Chapter Fourteen - War and Discontent 1915-1921

The war years were to change our lives more than we could ever realise at that time. None of us had known war, and it came to us like a shocking nightmare in the midst of a pageant of rich and pleasant dreams. The warnings of people like Roger Fry and Adrian Stephen, who had argued that a great war was on the horizon, went unheeded as the overwrought rantings of socialist doomsayers.

My mother, following the immemorial tradition of ‘seeing a daughter through her first’ had come to stay with us in Lexham Gardens after Diana was born in the first days of the war. There, I got a first-hand account of what the conflict of war meant to individuals, especially to women. As I lay in bed in my big pretty room with the silvery-blue striped wallpaper in tired and relaxed idleness, shot through with anxiety about that unknown thing, war, half-listening to the hot dusty rustle of plane-trees in the square below, she gave me maternal advice; but in the hot weeks of that particular August the advice she gave took on an unwonted tone for such an occasion, and matched the secret anxiety.

‘If you and Owen have to bury your silver, my dear child,’ she said suddenly one day, á propos de bottes, ‘remember that it is no use in burying it near a building or a tree, and count on that as a landmark because trees and buildings get blown up. Bury it near some quite large cross-roads; roads always run pretty much in the same place, whatever happens.’ Or, sitting large and calm in her grey summer dress, with her hands in her lap, she would give me detailed instructions for roasting barley if coffee should run out, and just what proportion of roasted acorns to add ‘if Owen likes chicory in his coffee.’ Owen doesn’t, but I listened almost awestruck, for I realized that I was hearing the voice of one of the few people in England at that moment who had first-hand experience of actual war from the civilians’ point of view.

What she was telling me she had heard from her aunts and sisters and cousins so soon after it had taken place – and when she spoke of picking old sheets for lint for bandages, or roasting barley to make coffee, somehow she always succeeded, (probably without any deliberate intention, it was just the way her mind worked) in giving me a perfectly clear background to these activities, since she herself had seen that background so very soon afterwards. There in London, in those long hot quiet days – punctuated by Owen’s return at all hours from the Foreign Office, where the young men were working round the clock in eight-hour shifts – I was carried by my mother’s words straight back to the deep South and the atmosphere of those other long hot quiet days, fifty years before, when her last war had been going on.


In the case of many people in England, it was the war which first aroused them to a realisation and appreciation of the importance of international relations in the course of our life as a nation. International relations had been, for them, a difficult and pronouncedly uninteresting work of supererogation, conducted, rather negligently, by gentlemen in the Foreign Office. The War suddenly made them interesting, horribly exciting, and – most strange of all – charged with moral values. These values were of a rather elementary sort, it is true; but there, suddenly, they were, and the public enjoyed them greatly.

It was otherwise with George. For him, war meant the breakdown of a system – faulty, it is true, and compromise-ridden, but which was still the fruit of centuries of human endeavour; which after all represented, however poorly, the forces of order, justice, and civilisation, as opposed to mere greed and anarchy. With the workings of this system he had made himself to some extent familiar. He had long been aware of the moral issues involved in it, with the moral forces by which it could be affected, of the fine deeds to which it might attain. For him, the war was not the great and heroic event of his lifetime, as it was to so many. It was, rather, the supreme disaster – a catastrophic interruption of human progress, a hideous resurgence of uncivilised and antisocial forces; the destruction of the good life as he knew it; the grave of a thousand hopes. For him as for every man, it was a happening of overwhelming importance, but it was an importance of destruction, rather than of fulfilment; the interruption of a sequence, not the attainment of a destiny.

To understand his attitude towards international relations in general and the war in particular, it is necessary to remind oneself of some of the roads by which he had been led to his position. When he read history at Cambridge, he brought to the subject a liveliness of mind, a discursive freshness of interest in the present illustrations of historical fact, which, though they would never have made an historian of him, might well have turned him, in other circumstances, into a politician. His strong moral preoccupation invaded this, like all other departments of his intellectual activity; the rightness or wrongness of national actions, the motives from which they sprang, concerned him profoundly.

It was also perhaps natural that his unusually conscious interest in human relationships on a small scale should have led him, in his historical thought, to a tendency to personalisation of nationalities which made even his casual exposition of some international crises a really vivid thing. Nations became to him like persons; their characters fair or ugly, lit by fine qualities or marred with weakness; their actions morally important, as the actions of people are morally important. This personification of nationalities can be overdone, but it was not, I think, by him. His was never the flimsy idealism of the sentimentalist, which disregards the rugged features of fact. It was simply that he could not tolerate the customary double standard of morals, one for persons, and another for politics. Political morality, he realised, was a much later growth of the human mind, a much more complex, difficult, and refractory matter than personal morality; depending as it must on a thousand considerations: considerations of economics, of diplomacy, of race, of trade, of the use of force and the possession of force, of social justice, and of national feeling.

The good life – for individuals, for all classes, for nations and the comity of nations; this with every year a deepening desire, was his idea. Round about 1911 and 1912 his interest had focused to a considerable extent on social conditions. It was then that he formed the acquaintance of W. H. Beveridge, then in the middle of his struggle for the decasualisation of labour, and from him learned something of the details and technicalities of that problem. He was interested in, but somehow never really caught by this. Laws and Labour Exchanges must be used, understood and improved, he recognised this; but they were not the ideal weapon with which to fight the many foes of the good life. To George, the Good life, like the Kingdom of Heaven, lay within and must be built from within. Material improvements and external compulsions had no life in themselves unless they were informed with that inner spirit which constituted the real nexus of civilisation. Their chief use was by example – to teach it, or as defences to consolidate the ground gained by humanity.

More and more he turned to education as the ideal instrument with which to build up a civilisation in which the spirit of man could be at home. Education, more than anything else, he believed to set man free from the worst part of himself; by education his imagination and sympathies were released from the narrow confines of his personal interests – to see with the eyes of other races and to feel for other men. Education could confer that habit of sifting evidence and thinking hard and clearly, which alone makes a sane and unprejudiced judgement possible. Only education could focus feeling where feeling was right and proper – on injustice, greed, or carelessness – and prevent it from trespassing unwanted on the course of clear thoughts, of clouding facts and realities with its red or rosy mists.

It was to this end that he, Geoffrey Young, Geoffrey Keynes, and David Pye got together after the war to discuss the founding of a school for boys on an entirely new model. Georis Young, Geoffrey’s brother, on hearing of George’s educational ideas, made the suggestion, and so it was that they drew up a list of the necessary requirements of a really progressive school:

First, home and school must not be left in exclusive compartments. Parents deserved and should retain responsibility for more than the arrangement of holidays. In order to foster clear thinking and spiritual awareness, parents and teachers must find ways of working together.

Second, as boys at public school knew little of the kind of work men had to do in the world, they had no idea what they themselves might accomplish. Thus a school should be situated on an estate with at least one farm, and would provide experience of useful employment and teach the obligations of responsibility and the value of efficiency and disinterested effort. This would also develop a sense of discrimination for what was of real value and what was shoddy.

Third, there must be no strict demarcation between work and play, lessons and leisure, else boys were apt to regard mental effort as the least enjoyable of duties. There must be an atmosphere friendly to intellectual effort. By requiring greater concentration in class and cutting down on the barrier between class and free time, the school could reduce the formal curriculum and still prepare boys for university. Classes would take boys to the country, where they would be expected to venture farther individually.

