The headmaster of Rokeby school who caned me for forgetting my gymnastic shoes loved German culture, and impressed this feeling on the school, so that it stood to my credit that I could speak German and had visited Germany. At my other preparatory schools this German connexion seemed something at least excusable, and perhaps even interesting. Only at Charterhouse did it rank as a social offence. My history from the age of fourteen, when I went to Charterhouse, until just before the end of the war, when I began to think for myself, is a forced rejection of the German in me. I used to insist indignantly on being Irish, and took my self-protective stand on the technical point that solely the father’s nationality counted. Of course, I also accepted the whole patriarchal system of things, convinced of the natural supremacy of male over female. My mother took the ‘love, honour, and obey’ contract literally; my sisters were brought up to wish themselves boys, to be shocked at the idea of woman’s suffrage, and not to expect so expensive an education as their brothers. The final decision in any domestic matter always rested with my father. My mother would say: ‘If two ride together, one must ride behind.’
We children did not talk German well; our genders and minor parts of speech were shaky, and we never learned to read Gothic characters or script. Yet we had the sense of German so strongly that I feel I know German far better than French, though able to read French almost as fast as I can read English, and German only very painfully and slowly, with the help of a dictionary. I use different parts of my mind for the two languages. French is a surface acquirement which I could forget quite easily if I had no reason to speak it every now and then.
5
I SPENT a good part of my early life at Wimbledon. We did not get rid of the house, a big one near the common, until soon after the end of the war; yet I can recall little or nothing of significance that happened there. But after the age of eleven or twelve I was always at some boarding school, and in the spring and summer holidays we went to the country, so that I saw Wimbledon only at Christmas and for a day or two at the beginning and end of the other holidays. London lay half an hour away, yet I seldom went there. We were never taken to the theatre, even to pantomimes, and by the middle of the war I had been to the theatre exactly twice in my life, and then merely to children’s plays, by courtesy of an aunt. My mother brought us up to be serious and to benefit humanity in some practical way, but allowed us no hint of its dirtiness, intrigue, and lustfulness, believing that innocence would be the surest protection against them. She carefully censored our reading. I was destined to be ‘if not a great man, at least a good man’. Our treats were educational or aesthetic: to Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, the Zoo, the British Museum, or the National History Museum. I remember my mother, in the treasure room of the British Museum, telling us with bright eyes that all these wonderful things were ours. We looked at her astonished. She said: ‘Yes, they belong to us as members of the public. We can look at them, admire them, and study them for as long as we like. If we had them back at home, we couldn’t do better. Besides, they might get stolen.’
We read more books than most children do. There must have been four or five thousand books in the house altogether. They consisted of an old-fashioned scholar’s library bequeathed to my father by my namesake, whom I have mentioned as a friend of Wordsworth, but who had a tenderer friendship with Felicia Hemans; to this were added my father’s own collection of books, mostly poetry, with a particular cupboard for Anglo-Irish literature; devotional works contributed by my mother; educational books sent to my father by publishers in the hope that he would recommend them for use in Government schools; and novels and adventure books brought into the house by my elder brothers and sisters.
My mother used to tell us stories about inventors and doctors who gave their lives for the suffering, and poor boys who struggled to the top of the tree, and saintly men who made examples of themselves. Also the parable of the king who had a very beautiful garden which he threw open to the public. Two students entered; and one, of whom my mother spoke with a slight sneer in her voice, noticed occasional weeds even in the tulip-beds; but the other (and here she brightened up) found beautiful flowers even on rubbish heaps. She kept off the subject of war as much as possible, always finding it difficult to explain how it was that God permitted wars. The Boer War clouded my early childhood: Philip, my eldest brother (who called himself a Fenian), also called himself a pro-Boer, and I remember great tension at the breakfast-table between him and my father, whose political views were never extreme.
