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ON THEIR SUMMER HOLIDAY OF 1900, the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign, the Knoxes lost their holdall, containing all their waterproofs, umbrellas, fishing rods and tweed coats. Mrs K. believed, with a serene optimism which the years never dimmed, that it would turn up, perhaps on the next train. The boys, with their inborn melancholy and natural relish for disaster, declared that it would not, and it did not.

The holiday that year was in a large house on the desolate fringe of Dartmoor. “We should have been warned,” Winnie wrote, “by the low rent demanded, but this my father held was due to its being in so remote a spot, so far from any railway station.” They arrived in two open waggonettes through the Devonshire lanes thick with honeysuckle, all of them drenched with rain, Ronnie with a pitiful cough on which he had decided to write a treatise. In the damp house itself, mice ran over the girls as they knelt at their evening prayers, and Ronnie, still coughing, had to meow like a cat (he had a talent for animal imitations) to keep them at bay. In the morning spirits revived, and Eddie and Wilfred went down to the rushing stream to fish, but there was a sensation, not to be shaken off, of something coming to an end. The family was dividing into children and those whose childhood was past.

Eddie was nineteen, Dilly seventeen, two pipe-smoking, Norfolk-jacketed young men. The sight of them, both unattached, was maddening to local hostesses in this remote district; “calls” had to be paid and returned. But Ronnie at twelve still clung to childhood, while Wilfred, fourteen, imperturbably arranged his Bits of Old Churches. These were souvenirs, stones and chippings which must genuinely have fallen off and been honestly picked up, otherwise they did not “count”, though Eddie and Dilly sometimes assisted with a good hard blow at the church wall which Wilfred never suspected. Dilly handed over to Ronnie his collection of 231 railway tickets; they no longer interested him.

In the autumn Eddie would be going to Corpus and Ronnie to Eton. In this family which breathed the air of scholarship, but had constant difficulty in making ends meet, education was the key to the future, and the Bishop believed that he could look forward with sober confidence. Although it was clear that Ethel, increasingly deaf and much slower than the others, would never leave home, Winnie was destined for University and, surely, for a brilliant clerical marriage, the three elder boys for the Civil Service, Ronnie for the Evangelical ministry. The Bishop was exceedingly busy, both with his pastorate and with the immense task of raising £100,000 for church extension. It is probable that he did not notice certain disturbing undercurrents, and that Mrs K. did not like to mention them. Neither Eddie nor Dilly felt certain any longer about the truth of Christianity. Their bookboxes contained not only classical texts but also The Golden Bough, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and George Moore’s Esther Waters. On the other hand Winnie, dreamily adolescent when she was not energetically bicycling, escaped into Malory, into William Morris and the stained-glass colouring of the Ages of Faith, and, safe in the airing cupboard, read aloud to Ronnie from the poems of Christina Rossetti.

The family were still conscious, if threatened, of a solid front against intruders. “We imagined other people might think we were peculiar, and yet we were quite sure that our family standpoint on almost any question was absolutely and unanswerably right.” No passage of time would ever destroy this feeling, but neither would it ever bring back the unity of 1900.

For the dimensions of earthly happiness, Ronnie always had to turn back to his childhood, and in particular to Eton. From the moment he arrived in College, was gowned and told “Sis bonus puer”, he gave the school his wholehearted devotion, and it offered him in return the certainty, the sense of belonging, and the discreet respect for brilliance which he so much needed. This was so in spite of the early days of bewilderment, which were not made much easier by Dilly, descending, when he remembered, like a vaguely amiable god, from his room to see how his “minor” was doing.

Sept 23 1900

Dear Mother,

I don’t quite understand the way the forms go, but Dilly says I am in the bottom division of Fifth Form as a matter of course. I hope this letter will reach you early, but I am only writing at 18 3/4 minutes past 8 p.m.… Yesterday I played in a game of Eton field game. I was put to hold a person up on one side, then someone threw the ball in among us, and by the time we were all sitting on top of one another the ball was far away.

We won apparently by three to none. I am very happy here. My love to Winnie,

your very sleepy son,

R. A. Knox

P.S. Floreat Etona.

