Читать книгу J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography - Humphrey Carpenter - Страница 10

‘My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.’

Ronald Tolkien wrote this nine years after his mother’s death. It is some indication of the way in which he associated her with his membership of the Catholic Church. Indeed it might be said that after she died his religion took the place in his affections that she had previously occupied. The consolation that it provided was emotional as well as spiritual. Perhaps her death also had a cementing effect on his study of languages. It was she, after all, who had been his first teacher and who had encouraged him to take an interest in words. Now that she was gone he would pursue that path relentlessly. And certainly the loss of his mother had a profound effect on his personality. It made him into a pessimist.

Or rather, it made him into two people. He was by nature a cheerful almost irrepressible person with a great zest for life. He loved good talk and physical activity. He had a deep sense of humour and a great capacity for making friends. But from now onwards there was to be a second side, more private but predominant in his diaries and letters. This side of him was capable of bouts of profound despair. More precisely, and more closely related to his mother’s death, when he was in this mood he had a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won for ever.

Mabel Tolkien was buried in the Catholic churchyard at Bromsgrove. Over her grave Father Francis Morgan placed a stone cross of the same design as that used for each of the Oratory clergy in their Rednal cemetery. In her will Mabel had appointed him to be guardian of her two sons, and it proved a wise choice, for he displayed unfailing generosity and affection to them. His generosity took a practical form, for he had a private income from his family’s sherry business, and since as an Oratorian he was not obliged to surrender his property to the community he could use his money for his own purposes. Mabel had left only eight hundred pounds of invested capital with which to support the boys, but Father Francis quietly augmented this from his own pocket, and ensured that Ronald and Hilary did not go short of anything essential for their well-being.

Immediately after their mother’s death he had to find somewhere for them to live: a tricky problem, for while ideally they should be housed by their own relatives there was a danger that the Suffield and Tolkien aunts and uncles might try to snatch them from the grasp of the Catholic Church. Already there had been some talk of contesting Mabel’s will and of sending the boys to a Protestant boarding-school. There was however one relative, an aunt by marriage, who had no particular religious views and had a room to let. She lived in Birmingham near the Oratory, and Father Francis decided that her house would be as good a home as any for the moment. So a few weeks after their mother’s death Ronald and Hilary (now aged thirteen and eleven) moved into their aunt’s top-floor bedroom.

Her name was Beatrice Suffield. She lived in a dark house in Stirling Road, a long side-street in the district of Edgbaston. The boys had a large room to themselves, and Hilary was happy leaning out of the window and throwing stones at cats below. But Ronald, still numb from the shock of his mother’s death, hated the view of almost unbroken rooftops with the factory chimneys beyond. The green countryside was just visible in the distance, but it now belonged to a remote past that could not be regained. He was trapped in the city. His mother’s death had severed him from the open air, from Lickey Hill where he had gathered bilberries, and from the Rednal cottage where they had been so happy. And because it was the loss of his mother that had taken him away from all these things, he came to associate them with her. His feelings towards the rural landscape, already sharp from the earlier severance that had taken him from Sarehole, now became emotionally charged with personal bereavement. This love for the memory of the countryside of his youth was later to become a central part of his writing, and it was intimately bound up with his love for the memory of his mother.

Aunt Beatrice gave him and his brother board and lodging, but little more. She had been widowed not long before, and she was childless and poorly off. Sadly, she was also deficient in affection, and she showed little understanding of the boys’ state of mind. One day Ronald came into her kitchen, saw a pile of ashes in the grate, and discovered that she had burnt all his mother’s personal papers and letters. She had never considered that he might wish to keep them.

Fortunately the Oratory was near, and it soon became Ronald and Hilary’s real home. Early in the morning they would hurry round to serve mass for Father Francis at his favourite side-altar in the Oratory church. Afterwards they would eat breakfast in the plain refectory, and then, when they had played their usual game of spinning the kitchen cat around in the revolving food-hatch, they would set off for school. Hilary had passed the entrance examination and was now at King Edward’s, and the two boys would walk together down to New Street if there was time, or would take a horse-bus if the clock at Five Ways showed that they were late.