The eventual sale of the Wimbledon house solved a good many problems. My mother hated throwing away anything that could possibly, in the most remote contingency, be of any service to anyone and, after twenty-five years, lumber had piled high. The medicine-cupboard was perhaps the most tell-tale corner of the house. Nobody could call it untidy; all the bottles had stoppers, but stood so crowded together that nobody except my mother, who had a long memory, could recognize the ones at the back. Every few years, no doubt, she went through them. Any doubtful bottle she would tentatively re-label: ‘This must be Alfred’s old bunion salve,’ or ‘Strychnine – query?’ Even special medicines prescribed for scarlet fever or whooping cough were kept, in case of re-infection. An energetic labeller, she wrote in one of my school prizes: ‘Robert Ranke Graves won this book as a prize for being first in his class in the term’s work and second in examinations. He also won a special prize for divinity, though the youngest boy in the class. Written by his affectionate mother, Amy Graves. Summer, 1908.’ Home-made jam used always to arrive at table well documented. One small pot read: ‘Gooseberry, lemon, and rhubarb – a little shop-gooseberry added – Nelly re-boiled.’
Three sayings and a favourite story of my mother’s:
‘Children, I command you, as your mother, never to swing objects around in your hands. The King of Hanover put out his eye by swinging a bead purse.’
‘Children, I command you, as your mother, to be careful when you carry your candles upstairs. The candle is a little cup of grease.’
‘There was a man once, a Frenchman, who died of grief because he could never become a mother.’
She used to tell the story by candle-light:
There was once a peasant family living in Schleswig-Holstein, where they all have crooked mouths. One night they wished to blow out the candle. The father’s mouth was twisted to the left, so! and he tried to blow out the candle, so! but he was too proud to stand anywhere but directly before the candle, so he puffed and he puffed but could not blow the candle out. And then the mother tried, but her mouth was twisted to the right, so! and she tried to blow, so! and she was too proud to stand anywhere but directly before the candle, and she puffed and puffed, but could not blow the candle out. Then there was the brother with mouth twisted upward, so! and the sister with the mouth twisted downward so! and they tried each in turn, so! and so! and the idiot baby with his mouth twisted in an eternal grin, so! At last the maid, a beautiful girl from Copenhagen with a perfectly formed mouth, put it out with her shoe. So! Flap!
These quotations make it clear how much I owe, as a writer, to my mother. She also taught me to ‘speak the truth and shame the devil!’ Her favourite Biblical exhortation went: ‘My son, whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.’
I always considered Wimbledon a wrong place: neither town nor country. The house was at its worst on Wednesday, my mother’s ‘At Home’ day. We went down in our Sunday clothes to eat cakes in the drawing-room, be kissed, and behave politely. My sisters had to recite. Around Christmas, celebrated in the German style, came a dozen or so children’s parties; we would make ourselves sick with excitement. I don’t like thinking of Wimbledon.
Every spring and summer, unless we happened to visit Germany, or France as we did once, we went to Harlech in North Wales. My mother had built a house there. Before motor traffic reached the North Welsh coast, Harlech was a very quiet place and little known, even as a golf centre. It consisted of three parts. First, the vi
llage itself, five hundred feet up on a steep range of hills: granite houses with slate roofs and ugly windows and gables, chapels of seven or eight different denominations, enough shops to make it the marketing centre of the smaller villages around, and the castle, a favourite playground of ours. Second, the Morfa, a flat sandy plain from which the sea had receded; part of this formed the golf links, but to the north lay a stretch of wild country which we used to search in the spring for plovers’ eggs. The seaside stretched beyond the links – good, hard sand for miles, safe bathing, sandhills for hide-and-seek.
The third part of Harlech was never visited by golfers or the few other summer visitors, and seldom by the village people themselves: the desolate, rocky hill-country at the back of the village. As we grew older, we spent more and more of our time up here, and less and less on the beach and the links. There were occasional farms and crofts in these hills, but one could easily walk fifteen or twenty miles without crossing a road, or passing close to a farm. Originally we went up with some practical excuse. For the blueberries on the hills near Maes-y-garnedd; or the cranberries at Gwlawllyn; or bits of Roman hypocaust tiling (with the potter’s thumb-marks still on them) in the ruined Roman villas by Castell Tomen-y-mur; or globe flowers on the banks of the upper Artro; or a sight of the wild goats which lived behind Rhinog Fawr, the biggest of the hills in the next range; or raspberries from the thickets near Cwmbychan Lake; or white heather from a nameless hill, away to the north of the Roman Steps. But after a time we visited those hills simply because they were good to walk about on. Their penny-plain quality pleased us even more than the twopence-coloured quality of the Bavarian Alps. My best friend at the time, my sister Rosaleen, was one year older than myself.