He was possessed by a kind of pleasurable anxiety to do the right thing, and yet not to waste money at home, asking diffidently for a Liberty’s armchair for his room “to get something in accordance with the rules of taste. Mr Goodhart [the Master in College] is always calling chairs ‘horrible!’, because he makes little expeditions into one’s room just as one is getting into bed, and remarks on pictures and things. He told me the picture of Rembrandt was the sort of thing you could look at for hours. I’ve never tried.” But if Ronnie was eager to conform, he felt free to be happy at Eton. The romantic in him, the inconvenient love of mystery and beauty—inconvenient, that is, to one who thought he mistrusted enthusiasm and only valued a reasonable faith—began to spread its wings. He felt a devotion to Henry VI, the Sorrowful King, the Founder of Eton, which merged, in his thirteenth year, with his feeling for the poetry of the Rossettis and for the splendour of the west window at St Philip’s, the Burne-Jones window through whose ruby-red glass the light streamed in at evensong.

To outward appearances he was still the brilliant, dutiful and rather delicate prizewinner, petted by the Matron in College and still kept firmly in order by his brothers. As the cold of winter approached, Wilfred had “borrowed” his gloves, Dillwyn his cherished new overcoat, which he had christened Alitat, the name of a goddess in Herodotus. Alitat was returned, but Ronnie was often in the sickroom. He meditated anxiously on his resources. “I have bought all my birthday presents, expending 10/- on the whole lot,” he wrote home in June 1902. “I shall have to send Eddie his to-morrow; I have got him a knife-sharpener and strop combined, and also a little pendant for his watch chain.”

Eddie’s departure to Oxford meant that the first of the Bishop’s sons was at University, and he could not help recalling his own achievements there and Bishop Chavasse’s letter to him: “Thank God, thank God, dear old boy, that you have got a First.” Might not this very real triumph be repeated, in four years’ time? Corpus was the Bishop’s own college, and the President, Dr Thomas Fowler, was an old friend. Fowler was one of the great men of the University, a grammar-school boy from Lincolnshire who had become Professor of Logic, but valued philosophy principally as a means of training character; in his famous “private hours” he drew out his young men, and made them apply thought to conduct. To parents he made the terrifying observation, that if they failed to give their children a good education they were no better than the parents in primitive societies, who were permitted to put their children to death. He was both conscientious and sympathetic, and the terrible responsibility of choosing undergraduates for commissions for the Boer Wars was said to have shortened his life.

Eddie went up to Corpus not only as a good classical scholar, but as an Edwardian elegant. He had never bought any clothes for himself before he was sixteen. Mrs K. made large orders at the drapers and outfitters as required, while in the “girls’ room” Winnie pinned and sewed, with Dilly intervening to adapt the sewing-machine to steam power. But the Bishop, who had suffered himself from reach-me-down clothes and “boots heeled, and, I think, tipped with iron—in vain did I attempt to deaden the hateful noises that attended my movements”—was sympathetic to his own boys, all of whom, except the lounging Dilly, had the instincts of a dandy. Eddie was made an allowance of a hundred pounds per annum, to be deducted from his share of the money left in trust by their mother. To the awe of the younger ones, he opened an account with a Birmingham tailor and a cigar merchant, and indulged his good taste in eau-de-Cologne and silk handkerchiefs.

The Oxford to which he went up, on the other hand, was still a slumbrous place where the old eccentrics, whom Lewis Carroll had compared to caterpillars and fantastic birds, emerged from the “sets” which they had occupied for some forty years, complaining at the disturbance of young bloods. The University was still slowly digesting the Commission of 1877, aimed at diverting wealth from the colleges, to expanding the sciences and giving increased chances to poorer students. In 1893 the mighty Jowett had died, glad to have lived to interpret the ideas of Plato to the world, and Corpus itself, which up to 1850 had never had more than twenty undergraduates, had cautiously followed the times, and had expanded into Merton Street. The college remained small, all the members could be gathered at once on the secluded green lawn under the old mulberry tree, and the record of scholarship, as always, stood high.