Fourth, games would not be over-emphasised, nor would they be allowed to take up such great amounts of time. Experience of games had value in their ability for the toughening of fibre, alertness in an emergency and for pure heroics, but often they were focused on to the detriment of the development of the whole boy.

They were not the only idealists interested in developing progressive schooling; the great educationalist A. S. Neil founded the famous Summerhill in 1921, with which readers will recognise many common themes. And certainly, had George lived, he’d have been instrumental in the design and founding of Gordonstoun, which Geoffrey founded with Kurt Hahn in 1934.

Part of his time in training in 1916 was spent in writing a pamphlet with me, addressed to the boys and girls of England, as to what they could do, while still at school, for their country. This was published, after much discussion, under the title (which commended itself to the publisher but not to him) of ‘War Work for Boys and Girls,’ by Messrs Allen and Unwin. But owing to the disorganisation of the book trade, the absence of travellers, and the expense of advertisements, it never had a very wide circulation. This is unfortunate, for it is a capital piece of work, written with much more simplicity and directness than is usual with him; an appeal to the youth of England to spend their years of enforced education in fitting themselves, by reading and by thought, to form a just, wise, and well-informed public opinion, which shall not be at the mercy of unscrupulous journalism or a wrong-headed government policy. I know of no better statement, for its size, of the importance of public opinion in international affairs, of the only means by which it can be obtained, to the aims to which such an opinion should direct itself.
George wrote,
If the individual man is conscious of himself as belonging to various groups, to the family, the trade, the class, and many others, why should his group consciousness stop with the state? Why should not an Englishman become conscious of Europe as a group and then of the whole world; become in fact a citizen of the world, so that patriotism is merged with cosmopolitanism?

The question is one of psychological possibility. I would go so far as to assert that there are already citizens of the world. To accept the larger group is not to lose sight of the smaller one. On the contrary, we shall still love our country as citizens of the world; wish for her the noblest life, as we would wish it for a friend, be pulsations in her tender conscience, stirring ions in her activities, drops of blood in her adventures.

We conceive of a ‘national conscience,’ and this conscience is a living reality to all who love England. She must be a lovely person, beautiful in action, in thought and feeling. When she is proud she must be pitiful; when she is angry she must use moderation; when she loves she must be kind; when she hates she must still see what is just; if her place is peculiarly fortunate her conduct must be particularly blameless; if she is strong she must admit a fault; if she is free she must be generous. And truly to love England means precisely this: that we wish the best for her as we wish it for friends whom we love. We are not to have one standard for our conduct and another for our country’s – we must apply the same principles for her as for ourselves and no less rigidly; we must test her actions by our finest feelings.

Certain effects the war undoubtedly produced in him. He was obliged to live for long periods at a time in close daily contact with all sorts of people whose mode of life and thought differed as widely as possible from his own, and he certainly gained in sympathy and tolerance by this, though not without a struggle. I am sure there never was such a lover of his own company as I am, he wrote in the summer of 1916. I hope I have learnt how to soften an excess of companions in a confined space, but I can never forgive or forget the excess of time that passes away with no additions to one’s store of amusing thoughts.

He learned a wholly new respect for practical efficiency. People who only knew him well during and after the war have found it hard to credit stories of his early ramshackle methods in dealing with everyday affairs, so thoroughly was this lesson assimilated. But as usual he plunged below the surface to discover in what the real efficiency consisted. He was for some time while in France liaison officer with a French anti-aircraft battery, and so had a chance to see our war machine through foreign eyes, an experience which he valued greatly.

One story from this source seemed to him to bear on the efficiency question: his hosts told him with half-amused and half-scandalised bewilderment how when an English Brigade took over some French trenches on the Somme, the young subalterns were to be seen walking coolly about above the trenches whose whereabouts the previous occupants had carefully concealed. ‘Ces Monsieurs Anglais sont fantas TIQUES!’ was the comment. No, routine efficiency and as good as it could be, still required intelligence and self-restraint to reap its full harvest; fantastic courage, such as could destroy in a careless moment the work of months, had no place in it.

Looking back at him, as he stood among his contemporaries in the years from 1912 to 1920, it is extraordinary to see how well he exemplified his own theories, and how startlingly he was in advance of most people of his time. To meet him in those years was to receive a strong impression of being led to walk in a larger room, where great and unfamiliar issues were present companions; to realise how thought was becoming his daily bread, and how much stronger and deeper his feeling was for being deaf to false catch-words and sham causes, and concentrated on unwonted and less obvious aspects of affairs. It was afterwards to become a passion that the good life could and must obtain, in international relations and well as in personal ones.

To a man holding these views, with these antecedents, the war came as a shocking impossibility, a nightmare incredibly stalking in the broad light of day. War in itself seemed to George so intolerably wrong that almost nothing could excuse it. It was a ghastly evil that sane men must bear as best they could. It was natural that for him there should be no joyful leap to meet the occasion, but what appeared to others rather as a horror-stricken detachment. Even about the war, he must think, free from passion or confusion. Thought and freedom from passion were not especially popular in England in 1915, but his absolute sincerity, patience, and justice made it impossible not to respect his attitude. His misery over the loss of his friends – my brother Jack, killed in the first gas-attack of the war; Harry Garret shot through the head in August, fighting the Turks; Hugh Wilson in December, when he called upon a German patrol to surrender – of all men’s friends, over the ghastly casualty lists, and the strain and anxiety and sorrow that clouded England in those hideous years was extreme.

The action of the Charterhouse authorities made his own course clear for the first twelve months of the war, for schoolteachers were immediately exempt from compulsory service, and indeed from voluntary service. Enough has probably been said to make it plain that much would have been needed to him feel that he would be doing better work for the cause of civilisation as a soldier than as a schoolmaster. But as the war dragged on and the horror deepened, that compulsion came upon him. He felt at last with all his being that the good life had its deadliest foes in the Central Powers, and that for the moment the blows struck in its cause must be struck with shells and bayonets. That once settled, his way was again clear, and his realism and his sense of fact made him see the war more plainly in terms of ‘Killing Germans’ than many people who had joined at once in every war-cry.

He joined up, as a Second Lieutenant with the Royal Garrison Artillery, with the help of his sister Mary’s husband, Ralph Brooke, who was an instructor at Woolwich. There were good reasons not to go apart from the merely philosophical: his daughter Clare had just been born in September, and he had stayed at home for three months from Charterhouse, working out a new programme for teaching history there. But he went into training, on a course at Weymouth for subalterns who might prove eligible for further training at Lydd in the Siege Artillery – Howitzers – and then went out, after the usual delays, to France.

Just before going out, he wrote: I was wishing the other day that I could know the individual minimum, as I call it to myself, for everyone – the least a man would be content to leave behind him as his share of life accomplished. Wouldn’t one know something if one could know that?

