Читать книгу The Knox Brothers - Penelope Fitzgerald, Richard Holmes, Simon Callow - Страница 9

EDMUND KNOX HAD TAKEN ORDERS because he felt God called him to do so. But to enter the mid-Victorian Church meant both more and less than this. “The plain fact is,” his son Ronnie wrote, half a century later, “that while England led the world, and the Church of England was the expression of its national life, there was a monumental quality about the partnership which, do what you would, laid hold of the imagination. Anglicanism fitted into the landscape, was part of the body politic.”

To become one of its ministers was to join a legal establishment which influenced those who governed, to take responsibility for the souls of a great empire, and to make effective judgments in peace and war. That might mean a disputed loyalty. Knox, the scholarship boy whose education had cost one shilling, was a passionate supporter of free education, but a stout opponent of the government’s long-drawn-out attack on the Church schools. Again, when he became rector of Kibworth, it was assumed that, as a mild Tory, he would settle down comfortably in that heavy clay country and become a squire’s parson. But nothing of the kind happened.

Edmund’s heart sank when he saw the farm-labourers, in their smocks and tall hats, waiting outside the church so that “the quality” could go in first. He did not feel at ease with such a system, and longed for a wider scope, if not abroad, then in one of the great industrial cities. In 1891 he received from the Trustees of Aston-juxta-Birmingham (who were mostly Evangelicals) an offer of preferment. Aston was a huge, built-over, crowded industrial district, known to the world only through its football team, Aston Villa.

On a preliminary visit he found the vicarage, after making a number of inquiries, “in a dark and narrow street, set in a maze of smoke-begrimed small houses.” Edmund was more than doubtful about what the effect of the “air”, to which nineteenth-century doctors and patients attached so much importance, would be on his wife’s health. She had never quite recovered from the birth of Ronnie, when she had had a long and difficult labour. But Ellen was not afraid of the sulphur-laden air of Birmingham. She was her father’s daughter, and his last lonely mission had inspired her to do something, no matter how little, that would be worthy of him. She herself had never been to India, and had followed all his wanderings through his frequent letters to her. In the very last of them, written from Muscat two weeks before his death, he had congratulated them both on their resolution to take on the new difficult work. His only sorrow was that “I shall never be able again to offer to take a Sunday for you and set you free for needed rest.” “Your children will miss the beautiful lawn and the pleasant strolls in the country,” he added; “they have to enter on the sterner realities of life.”

If forty-two thousand souls of Birmingham’s workforce could live in the smoke and darkness of Aston parish, so, obviously enough, could their priest. Edmund threw himself into organization and visiting, Ellen into work for the schools—Sunday schools, reading classes for adults, and what were still called the Ragged Schools. They were full of confidence. When they left Kibworth a well-wisher, looking at Edmund’s solid form, had said: “Those shoulders are broad enough for anything.”

The six children had arrived at Aston with the girls in tears at parting with Doctor and at the sight of the tiny, soot-blackened garden. The boys, however, were stopped in their tracks by the sight of a new and instantly attractive form of transport, trams. “I was early fascinated by those gigantic steam-kettles in two sections, which used to ply between Aston and Birmingham,” Ronnie wrote. The cable past Snow Hill, where you could peer down a slit at the endless cable, gave the brothers the concept of perpetual motion. The trams were kings of the road; in Lancashire they were known as “cars”. Bicycles skidded on the lines, one breakdown held up the whole system, and old ladies were marooned in the middle of the street and had to be rescued. The years to come were never to bring any form of transport that they loved quite so well. They became trammers from that first day.

One advantage of Aston was the schools. By tram the girls could go to Edgbaston Ladies’ College, and Eddie and Dilly to day school. Edmund Knox did not like boarding schools, which he considered unnatural, and he wanted to undertake the family religious instruction himself, at home. Here a certain unevenness of response had already appeared. The girls were devout, so were the little boys, Ronnie in particular; dressed in Ethel’s pinafore for a surplice, he conducted the funerals of pet birds in the grimy flower-beds. On Eddie, as he put it himself, “Church did not seem to rub off properly,” though he conformed for his mother’s sake. Dilly held his counsel.

