I have kept a record of our talk with him. He welcomed us as representatives of the post-war generation, claiming to live such a quiet life at Dorchester that he feared he was altogether behind the times. He wanted, for instance, to know whether we had any sympathy with the Bolshevik regime, and whether he could trust the Morning Post’s account of the Red Terror. Then he asked about Nancy’s hair, which she wore short, in advance of the fashion, and why she kept her own name. His comment on the name question was: ‘Why, you are old-fashioned! I knew an old couple here sixty years ago who did the same. The woman was called Nanny Priddle (descendant of an ancient family, the Paradelles, long decayed into peasantry), and she would never change her name either.’ Then he wanted to know why I no longer used my army rank. I explained that I had resigned my commission. ‘But you have a right to it; I should certainly keep my rank if I had one, and feel very proud to be called Captain Hardy.’
He told us that he was now engaged in restoring a Norman font in a church near by – only the bowl, but he enjoyed doing a bit of his old work again. Nancy mentioned that our children were not baptized. Interested, but not scandalized, he remarked that his mother had always said that, at any rate, there could be no harm in baptism, and that she would not like her children to blame her in after-life for leaving any duty to them undone. ‘I have usually found that what my mother said was right.’ He told us that, to his mind, the new generation of clergymen were very much better than the last… Though he now went to church only three times a year – one visit to each of the three neighbouring churches – he could not forget that in his boyhood the church had been the centre of all musical, literary, and artistic education in a village, He talked about the string-orchestras at Wessex churches, in one of which his father, grandfather, and he himself had taken part; and regretted their disappearance. He mentioned that the clergyman who appears as Mr St Clair in Tess of the D‘Urbervilles had protested to the War Office about the Sunday brass-band performances at the Dorchester Barracks, and been the cause of headquarters’ no longer being sent to this very popular station.
We took tea in the drawing-room which, like the rest of the house, was cluttered with furniture and ornaments. Hardy had an affection for accumulated possessions, and Mrs Hardy loved him too well to suggest that anything at all should be removed. With a cup of tea in his hand, he made jokes about bishops at the Athenaeum Club and imitated their episcopal tones when they ordered: ‘China tea and a little bread and butter.’ ‘Yes, my lord!’ Apparently, he considered bishops fair game, but soon began censuring Sir Edmund Gosse, who had recently stayed with them, for a breach of good taste in imitating his old friend Henry James’s way of drinking soup. Loyalty to his friends was always a passion with Hardy.
After tea we went into the garden, where he asked to see some of my new poems. I fetched him one, and he wondered whether he might offer a suggestion: the phrase ‘the scent of thyme’, which occurred in it was, he said, one of the clichés which poets of his generation had studied to avoid. Could I perhaps alter it? When I replied that his contemporaries had avoided it so well that I could now use it without offence, he withdrew the objection.
‘Do you write easily?’ he inquired.
‘This poem is in its sixth draft and will probably be finished in two more.’
‘Why!’ he said, ‘I have never in my life taken more than three, or perhaps four, drafts for a poem. I am afraid of it losing its freshness.’
He said that he could once sit down and write novels by a time-table, but that poetry always came to him by accident, which perhaps was why he prized it more highly.
He spoke disparagingly of his novels, though admitting that he had enjoyed writing certain chapters. As we walked around the garden, Hardy paused at a spot near the greenhouse. He had once been pruning a tree when an idea for a story suddenly entered his head. The best story he had ever conceived, and it came complete with characters, setting, and even some of the dialogue. But not having pencil or paper with him, and wanting to finish his pruning before the weather broke, he took no notes. By the time he sat down at his table to recall the story, all was utterly gone. ‘Always carry a pencil and paper,’ he said, adding: ‘Of course, even if I remembered that story now, I couldn’t write it. I’m past novel-writing. But I often wonder what it can have been.’
That night at dinner he grew enthusiastic in praise of cyder, which he had drunk since a boy, as the finest medicine he knew. I suggested that in his Message to the American People, which he had just been asked to write, he might take the opportunity to recommend cyder.
Hardy complained of autograph-hunters and their persistence. He did not like leaving letters unanswered, and if he did so, these people pestered him the more. He was upset that morning by a letter from an autograph-fiend, which began:
Dear Mr Hardy,
I am interested to know why the devil you don’t reply to my request…
He asked me for advice, and jumped at the suggestion that a mythical secretary should reply offering his autograph at one or two guineas, the amount to be sent to a hospital – ‘Swanage Children’s Hospital’, he put in – which would forward a receipt.
He regarded professional critics as parasites, no less noxious than autograph-hunters, wished the world rid of them, and also regretted having listened to them as a young man; on their advice he had cut out from his early poems dialect-words which possessed no ordinary English equivalents. And still the critics were plaguing him. One of them complained of a line: ‘his shape smalled in the distance.’ Now, what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed a little. Once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and found it there right enough – only to read on and discover that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of early literary influences, saying that these were negligible because he did not come of literary stock. But he admitted that a fellow-apprentice in the architect’s office where he worked as a young man used to lend him books. (His taste in literature was certainly most unexpected. Once, a few years later, when Lawrence ventured to say something disparaging about Homer’s Iliad, he protested: ‘Oh, but I admire it greatly. Why, it’s in the Mannion class!’ Lawrence at first thought that Hardy was having a little joke.)