I had a letter from him in the middle of May from Rouen, where he was briefly:
Now I am ‘in for it’ at last, as nearly all our friends and relations. The whole business is ghastly and disconcerting, especially in contrast to the green life going on around me. You will find it ironic as I did that I could go out for a lovely walk all alone to Montvilliers, with the flax and lavender growing high beside me, scenting the air wonderfully, completely unmolested and secluded from the mad world. Spring burgeons in this peaceful landscape and one would hardly know that twenty miles away is such death and destruction not fit for the human imagination; the only indication of any thing amiss is the occasional sound of gunfire, when the wind is in the right direction. It could be mistaken for thunderclaps.

I went to the church, or Abbey rather, which dates back to 684. It is beautifully Gothic, with sculpted decoration on the arch of the chapel – of animals, warriors and various biblical figures – and was, I understand, under the patronage of the Dukes of Normandy.... But how far is this from the reality of life, the life that we knew! I think of our last holiday in Wales last summer. It seemed like old times to have you there. Do you remember the South Buttress, and the lamb? I shall never forget the sight of you on Hugh’s motorbike...

We had all gone to Pen-y-Pass in late July, with Ursula Nettleship and Bertie Graham. George had already been there with Hugh Percy for nearly a week. The lamb in question had been stuck up on the slopes of Tryfan, bleating piteously, and George carried it down to Ogwen in his rucksack. As for the motorbike, I had borrowed it to go down into Old Llanberis for oddments for Diana; George had never seen me on a motorbike, and as he said, didn’t even know I could drive – let alone roar off at forty miles an hour. They were good days.

And again after the first Zeppelin raid on London at the end of May:
We have heard, in ‘King and Country’, of your trouble there. Are you all right my dear, in getting to your office? We hear nothing of the areas affected of course, for security reasons, one presumes.

I had, in addition to working at the 2nd London auxiliary hospital in Chelsea as a VAD – a nursing assistant the Volunteer Aid Detachment – been recruited into working for the Home Office, decoding intercepted German messages – a most interesting but cumbersome process, for the messages first had to be deciphered (they were simply a series of numbers) into German words and then translated into English. At any rate, we were at that time in the bowels of the offices in Westminster, well within harm’s way. It was the unremitting Zeppelin raids that caused George and Ruth to offer us the Holt while George was away, as Ruth and the children were at her father’s house at Westbrook.

The raid in May killed twenty-eight people and injured scores more. Many places suffered from Zeppelin raids apart from London, as far away as Gravesend, Sunderland, Edinburgh, as well as the Midlands and the Home Counties. Defence against such attacks was almost non-existent, and people were deeply shocked, and very angry that the enemy could apparently strike directly at people and property in Britain and return home with impunity.

It is hard to say of anyone what such an event as actual experience of modern warfare means to him. Some part may be expressed, more perhaps becomes apparent, but most is of the order of secret imperceptible modification, hard to realise and harder, if not impossible, to describe. With George, there was a strong sense of his carrying on a private, interior life of his own, through all the monotony and fatigue of his months of training in England; through the disorder, ugliness and confusion of his time in France. He clung, I think, rather desperately to his detachment, to his own life of thought, to anything that would serve to remind him of the continued existence of an order of things, more sane, less horrible that that in which he found himself involved.

So he wrote from France in 1918 of his week’s leave in Paris with Trafford, where his rejoicings over the armistice are followed by an account of delightful hours spent in the Bibliotech Nationale where he held in his own hands the manuscript of Figaro, and of the bookseller’s where he found, for five francs, a complete edition of Beaumarchais, and the emotion this gave him. This in contrast to August of 1915, when he had seriously vexed some of his friends by forgetting, on the 4th, what deadly anniversary it was, so happy was he in a flying visit to North Wales.

His letters from France are full of books he had read and from which he had got pleasure, though this was frustrating, for he wrote plaintively in February of 1917, when he was only three miles from the front lines, but of what use telling you what I read, since we can’t talk about it? He wrote of friends and friends’ concerns –we were all shocked to learn that Geoffrey Young was severely wounded in Italy in the battle of Monte San Gabriele and his left leg had been amputated above the knee, however will he climb again? Geoffrey is a creature of the mountains as we are; and his frustrations during a spell of looking after an aging Colonel while he was himself convalescing from having his old ankle injury operated on –Damn it all! I’m not a valet! But he wrote most often of the whole question of final values, which the precariousness of all men's lives made more pressing than ever.

The whole matter of having his ankle looked at was a relief for him, not merely from the constant pain of the old injury in the dampness of the trenches, but from the whole ugly business of war. He was, for a blessed space of time, safe with us. His old climbing injury had probably saved his life. He came home in May, and was for some time in hospital ‘with duchesses on the foot of one’s bed’, so there was plenty of time for letters and discussion of books. We had moved into the Holt by then, and it was very amusing to direct letters to him in hospital in London from his own house, writing in his own study, as I liked to do. It was good to see him also, as we did when he was well enough, though he looked very thin and haggard. He and Ruth stayed at Westbrook during the week and came up to the house at the weekends if she was feeling well enough, for she was expecting a baby then, and it was just like old times with their house-parties. We would sit then, far into the night, in the study or in the loggia, reading and talking and arguing about anything except the war. It was so good to see him! To see his delight in Clare and Diana, at ages two and three, in the garden, to watch him stand, smoking his pipe, looking out over the treetops when the afternoon sun went slanting over the spires of Charterhouse.

At last he was well enough to put in a few days’ climbing at Arran and a week on the West Coast beforehand with David Pye and Will Arnold-Forster. They climbed Cir Mhor and Goat Fell, and it is impossible to forget his contentment in this short return to civilised life. The lines left his face, and his colour returned; he seemed to be tasting, with a serene intensity, all the simple good things: the hill walks, the inocuted scrambles up the beds of burns, the bathing, the sitting under perfumed haycocks, the varied amusements afforded by a house-party; the long stretches of talk in the greenest shade of a walled garden, the hearts of golden raspberries out of a rhubarb leaf, partaken along the rocks by the shore.

‘It was all perfect,’ he said of his time at home, before he went away again. We stood in the hall at the Holt, beside the steep, winding stairs, with the sunlight pouring in from the drawing room and from the fanlight in the door, lighting in dappled patterns the tulip and rose wallpaper above the panelling. We were alone, as Owen was in London and Diana was at her afternoon nap. George had come by himself for tea. ‘Thank you for your part in it.’
I looked at him in surprise. ‘My part in it? I did nothing.’
‘Oh no,’ he murmured, with a soft and thoughtful expression. He regarded me with such naked feeling that it stopped my breath. ‘You have kept this place alive,’ he said, laying a hand on my arm. ‘It means a good deal to me, to know that you love this house too and are looking after it for me.’

The old feeling only he could evoke welled up in me, and I could hardly breathe. ‘I love it because it is your house. I treasure it because you made it peaceful and lovely. I would do anything to keep it that way. For you.’ Neither of us spoke but above a whisper, filled with that deep old intimacy.
He regarded me a long moment. ‘I know,’ he said at last. ‘And it, and you, will be here when I return,’ he said slowly. ‘And I shall return, dear. There is so much to live for.’
‘George!’ Tears spilled over and I flung my arms around him, just wanting so much for him to be safe. ‘Take care! Take care!’ I murmured, again and again. We stood together for a long time before he moved away, smiling a little.
‘I will, dear.... Goodbye, Diana!’ He kissed my cheek hurriedly, with a fierce look, that one small action giving vent to all the emotions swirling about. ‘Write to me!’ he commanded.
‘I will,’ I promised. And then he was gone, up the steps and on his bicycle, away down the hill to Godalming and Westbrook. Back to France.