Leaving the question of doctrine aside, all the instruction they received from their parents was positive and humanitarian—not so, however, the grim warnings of Nurse and Cook, whose villain was that horror-figure, the Pope, “always laying snares,” Winnie remembered, “in far-off Italy to entrap our nursery in especial, and in general, into the evil lures of his superstition.” Old Nurse said she could smell a Papist a mile off, and was much preoccupied with the imminence of the Last Trump, which she hoped might come when they were all at prayer, and if possible in clean underclothes. But the children were born with the power of discrimination. Even the girls were able to discount Old Nurse, and “in such homes as ours,” Winnie thought, “we surely experienced something of the clear light crystal world of the earlier ages of Faith.”

The vast parish was responding well, and Aston was now divided into seven districts, with willing helpers in each of them. But a few days after Christmas 1891, in the thick of the Christmas work, Ellen Knox caught influenza. She did not seem to be able to pick up. For the next eight months she had to be sent to one nursing home after another, the last one being at Brighton, “for the air”. Aunt Emily, Edmund’s kind, but harassed and ineffective, sister, came to keep house. She had no imagination, was not used to children, and had no idea what to do. There was an atmosphere, so frightening to children, of things not being quite right, and of discussions behind closed doors. The news from Brighton was worse. They were sent for, and although on this occasion their mother recovered, they never forgot that Aunt Emily had refused to let them travel, because it was Sunday. The immediate danger was said to have passed. Then, at the end of August a letter came from their father, addressed to all of them: “My dear, dear children.” Their mother had died that morning.

The blow to Eddie was such that in the course of a very long life, he, like his grandfather before him, never quite recovered from it. It gave him, at twelve years old, a spartan endurance and a determination not to risk himself too easily to life’s blows, which might, at times, have been mistaken for coldness.

For a year he remained alone at Aston with his father and Aunt Emily, while the others were distributed among relations. Edmund Knox could find relief from his misery only by working all day and half the night, so that the small boy was intensely lonely. He was old enough now to go to King Edward’s School; during the long miserable evenings he went up by himself to the box room and comforted himself by devising his own tramway system. It had to be horse-drawn, because he could not think how to represent the steam engines.

There was a large kitchen table in the box-room [Eddie wrote]; I cut the tramlines with a penknife and burnt them out to make them deeper with a knitting needle heated on a candle. The system was fairly accurate and I bought some little tin engines and Stöllwerk chocolate horses to pull them. These were very cheap, and lasted till they melted. The grown-ups found out, of course; they didn’t punish me, nor did they praise my industry.

Winnie, Ethel and Dilly were packed off to Eastbourne. Their broken-hearted father hardly knew which way to turn, and was prepared to accept any reasonable offer. The relative at Eastbourne was a widowed great-aunt, a sister of George Knox’s, who made it clear that by offering them a home (she was in fact being paid for their board and lodging) she was exceeding herself in Christian charity. Her Protestantism was of the “black” variety. When Dilly, shy and unmanageable, was told to kneel down and “give himself to Jesus” he took refuge in the coal hole. He had to go to an uncongenial preparatory school where he too rapidly learned all that they could teach him, and he was suffering the frustration of a natural athlete—there was no one at school who could play his spin bowling—and what sort of practice can you get in a coal hole? His sister describes him at this time as “brusque and cutting beyond endurance to the uppish or conceited, but kind beyond belief in one’s troubles.” Therefore although Dilly, like Eddie, had made a promise to himself not to care too much about anyone or anything again, he was obliged to break it every time the girls cried, or were given arithmetic homework.

The little boys, Wilfred and Ronnie, were far more fortunate. They were sent to their father’s younger brother, Uncle Lindsey, the vicar of Edmundthorpe, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire. It was a small country parish where life went by placidly, and on Sundays even the old horses in the fields knew what day it was and did not come down to the gate to be harnessed. The grandmother, Frances Knox, now widowed, occupied one of the rooms, and was so much respected that when she drove out, still in her Quaker cap and shawls, the whole village stood at their doors to see her. She was able to give a good deal of discreet financial help to the family (it was she who had paid for the Knox children’s seaside holidays) and “did much good”, as the saying went, locally. Three of the unmarried daughters also lived at the vicarage, and Lindsey, who had never married either, had very little say in the household. He lived a life of untroubled contentment. The ladies gave all the orders and told him what to say and do; sometimes he would forget, and wander off into the fields, returning with a hatful of mushrooms. This absent-mindedness was in part a self-protection, perhaps, but Uncle Lindsey had no grievances. He cared deeply for the welfare of his little flock. When a visitor’s carriage was ready to drive away he would emerge tremblingly on the front steps and cry: “Beware! Beware the parting pot!” The Parting Pot was, as it turned out, a public house at the crossroads from which his parishioners often came out in a confused condition and in danger of being run over. Farther than this ten-mile distance he rarely ventured. Some things which he saw in the newspapers he could hardly believe, and he put them out of his mind, which had room only for belief.

