Chapter Thirteen -Ruth 1914

George’s own engagement and marriage in 1914 to Ruth Turner at once completed one stage in his progress, and began another. The movement towards actuality, the transferring of his medium and expression from the sphere of literature to the sphere of real life, had been going on for some time. His work at Charterhouse had a good deal to do with forcing him to the practical necessity of dealing, somehow or other himself, with the idiosyncrasies of other people. It was no good merely to ruffle up his hair and quote Henry James over a form of boys or his colleagues. There was no real escape. Something more drastic was needed.

He found himself compelled to bring to the task of dealing with all sorts and kinds of people that he didn’t like something of the same care and consideration that he so willingly expended on his friends. This was a thoroughly difficult job for a person of his type. His natural impatience, his rapid preferences, his fastidiousness and his habitual preoccupation with impersonal topics were all in his way. He had to deal with himself then, with aspects of himself that he did not like, work at them diligently, which he did. For instance, his continuous and protracted backing away from any task which didn’t consume his enthusiasm was the hardest thing in the world for him to tackle. He never was able to quit himself of this procrastination and general avoidance entirely, but he made good progress.

To accomplish this, he had to fall back on first his tremendous conscientiousness, and then his own peculiar brand of half-humorous philosophy. This last always struck me as being an acquired characteristic in George, for he was not natural philosophical by any means. Just where he acquired it, I cannot be sure. Not from Graham Irving, who was straight as a pike; not from Benson, for his brand of philosophy appeared to be rather dour; the only source I can tentatively give it is his extensive reading of Henry James.

Certainly he could have fallen into Benson’s rather more pessimistic view of life, for his eagerness, his enthusiasm, his optimism, were all accompanied, as we have seen, by their natural and corresponding opposites: a tendency to depression, impatience, and disgust at any failure. Until after the war, he could not endure the least opposition. He liked to carry obstacles with a rush; the process of slowly overcoming these he did not ever enjoy, though he got better at enduring them later on. He did, however, frame his mind heroically to task of dealing with his fellow beings and achieved a measure of success. He became a good deal happier in consequence.

By the end of 1913, however, George seemed to have got as far by himself as he was likely to get, along the road of actuality, which is, whether he knows it or not, the goal of every man’s search. Friendship he now understood and excelled in. He had made a resolute effort to tackle the problem of relationships, other than those of choice. He was already the most enchanting, if the most elusive, of friends. But nothing as yet had happened to him to bring him under the common yoke of humanity, of intimate hopes, anxieties, loves, and fears. He could still be irresponsible if he chose – he was free to retire at any moment into the fastness of his impersonality. It was just this which marriage was to do for him. And his uncharted freedom had begun almost, one might say, to tire him. At any rate he was thoroughly ready for the adventure when it came. ‘This will be a furious revolution and all the better for that’, he wrote of his engagement.

Ruth Turner was the daughter of Thackeray Turner, the architect, and the Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. He was great friends with John Ruskin and William Morris, and a powerful force in the Arts and crafts Movement as well as in the preservation of ancient buildings. He had a terrific understanding of the ancient vernacular of architecture, and was, in his capacity as Secretary to the Society, often called upon to ascertain the dates of various buildings during their restoration.

The Society had been founded in 1877 by William Morris, George Wardle, his business associate, and the architect Philip Webb. They opposed the over-zealous restoration of medieval buildings, often involving virtual rebuilding, with the loss of original features and the use of inappropriate styles and finishes. The church at Blytheburgh in Suffolk was one of Turner’s salvages. Society immediately sought details of the restoration plans drawn up for the local building committee by the architect George Edmund Street, and continued after his death in 1881 by his son Arthur. Webb visited the church in 1882 and prepared his own report for the Society. Morris visited the church in July 1895, with Thackeray Turner. They restated the rigorous SPAB position, including opposition to opening out any more windows, and urged that the south porch should be attended to without delay. Eventually, none of the proposed changes went through, though some thought this was due to lack of funds rather than the urging of the Society.