The idea that a son of Bishop Knox could be “frivolous and extravagant” did not cross Dr Fowler’s mind. But the President’s regulations, even by the standards which Edwardian Oxford tried to impose, were strict to excess. He had a horror of even the mildest forms of gambling, and imposed penalties on the undergraduates for playing the dreaded new game of “Bridge” and for attending the theatre in gowns “on the pretext that they thought the play was by Shakespeare”. Eddie could not conform. He stayed out late. The most difficult route for climbing in at night was across the wall from Merton, where the less agile were sometimes impaled on revolving iron spikes; he became an expert, only damaging his wrists during the last few feet when his friends dragged his light weight across the windowsill.

With these friends, and in particular with Alan Barlow, later Secretary of the Treasury and Trustee of the National Gallery, Eddie passed golden hours. He was the unobtrusive wit of the dining clubs, organized races in hansom cabs, and introduced Miss Mabel Love, a music-hall performer, into the college. But he was aware of a document headed Communication to Mr E.V. Knox, Scholar, after complaints by the Tutors on his Idleness, and of the bitter disappointment that this was likely to cause at home. The summer of 1901 was spent at Glencrippsdale, where in the course of damp picnics and fishing expeditions Eddie fell into the melancholy which lay in wait for all the brothers. In an elegant version of the Greek Anthology, not the less true because it was a commonplace, he wrote,

Leaf and bud, ah quick, how quick returning

Here is visaged immortality;

Freshly from the dark soil sunward yearning

Lifts the ageless green; and must I die?

The natural confidante for these moods would be a young woman, in this case a girl called Evelyn Stevenson, who was also staying at Glencrippsdale, a spirited creature who played billiards and tramped over the heather in an “artistically simple” outfit from Liberty’s. “Do you know, I actually read your letter right through?” she wrote to him. “Awfully good of me, wasn’t it? I hope you are taking a generally less gloomy view of life and things in general … it’s really easier than one thinks to go on living—at least it seems to me to be so.” She also advised him “not to get too clever”. But on his return to Oxford Dr Fowler informed him, in a spirit of anxious justice, that his scholarship had been suspended.

To retrieve himself he must come back in September and take an examination on the whole of Herodotus and the whole of Plato’s Republic, with a fine to be paid if he did not pass, “which I fear would fall on your father rather than on yourself”—and Dr Fowler would be unable to supply him with testimonials of any kind. As a threat this would have had no effect on Eddie, but as an appeal to his affection it could and did. He gave up his “habitually late hours” (the records by now refer to him as “Mr Knox’s case”), spent only eightpence a week on bread and beer in Hall, and he passed his Honour Mods. A further letter from the Doctor recalls the pastoral atmosphere of Edwardian Oxford:

Dear Mr Knox,

I sincerely hope that our relations may be more pleasant in future, and that the discipline you have been under, and will continue to be under, in a modified form, this term, may turn out to be for your good, not only by teaching you the useful lessons of obedience and submission to authorities, but also by procuring for you more opportunities of reading undisturbed by callers, during the solitary hours in your rooms, as well as by leading you to reflect on, and I trust to repent of, the folly of some part of your conduct in the past.

If all goes well for the rest of the term, I shall regard your present punishment and the spirit in which you have received it as purging your offences of the past, and, I trust, giving me the opportunity of speaking well of you to any one who may make enquiries as to your character.

Those who were expected to make enquiries were the examiners for the Indian Civil Service, for which Eddie was destined. But now he knew—and, indeed, he had told Miss Stevenson—that he was going to be a writer, and one good enough to justify his choice of career to his father. He never took his final degree, but spent his last two years at Oxford training himself as a debater, essayist and poet by practising, as an apprentice has to do, in the styles he admired most—Swinburne, A. E. Housman, the young W. B. Yeats, the later George Meredith. Confined to his rooms by nine-fifteen every evening, he wrote alcaics:

I am dumb to-night, I cannot sing your praises,

Only feel this cool sweet-smelling silence,

Between leaf-lattices, upward and upward …

Wilfred was left stolidly behind at Rugby, working towards his turn for a scholarship. He was not very interested in school teams, and not very successful in getting prizes. But the placid exterior was deceptive, for Wilfred, like his brothers, had to come to terms with an inner struggle between reason and emotion, and between emotion and the obligation not to show it. From his letters it appears that his solution, for the time being, was a strange fantasy life entirely of his own devising. He refused to join the school debating society, “as if one who has spoken in all the Parliaments of Europe would condescend to speak at a petty school society!” When his box arrived and the Railway Company had demanded four shillings and ninepence he had “flung the minion out of the window for his presumptuous demands.” The heat had been appalling for October and during a rugby match several players melted into pools of water, drowning one of the onlookers, “a double tragedy which has cast a gloom over the whole community.” The Bishop complained about his spelling, and was told that “as soon as my friend Joseph Chamberlain has finished with Free Trade I shall instruct him to introduce a bill for spelling reform.” No alterations were to be undertaken at St Philip’s Rectory until Wilfred had come home to direct the workmen with a few well-chosen words, and if too many visiting clergymen arrive, he advises that it will be best to poison them with white arsenic.

In contrast to this, Wilfred showed the humility of the “in-between” child in a large family when he insisted that he doesn’t need a new bicycle—the old Raleigh will do quite well “for something I have always rather wanted to do, ride back from Rugby to Birmingham,” and his only request for new clothes is when the time comes for him to sit for his University scholarship.

The problem which had begun to occupy Wilfred’s inmost thoughts was moral and social, rather than religious. It was the question of poverty, which concerned him at the simplest and perhaps the only important level: is it tolerable that anyone should be truly poor? At Edmundthorpe he had asked Aunt Fanny whether it was right that the village children should be lifting potatoes until it was too dark to see, and had received the reply, “Nonsense, Wilfred! It will teach them habits of industry!” Since then he had seen the frightening slum poverty of Aston, where the women gathered round the stalls on Friday nights to fight for scraps of bone and offal. He did not, of course, underestimate his father’s tireless work in the grimy parish, but the Evangelical Movement, with all its wonderful record of service to humanity, did not go as far as Wilfred wanted. He felt that a new century needed a new direction.

Of all the older boys at Rugby, the one who had impressed him most had been Billy Temple. Temple, even as a schoolboy, had steadfastly refused to discuss “the Christian solution” for any specific problem; there was only one solution, and that was a total change of heart in society. From this idea, for which he had an ungrudging respect, and from what he had read of Ruskin and F. D. Maurice, Wilfred, at the age of seventeen, began to arrive at his own vision of the socialism of the future. In March 1903 he wrote to Ronnie about the Woolwich by-election in which Will Crooks, brought up in the workhouse, had just won the seat for Labour in what had always been considered a safe Conservative stronghold. Ronnie was not sure whether to rejoice or not. He was struggling, for his part, with a “Sunday Question” on the subject “What do you understand by Socialism and by the doctrines of Nietzsche?” Ronnie’s suggestion was that the poor and habitually unemployed might be shipped to Canada “or other places”. “This would only be applicable to the young,” Mr Goodhart wrote in the margin.

In the August of 1903 Wilfred and Ronnie were sent abroad together on a trip down the Rhine in the perennial hope of parents that they would “improve their German”. They were to photograph the churches and to keep a Tagebuch. They began by drawing up elaborate rules and regulations for calculating the number of lemon squashes consumed and the probable weight of the very stout German ladies on the boat. The tramway systems were, they thought, unimpressive, but they dutifully did the sights. Cologne was “clean but papistical”—and Ronnie, very much the junior, was made to sew on Wilfred’s buttons. The diary soon became light-headed:

August 5: Wilfie asks for beer at Gurzenich restaurant. Thrown downstairs. [Ronnie] … Ronnie evicted from St. Somebody’s by sacristan for sitting on tomb and intoning from Baedeker during mass. [Wilf] … W. excommunicated by Archbp. of Cologne for photographing him in Compline. [Ronnie] … Pulled Archbp’s mitre about his ears and beat him with a beadle’s bargepole. [Wilf] … Got W. out of military prison on plea of insanity. [Ronnie] …