Ronald made many friends at school, and one boy in particular soon became an inseparable companion. His name was Christopher Wiseman. A year younger than Ronald, he was the son of a Wesleyan minister who lived in Edgbaston; he had fair hair, a broad good-natured face, and an energetically critical manner. The two boys met in the Fifth Class in the autumn of 1905, Tolkien achieving first place in the class – he was now showing distinct academic promise – and Wiseman coming second. This rivalry soon developed into a friendship based on a shared interest in Latin and Greek, a great delight in Rugby football (‘soccer’ was never played at King Edward’s), and an enthusiasm for discussing anything and everything. Wiseman was a staunch Methodist, but the two boys found that they could argue about religion without bitterness.

Together they moved class by class up the school. Clearly Ronald Tolkien had an aptitude for languages – his mother had seen that – and King Edward’s provided the ideal environment in which this aptitude could flourish. The study of Latin and Greek was the backbone of the curriculum, and both languages were taught particularly well in the First (or senior) Class, which Ronald reached shortly before his sixteenth birthday. The First Class was under the bright eye of the headmaster, Robert Cary Gilson, a remarkable man with a neat pointed beard who was an amateur inventor and an accomplished scientist as well as a skilled teacher of the classics; among his inventions were a windmill that charged batteries to provide electric light for his house, a species of hectograph which duplicated the school exam papers (illegibly, said the boys), and a small gun that could shoot golf balls. When teaching, he encouraged his pupils to explore the byways of learning and to be expert in everything that came their way: an example that made a great impression on Ronald Tolkien. But though he was discursive, Gilson also encouraged his pupils to make a detailed study of classical linguistics. This was entirely in keeping with Tolkien’s inclinations; and, partly as a result of Gilson’s teaching, he began to develop an interest in the general principles of language.

It was one thing to know Latin, Greek, French and German; it was another to understand why they were what they were. Tolkien had started to look for the bones, the elements that were common to them all: he had begun, in fact, to study philology, the science of words. And he was encouraged to do this even more when he made his acquaintance with Anglo-Saxon.

This was thanks to George Brewerton, the master who preferred muck to manure. Under his tuition Ronald Tolkien had shown an interest in Chaucerian English. Brewerton was pleased by this and offered to lend the boy an Anglo-Saxon primer. The offer was accepted eagerly.

Opening its covers, Tolkien found himself face to face with the language that was spoken by the English before the first Normans set foot in their land. Anglo-Saxon, also called Old English, was familiar and recognisable to him as an antecedent of his own language, and at the same time was remote and obscure. The primer explained the language clearly in terms that he could easily understand, and he was soon making light work of translating the prose examples at the back of the book. He found that Old English appealed to him, though it did not have the aesthetic charm of Welsh. This was rather a historical appeal, the attraction of studying the ancestor of his own language. And he began to find real excitement when he progressed beyond the simple passages in the primer and turned to the great Old English poem Beowulf. Reading this first in a translation and then in the original language, he found it to be one of the most extraordinary poems of all time: the tale of the warrior Beowulf, his fight with two monsters, and his death after battle with a dragon.

Now Tolkien turned back to Middle English and discovered Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Here was another poem to fire his imagination: the medieval tale of an Arthurian knight and his search for the mysterious giant who is to deal him a terrible axeblow. Tolkien was delighted by the poem and also by its language, for he realised that its dialect was approximately that which had been spoken by his mother’s West Midland ancestors. He began to explore further in Middle English, and read the Pearl, an allegorical poem about a dead child which is believed to have been written by the author of Sir Gawain. Then he turned to a different language and took a few hesitant steps in Old Norse, reading line by line in the original words the story of Sigurd and the dragon Fafnir that had fascinated him in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book when he was a small child. By this time he had acquired a range of linguistic knowledge that was remarkable in a schoolboy.

He continued his search for the ‘bones’ behind all these languages, rummaging in the school library and exploring the remoter shelves of Cornish’s bookshop down the road. Eventually he began to find – and to scrape together enough money to buy – German books on philology that were ‘dry-as-dust’ but which could provide him with the answers to his questions. Philology: ‘the love of words’. For that was what motivated him. It was not an arid interest in the scientific principles of language; it was a deep love for the look and the sound of words, springing from the days when his mother had given him his first Latin lessons.

And as a result of this love of words, he had started to invent his own languages.

