics of the suffragettes. It was judged a good effort, though the school magazine thought that his talents as a debater were ‘somewhat marred by a faulty delivery’. In another speech, on the motion (probably of his own devising) ‘That this House deplores the occurrence of the Norman Conquest’, he attacked (so the magazine reported) ‘the influx of polysyllabic barbarities which ousted the more honest if humbler native words’; while in a debate on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays he ‘poured a sudden flood of unqualified abuse upon Shakespeare, upon his filthy birthplace, his squalid surroundings, and his sordid character’. He also achieved much success on the Rugby football field. He was thin, almost scrawny, but he had already learnt to compensate for lack of weight by playing with ferocity. Now he made an extra effort, which was rewarded when he got into the school team. Once there, he played as he had never played before. Reflecting on this years later, he ascribed it directly to the impulse of chivalry: ‘Having the romantic upbringing, I made a boy-and-girl affair serious, and made it the source of effort.’
Then one day towards the end of the autumn term of 1909 he arranged secretly with Edith that they should go for a bicycle ride into the countryside. ‘We thought we had managed things very cleverly,’ he wrote. ‘Edith had ridden off on her bicycle nominally to visit her cousin Jennie Grove. After an interval I rode off “to the school sports-ground”, but we reassembled and made for the Lickeys.’ They spent the afternoon on the hills and then went into Rednal village in search of tea, which they were given at a house where Ronald had stayed some months previously while working for his scholarship. Afterwards they rode home, arriving separately at Duchess Road so as not to arouse suspicion. But they had reckoned without gossip. The woman who had given them tea told Mrs Church, the caretaker at the Oratory House, that Master Ronald had been to call and had brought an unknown girl with him. Mrs Church happened to mention it to the cook at the Oratory itself. And the cook, who always liked telling tales, told Father Francis.
Ronald’s guardian had been as a father to him, and his feelings can be imagined when he learnt that the ward on whom he had lavished so much affection, care, and money, was not concentrating his abilities on vital school-work but was (as quickly became apparent upon investigation) conducting a clandestine love affair with a girl three years his senior who was living in the same house. Father Francis summoned Ronald to the Oratory, told him that he was deeply shaken, and demanded that the affair should stop. Then he made arrangements for Ronald and Hilary to move to new lodgings, so as to get Ronald away from the girl.
It may seem strange that Ronald did not simply disobey Father Francis and openly continue the romance. But the social conventions of the time demanded that young people should obey their parents