When Wilfred and Ronnie arrived they were told to pay particular respect to the stationmaster, because he had refused to put up Liberal posters during the election of 1886. “Conservative” was far too weak a word to describe the politics of Uncle Lindsey and the Aunts. Their lack of understanding of industrial and social problems was absolute.

On the other hand, they were most successful as hosts to young children, perhaps because they had never left childhood behind. The atmosphere at Edmundthorpe was quite unlike Waddon or even Kibworth; it was a sweet and primitive Evangelicalism, where Christ was felt as “the unseen guest” at every meal, and to be distressed if your umbrella was missing was “a sin of angry thought”. When Ronnie won fivepence at ludo—which, in a sense, was gaming—he felt it was tainted money, and put it in the collection. There were no harsh words; the motive power was always love. And Uncle Lindsey, like Mr Dick, had quite definite ideas as to what to do with a small boy, if one came his way: amuse it; wash it; feed it. With their uncle they collected honey, made bonfires of autumn leaves and jumped over them, and slid on the ice in winter. He also conceived the idea of starting their education, and crammed into his small nephews, aged six and four, an amazing quantity of Latin and Greek. He saw no difficulty in this, and in fact there was none. Ronnie was an exceedingly bright little boy, and Wilfred, who in some ways had the better brain of the two, was gifted with an exceptional memory. He could read through the Times leader once, shut his eyes, and repeat it word for word.

Ronnie accepted the régime in a less critical spirit than Wilfred, who had a sharper temper than his brother. But both of them were happy, and, above all, happy with each other. They shared all their games, all their confidences, and grew up, Winnie thought, “in absolute dependence on each other”. It was an alliance against fate, which, it seemed, Time would never have power to break.

It was during the four years at Edmundthorpe that Wilfred told, or rather implied, his only lie. While Ronnie and he were ambushing each other in the garden they had the bad luck to break off a branch of the flowering Judas tree. Wilfred dared not confess—not for fear of punishment, for there was none at Edmundthorpe, but because the Aunts were so fond of the tree. By bedtime he had still said nothing, and that night there was a storm, which scattered twigs and branches everywhere. All the damage was put down to the wind, but Wilfred’s conscience ached.

During the school holidays the children all went back to Aston for a noisy reunion. Different backgrounds had made them adjust differently, and they quarrelled, but at the approach of authority, all made an impenetrable common front together. Eddie and Dilly were particularly glad to see each other—“I can’t think what I’m going to do without you, you lazy hound,” Eddie wrote to Eastbourne—and disagreed particularly fiercely. Their father, coming home to uproar, was driven distracted. “It was specially painful to me,” he recalled, “to feel increasingly as each holiday came round the bereavement that I had sustained.” The doctor suggested a visit to the seaside, even if it could only be a shadow of their happiness at Penzance.

Aunt Emily, protesting feebly, embarked with them to Bridlington. They immediately escaped from her care, rushed down to the sea (which the doctor had forbidden), and for the first time in their lives saw a theatre, or rather a nigger minstrels’ fit-up, where Uncle Sam was clacking the bones, and inviting the audience to join in singing

Can’t get away

To marry yer today—

My wife won’t let me!

When their father arrived he could hardly credit the vulgar gaiety, so different is the measure of heartbreak in adults and children. He hastily inaugurated new amusements—cricket on the sands, as far as possible from Uncle Sam, and expeditions to neighbouring churches. The next year Aunt Emily’s nerves and health failed, and he had to take them himself to the Isle of Man. “But of course,” he wrote, “it was evident that while I might be able to manage a parish, I was a poor hand at controlling the high spirits and caring for the costumes and manners of so charming and irresponsible a party. ‘Garters’ I remember as a special trial. They were always missing!”

Although Knox’s pastoral work flourished, the rectory at Aston grew more seedy and neglected with every passing month. The furniture was engrained with soot, the drawing room shut up, the cupboards full of mislaid or broken articles. The boys were beginning to resemble savages, speaking Latin and Greek. There was no help for it, the home would have to be broken up. At this point the Bishop of Worcester, Perowne, an old friend of Bishop French, sent for Knox and offered him a new appointment—the parish of St Philip’s, Birmingham, with the post of Bishop Suffragan of Coventry.