While he was in France, George began writing a book which nominally chronicled a father’s concerns for his young boy – the distillation of all George’s experience with young boys at Charterhouse. He called it The Book of Geoffrey, after Geoffrey Young, and it was, more than anything, an exposition of his whole philosophy, on life and the moral question. He wrote it as a journal, writing reflectively in odd moments when he could. Some of it he typed up – badly – on long narrow sheets when he returned home, but with one thing and another – work at Charterhouse and the lectures he gave for the Fabian Society, and then Everest – he never did finish it, which is a great pity.

I am grateful that he kept his handwritten journals for the when I went through his typescript after he died, the pages were all hopelessly muddled, with nothing quite matching, and had I not the journals as a guide, the job of putting it all together would have been impossible. Ruth gave it to me, along with his diaries, which I found very touching, in hopes I think of making my work easier, but it didn’t really. George’s writing is very complex and opaque, running to long intricate sentences, which even for a very intelligent person are not always easy to follow. In the second of the Everest expedition books, he had a single sentence that ran on for two and half pages! I don’t know why Arnold and Company allowed it. In the event, had he time to work on it and knock it into shape, The Book of Geoffrey would have been an important primer for parents.

George wrote: The case of my merely righteous man is clearest of all; his success is not only a measure of the amount of goodness he does. His success is also a measure of the amount he excludes. He too is human for all his well-wrought armour; and yet his weakness is that he lacks humanity. He inflicts upon himself limitations of experience. To do simply what is right, the whole of that and nothing contrary is so difficult a task in itself that every faculty must be bent to that employ, The spirit cannot be allowed its flight; it must take humbly what is near at hand not wasting strength in distant enterprise. His life is therefore sweet and fresh, and he is not obliged to struggle with his kitchen fire on a winter’s morning. A saint he may be, but not a hero. And if he appears the nicest of men, with charity, faith, and hope in plenty, and brings forth more than others the ‘fruits of the spirit,’ at what price has he purchased them! He is out of touch with the practical world; he will not understand the common points of view; he serves no general scheme of progress and by acting alone from his own idealism accomplishes far less for the world than many a simple bonhomme. To master the facts and details of the social life around him requires mental effort and a sustained application: but that he always refuses to make.

My prophet appears a still more spiritual man; he is more intense, more enraptured, more inspired. His enthusiasm is wonderful. One may listen to his eloquent exposition with delight, seeming to share his joy and passion and to penetrate further than ever before into the kingdom of God and His holy mysteries. But what an unequal goodness this is! What periods of pessimism, or irritation and gloom must be set against these moments of exaltation. Many a child has more self-control than this man. His nerves play with him what tricks they will and he is so ‘farouche’ at times as to be almost unapproachable. Here was his own struggle, his own journey, a ringing self-portrait of his own youth, in his own words.

Is the martyr any more perfect? What he endures almost passes belief. The high purpose, the heroism, the grit of the man compel for a moment my unqualified admiration. But is it possible to take him seriously? The cause seems so unequal to the sacrifice. How much better it would have been to persist more quietly! He may be a martyr, but he lacks some understanding, some spirit of wisdom – true proportion and judgement without which a man is lost, condemned to wander rudderless, the sport of any wind.

I find truth in a world of warring Goods no less than of strife between Good and Evil – not that the Goods are necessarily exclusive; Good appears to us all of one essence; the strife is not in Good as we recognise it, but in men as we find them. Here too we must bow before the universal law of compromise. The old commonplace of imperfection amounts only to this: that the more a man has of Good in one sort the less likely will he be to have it in another. If men are not equally good, they may still be equally imperfect.

... It may appear at first sight when this problem presents itself that it concerns after all a few rare cases. For the many life is a simple affair with good and evil clearly distinguished; if a question arises, the answer is not difficult; it must be right or wrong and that is the end of it. Morality for them has no complications. Happy are they, the simple righteous; they are not too many. But life is never simple but with the aid of circumstance, spring unto itself. To choose the Good is to have a fresh consciousness of it. Morality therefore, the active form of Good, should lead to the experience of Good in other forms. It only becomes an obstacle when men are infatuated, when instead of being aware of Good in many kinds, present everywhere and ready to be admired for its various beauty, they see it only as related to morality, as so many minions in the service of their mistress.

It is not necessary to examine in detail the processes by which men become infatuated: I have seen the beginnings of them in Geoffrey’s case... He might end by determined rebellion, and choose instead a false divinity, the attractive counterfeit of the goddess Freedom; Heaven defend him from that disaster. But in so far as he has submitted to this splendid lady, Morality, he has cooled a little towards other friends. That sly fellow Impulse is already a little shy; he can bear to be condemned when he is bad, but when feeling good he dislikes to meet suspicion. And in proportion as Morality is presented to Geoffrey as being the one most splendid figure, and his mind becomes filled with the suggestion of her transcendence, he tends to neglect the other beauties. He may see them because they belong to the scene, but without actually becoming acutely aware of them. No one whispers in his ear on their behalf that he should pay homage to their beauty.

If his love of Morality has cost him so much effort to cultivate why should he not be satisfied with her? That these other beauties would help him with this lady he has not been told and could not know. Perhaps he will never learn of his own accord that way of combining faithfulness to his love with a proper admiration for all that is desirable, and that duty for the increase of love in general to adore the most beautiful wherever it appears, and even to seek wherever it is to be found.

When he had his own son, John, he really looked forward to testing these theories in immediate practise, but John Mallory was three and a half years old when his father died, and so, as with so much else, George never got the chance.

As for me, I did have the chance to test some of George’s theories on my own son, Patrick John, who was born at the end of March, 1918, at the Holt; though I must say they were not entirely successful. His birth, alas, was somewhat symbolic of the course of his life, which has not been smooth. He was rather early, arrived precipitously, and caused everyone a very great deal of care and worry, more so than most babies do.

About a fortnight before he was expected I was stuck in with a lot of boxes in the attic one day, moving things about in an effort to get ready for him. I thought, as it was raining rather hard, it would be a good day for such a project, so while Diana was occupied in her little schoolroom (one of the old servants’ rooms at the top of the house) with strict instructions to do nothing but copy out the numbers and letters I had written out for her, for so many pages – for we had no nursery governess in those days, I taught the children myself – I somehow got myself up to the attic, pulling up loads of old clothes, and odd household items of ours which were cluttering up an unused room, by aid of climbing rope and a good deal of swearing.

So there I was, sitting in the cramped space, amid the Mallorys’ own collection of unused items, our ski equipment and George’s climbing gear, trying to shift some rather heavy boxes on the unfinished floor. Now, being tall, such an endeavour would have been a challenge at the best of times, for the headspace in the attic was less than five feet at its apex, but being lumbering and unwieldy with a term baby made it nearly impossible. I found myself stuck in corners several times.