This country (and I know no country like it) seemed to be independent of formal nature. One hardly noticed the passage of the seasons there; the wind always blew across the stunted grass, the black streams always ran cold and clear, over black stones. The mountain sheep were wild and free, capable of scrambling over a six-foot stone wall (unlike the slow, heavy, smutty-fleeced Southdown flocks that fattened in the fields beyond Wimbledon) and, when in repose, easily mistaken for the lichen-covered granite boulders strewn everywhere. Few trees grew except hazels, rowans, stunted oaks, and thorn bushes in the valleys. Winters were always mild, so that last year’s bracken and last year’s heather survived in a faded way through to the next spring. We saw hardly any birds, bar an occasional buzzard, and curlews wheeling in the distance; and wherever we went the rocky skeleton of the hill seemed only an inch or two beneath the turf.
Having no Welsh blood in us, we felt little temptation to learn Welsh, still less to pretend ourselves Welsh, but knew that country as a quite ungeographical region. Any stray sheep-farmers whom we met seemed intruders on our privacy. Clarissa, Rosaleen, and I were once out on the remotest hills and had not seen a soul all day. At last we came to a waterfall and found two trout lying on the bank beside it; ten yards away stood the fisherman, disentangling his line from a thorn-bush. He had not seen us, so I crept up quietly to the fish and put a sprig of white bell-heather (which we had picked that afternoon) in the mouth of each. We hurried back to cover, and I asked: ‘Shall we watch?’ But Clarissa said: ‘No, don’t spoil it.’ We came home and never spoke of it again, even to each other: and never knew the sequel….
Had this been Ireland, we should have self-consciously learned Irish and local legends; but we did not go to Ireland, except once when I was an infant in arms. Instead we came to know Wales more purely, as a place with a history too old for local legends; while walking there we made up our own. We decided who lay buried under the Standing Stone, and who had lived in the ruined round-hut encampment, and in the caves of the valley where the big rowans grew. On our visits to Germany I had felt a sense of home in a natural human way, but above Harlech I found a personal peace independent of history or geography. The first poem I wrote as myself concerned those hills. (The first poem I wrote as a Graves was a neat translation of one of Catullus’s satires.)
Our busy and absent-minded father would never worry about us children; our mother did worry. Yet she allowed us to go off into the hills immediately after breakfast, and did not complain much when we came back long after supper-time. Though she had a bad head for heights, she never restrained us from climbing in dangerous places; and we never got hurt. Having a bad head for heights myself, I trained myself deliberately and painfully to overcome it. We used to go climbing in the turrets and towers of Harlech Castle. I have worked hard on myself in defining and dispersing my terrors. The simple fear of heights was the first to be overcome.
A quarry-face in the garden of our Harlech house provided one or two easy climbs, but gradually I invented more and more difficult ones. With each new success behind me I would lie down, twitching with nervousness, in the safe meadow grass at the top. Once I lost my foothold on a ledge and should have been killed; but it seemed as though I improvised a foothold in the air and kicked myself up to safety from it. When I examined the place afterwards, I recalled the Devil’s Temptation to Jesus: the freedom to cast oneself from the rock and be restored to safety by the angels. Yet such events are not uncommon in mountain climbing. My friend George Mallory, for instance, who later disappeared close to the summit of Mount Everest, once did an inexplicable climb on Snowdon. He had left his pipe on a ledge, half-way down one of the Lliwedd precipices, and scrambled back by a short cut to retrieve it, then up again by the same route. No one saw what route he took, but when they came to examine it the next day for official record, they found an overhang nearly all the way. By a rule of the Climbers’ Club climbs are never named in honour of their inventors, but only describe natural features. An exception was made here. The climb was recorded as follows: ‘Mallory’s Pipe, a variation on Route 2; see adjoining map. This climb is totally impossible. It has been perfomed once, in failing light, by Mr G. H. L. Mallory.’