It would be a considerable responsibility—another vast district, a diocese with only one minister to every five thousand of the population. In his own words, “it became evident that I must marry again.” The whole rich supporting background of Victorian churchgoing—the parish workers, the lay readers, the churchwardens, the Gospel Temperance meetings, the missions, the men’s Bible classes—everyone, up to the Bishop himself, knew that Knox could not go on without a wife.

She would have to be vicarage born and bred, or she could hardly face the huge city diocese, administered from Coventry, as Knox knew, “by the most charming of old-fashioned clergy, whose interest in Birmingham was, to say the best, tepid.” All the work and duty would be his. As a husband, he was now a man of forty-seven, growing bald and very stout, his natural geniality under a cloud, barely solvent as a result of his many charities and building activities, and chronically overworked. He would never marry without love and respect, and that meant respect, also, for his uncouth children. Many, however, were undaunted. Out of the unmarried lady church workers of Aston, few would have refused the new Suffragan Bishop. Here was another difficulty. From this aspect, Edmund Knox was in need of rescue.

Through Bishop Perowne, he was invited several times to meet Canon Newton, the Vicar of Redditch—a kind of vicar quite outside Knox’s experience, because he had inherited an absurdly large sum of money and had not given it away, but lived in comfort, even luxury. Horace Newton went deer-stalking every year on his own moor in the West Highlands, travelling from Glasgow on his own steam-yacht; he built a vast holiday mansion there, Glencrippsdale, and, since the vicarage was much too small for him, another one at Redditch. This house, Holmwood, had been designed for him by Temple Moore at the beginning of his career as an architect.

At Holmwood there was ample room for his six daughters and his long-wished-for son, and the handsome family moved like the Shining Ones in this appropriate setting. In Scotland the girls rode and fished, but always gallantly and high-heartedly, enjoying risk, but not taking it seriously. As vicar’s daughters, and sincere Christians, they undertook the parish duties, but admitted frankly that they found them very boring. They remained serene, never pretending. They had style.

The eldest of them, Ethel Mary, was a graceful and handsome young woman with blue eyes, an airily penetrating blue gaze before which affectation collapsed. Her uncle, Richard Wilton, a minor Victorian poet, wrote a sonnet on her photograph:

Since through the open window of the eye

The unconscious secret of the soul we trace

And character is written on the face,

In this sun-picture what do we descry? …

Courage, certainly. Wilton also refers to “the gentle current of thy days”, but this was soon to be interrupted.

In 1894 Ethel was twenty-seven, with many admirers, one of them a wealthy cousin. She could certainly have “looked above” Edmund Knox. This was in spite of the fact that Canon Newton settled no money at all on his daughters when they married. Why should he? His own wife, their mother, had been penniless, and they were perfectly happy. He did not give the girls any formal education either. They were taught music and languages, spoke French, and picked up the rest of their knowledge from the books in the library. Ethel had learned classical Greek, but simply because she wanted to.

Was it possible that she would consider marriage with Edmund? Not much less romantic than the day when he bought the rose on the station platform, he decided that if Ethel accepted an invitation to his consecration at St Paul’s Cathedral, that would mean that she had given him encouragement to hope. “It proved,” he wrote, “that I was right, to my own unspeakable gain.”

But would it be a gain for Ethel? She had not yet met the children, to whom, after all, she must be stepmother. Determined to risk everything, Edmund Knox arranged to bring the whole lot of them to Holmwood for the New Year of 1895.

The Newtons, meeting them at the station, gave no sign of dismay, for that would have been unkind, and they were never unkind. The Knox children looked like scarecrows, or remnants from a jumble sale, the girls in all-purpose black frocks, two sizes too large to allow for growth, Ronnie and Wilfred in grotesque black suits, handsewn by their grandmother’s maid at Edmundthorpe. The six of them clung together awkwardly, too shy to find the right words. They had known them at Kibworth, but had forgotten them since. For their part, they stared almost in disbelief at the house to which they had been brought. Holmwood was in the highest style of the Arts and Crafts movement, with stone-framed lattice windows and steep slate roofs, the haunt of doves in summer, now deep in snow. Once inside the white-painted hall they saw shining floors, Gimson furniture, Morris chintzes, and a staircase sweeping upward to the glass dome of the house. A blazing wood fire drew out the scent of hothouse plants. And where did the light come from? None of the children had ever seen electric light in a house before. When Wilfred and Ronnie were put to bed they sat in their nightgowns, taking strict turns, as they always did, to turn it on and off, and nobody told them to stop.