As the trip went on, however, Ronnie grew serious. Not very sensitive, in later life, to the language of painting, he was touched, during those hot summer days, by the unmistakably direct appeal of what religious pictures he saw. On 16 August he wrote: “We went to the church of Notre Dame in Bruges, where there is a glorious Van Dyke Crucifixion with a very dark background and no one else except Our Lord in the picture. It makes one feel terribly lonely.” Although Ronnie, as he wrote in A Spiritual Aeneid, “then as always dreaded the undue interference of emotion in religion,” he bought a small silver crucifix in Bruges which he put first on the wall, then on his watch chain, then round his neck. Such an object had never been seen before at St Philip’s Rectory. He found himself responsive also to the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. “I should like books for presents; obscurer English poets, esp. before and just after the Revolution,” he wrote to Mrs K. He was still very ready to become a finished product of Eton; he still valued highly the power of Etonian understatement. (The best reproof for a violent offender, A. C. Benson tells us, is “I believe, Smith, we do not see you quite at your best today.”) Ronnie’s heart was given to Eton, but it was also open to the poetry of Henry Vaughan and his emblems of light and “dazzling darkness”, the night-time when “spirits their fair kindred catch”. He read for the first time, and memorized, Vaughan’s “Peace”:

My soul, there is a country

Far beyond the stars,

Where stands a wingèd sentry

All skilful in the wars …

But the book which moved him most at this time was a present from his sister Winnie, a volume of unashamedly sentimental short stories, Hugh Benson’s The Light Invisible, a book abounding in wise, tobacco-stained old priests, one of whom tries and fails to save a child in danger of being crushed by a cart: an angel appears and gently guides the child, not away from, but underneath the wheels. This story particularly struck Ronnie. We have no idea what God intends for us; we have no right to ask for safety, perhaps we do not even know what it is. A lifelong enthusiasm for unpopular causes awoke in him. He borrowed a history of the Tractarian Movement, and, as he put it, “trembled for Newman, mourned for him as lost to the Church, and rose with the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the circles I moved in, there was a cause for which clergymen had been sent to prison and noble lives spent; a cause which could be mine.” To his father, to all the Evangelical homes of his childhood, the Tractarians were traitors from which English Christianity must be rescued. Ronnie’s changing views were “known at home, and doubtless regretted”, but he was only sixteen, the favourite child, the youngest, and these notions of his would surely pass.

Meantime the Bishop’s field of activity grew even wider when he was appointed, in the autumn of 1903, to the see of Manchester. He accepted by return of post, knowing that Balfour’s ministry might fall and the offer might not be repeated by a new Prime Minister less favourable to the Evangelicals. The bishopric had been constituted only fifty years earlier, and covered a huge district of east and central Lancashire, caring for three million souls. The great Lancashire battle to keep its own religious education, of which the Bishop was to be a staunch champion, had only just begun. There were unshepherded multitudes in Blackpool, where in Wakes Week the landladies let their beds for half the night, then put in a new relay of holidaymakers while the first lot were turned out in the backyard. Manchester, with God’s help, would be a worthy opportunity for his energy and splendid powers of organization.

Ronnie, who had rather expected “fatal opulence”, as though the Knoxes were entering a new chapter of Barchester Towers, was a little dashed to be told by Mrs K. that “it wouldn’t make much difference; it would make much more if we all got scholarships.” Perhaps even she was disconcerted by a moving day of such formidable proportions—it was during this move that Wilfred’s Bits of Old Churches were finally dispersed—and still more by the sight of Bishopscourt, the family’s new home in Manchester.

Dear Father [Ronnie wrote],

I told you that I didn’t want us to be better off, but only not worse off, so I am quite happy. Besides, you speak as if keeping a carriage was a necessary expense without any remuneration; but if we have a carriage we save cab-fares. Again, if we keep a garden, no more (or at any rate a little less) need to buy vegetables; even extra hospitality always has its remains; with charity the gain is purely moral. So we are practically better off.

About the house sounds more serious. But I am quite ready to

… let my childish eyes

Distort it into paradise …

(this is not a quotation but a thing I have just made up à propos). Anyway there is a walled garden which has a small dogs’ graveyard in it. And whatever it’s like, I shall be ready to be happy there.

