in the hands of others.’ Moreover time spent away would be on half pay, and he could not easily afford this in addition to the expense of the voyage. So he decided to stay in Bloemfontein for the time being and to join his wife and children in England a little later. Ronald watched his father painting A. R. Tolkien on the lid of a family trunk. It was the only clear memory of him that the boy retained.
The S.S. Guelph carried Mabel and the boys from South Africa at the beginning of April 1895. In Ronald’s mind there would remain no more than a few words of Afrikaans and a faint recollection of a dry dusty barren landscape, while Hilary was too young even to remember this. Three weeks later, Mabel’s little sister Jane, now a grown woman, met them at Southampton; and in a few hours they were all in Birmingham and cramming into the tiny family house in King’s Heath. Mabel’s father was as jolly as ever, cracking jokes and making dreadful puns, and her mother was kind and understanding. They stayed on, and the spring and summer passed with a marked improvement in Ronald’s health; but though Arthur wrote to say that he missed his wife and children very badly and was longing to come and join them, there was always something to detain him.
Then in November came the news that he had contracted rheumatic fever. He had already partially recovered, but he could not face an English winter and would have to regain his health before he could make the journey. Mabel spent a desperately anxious Christmas, though Ronald enjoyed himself and was fascinated by the sight of his first Christmas tree, which was very different from the wilting eucalyptus that had adorned Bank House the previous December.
When January came, Arthur was reported to be still in poor health, and Mabel decided that she must go back to Bloemfontein and care for him. Arrangements were made, and an excited Ronald dictated a letter to his father which was written out by the nurse.
9 Ashfield Road, King’s Heath, February 14th 1896.
My dear Daddy,
I am so glad I am coming back to see you it is such a long time since we came away from you I hope the ship will bring us all back to you Mamie and Baby and me. I know you will be so glad to have a letter from your little Ronald it is such a long time since I wrote to you I am got such a big man now because I have got a man’s coat and a man’s bodice Mamie says you will not know Baby or me we have got such big men we have got such a lot of Christmas presents to show you Auntie Gracie has been to see us I walk every day and only ride in my mailcart a little bit. Hilary sends lots of love and kisses and so does your loving
Ronald.
This letter was never sent, for a telegram arrived to say that Arthur had suffered a severe haemorrhage and Mabel must expect the worst. Next day, 15 February 1896, he was dead. By the time a full account of his last hours had reached his widow, his body had been buried in the Anglican graveyard at Bloemfontein, five thousand miles from Birmingham.
When the first state of shock was over, Mabel Tolkien knew that she must make decisions. She and the two boys could not stay for ever in her parents’ crowded little suburban villa, yet she scarcely had the resources to establish an independent household. For all his hard work and conscientious saving, Arthur had only amassed a modest sum of capital which was chiefly invested in Bonanza Mines, and though the dividend was high it would not bring her an income of more than thirty shillings a week, scarcely sufficient to maintain herself and two children even at the lowest standard of living. There was also the question of the boys’ education. Probably she could manage this herself for some years, for she knew Latin, French, and German, and could paint, draw, and play the piano. Later when Ronald and Hilary were old enough they must take the entrance examination for King Edward’s School, Birmingham, which Arthur had attended and which was the best grammar school in the city. Meanwhile she must find cheap accommodation that she could rent. There were plenty of lodgings to be had in Birmingham, but the boys needed fresh air and the countryside, a home that could make them happy despite their poverty. She began to search through the advertisements.
Ronald, now in his fifth year, was slowly adjusting to life under his grandparents’ roof. He had almost forgotten his father, whom he would soon come to regard as belonging to an almost legendary past. The change from Bloemfontein to Birmingham had confused him, and sometimes he expected to see the verandah of Bank House jutting out from his grandparents’ home in Ashfield Road; but as the weeks passed and memories of South Africa began to fade, he took more notice of the adults around him. His Uncle Willie and his Aunt Jane were still living at home, and there was also a lodger, a sandy-haired insurance clerk who sat on the stairs singing ‘Polly-Wolly-Doodle’ to the accompaniment of a banjo, and making eyes at Jane. The family thought him common, and they were horrified when she became engaged to him. Ronald secretly longed for a banjo.
In the evening his grandfather would return from a day spent tramping the streets of Birmingham and cajoling orders for Jeyes Fluid from shopkeepers and factory managers. John Suffield had a long beard and seemed very old. He was sixty-three, and he vowed that he would live to be a hundred. A very jolly man, he did not seem to object to earning his living as a commercial traveller, even though he had once managed his own drapery shop in the city centre. Sometimes he would take a sheet of paper and a pen with an extra fine nib. Then he would draw a circle around a six-pence, and in this little space would write in fine copperplate the words of the entire Lord’s Prayer. His ancestors had been engravers and plate-makers, which was perhaps why he had inherited this skill; he would talk with pride about how King William IV had given the family a coat of arms because they did fine work for him, and how Lord Suffield was a distant relative (which was not true).
So it was that Ronald began to learn the ways of the Suffield family. He came to feel far closer to them than to the family of his dead father. His Tolkien grandfather lived only a little way up the road, and sometimes Ronald was taken to see him; but John Benjamin Tolkien was eighty-nine and had been badly shaken by his son’s death. Six months after Arthur died, the old man was in his own grave, and another of the boy’s links with the Tolkiens was severed.
There was, however, Ronald’s Aunt Grace, his father’s younger sister, who told him stories of the Tolkien ancestors: stories which sounded improbable but which were, said Aunt Grace, firmly based on fact. She alleged that the family name had originally been ‘von Hohenzollern’, for they had emanated from the Hohenzollern district of the Holy Roman Empire. A certain George von Hohenzollern had, she said, fought on the side of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at the Siege of Vienna in 1529. He had shown great daring in leading an unofficial raid against the Turks and capturing the Sultan’s standard. This (said Aunt Grace) was why he was given the nickname Tollkühn, ‘foolhardy’; and the name stuck. The family was also supposed to have connections with France and to have intermarried with the nobility in that country, where they acquired a French version of their nickname, du Téméraire. Opinion differed among the Tolkiens as to why and when their ancestors had come t England. The more prosaic said it was in 1756 to escape the Prussian invasion of Saxony, where they had lands. Aunt Grace preferred the more romantic (if implausible) story of how one of the du Téméraires had fled across the Channel in 1794 to escape the guillotine, apparently then assuming a form of the old name, ‘Tolkien’. This gentleman was reputedly an accomplished harpsichordist and clock-repairer. Certainly the story – typical of the kind of tale that middle-class families tell about their origins – gave colour to the presence of Tolkiens in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century, making their living as clock and watch manufacturers and piano-makers. And it was as a piano-maker and music-seller that John Benjamin Tolkien, Arthur’s father, had come to Birmingham and set up business some years later.
The Tolkiens always liked to tell stories that gave a romantic colouring to their origins; but whatever the truth of those stories the family was at the time of Ronald’s childhood entirely