At dinnertime, under the glowing lights, the Newton girls wore Liberty gowns of velveteen; they were beautiful, the house was beautiful—in the boys’ terms, “awfully jolly”. Faced unequivocally with beauty, the older children recognized at last a starvation they had never known by name. It was strange territory. They felt humiliated most of all when, as they usually did at home, they began to quarrel, punching and pulling each other’s hair to emphasize their points. The Newtons said nothing in reproach, they simply went away; no one ever quarrelled, or even raised their voices, at Holmwood.

“It never occurred to me,” Winnie wrote, “for we had no idea why this treat had come our way, that upstairs slender forms in satin dressing-gowns were slipping in and out of their charming bedrooms to murmur to my future stepmother: ‘Ethel, darling, you can’t possibly face that family.’ But luckily for us expostulations were useless.” Ethel would never have given Edmund Knox encouragement if she had not intended to carry off everything in her stride. She wanted to do this, just as she had wanted to learn Greek. The family never let her forget the entry she made in her diary on her wedding day. Finished the Antigone. Married Bip.

All that could be done in the way of improvement she did, rapidly and tactfully. Her first task was the decoration of St Philip’s Rectory, a good large house in the very centre of Birmingham, but with no garden, only a small backyard. This was a further restriction for the children, and a real sacrifice to the Bishop, an expert gardener. As to the rooms, St Philip’s would never be much like Holmwood, but it could be painted white, and hung with Morris’s Blackthorn chintz, and good pieces of furniture could be recovered from the shambles at Aston; she added things of her own, china, silver, watercolours, poetry books, French literature. Some of the Knox possessions she never managed to get rid of, the Indian bedspread, for example, brought back by Mrs French, embroidered with tigers in gold thread with looking-glass eyes, and a steel engraving of “ God’s Eye Shut Upon the Heart of the Sinner”, which she finally banished to the lavatory. All the Newtons’ prophecies were falsified. The home was reestablished and the whole family reunited. In the evening Ethel coaxed her dreaded charges into the drawing room and read aloud to them—Stevenson’s Will o’ the Mill and The Wrong Box, Edward Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes—undisturbed by the boys who were winding up their clockwork engines behind the sofa. To them it was keenly interesting that one of the main railway lines ran into the station from a tunnel actually underneath the house. Very well, their stepmother accepted this, just as, to begin with, she accepted everything, except the annual seaside lodgings; instead of these, she hired vacant rectories, in different parts of England and Wales, for their summer holidays. Here she adapted gallantly to the demand for high teas and to long cricket matches, during which Dilly was not allowed to make more than a hundred and fifty runs, and little Ronnie, quite ignoring the game, picked bunches of wild flowers in the deep field and brought them, as an admiring tribute, to his new mother.

The little ones, naturally, were the first to be won over and the most dear to her; the girls had begun to turn to her from the first evening at Holmwood. The older boys, Eddie in particular, were a challenge. She saw that the trouble lay partly in names, and told them to call her Mrs K. But a slight barrier remained. She was reluctant, for example, to discuss health matters, her own or anyone else’s. Eddie’s nervous indigestion was dismissed as “the gulps”. He could not quite lower his defences, even when she took him to Glencrippsdale, and taught him to fish.

The civilizing process had to be gradual. In the main, it was assumed in those days that it was sufficient amusement for brothers and sisters simply to be together. So, indeed, it was. But Mrs K. would look into the schoolroom and note that all was well, the girls banging out a duet on the piano, the little boys quietly playing, Eddie and Dilly sarcastically reading to each other out of Smiles’s Self-Help, then be summoned urgently a few minutes later to find Self-Help sailing out of the window, Eddie and Dilly locked in a death grapple, Wilfred and Ronnie cowering in corners with their hands folded over their bellies to protect their most valuable possession, their wind. At other times the boys disappeared completely for long periods to avoid being made to “pay calls”.