Just when I decided that this whole undertaking was a poor idea, badly executed, it began to thunder outside, rumbling across the landscape like cannon fire. Below me, in the schoolroom, I heard Diana calling for me, in something of a panic, for she had been terrified of the Zeppelin raids in London. I called out to her in return, not to be frightened, that I would be down in a moment, and went on with my sorting, trying to shove the boxes and gear about to clear a path, for I had no easy way just then to get across the floor and over to the trap door with its precarious little folding staircase. After several minutes, a shock of lightning went across the sky, and a terrific boom of thunder quite close on, and Diana screamed in the room below.

‘Damn it!’ I gave up trying to bring order to chaos and very awkwardly clambered over boxes and cases and piles of climbing rope as best I could, whacking my head on the ceiling several times. It seemed to take forever to get to the trap door, with Diana howling a fearful racket, and when I did, my relief at having reached the little staircase, which at the other end did not nearly reach the floor, was smashed. At once a clap of thunder broke, and I, twisting round on the step, missed one and went skittering down two or three of them before I caught myself. Then, shaken and shaking, while clinging to the top of the staircase, wishing to God for the security of bootnails at least if I were going to be hanging precariously off the ground, the waters broke and nearly knocked me over with the force.

‘Damn! Damn!’ Now I was in real trouble! Diana was still screaming, I had to get down from this blasted ladder, Owen was in London and unlikely to be home before the weekend (as he hated the Holt and spent the week nights at his club), the baby was coming and no one clear to Charterhouse was on the telephone.

I had nothing to balance my feet on. I tried the wall and nearly lost my grip entirely. I had nothing to rely on but arm strength to slowly manoeuvre myself down the staircase to a level where a drop would not injure myself or the baby. It must have taken me fifteen minutes, and I was prouder of no mountain adventure than I was having got myself safely off that blasted stair.
I squidged away to Diana, who was quite hysterical by this time, and gathered her into my arms on the floor of the schoolroom. Around us the storm continued for nearly an hour, while I sat rocking her and singing her the little songs my mother used to sing to me, the ‘darkie songs’ of her childhood in the American South; all the while I grew more worried about how I should get the doctor and the district nurse in, as it was evident that the baby was not going to wait until tomorrow to arrive.

At last, the storm let up and I was able to take Diana downstairs and to the neighbour across the road. She was a friend of Ruth’s, with a young son with a bicycle. I would have to wait for an hour or so until the son arrived home, but she would walk down to Godalming and fetch the doctor herself, and so she did, bless her. I wanted her to send a telegram to Owen, and she did that too, without ever asking me for the fee. I wrote out the message on a scrap of paper, making sure she could read the address, my handwriting not being the best just then, and off she went, leaving me to my fate. It was still raining and we went across the road, both huddled under my overcoat, which I had to hold over us because it would not go round.

I went back in the house, Diana trailing behind me, and got what things ready I could, but I was fairly hopeless. Everything was happening very fast, and when Ruth arrived about an hour later, I had only managed to boil some water, fetch towels and make a pot of tea. The doctor was nowhere to be seen. Diana sat at the table in the kitchen with a bun and some cold meat while I leaned over the sink and tried to think of how to get upstairs. Ruth came in without knocking, thank goodness, and called up the stairs.
‘Mary Anne, it’s Ruth. Where are you?’
‘In here,’ I returned. She came into the kitchen still wearing her wet coat, her brown hair half hidden under a scarf. Her expression was one of incredulity.
‘My goodness, Mary Anne, whatever are you doing in here?’
I was so glad to see her, after such a trying afternoon! I didn’t mind the scolding for once.
‘I don’t seem to be able to collect myself,’ I admitted. I felt rather dazed and stupid, truth be known.
‘Well, don’t worry,’ she said.

With calm efficiency she hung up her coat, got me upstairs, settled the room, and looked to Diana all in about twenty minutes, then sat herself down beside me to ask how I was – not the least disturbed when I told her I thought we’d best not wait for the doctor.
‘Oh my,’ was all she said, an expression of surprise, rather than panic. I would have been beside myself! No doctor, no nurse, only my own experience to guide me. But she rose and quickly fetched blankets and towels and the boiled kettle, and had everything in order when Patrick made his entrance into the world. Another storm had begun since I had gone upstairs, and when Pat was born a huge thunderclap rattled the windows, which made him cry at once. It was all very Gothic.

While we waited for the doctor, who missed the entire show, I told her of my adventure in trying to move the boxes in the attic, the storm, and Diana’s panic. Diana now sat on the bed with us – myself, Ruth and wee Patrick – and we drank tea and had a good laugh at my idiocy.
‘Did you not think it was dangerous to go climbing up to the attic?’ Ruth teased. ‘Weren’t you worried about getting through the door?’
‘I never thought of it,’ I admitted, though she was right – I could have got myself stuck in the trap door very easily. ‘All I thought was that I had to get a room ready before the baby came. I had no idea it would be today!’
‘He did,’ Ruth smiled, looking over at Pat.
‘We shall have to clean the carpet,’ I warned. I felt bad about that. Their carpets were old and rather expensive.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s all part of the hazard of family life.’
I was deeply touched by that implication, of being family.
‘Thank you for coming,’ I said quietly. ‘I really wasn’t able to manage.’ It was only now just sinking in that she had dropped everything and come out in a storm, leaving her own two small girls at Westbrook. She looked up at me for a long moment, her face soft and full of affection that I had done nothing to deserve.
‘Of course,’ she murmured. ‘You’d have done the same.’
I would have, too.

Finally, in November, came the Armistice. How we all waited on that day, to hear the bells that would signal the Peace, the end of all the horror and blasphemy and terrible cruelty of the war. All morning we waited and listened, straining our ears to catch the first peals. At last it came: at the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month of 1918. Late, but not too late. We heard the churchbells in Godalming first, and then at Charterhouse and then all over the Wey valley until the whole world seemed to resound in the blessed news: the war is over, the war is over! I was reminded, with a terrible poignancy, of when I was eleven and my sisters and I had stayed up until midnight at Ridgemead with the White sisters, to hear the churchbells ring, and wish each other ‘Happy Century’, for as my sister Tiss said, ‘you will not live to see the beginning of another.’ We had such hopes then! Such bright dreams for this new century. The Great War was not what we had had in mind.

If during the war George had become more tolerant of people, he had become doubly intolerant of laziness in the sphere of ideas, and the intellectual inefficiency to which this led. The war had deepened still more his sense of the importance of ideas; he was clear that they mattered more than anything else, and that the battle of good and evil must be fought out now in this theatre of war, as well as in every other.

This was for him the final lesson of the war. The good life, for men or nations, depended upon right ideas being held with passionate conviction, and in utter clarity, by the largest possible number of people; held with a conviction which nothing could shake, and formed with a lucidity which no juggling could betray or confuse. It was a lesson which the events of the Peace rubbed in cruelly. And it is the key to all his proceedings after the war.

In the middle of January, 1919, Owen and I managed to secure an absolutely darling house, Bridge End, at Ockham – eight miles from Godalming – for an absurdly low rent from old Lady Lovelace for a term of years. The house, on any showing, was beautiful – the old part fifteenth-century, with beams in the walls and low ceilings; what the villagers still delightfully referred to as ‘the new end’ had the date 1770 on it in blue-ended bricks, and charming half-panelling in the rooms. An aged wisteria climbed up the front, and we had planted pears and plums on the other walls; there was a cedar out the back, a lawn and a pleasant garden; across the road yet more garden, in which stood the gardener’s cottage – two rooms of this were let off to Ursula Nettleship.