Bishopscourt, behind its forbidding gateway and under its mask of soot, was about two miles north of the Cathedral; an electric tram passed within about thirty yards, but you had to be adept—as all the boys were by this time—at jumping off at the right place. There were three acres of garden, “the soil of which,” the Bishop recalled, “was, on the whole, waterlogged, and the surface blackened with coal-dust and fog.” The rooms were ill-arranged, and the butler, who “went” with the house, was offended to find the chaplain working next door to his pantry in a kind of cupboard. “My Lord,” he said, “what is to become of my dignity?” There was, however, plenty of room to entertain visitors on a large scale, from the Ragged School children to the justices of Assize, and to put up ordination candidates; the Bishop was satisfied. Two bathrooms were put in, and the drainage improved, and although the curtains were still being hung in the front rooms as the first Examining Chaplain appeared in the drive, Mrs K. was immediately her charming, welcoming self. Alice, the grumbling cook, and Richmond, the parlour maid, retreated into the cavernous kitchen, and the Bishop entered upon a further twenty years of selfless hospitality.

“What one chiefly remembers of Manchester,” Eddie wrote, “is the great dray-horses bringing loads of cotton to be bleached; they made a tremendous noise, and struck sparks, because of the stone setts.” When they were not at large in the roaring city, the boys took possession of a darkish, dampish study on the ground floor. If they wanted to smoke, they climbed up on to the roof and sat on the top of the glass dome of the entrance hall, where a false step meant a broken neck. The Bishop was unaware of this, and also of some of the scurrilous and wide-ranging discussions in the “boys’ room”. where the brothers could disagree just as fiercely as in the days when they had punched one another in the wind. “In polite and educated circles,” Dr Fowler of Corpus had written, “physical blows are replaced by sarcasm and innuendo, but this refined mode of warfare may give an equal amount of pain.” The brothers, who loved each other, could not resist the temptation to hurt each other at times. Dilly, when roused, was particularly arrogant, always taking, in argument, the extreme position.

The Bishop had understandably determined not to send his second son to Corpus, or even to Oxford. Dillwyn, who seemed equally attracted to classics and mathematics, should try for Cambridge, and sit for a scholarship to Eton’s sister foundation, King’s.

In the December of 1902 the Bishop had received a letter from Canon Bowlby, at Eton, which began: “I cannot imagine a better Christmas present than the report on your two boys.” But the delight and astonishment in young Ronald’s progress became somewhat clouded when he turned to the perplexing Dillwyn, who in his Cambridge exam had done two brilliant papers, one in maths and the other in Greek verse, and had left all the others unfinished. “It is not known whether he has any taste for philosophy or archaeology.” Perhaps Dilly had been asked, but had not replied. The Canon’s letter now takes on the tone of a racehorse trainer as he adds: “As to the Newcastle [scholarship] one can never be sure what D. will do. Only two boys are left who might beat him in classics, Swithinbank and Daniel Macmillan. They are a dangerous pair, no doubt, as they have been improving at the same time as he has.” One feels he might go on to recommend more oats and regular exercise, as, indeed, an Edwardian schoolmaster would not hesitate to do. But Dilly would not compete where he was not interested. His friend Maynard Keynes, who had beaten him the year before in the Tomline Prize, wrote to his father that Knox showed up his work “in a most loathsomely untidy, unintelligible, illegible condition,” forgetting to write down the most necessary steps, and “even in conversation he is wholly incapable of expressing the meaning he intends to convey.” Yet he respected Dilly as a mathematician, and perhaps, as Sir Roy Harrod suggests in his biography of Keynes, “it was precisely the shower of irrelevant ideas impinging on a brain of the very highest quality that produced such successful results.” We recognize the description of genius. So, too, did Nathaniel Wedd, the King’s admissions tutor in classics; he recommended Dillwyn for a scholarship, and said that he “appeared to be capable of indefinite improvement”. This was fortunate for Dilly.