On the subject of education—perhaps because her own had been so casual, partly perhaps because of the maniacal scenes in the schoolroom—Mrs K. stood firm. The boys must go to boarding schools. Their father was still doubtful and would have liked to keep them at home, but was induced to agree. Of course, they would have to win scholarships or the fees could not be met, and it would be a mistake for those nearest in age to compete with each other, so Eddie and Wilfred were entered for Rugby, and Dilly and Ronnie for Eton.

Meantime, Eddie was sent to a distant preparatory school, Locker’s Park, in Hemel Hempstead; Dilly went, at the age of eleven, to Summer Fields (then still called Summer Field), near Oxford. Mrs McLaren, the formidable manager, was, it appears, unwilling to admit him at such a late age, for she liked to catch them young, but changed her tune when she heard that Ronnie, already reading Virgil at the age of six, would soon be joining him. Dilly needed only a year’s coaching to take his Eton scholarship. As for Ronnie, the little boy who had been asked at four years old what he liked doing and had replied, “I think all day, and at night I think about the past,” was already a natural philosopher. He made a docile and friendly pupil, saved from any temptation to vanity by his relentless elder brothers.

Neither he nor Dilly remembered Summer Fields with much pleasure, except for the chance to swim in the river under the willow trees on sunny afternoons. In middle age, Ronnie used to recall deliberately what it was like to be beaten for having an untidy locker, to remind himself “how much better it is to be forty than eight”. The preparation of the children for scholarships was so intensive as to be only just over the borderline of sanity. Before the Eton exam Dr Williams, the headmaster, used to take a room in the White Horse Hotel in Windsor and walk the candidates up and down to steady them while he crammed in a few last showy bits of information. Many of them never reached such a high standard of learning again. Fortunately Ronnie’s sparkling intelligence, and Dilly’s dispassionate view of adults, enabled them both to survive.

In 1896, the year that Ronnie arrived at Summer Fields, Eddie won his scholarship to Rugby. Thomas French had been there in the days of Arnold, although he had been quite unmoved by the great Doctor, whose teaching was “not the Gospel as he had been accustomed to receive it.” The headmaster was now Dr H. A. James, known as The Bodger. In comparison with Eton it was a rougher, more countrified, more eccentric, more rigidly classical, less elegant and sentimental establishment. There were the usual bewildering regulations, much more binding than the official rules; only certain boys, the “swells”, could wear white straw hats, all first-year boys must answer to a call of “fag” and run to see what the “swell” required, it was a crime to walk with your hands in your pockets until your fourth year, one hand was allowed in the third year, and so forth, proscriptions being multiplied, as in all primitive societies. The younger boys got up at five forty-five and took turns in the cold baths. Eddie, who was in School House, could consider himself lucky to get a “den” at the end of his first year, overlooking the seventeen green acres of the famous Close.

Divinity was taught by The Bodger himself, a short, squarish man with a luxuriant beard, concealing the absence of a tie. “Dr James walked up and down,” as Eddie remembered him; “if it was the Upper Bench, round and round, because it was a turret room. He walked like a Red Indian, placing one foot exactly in front of the other. He kept a small private notebook in which he put favourable remarks about a boy, but a quotation from the Lays of Ancient Rome would gain at least five marks a go.” This was fortunate for the Knoxes, reared since nursery days on the Lays. The finest scholar on the staff, however, was Robert Whitelaw, Rupert Brooke’s godfather, who taught classics to the Twenty, the form below the VIth. He is described as looking like a bird of prey, and was unable to correct examinations without listening to the music of a barrel organ, which he hired to play underneath his window. “I don’t think I ever felt so grand,” Eddie thought, “as when we were set to translate a poem of Matthew Arnold’s into Latin, and I hit on the same couplet as Whitelaw.” Eccentrics scarcely disturbed the late-Victorian schoolboy, who, however, had a rare sense of quality, and recognized the expert.

Undoubtedly Rugby could claim to “harden”. The boys worked an eleven-hour day, with two hours for prep. Hacking, scragging, mauling and tripping were supposed to have disappeared under The Bodger’s rule, but the prefects punished by making a wrongdoer run past an open door three times while they aimed a kick at him. Ribs got broken that way. At breakfast, rolls flew through the air and butter was flicked onto the ceiling, to fall, when the icy atmosphere had thawed out, onto the masters’ heads. There was a strong faction in favour of the Boers during the South African War, and strikes against the horrible food; to counter them, Dr James was obliged to eat a plateful, in furious indignation, in front of the whole school, but then, furious indignation was his usual attitude. All the notices he put up ended with the words THIS MUST STOP.