We established ourselves in the way of life we liked best, which was also a way we could handle and, moreover, afford. There was a paddock and an orchard as well as the garden, and we kept pigs and geese and chickens and made them pay; twice a week the carrier took boxes of our new-laid eggs to London, and in due season cockerels, plucked an drawn and trussed by me – it was nothing out of the way for me to kill twenty cockerels on a Sunday evening, pluck them on Monday, and get up at 5 A.M. on Tuesday morning to draw and truss them in the kitchen before the maids came down, because they disliked the smell.

Owen, for all his personal faults, was a first-rate joiner, and he built the chicken-houses and made the hen-coops himself, as well as the hoppers for the hens’ dry mash. We were very scientific about it, and trap-nested our pedigree pullets. Diana’s lessons had to be arranged in thirty-five minute periods, with gaps for preparation in between, so that I could run out to release the squawking creatures and log up the numbers of their leg-rings on a chart which hung on the hen-house wall. The pigs were profitable too, and the hams I cured myself.

One of the good things about living in a fifteenth century house, however small, was that there was so much space. At Bridge End, besides the stable and coach house and harness-room, with a loft over them outside, there was a fair-sized room adjoining the kitchen where I did the washing and ironing, and off that again a sort of pantry with a sink, and a big cellar with a brick floor, a slab slate under the window, and a range of shelves running down one side, on which you could store vast quantities of bottled fruit – it was always my aim to bottle enough in the summer to be able to open six bottles a week through the winter months and put down sufficient eggs to be able to use six dozen weekly. The eggs were kept in the vast larder, also brick-floored, but the hams while in pickle lived in the cellar, in large earthenware crocks.

George, when he saw all of this in operation late in the summer the first year we lived there, teased me, saying, ‘You’ve become quite the regular farmer! I never knew such a society girl as you had such mediaeval talents.’ He had just got back from a fortnight in the Alps, after climbing in Wales and the Lake District, and was in fine fettle.
‘But I grew up in the country!’ I exclaimed in astonishment, before I saw that he was teasing. I had always thought of myself as a country mouse, and was really surprised that he did not as well. I was more than a little wistful at hearing of his adventures – the last time we had been to Pen-y-Pass was the summer of 1915, and I had not been to the Alps since before my marriage. I missed those days in the mountains, among mountain folk, I ached for them; talking with them in their homes was no substitute for the comradeship of the mountains. I was a mountain creature, and I’m sorry to say how jealous I was of George’s freedom, just then.

‘So are you happier now?’ He asked me as we walked from the cellar and I locked the door behind us with the great iron key. He knew well, better than anybody, just how unhappy I had been since my marriage. From the first weeks Owen was moody, ranging in a terrible cycle of abusive vitriol to sulking silence and back again. Then after Diana was born I discovered that much of his time, as I thought spent at the Foreign Office during the first days of the war, was actually spent with his mistress – at first the Miss Nyland of ill-fame, but there were others later, continuously. When we moved to the Holt – which was George’s idea to keep us safe from the bombs falling on London – he never came but for the week-ends and often not then; Patrick was a fortnight old before he saw him. Owen’s family –primarily his mother, Winifred – were horrid. ‘Aunt Winnie’ as everyone called her, had no charm at all, either of appearance or manner; she was very pious, and rejoiced in the nearby presence of the Bishop of Oxford, and the College there, full of theological students. She did not get on at all with the county people, nor did she wish to – the only people she liked were the farmers’ and villagers’ wives, whom she scourged and coaxed into the Mothers’ Union.

I looked at George now. ‘Happier, for I have good activities to occupy me, and they bring in money which gets Owen off his harangue, but happy? I wish I could say it were so, but I will never be happy until he is dead.’ It was a terrible thing to say, but true. I closed the pantry door behind us as we went through, with rather more force than was necessary, and the great noise of the oaken door reverberated in the room.
‘I’m so sorry, dear girl,’ he murmured.
‘All our visits are life-saving you know,’ I told him. ‘Even here, it is such a relief to get away, just to sit and talk with you, about books or anything.’ I smiled a little realising how pathetic it sounded. ‘Your notes are wonderful – it’s lovely to have them at almost every post – but it is that time in the garden or your study that stays me.’
George looked wistful, and patted my arm. ‘I hoped it would be better for you now,’ he admitted. ‘This is a lovely house. But you are always welcome in mine.’

But he was discontented too, as I found out later. He wrote to me a few days later of the problems at Charterhouse:
Despite all my work for Frank Fletcher on the History curriculum, very little has been done in terms of daily change. I am so thoroughly tired of the rote transmission of elementary knowledge to bored little boys, and of the intellectual bribery and caressing one must do to engage their interest.
In part, this frustration was responsible for his school scheme with Geoffrey, David Pye and others. But while these ideas gave him hope for the future, they did nothing to change his everyday existence. He needed a broader scope for his teaching abilities, for his writing, and for his social idealism.

He had a reprieve in the summer of 1920, when he spent a whole month in the Alps with David, Herbert Reade, George Finch – who was later on the second Everest expedition – and Guy Forster but the weather was bad. They spent two days in the Bétemps hut, ‘meditating an extensive scheme on Monte Rosa’, then crossed the Théodule and got to the Gamba hut after a series of slips, broken crampons and struggling with a very wet and useless rope. Their planned traverse of Mont Banc was equally blighted; when they arose at 11 P.M. for a midnight start, thunder began, and with it a storm. It was the end of his season, but at least he had good news on his arrival home: half an hour before he got there, John was born. After two girls, George finally had his boy.

He went to Ireland in December of 1920. George had always had sympathy with the ideals of the Sinn Feiners, particularly James Connolly’s socialist ideals, if not with their methods. This sympathy he had espoused since the earliest days of our acquaintance, introduced to it by Bernard Shaw. In those days, in the papers and in the picture-show newsreels, all we heard of were the Black and Tans – the Auxiliary force the government had sent over to quell the renewal of revolutionary spirit after the 1918 elections. Looting, rioting, rape, murder, it was a shameful catalogue of conduct for men representing His Majesty’s forces. Their own commanding officer had resigned in protest after a group of them opened fire on the crowd at a football match in the centre of Dublin. George, distressed and wanting to see for himself, hoping to write an article for the newspapers, contacted Will Forster, who was then a member of the administrative committee for the League of Nations; Will sent him to Gilbert Murray, who commissioned George to ‘report on whatever he found’. Handily, Desmond Fitzgerald and Connor O’Brien, those old climbing friends, were among those in either the Irish army or the Provisional Government, and he was given a pass by the former – which he found he needed at checkpoints – to investigate whatever he wished.