In a certain sense, he had left home already. During his last half at Eton, Dilly had become a ferocious agnostic. He had postponed a confrontation with his father for the familiar reason—not fear, but the fear of giving pain. God once dismissed, Dilly and Maynard Keynes had calmly undertaken experiments, intellectual and sexual, to resolve the question of what things are necessary to life. Pleasure, like morality and duty, was a psychological necessity which must therefore be accepted, but without too much fuss; and just as Dilly had eaten cold porridge at Aston, because the pleasure of eating consisted of the pleasure of filling your belly, so now he declared that one should drink only to get drunk, and that women (to whom he was always timidly and scrupulously polite) existed only for sex. True pleasure came from solving problems: “nothing is impossible”. Happiness was a different matter; it was suspect, as being too static.

Dilly’s Cambridge was liberating in quite a different sense from Eddie’s Oxford. In 1903 it was still a small East Anglian market town with shopkeepers anxious to supply to the great colleges, and not without its share of Victorian eccentrics; old Professor Newton, in his top hat, walked between the rails of the horsetrams and refused to give way to oncoming vehicles. But the spirit of the University was the exposure of truth at all costs, and in that atmosphere, under that remorseless light and in the cold winds of the Fen country, Dilly’s mind was condensed into a harder crystal. By compensation, he developed even wilder notions and a tenderer heart, and made there the friendships of a lifetime.

His rooms, like most of those allocated by King’s to its freshmen, were in The Drain, a row of cramped buildings without running water, and connected with Chetwynd Court by a kind of tunnel. He was obliged to buy crockery and furniture from the last occupant, but, as he wrote to Mrs K., “they look solid, and may last for years … I am doing the room mainly in green,” he added, rather surprisingly, but one could never tell what Dilly would, or would not, notice.

King’s at this time had only a hundred and fifty undergraduates and thirty dons, all unmarried; it was a little world within a world, self-regarding, self-rewarding, and doubtful about how far life outside the boundaries of King’s was worth undertaking. The college finances were depressed, the food uneatable, and Hall so crowded that waiters and diners were in constant collision, but the prevailing air was one of humanism and free intellect, and many felt, as Lowes Dickinson had described it, that “the realisation of a vast world extending outside Christianity was like a door that had once or twice swung ajar, and now opened and let me out.” But across the way their magnificent chapel stood in all its beauty, a perpetual reproach to them.

The Provost, in 1903, was the mighty Henry Bradshaw, the “don’s don”. Bradshaw, a man of ferocious integrity, once faced a visiting preacher who had said that the loss of Christian faith must mean a loss of morals with the words: “Well, you lied, and you know it.” This was the last year of his provostship; in 1904, he was found dead in his chair, with an open book in front of him. Nathaniel Wedd, Dilly’s first tutor, seemed to many people an aggressive man, shocking with his red tie and open blasphemies, but, as his unpublished autobiographical notes show, he had hidden complexities. By origin he was an East Ender, raised in dockland, who had got to Cambridge the hard way; on the other hand, his hard-working cynicism was relieved by strange communications from the unseen world, to which, as time went by, he paid increasing attention.

But the greatest influence upon Dilly was the best-loved and most eccentric of the Fellows, Walter Headlam. Headlam, one of the finest of all interpreters of Greek thought and language, was a purebred scholar, descended from scholars. In 1902 he was thirty-seven years old, and seemed to have only a frail contact with reality. Travelling was difficult because he could not take the right train, and even when on horseback he rode straight into the pond at Newnham, saying doubtfully, “Do you think I ought to get off?” Letters were difficult, because Headlam chose his stamps only for the beauty of the colours. But his rooms in Gibbs Buildings were open to everyone who cared to come, and anyone who could make their way through the piles of manuscripts and bills was sure to be listened to and taught. The pupils’ work was usually lost and rapidly disappeared under the mass of papers, but Headlam sat “balancing an ink-pot on one knee,” as Shane Leslie described him, “and scribbling words into Greek texts, missing since the Renaissance, with the other. His famous emendations, in exquisite script, were allowed to float about the room until gathered for the Classical Review. A year later they became the prey of German editors.”