6
LET me begin my account of Charterhouse School by recalling the day that I left, a week before the outbreak of war. I discussed my feelings with Nevill Barbour, then Head of the School. First, we agreed that there were perhaps even more typical public schools than Charterhouse in existence, but that we preferred not to believe it. Next, that no possible remedy could be found, because tradition was so strong that to break it one would have to dismiss the whole school and staff, and start all over again. However, even this would not be enough, the school buildings being so impregnated with what passed as the public school spirit, but what we felt as fundamental evil, that they would have to be demolished and the school rebuilt elsewhere under a different name. Finally, that our only regret at leaving the place was that for the last year we had been in a position, as members of the Sixth Form, to do more or less what we pleased. Now we were both going on to St John’s College, Oxford, which promised to be merely a more boisterous repetition of Charterhouse. We should be freshmen there, but would naturally refuse to be hearty and public schoolish, and therefore be faced with the stupidity of having our rooms raided, and being forced to lose our temper and hurt somebody and get hurt ourselves. There would be no peace probably until we reached our third year, when we should be back again in the same sort of position as now, and in the same sort of position as in our last year at our preparatory school. ‘In 1917,’ said Nevill, ‘the official seal will be put on all this dreariness. We’ll get our degrees, and then have to start as new boys again in some dreadful profession.’
‘Correct,’ I told him.
‘My God,’ he said, turning to me suddenly, ‘I can’t stand the prospect. Something has to be put in between me and Oxford; I must at least go abroad for the whole vacation.’
Three months were not long enough, to my mind. I had a vague thought of running away to sea.
‘Do you realize,’ Nevill asked me, ‘that we have spent fourteen years of our lives principally at Latin and Greek, not even competently taught, and that we’re now going to start another three years of the sam
e thing?’
Yet when we had said our very worst of Charterhouse, I reminded him, or he me, I forget which: ‘Of course, the trouble is that at any given time one always finds at least two really decent masters in the school, among the forty or fifty, and ten really decent fellows among the five or six hundred. We shall always remember them, and have Lot’s feeling about not damning Sodom for the sake of ten persons. And in another twenty years’ time we’ll forget this conversation and think that we were mistaken, and that perhaps everybody, with a few criminal exceptions, was fairly average decent, and say: “I was a young fool then, insisting on impossible perfection,” and we’ll send our sons to Charterhouse for sentiment’s sake, and they’ll go through all we did.’
This must not be construed as an attack on my old school; it is merely a record of my mood at the time. No doubt, I was unappreciative of the hard knocks and character-training that public schools are advertised as providing; and a typical Old Carthusian remarked to me recently: ‘The moral tone of the school has improved out of all recognition since those days.’ But so it always will have.
As a matter of fact I did not go up to Oxford until five years later, in 1919, when my brother Charles, four years younger than myself, was already in residence; and did not take my degree until 1926, by which time my brother John had caught up with me, though eight years younger than myself.
From my first moment at Charterhouse I suffered an oppression of spirit that I hesitate to recall in its full intensity. Something like being in that chilly cellar at Laufzorn among the potatoes, but a potato out of a different sack from the rest. The school consisted of about six hundred boys, whose chief interests were games and romantic friendships. Everyone despised school-work; the scholars were not concentrated in a single dormitory house as at Winchester or Eton, but divided among ten, and known as ‘pro’s’. Unless good at games, and able to pretend that they hated work even more than the non-scholars, and ready whenever called on to help these with their work, they always had a bad time. I happened to be a scholar who really liked work, and the apathy of the class-rooms surprised and disappointed me. My first term, I was left alone more or less, it being a rule that new boys should be neither encouraged nor baited. The other boys seldom addressed me except to send me on errands, or coldly point out breaches of school convention.