Most children make up their own words. Some even have rudimentary private languages that they share with each other. This was what Ronald’s young cousins Mary and Marjorie Incledon had done. Their language was called ‘Animalic’, and it was constructed principally out of animal names; for instance Dog nightingale woodpecker forty meant ‘You are an ass’. The Incledons now lived outside Birmingham at Barnt Green, the neighbouring village to Rednal, and Ronald and Hilary usually spent part of their holidays there. Ronald learnt ‘Animalic’ and was amused by it. A little later Marjorie (the elder sister) lost interest in it, and when she dropped out Mary and Ronald collaborated to invent a new and more sophisticated language. This was called ‘Nevbosh’ or the New Nonsense, and it was soon sufficiently developed for the two cousins to chant limericks in it:

Dar fys ma vel gom co palt ‘Hoc

Pys go iskili far maino woc?

Pro si go fys do roc de

Do cat ym maino bocte

De volt fact soc ma taimful gyroc!’

(There was an old man who said ‘How

Can I possibly carry my cow?

For if I were to ask it

To get in my basket

It would make such a terrible row!’)

This kind of thing caused a good deal of amusement at Barnt Green, and as Ronald reached adolescence it gave him an idea. Already when beginning to learn Greek he had entertained himself by making up Greek-style words. Could he not take this further and invent a complete language, something more serious and properly organised than Nevbosh – most of which was only English, French, or Latin in disguise? Such a language might not have any particular use – though the invented language Esperanto was very popular at the time – but it would amuse him and allow him to put all his favourite sounds on paper. Certainly it seemed worth trying: if he had been interested in music he would very likely have wanted to compose melodies, so why should he not make up a personal system of words that would be as it were a private symphony?

In adult life Tolkien came to believe that his impulse towards linguistic invention was similar to that felt by many schoolchildren. He once remarked, while talking about the invention of languages: ‘It’s not that uncommon, you know. An enormously greater number of children have what you might call a creative element in them than is usually supposed, and it isn’t necessarily limited to certain things: they may not want to paint or draw, or have much music, but they nevertheless want to create something. And if the main mass of education takes a linguistic form, their creation will take a linguistic form. It’s so extraordinarily common, I once did think that there ought to be some organised research into it.’

When the young Tolkien first set to work at linguistic invention on an organised basis, he decided to take an existing language as a model or at least a starting-point. Welsh was not available to him in sufficient quantity, so he turned to another favourite source of words, the collection of Spanish books in Father Francis’s room. His guardian spoke Spanish fluently and Ronald had often begged to be taught the language, but nothing came of it, though he was given the freedom of the books. Now he looked at them again and began work on an invented language that he called ‘Naffarin’. It showed a great deal of Spanish influence, but it had its own system of phonology and grammar. He worked at it now and then, and he might have developed it still further had he not discovered a language that excited him far more than Spanish.

One of his school-friends had bought a book at a missionary sale, but found that he had no use for it and sold it to Tolkien. It was Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language. Tolkien opened it and immediately experienced ‘a sensation at least as full of delight as first looking into Chapman’s Homer’. Gothic ceased to be spoken with the decline of the Gothic peoples, but written fragments survived for posterity, and Tolkien found them immensely attractive. He was not content simply to learn the language, but began to invent ‘extra’ Gothic words to fill gaps in the limited vocabulary that survived, and to move on from this to the construction of a supposedly unrecorded but historical Germanic language. He communicated these enthusiasms to Christopher Wiseman, who was a sympathetic listener since he himself was studying Egyptian and its hieroglyphics. Tolkien also began to develop his invented languages backwards; that is, to posit the hypothetical ‘earlier’ words which he was finding necessary for invention by means of an organised ‘historical’ system. He was also working on invented alphabets; one of his notebooks from schooldays contains a system of code-symbols for each letter of the English alphabet. But it was languages that occupied him most, and on many days he closeted himself in the room he shared with Hilary and, as he wrote in his diary, ‘Did a lot of private lang.’ Father Francis had done a good deal for the Tolkien boys since their mother’s death. Every summer he had taken them on holiday to Lyme Regis, where they stayed at the Three Cups Hotel and paid visits to his friends in the neighbourhood. Ronald loved the scenery of Lyme and enjoyed sketching it on wet days, though when it was fine he was happiest rambling along the shore or visiting the spectacular landslip that had recently occurred on the cliffs near the town. Once he found a prehistoric jawbone there, which he supposed to be a piece of petrified dragon. On these holidays Father Francis talked a good deal to the boys, and he observed that they were not happy in the drab lodging that 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 or guardian; moreover Ronald had great affection for Father Francis, and depended on him for money. Nor was he a rebellious young man. Given all this, it is scarcely remarkable that he agreed to do as he was told.