It is terrible here, he wrote to me one midnight. I imagine that it is of the order of everyday terror those in London must have endured during the war, with martial law, curfew, searches and checkpoints, save that here, HM forces accost wholly innocent persons – women, children – in broad daylight at gunpoint. They too often mistake one man of a similar name for another, and summary executions are not uncommon. The dead, alas, cannot be vindicated when the mistake is discovered, and there is in the administration the most distressing callousness towards loss of life and brutality. Whatever we have heard, the reality is worse... I understand Shaw’s long harangue on the subject so much better now... It is true there has been violence on both sides and that not all the victims in this poor country are innocent, but how should men behave whose national spirit is being suppressed? Would an Englishman not behave similarly were his country invaded and so barbarously mismanaged by a foreign power, its citizen subject to the worst indignities to befall a human being?

Even he was not safe in that benighted country: in Dublin he was wakened in the middle of the night in his hotel, the door being kicked open and an electric torch flashed in his eyes. The assailant asked him questions in rapid fire at gunpoint: Where was he from? Who were his people? What business had he in Dublin? Was he a Protestant or a Catholic? I was never so glad of my public-school accent! He wrote, with some irony, though they took a little convincing that it was not put on. We were dragged up out of our rooms while the rooms were searched, standing in the hall in our pyjamas, men, women and children, and one poor wretch, from the North, whose answers and antecedents were apparently not satisfactory, was dragged off to the Lord knew where. I could never discover what had happened to him; a tense veil of silence had fallen on the subject.

When he arrived home he came to see me, to show me the article he had written. It was the middle of the week, a Thursday, his half-day at Charterhouse. We sat in the drawing room, done up in the blue dupioni I wheedled out of Margaret Graham, Owen’s aunt in Skipness. Owen was not home, nor did I expect him until very late. We had tea and went over the article, which was the most precise, incisive piece of writing I had ever seen from George. He took the view of ‘reporter’ very seriously and all his scalding Fabian ideals rose to the fore in a powerful demonstration of social criticism.
‘I don’t know what the League of Nations will think of it, but I think it’s stupendous,’ I said when finally putting it down.
‘Thank you,’ he ran his hand through his hair, distractedly.
‘What’s the matter? Aren’t you pleased with it?’
‘Not with it,’ he said irritably, putting his teacup down. ‘With life!’ He sighed. ‘It only showed up to me what I can do, when I have the time and lack of interruption. I am so tired of the daily round, the everlasting sameness. I feel as if I’m wasting my life! I want to write, to teach people who care, to make some kind of a difference to situations like this!’ He thumped the article with a finger.

I had not seen him so passionate about the subject in some while. His everyday affairs must have been very pressing for him to react so strongly.
‘And is Ruth no help to you?’ I said softly, thinking that of course she would be, so I found his answer shocking.
‘Not just at the moment,’ he muttered darkly.
‘What!’
‘Oh, she’s taken up with John,’ he said, running a hand through his hair again. He looked up. ‘It’s not that I blame her, of course she’s concerned about him – oh but she does always get to caught up in the children when they come! She wasn’t keen on my going to Ireland, understandably you may say! And I did miss her, but since I’ve got back we’ve hardly had an hour of what passes for real conversation. This is not the way I wanted our life to be, plaster Madonnas and the small concerns of everyday taking up all our time together.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said in a small voice. It was the first time he had really complained to me about Ruth, and I felt very uncomfortable. She was my friend, and had always been very dear, but there was a small, nasty part of me that was half-glad of this to have come at last; to know that all was not perfect in paradise and perhaps he regretted not having made a better show of it with me. He looked at me sharply, mistaking my uncharitable emotion.
‘Oh, no, oh God, dear, it’s me who should be sorry, going on this way when your life has never been cordial with Owen.’ He sighed and turned to me on the sofa, regarding me earnestly. ‘It is still very bad?’

The unexpectedness of the question brought tears to my eyes. ‘He was home last week,’ I said, unable to suppress the tremor in my voice. ‘He brought Lily Carr...’ Lily Carr was Owen’s latest mistress, as George knew. ‘She stayed with us until Tuesday, when they went to town again.’
‘Oh Cottie, and that is not your way at all.’ He took my hand.

The soft sympathetic words, kindly spoken, were too much to bear and the tears spilled over. ‘No no! And I had to be nice to her! As if she were just a houseguest, or the children would know! Ah!’ I looked at George miserably, and to my relief and confusion he gathered me up in his arms, murmuring,
‘My poor dear girl, there now! How much you have suffered. My poor dear.’ The words were soft and coaxing, and not pitying. His genuine sympathy was undoing to the cool and competent mask of stoicism I had adopted. No one but he knew of the horror of my marriage; to everyone else I presented a cheerful face, forever lying about how things were and putting a brave face on it, even with Owen’s family, who knew how he was, which I felt the greatest betrayal. Only with George could I be frank and true.

‘Oh, Giorgio... it has been so hard! ...And it’s hard too, so hard! for me to hear about your wonderful times in Wales and the Alps, and your happy life... I am happy for you, really, but... but you always evoke the mountains so perfectly and the times we had... and I miss them so...’ I choked on my words, unable to finish, and buried my head in my hands.
‘I miss you so...’, I admitted at last, in a whisper.
‘Ah!’ he murmured in distress. ‘There my girl, my dear, Diana. Hush hush. It’s all right here.’
How sweet it was to relax into that embrace, as we had so rarely done in old days, to sit with my face buried against his shoulder while he swayed with me, murmuring kindly nonsense, his hands patting my hair and back.

Presently, the room and one’s breath grew very still, and I became aware, slowly, that the strong arms around me were shaking ever so perceptibly, and that his fingers in my hair were agitated. I hardly dared breathe, afraid to disturb this marvellous stillness, this concord. But I had to know if what I thought was so was so: was this desire, so old and long-suppressed, I felt from him? I ventured, moving away a little to look into his eyes. His colour was hectic, his eyes dark. What a struggle he was making to contain it, yes that old desire! I understood it better now than I had as a girl, just how helpless he was against it. The power of his will was palpable. I gazed at him wonderingly.


‘George – ’
He looked at me with those blazing eyes, dark as a storm, and I caught my breath.
‘Hush,’ he murmured fiercely, ‘hush.... You know what you are to me,’ he went on in that same low, passionate tone, ‘an ache, a haunting and I cannot expunge it, and before God, I don’t want to! Muse and siren, what would I do without you?’ He closed his eyes a moment. ‘I can’t put it by – I’ve tried....’ He looked over my face, ‘And when you are near I am overcome. When you are as near as this I have no will to resist, mia bellezza. Cottie –’

I kissed him, rashly, impulsively, with a lover’s kiss that he did not resist. I could not feel our accouplement anything but a joy, in that beautiful old room, with the low pale winter sun touching all a silver gilt. It was all joyous, and so beautiful, shatteringly glorious, reaching down into the root of one’s soul. George was so exquisite, sure and present and artful, giving of everything that he was. This, this, was how it was always meant to be! No sooner did that pass through my mind, so riven that I could not call it thinking, than he said it, murmured with the dearest look. And then, ‘Tutti che incontri nei miei dadi di mente, quando vengo guardare su voi, gioia dolce: e quando sono vicino voi, ritengo l'amore che dice: “funzioni, se vi preoccupate per morire.” La faccia mostra il colore del cuore, quello, perdente i sensi, si appoggia a per supporto: e nel tremito ebrietas ampio le pietre sotto me gridano...’