The tradition of Arnold was continued with frequent compulsory chapels, but Eddie, and later Wilfred, were less influenced by these than by another boy in School House, “a rotund, ridiculous, good-natured boy, who had from the start the sort of quiet purpose that earned respect—rather grudging, I suppose.” This was Billy Temple, the future Archbishop of Canterbury.

Eddie liked Rugby well enough and accepted its routine, though he particularly enjoyed the moments when it was interrupted. One midday a boy threw a squash ball which exactly struck the hands of the great clock that set the time for the whole school, and stopped it. Masters and boys, drawing their watches out of their pockets as they hurried across the yard, to compare the false with the true, were thrown into utter confusion. It turned out that the boy, who confessed at once, had been practising the shot for two years. The Bodger called this “un-English”. Eddie did not agree. The patient, self-contained, self-imposed pursuit of an entirely personal solution seemed to him most characteristically English.

At St Philip’s, Mrs K. was undismayed by the routine of the diocese. She taught herself shorthand to deal with her husband’s correspondence, gave heart to the shy chaplains, charmed the ordinands, and managed surprisingly well on an inadequate stipend, though the housekeeping was somewhat haphazard, and the wine was cheap and sometimes undrinkable. Perhaps only Mrs K. could have tamed Alice, the cook (though in those days it was assumed that all cooks were ill-tempered), but charm, energy and devotion carried all before them. With such a wife, it was clear that Edmund Knox would soon be more than a Suffragan Bishop.

The holiday expeditions continued, but now with much wider range, with the advent of bicycles. A Coventry firm presented a machine to the Bishop; Mrs K., although as a horsewoman she mistrusted the contraption, learned quicker than her portly husband, who was, he said, “an ardent devotee, until, one day, the bar snapped and let me down”; the children all followed, teaching themselves on Raleighs paid for by old Mrs Knox. Eddie and Dilly were soon rapidly skimming through the Birmingham traffic, the girls pedalling gamely along in hats and white cotton gloves, the little boys doing the best they could, before the days of freewheel, their short legs turning rapidly. Rules were immediately invented, and it became a point of honour among the four brothers never to get off even up the steepest hill. Pale with fatigue, Wilfred and Ronnie toiled upward, Eddie describing wide circles around them, until he brought them to a halt by the wayside, with the words THIS MUST STOP.

Ronnie sometimes stayed behind. He had become fascinated with dictionaries. He threatened, in spite of a rule that no one must speak a language that the others did not understand, to learn Sanskrit and Welsh. “I can still see Ronnie,” Winnie wrote, “on the seat by the Welsh driver of the waggonette which conveyed us all to church, making out a Welsh Bible with the aid of this friend, while the horse wandered along unnoticed, and my father predicted we should all be late for the service.”

At home, Eddie took charge of the family newspaper, The Bolliday Bango. It was the voice of Scholesia—their name for the world of the shabby schoolroom. Eddie levied the contributions, sometimes by force, copied them out in ink, and did the illustrations. There are action pictures of the bicycles, of a peculiar form of football played in the tiny yard, and, more fancifully, of a synod of bishops playing billiards with their crosiers, and hanging up their mitres on the pegs. It was Eddie’s first venture into journalism, and in its handwritten pages Dilly produced his first document in cipher (though the editor refused further instalments), and Ronnie, at the age of eight, his first Latin play.

In time, however, the editor and sub-editor became interested in other things. Developing a keenly critical spirit, they detected a number of inaccuracies, even downright contradictions, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and sent a list of them to Conan Doyle in an envelope with five dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Eddie acquired photographs of a number of music-hall actresses who had appeared, or were appearing, on the Birmingham stage. Then he and Dilly acquired pipes and tins of Tortoiseshell Mixture. Clouds of smoke began to float round Scholesia, already frequently plunged in darkness while Wilfred tried to develop his photographic plates. Mrs K. heroically avoided noticing the haunting whiffs of tobacco. The Bolliday Bango ceased publication, and Ronnie, still in his sanctum underneath the table, tried to produce a magazine on his own, but the impetus was gone as he became the last one left in childhood.

His consolation was a book—not one of the borrowed dictionaries, but the first book that had ever been truly his own, not to be touched by any of the others without his permission. It was a present, and the pencil mark inside showed that it had cost five shillings: Natural History, by the Rev. J. C. Wood.