At the height of the storm about Edith, Ronald had to go to Oxford to take the scholarship exam. If he had been in a calmer state of mind he would have revelled in his first view of Oxford. Seen from Corpus Christi College where he was staying, the towers and parapets offered him a prospect of which his school was but a poor shadow. Oxford was new to him in every way, for his ancestors had never been university people. Here now was his chance to win honour for the Tolkiens and the Suffields, to repay Father Francis’s affection and generosity, and to prove that his love for Edith had not distracted him from his work. But it was not so easy. Looking at the notice-board after the examination, he saw that he had failed to obtain an award. He turned his back in misery on Merton Street and Oriel Square and walked to the railway station, perhaps wondering if he would ever return.

But in truth his failure was neither surprising nor disastrous. Competition for Oxford scholarships was always extremely severe, and this had been only his first attempt. He could try again next December, although by that time he would be nearly nineteen, and if he failed once more to win an award there would be no chance of his going to Oxford, for a commoner’s fees would be beyond his guardian’s pocket. Clearly he must work much harder.

‘Depressed and as much in dark as ever,’ he wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day 1910. ‘God help me. Feel weak and weary.’ (It was the first time that he had kept a diary; or at least this is the first of his diaries that was preserved. Now, as later in life, he used it chiefly as a record of sorrow and distress, and when later in the year his gloom dissipated he ceased to keep up the diary entries.) He was faced with a dilemma, for though he and Hilary had moved to new lodgings they were not far from Mrs Faulkner’s house, where Edith was still living. Father Francis had demanded that the love affair be broken off, yet he had not specifically forbidden Ronald to see Edith. Ronald hated to deceive his guardian, but he and Edith decided to meet clandestinely. They spent an afternoon together, taking a train into the countryside and discussing their plans. They also visited a jeweller’s shop, where Edith bought Ronald a pen for his eighteenth birthday, and he purchased a ten-and-sixpenny wrist-watch for her twenty-first, which they celebrated in a tea-shop the next day. Edith had now decided to accept an invitation to go and live in Cheltenham with an elderly solicitor and his wife, who had befriended her. When she told this to Ronald he wrote ‘Thank God’ in his diary, for it was the best solution.

But once again they had been seen together. This time Father Francis made his attitude quite clear: Ronald must not meet or even write to Edith. He could only see her once more, to say goodbye on the day she left for Cheltenham. After that they must not communicate again until he was twenty-one, when his guardian would no longer be responsible for him. This meant a wait of three years. Ronald wrote in his diary: ‘Three years is awful.’

A more rebellious young man might have refused to obey; even Ronald, loyal to Father Francis, found it hard to follow his guardian’s wishes. On 16 February he wrote: ‘Last night prayed would see E. by accident. Prayer answered. Saw her at 12.55 at Prince of Wales. Told her I could not write and arranged to see her off on Thursday fortnight. Happier but so much long to see her just once to cheer her up. Cannot think of anything else.’ Then on 21 February: ‘I saw a dejected little figure sloshing along in a mac and tweed hat and could not resist crossing and saying a word of love and cheerfulness. This cheered me up a little for a while. Prayed and thought hard.’ And on 23 February: ‘I met her coming from the Cathedral to pray for me.’

Though these meetings were accidental, there was the worst possible consequence. On 26 February Ronald ‘had a dreadful letter from Fr. F saying I had been seen with a girl again, calling it evil and foolish. Threatening to cut short my University career if I did not stop. Means I cannot see E. Nor write at all. God help me. Saw E. at midday but would not be with her. I owe all to Fr. F and so must obey.’ When Edith learnt what had happened she wrote to Ronald: ‘Our hardest time of all has come.’

On Wednesday 2 March, Edith set out from Duchess Road to go to her new home in Cheltenham. In spite of his guardian’s ban, Ronald prayed that he might catch a final glimpse of her. When the time for her departure came he searched the streets, at first in vain. But then: ‘At Francis Road corner she passed me on bike on way to station. I shall not see her again perhaps for three years.’