Dante and Beatrice. In Italian. I was in tears, in a swoon.
‘Wherever did you learn that?’ I managed at last, laughing and crying at once in giddy confusion.
‘I learnt a thing or two in Italy,’ he murmured, with a kiss full of affection. ‘I even remembered them.’ The old joke; he was terrible at remembering poetry.
‘I can see that.’
He smiled, his beautiful eyes crinkling up at the corners where the fine lines were now. I loved him so. ‘Wicked girl,’ he said. ‘Dear girl. How lovely you are.’
‘You’ll turn my head,’ I warned.
‘Too late for that.’

He was gone back to Godalming by seven – before dinner – and after he left I felt such peace, such peace as I had not done for so long. Not since that long ago Christmas, after the Alpine Club dance, when we had walked along the Thames in the small hours. Our tryst had made up for so much, assuaged so much pain and heartache. But I did not feel it dear-bought. It didn’t matter if it ever happened again. What mattered was that it had – the perfect, joyous expression of an inexpressible connection. When we parted it was with deep affection, oh great love, but no frantic anxiety on my part, nor guilt or diffidence on his. There was, for the first time, a true and perfect concord. Had I grown wise in the intervening years, or worldly? Had he grown sure in his own freedom, or cavalier? I liked to think it was the former, for us both. I knew one thing that night, as I danced my way through the evening chores of getting the children to bed, and myself settled down to a tranquil rest: what he had been trying to convey to me for so many years, his understanding of Love and devotion to Beauty, I now really apprehended fully. One could love many people, in many different ways, all as expressions of Beauty, without the love for one taking away from the love for another.

Such transcendence could not last forever, although it did last through my discovery that I was pregnant. I was surprised, but not upset, which in itself surprised me. I should have felt panicked, or guilty or ten thousand things my upbringing said, but I did not. Neither was I cavalier. I felt an odd calm, and not the least desire to create a scene or disturb anyone’s lives.
When I told George, we were sitting in his study – this was just after he had been invited to go to Everest, and had accepted. I was sitting in one of his tatty old comfortable armchairs and he was standing at the desk, looking for the letter from the Mount Everest Committee.
‘Oh,’ he said, in a very ‘that’s nice’ sort of tone. Then, ‘Oh.’ Remembering. There was a long silence, and he put down the letter he held. He sighed heavily, running a hand though his hair, then turned sharply and closed the door, coming to sit near me. He was very pale, with that old wariness in his eyes. He sat with his elbows on his knees, with his hands clasped tightly before him. Bracing himself. I had been, admittedly, given to scenes before. The row we had after Duncan hung in the air.

He looked at me keenly. ‘How are you? Are you upset?’
‘No,’ I said frankly, ‘and it surprises me.’ I looked across at him. He visibly relaxed, reaching over to the desk for his cigarette case. He lit a cigarette, a little shakily, and leaned forward again with that keen look.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he began quietly, conscious, no doubt, that Ruth could come up at any time. The clock ticked in the silence while collected himself. ‘I didn’t intend this,’ he said at last, shaking his head as he blew out smoke. ‘You must believe me.’ How many times he had said that to me! But I wasn’t hurting now and he must know it!
‘I do believe you,’ I said quickly.
‘You don’t seem to fuss about babies,’ he went on, as if I had not spoken, ‘but, aren’t you at all upset with me?’
I was a little desperate now that he should believe me, too. ‘With you? Goodness no! Why should I be?’
He ran his hand through his hair. ‘Well, I did get you into this fix. It’s more than a little irregular, and will cause you problems.’

‘Far fewer than it would have done before!’ I laughed. ‘I was terrified of it then!’ I, like most girls in those days, was so ignorant that I believed that if one were kissed too much one had a baby. It was not until I read Havelock Ellis, after discovering about George and Duncan, that I fully understood how sex and babies worked.
‘That would have been difficult,’ he admitted. He frowned a little. ‘I’m sorry to say, I never thought of it, in those days. Or now.’ He sighed and regarded me pensively. ‘I’m happy you’re not upset with me,’ he admitted. ‘By any ordinary standard, you could have been expected to be.’

I smiled. ‘When did you ever conduct yourself by any ordinary standard? Oh, George, how could I be? It is a constant reminder of the greatest beauty I have ever known.’
He made a swift intake of breath before his expression changed from one of concern to tenderness. ‘Thank you for that’, he said softly. ‘Thank you Diana.’ He reached out and took my hand briefly.
‘If it – if a child of ours is that to you... then it makes up for the difficulties it will bring with Owen. I am under no illusions about those! ...Believe me, my dear,’ his gaze wandered over my face and he put down his cigarette and took both my hands, ‘I will do what I can to make it easier for you, without bringing down the whole show. That’s a promise. For I remember that beauty also.’
‘Thank you.’ For one long moment, the perfect concord, the ecstasy of that day breathed between us.

George tilted his head then. ‘What will you do about Owen?’
‘It would be very hard to deceive him,’ I said – George knew that Owen and I had lived separate lives since Patrick was born – ‘and I don’t want to, anyway. I shall tell him the truth if he asks, and say nothing if he doesn’t, I expect.’ It sounded so oddly cold-blooded, when put so starkly.
‘He’s likely to be quite nasty,’ George said. ‘Can you stand it?’
‘I’ve borne so much else!’ I said vehemently. ‘And at least now there is a vindication,’ I looked on his beautiful face. ‘Yes, I can stand it.’ In that moment, I really believed I could.

‘I hate the man, Cottie!’ George said with his own sudden vehemence, startling me. ‘I hate every rotten thing he has done to you –’ he looked at me, with that fierce passionate look of our afternoon. In a deep way, I had understood then, he felt I belonged to him. That same sense rose up again now, and was to me a tremendous comfort, the source of my peace, despite our irregular situation. But it was otherwise for George. He burst out then,
‘And if he harms that child out of spite for me, I swear I’ll kill him.’ The subterranean emotion was shocking.
‘He won’t!’ I assured, to assuage George’s terrible, jealous rage. ‘He wouldn’t dare.’
‘He has dared with you,’ George spat, reaching to light another cigarette. ‘He may not devolve to physical violence, but he has violated you nonetheless.’ I couldn’t argue with that. He smoked agitatedly for a while, until he had calmed down again.

‘Well, we’ve Duncan and Nessa to look to as exemplars, and Clive, anyway.’ He said, changing the subject slightly. He leaned back in his chair.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Angelica is Duncan’s child, didn’t you know?’ Angelica was Vanessa’s daughter, born on Christmas Day in 1918. George’s sense of proportion, and the broader picture, were slowly returning.
‘No.’

Old Bloomsbury gossip! Still haunting the corners of my life. It made me smile wistfully. There was more of their way of thinking about love infused in me than I’d thought. We sat together for a little longer before he opened the door again, talking about Duncan and ‘Angel’ and the little coterie at Charleston, the country house in Sussex to which in1916 the Bells and Duncan had moved with their unconventional household. It was a way of coping with the emotional undercurrent of own situation, and of returning matters to a more normal mode. That there was such a precedent, both in the bohemian world and in high society, where such things happened with untold regularity, was very little help when it came, eventually, to dealing with Owen, but at least between George and me there was an understanding; just then, as he was about to go off halfway round the world to Everest, that is what mattered.