We left the next day, after another of Hardy’s attacks on the critics at breakfast. He complained that they accused him of pessimism. One critic singled out as an example of gloom his poem on the woman whose house burned down on her wedding night. ‘Of course it’s a humorous piece,’ said Hardy, ‘and the man must have been thick-witted not to see that. On reading his criticism, I went through my last collection of poems with a pencil, marking them S, N, and C according as they were sad, neutral, or cheerful. I found them in pretty equal proportions; which nobody could call pessimism.’
In his opinion, vers libre could come to nothing in England. ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us.’ Of his own poems he told me that, once written, he cared very little what happened to them.
He described his war-work, rejoicing to have been chairman of the Anti-Profiteering Committee, and to have succeeded in bringing a number of rascally Dorchester tradesmen to book. ‘It made me unpopular, of course,’ he admitted, ‘but it was a hundred times better than sitting on a Military Tribunal and sending young men to the war who did not want to go.’
We never saw Hardy again, though he gave us a standing invitation to stay with him.
From Dorchester we bicycled to Tiverton in Devonshire, where Nancy’s old nurse kept a fancy-goods shop. Nancy helped her dress the shop-window, and advised her about framing the prints which she was selling. She also gave the shop a good turn-out, dusted the stock, and took her turn behind the counter. As a result of Nancy’s work, the week’s receipts went up several shillings and continued at the improved figure for a week or two after we were gone. This g
ave Nancy the idea of starting a shop herself on Boar’s Hill, a large residential district with no shop nearer than three miles away. We could buy a second-hand army hut, stock it with confectionery, groceries, tobacco, hardware, medicines, and all the other things that one finds in a village shop, run it tidily and economically, and make our fortune. I promised to help her while the vacation lasted.
But army huts could not be bought at any reasonable price (the timber-merchants were in a ring); so a local carpenter built a shop to Nancy’s design. A neighbour rented us a corner of his field close to the road. The work got finished in good time, and we bought the stock. The Daily Mirror advertised the opening on its front page with the heading ‘SHOP-KEEPING ON PARNASSUS’ and crowds came up from Oxford to look at us. We soon began to realize that it must either be a large general shop which made Boar’s Hill more or less independent of Oxford (and of the unsatisfactory system of vans calling at the door and bringing inferior foods with ‘take it or leave it’), or a small sweet and tobacco shop that offered no challenge to the Oxford tradesmen. We decided on the challenge. The building had to be enlarged, and two or three hundred pounds’ worth of stock purchased. I used to serve in the shop several hours of the day, while Nancy went round to the big houses for the daily orders. Term had now begun, and I should have been attending lectures in Oxford. Another caricature scene: myself, wearing a green-baize apron this time, with flushed face and disordered hair, selling a packet of Bird’s Eye tobacco to the Poet Laureate with one hand, and with the other weighing out half a pound of brown sugar for Sir Arthur Evans’s gardener’s wife.
Finally, the shop business ousted everything, not only Nancy’s painting but my University work, and Nancy’s proper supervision of the house and children. We engaged a boy to call for orders, and soon had the custom of every resident on Boar’s Hill, except two or three. Even Mrs Masefield used to visit us once a week. She always bought the same tin of sink-powder and packet of soap-flakes, paying money down from a cash-box which she carried with her. The moral problems of trade interested me. Nancy and I both found it very difficult at this time of fluctuating prices to be really honest; we could not resist the temptation of under-charging the poor villagers of Wootton, who were frequent customers, and recovering our money from the richer residents. Playing at Robin Hood came easily to me. Nobody ever detected the fraud; it was as easy as shelling peas, the boy said, who also took his turn behind the counter. We found that most people bought tea by price and not by quality. If we happened to be out of the tea, selling at ninepence a quarter, which Mrs So-and-so always bought, refusing the eightpenny tea, and if Mrs So-and-so asked for it in a hurry, we used to make up a pound of the sevenpenny, which was the same colour as the ninepenny, and charge it at ninepence. The difference would not be noticed.
We felt sorry for commercial travellers who sweated up the hill with their heavy bags of samples, usually on foot, and had to be sent away without any order. They would pitch a hard-luck tale, and often we relented and got in more stock than we needed. In gratitude they would tell us some of the tricks of the trade, advising us, for instance, never to cut cheese or bacon exactly to weight, but to make it an ounce or two more and over charge for this extra piece. ‘There’s few can do the sum before you take the stuff off the scales, and there’s fewer still who take the trouble to weigh up again when they get back home.’