Headlam taught both by night and by day, for both were the same to him. His knowledge of Greek literature was enormous and consisted quite simply of knowing everything that had been written in ancient Greek, down to the obscurest Rhetoricians; he had no need for a dictionary. But Greece, to him, was not a dead civilization. He taught the Eleusinian mysteries with reference to ghost-raising and The Golden Bough, Greek obscenities were collated with Burton’s Arabian Nights, he strummed on a hired piano to illustrate the music of the tragic chorus, and, draped in his own beautiful faded crimson curtains, demonstrated how they should enter. Enthusiasm, however, combined with meticulous exactness. Headlam’s vast learning told him infallibly what an author could not have written, his artist’s eye helped him to supply missing letters. And only here, in matters of textual criticism, a battlefield of giants in those days when reputations were lost and won and German and English scholars faced each other in mighty competition, did Headlam make enemies. Confronted with an inaccurate text, his charming, sunny temperament disappeared and was replaced by a concentration of scorn. Afterwards he would be mildly surprised at the resentment of those he had called “idiotic pedants” and “illiterate amateurs”; a party had formed against him, even in King’s itself. Meanwhile his own undertakings, and in particular his edition of Aeschylus, remained unfinished; his own sense of perfection made it impossible for him to finish anything.

Dilly did not find Dr Headlam’s rooms unusual at all, or even untidy. They were exactly the kind of rooms he would have liked himself, and he responded at once to the problems of emendation, which, as Headlam wrote to Professor Postgate, “are, I suppose, empiric; what you call ‘instinct,’ I should rather call ‘observation.’ ” The borderland where the mind, prowling among misty forms and concepts, suddenly perceives analogies with what it already knows, and moves into the light—this was where Dilly was most at home. And he was able to help Headlam to find his notes. They are, after all, always more or less where you left them last night, as long as no one is allowed to tidy them away.

As far as friends were concerned, the college, as E. M. Forster put it, was divided into the excluded and the included, and Dilly, as an Etonian, was included, though this was of singularly little importance to him. The prodigiously brilliant and impatient Keynes had arrived in The Drain a year earlier, and had made his classic comment: “This place seems pretty inefficient to me.” With Lytton Strachey, who had already been up at Trinity for three years, he had taken readily to the Apostolic atmosphere of intense friendship and mutual criticism, based on a very natural desire to talk about each other’s shortcomings, and on a convenient version of some of the notions of their captive philosopher, G. E. Moore. Moore, diffident and speechless himself, was confidently interpreted by the brilliant Kingsmen. His proposition that it is useless to discuss what is meant by “I’ve got sixpence,” but useful to think what we mean by saying it, led to endless variations of “What do you mean by … ?” and “You don’t really mean … ?” His recognition of goodness and beauty (Moore did not think they could be defined) as inherent qualities of things, in some ways like blueness or squareness, and his insistence that it was actually wrong to be in a state of contemplating ugliness, meant that those who could recognize beauty must be in a superior class apart, as, indeed, the Apostles already felt they were. This particularly infuriated Dilly. “Knox, of course, was highly enraged at anyone’s writing such rubbish,” Keynes wrote to Strachey, after a reading of his paper on Beauty. Furthermore, the search for beauty tended to become narrowed to a search for fresh-faced undergraduates with whom one could fall in love.

Homosexuality appeared in many shades in early-twentieth-century Cambridge, linking more than one generation, from the outrageous Oscar Browning, wallowing naked, though by this time decrepit, in the Cam, to the “charmed life”, sometimes more a matter of imagination than of fact, of the Apostles themselves. Headlam himself had found, as he told Mrs Leslie Stephen, that “life is not simple for those who have to choose between conflicting tendencies,” and had expressed this in the finest of his English poems, on the death of John Addington Symonds:

I go mourning for my friend

That for all my mourning stirs nor murmurs in his sleep …

Dilly regarded the subject with detachment, knowing that it explained why Lytton Strachey should at first dislike him violently and describe him as “gravely inconsiderate”. Dilly never became an Apostle, although his name was more than once put forward.

But, in spite of his hesitations (one of his nicknames at home was Erm), he was a speaker much in demand at college societies. Of these there were many, including one organized by Lowes Dickinson (it was here that Keynes had read his paper on Beauty) which was known as the “As It Were In Contradistinction Society”.

The adjective “noxian”, applied to Dilly in Basileon