The influence of this book, which gave him his first glimpse of independence, was disproportionate. From the first picture (of a man raising a bottle to his lips, contrasted with a noble lion, and titled: “Between man and brutes there is an impassable barrier, over which man can never fall, or beasts hope to climb”), Ronnie was as if hypnotized. When, sixty years later, he went to Africa, he judged both flora and fauna by the steel engravings in Wood. He knew the whole book by heart, and professed to believe it all; the animals were all graded by their usefulness to man, which meant that the Labrador came top (“many must have perished but for its timely aid”). Yet, as he said himself, in spite of the years at Edmundthorpe, outside the book he could not tell a bullfinch from a chaffinch.

Absurd though it may seem, Wood had an even deeper effect on Ronnie; this was because of his praise of reason. “It were an easy task to prove the unity of mankind by scriptural proofs,” Wood wrote in his introduction, “but I thought it better to use rational arguments.” This went deep. Ronnie told Eddie that there were “rational arguments” why he should be allowed to join the brothers’ inner group—the St Philip’s Pioneering and Military Tramway Society; they were not accepted, he had to pass the set tests, but Ronnie remained convinced of the supreme saving power of reason.

Ronnie could not help knowing that he was clever for his age, and that much was expected of him, and he hoped not to disappoint anybody. Meanwhile his elders, the fixed stars of his firmament, sometimes praised him, and sometimes took him to a football match; for sheer quality of happiness, he did not think one could beat the moments when Aston Villa won at home, and his brothers allowed him to wave a flag.

The Bishop’s tasks multiplied. Queen Victoria did not take kindly to Evangelicals, and tried to exclude them from high responsibilities until they were too old to give trouble. Knox was an exception. Rejecting, to the relief of his family, the offer of the bishopric of Madras, he fought on until “dignified Worcester and placid Coventry began to look upon Birmingham as something more than a rather heathen shopping town.” In 1896 the last of the lovely Burne-Jones windows were installed at St Philip’s, and the church was worthy of becoming what it now is, the Cathedral of Birmingham.

Preoccupied as he often was, deep in church affairs to the exclusion of all others, he remained a family man, confident of his children’s support. He could be, and often was, exceedingly angry with them, and sometimes cuffed the elder boys all the way round his study, but he was perfectly tolerant of their jokes at the expense of his dignity. One Sunday his private chapel was mysteriously full of the scent of Popish incense; once, when he was on a visitation, he found that his hostess had been told (by Eddie) to be sure to supply him with a bottle of whisky—“the Bishop could not do with less”—and with a pair of black silk stockings, in case he had forgotten his own. Once a representative of the press called at their holiday rectory, and since there were no servants and Mrs K. felt that the family might be considered too informal, Winnie and Ethel obligingly did duty as cook and parlour maid; only Eddie told the reporter that both of them were deaf and dumb, and could be addressed only in sign language; this caused Winnie to drop the soup. The Bishop marvelled, thinking of his own industrious and obedient boyhood, at where such ideas could come from.

St Philip’s Rectory never became completely settled territory. There was always an unpredictable element. But the boys were going ahead unchecked, maintaining their early promise. All were winning prizes and scholarships, and their father was accustomed to measure progress by such things. As soon as it was dark, wherever they were, there was a cry, as though from the Inferno, for lamps and candles, so that the children could get down to their studies. Beyond his knowledge, however, there were stirrings, intimations of nature and poetry and human weakness, which could never be confided either in him or in Mrs K., who, in Eddie’s phrase, in spite of her sterling qualities, seemed to them “rather drawing-roomy”. There were certain aspects of sea and cloud and open country that brought to them, as it did to Housman’s Shropshire Lad, “into my heart an air that kills”—certain poetry, too, that would always have the power to bring them together, Sylvie and Bruno, Catullus, Matthew Arnold, Housman himself, Cory’s epitaph:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.

I wept when I remembered how often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

They knew that this was nothing more than an inaccurate translation from the Greek, made by an Eton schoolmaster to help out his class; later, they knew that the schoolmaster had had to leave Eton under a cloud, and take a different name. But the power of the two verses to remind them of each other, across time and space, was beyond this, and indeed beyond “rational argument”.

Still, every morning, at family prayers, the whole household knelt down together, while the ancient coffee-machine simmered ferociously in the background, and the unity and peace, like that of England itself, seemed unlikely to be broken.