The shop lasted six months. Prices began falling at the rate of about five per cent every week, the stock on our shelves had depreciated greatly in value, we had let several of the Wootton villagers run up bad debts. Then I went down with influenza, at the same time as Nancy quarrelled with the nurse and had to take the house and children herself. When we came to reckon things up, we decided to cut our losses; hoping to recoup the original expenditure, and even to be in pocket on the whole transaction, by selling the shop and goodwill to a large firm of Oxford grocers who wished to buy it as a branch establishment. Unfortunately, however, the site was not ours, and Mrs Masefield prevailed on the landlord not to let any ordinary business firm take over the shop from us, and thus spoil local amenities. No other site being available, we had to sell off what stock remained at bankruptcy prices to the wholesalers, and find a buyer for the building. Unfortunately again, the building was not made in bolted sections to be re-erected elsewhere; it could be sold only as timber, and during these six months the corner in timber had also been broken and prices fallen steeply. We recovered twenty pounds of the two hundred that had been spent on it, but were some five hundred pounds in debt to the wholesalers and others. A lawyer took everything in hand for us, and disposed of our assets; finally reducing the debt to some three hundred pounds. Nicholson sent Nancy a hundred-pound note (in a match-box) as his contribution, and Lawrence unexpectedly contributed the remainder. He gave me four chapters of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to sell for serial publication in the United States. As a point of honour, Lawrence refused to make any money out of the Revolt, even in the most indirect way; but if it could help a poet in difficulties, he saw no harm in that.
We gave the Masefields notice that the cottage would be free by the end of the June quarter 1921; but did not have any idea where to go, or what to do next. It seemed clear that we must get another cottage somewhere, live quietly, look after the children ourselves, and try to make what money we needed by writing and drawing. Nancy, who had taken charge of everything while I was ill, now set me the task of getting the cottage. It must be found in three weeks’ time.
I protested: ‘But you know there isn’t a single cottage for rent anywhere.’
‘Yes, but we simply have to get one.’
‘All right, then, describe it in detail. Since there are no cottages, we might as well get a no-cottage that we really like.’
‘Well, it must have six rooms, water indoors, a beamed attic, a walled-in garden, and it must be near the river. It must be in a village with shops, and yet a little removed from the village. The village must lie five or six miles from Oxford in the opposite direction from Boar’s Hill. The church must have a tower and not a spire – I’ve always hated spires. And we can afford only ten shillings a week unfurnished.’
I took down other details about soil, sanitation, windows, stairs, and kitchen sinks; laid a ruler across the Oxford ordnance map, and found five riverside villages which corresponded in general direction and distance with Nancy’s stipulation. Of these five villages, two proved on inquiry to possess shops; and, of these two, one had a towered church and the other a spired church.
I went to a firm of house-agents in Oxford and asked: ‘Have you any cottages to let unfurnished?’
The clerk laughed politely. ‘What I want is a cottage just outside the village of Islip, with a walled garden, six rooms, water in the house, a beamed attic, and at a rent of ten shillings a week.’
‘Oh, you mean the World’s End cottage? But that’s for sale, not for rent. However, it’s failed to find a buyer for two years, so perhaps the owner will let it go now at five hundred pounds, which is only half of what he originally asked.’
The next day Nancy came to Islip with me. She looked around and said: ‘Yes, this is the cottage all right, but I shall have to cut down the cypress trees, and change those window-panes. We’ll move in on quarter-day.’
‘But the money! We haven’t the money.’
Nancy answered: ‘If we could find the exact house, surely we can find a mere lump sum of money?’
She was right. My mother very kindly bought the cottage for five hundred pounds and let it to us at ten shillings a week.
29
MY mother, in letting us the Islip house, put a clause in the agreement that it must be used as a residence only, and not for the carrying on of any trade or business. She wanted to guard herself against any further commercial enterprise on our part; but need not have worried – we had learned our lesson. Islip, an agricultural village, lay far enough from Oxford not to be contaminated with the roguery for which the outskirts of most uni
versity towns are notorious. The policeman led an easy life. During the four years we lived there nothing of ours was ever stolen, and no Islip cottager cheated or offended us. Once, by mistake, I left my bicycle at the station for two days and, when I recovered it, not only were both lamps, the pump, and the repair outfit still in place, but an anonymous friend had even cleaned it.
Every Saturday during the winter months I played football for the village team. We ex-soldiers reintroduced the game at Islip after a lapse of some eighty years. The village nonagenarian complained that football was not so manly now as in his boyhood. He pointed across the fields to a couple of aged willow trees: ‘Them used to be our home goals,’ he said. ‘T’other pair stood half a mile upstream. Constable stopped our play in the end. Three men were killed in the last game – one kicked to death; t’other two drowned each other in a scrimmage. Her was a grand game.’ I found Islip football, though not unmanly, ladylike by comparison with the Charterhouse game. When playing centre-forward, I often got booed for charging the goalkeeper as he fumbled with the shot he had saved. The cheers were reserved for my inside-left, who spent most of his time stylishly dribbling the ball in circles round and round the field until robbed of it; he seldom went anywhere near the goal. But the football club was democratic, unlike the cricket club. I played cricket the first season, but resigned because the team seldom consisted of the best eleven men available; regular players would be dropped to make room for visiting gentry.