His position as Secretary of the Society brought him outside architectural work as well: York Street Chambers, in Marylebone, was designed after he had been invited to inspect Chenies Street Chambers.

Turner, who was partnered with Eustace Balfour, in 1898 designed his own house and garden at Westbrook, a lovely old mediaeval looking house, not terribly unlike Morris’ own Red House, and the Phillips Memorial by the River Wey in Godalming. Phillips, as the Surrey Advertiser and County Times noted, was a hero of the Titanic disaster:

THE WIRELESS OPERATOR OF THE TITANIC
Monday 30 September 1912
A rectangular cloister, 120 ft square, will be the chief feature of the memorial which is to be provided at Godalming in memory of Mr. John George Phillips, the wireless operator in the Titanic, whose home was at Farncombe, Godalming. The memorial committee includes among its members the Mayor, Alderman E. Bridger (chairman), Mrs. G. F. Watts, Lady Chance, the Hon. Mrs. Arthur Davey, and Mrs. W. E. Horne (wife of Mr. W. Edgar Horne, M.P. for the Guildford Division). Miss Gertrude Jeykll, with whom Mr. Thackeray Turner has collaborated, was invited to submit a scheme for the memorial to be placed on a piece of land, about 1½ acres in extent, abutting on the main Portsmouth Road. In a letter to the committee outlining the scheme Miss Jekyll states:-

''We propose to build on a portion of the ground offered a rectangular cloister of some 120 ft. square with a main entrance from the road. Entering the enclosure there would be a wide paved space with a small square middle garden consisting of beds of dwarf shrubs and flowers with grass between. The central circle could be either a shallow fountain basin or another planted bed. The sides to the right and left would be unbroken cloister. The further side would have the wall not cloistered by arcades to the meadow with a wide central solid panel, where the memorial table would be placed. Seen through the arches the view of the meadow and wooded hillsides beyond would be singularly beautiful. There would be seats under the cloisters, and according to wind and weather there would always be some portion affording comfortable protection. The style of structure that we contemplate is that of the older of the local farm buildings - that have the merit and beauty of a simple aim and the dignity that comes of the use of local material in the excellent traditional way of the country.'' Miss Jekyll concluded by urging that the subscription list should not yet be closed.

The committee have approved the scheme with the addition of a small drinking fountain. About £400 has already been subscribed, and it is expected that a further £200 will be needed. Subscriptions may be sent to Mr. T. P. Whately, town clerk, Godalming.

Turner also saved the medieval bridge at Eashing, and the old Deanery Farm barn in Charterhouse Road, not far from the Holt, George and Ruth’s house. Thackeray’s brother Laurence was also a designer, and another brother, Hawes, was Keeper of the National Gallery. Their father was a vicar, at Wroughton in Wiltshire.

He married Mary Elizabeth Powell, the second daughter of Thomas Wilde Powell, the financier, who like my own father invested in railways. Mary Turner was a gifted embroideress, a friend of May Morris. Julia Huxley called her ‘one of the finest and noblest women I have ever known, as well as the most unselfish’. Her practicality she imparted to her daughters, as well as her skills in handcraft – all of them were fine embroiderers and painted china and other decorative arts objects with their father.

George met Ruth at a garden performance of The Princess at the house of Arthur Clutton-Brock, who lived in the Hindhead Road. George played Cyril in this socialist comedy, and Ruth and her sisters played Ida’s maidens. Then there was a Shakespeare reading at Charterhouse to which all the Turners were invited. They became fast friends; George often went to Westbrook to play billiards with Thackeray Turner, or walk with the girls. In March, the family were going to Italy for the Easter hols and invited George to visit them. It was not Ruth who wrote to George confirming the travel details, but Milly and Marby – as they were known; Mildred and Marjorie. The former was a dear little woman much like Ruth, the latter, I’m sorry to say I never liked, finding her argumentative and abrasive. Of course George went – there were other charms as well – George and Charles Trevelyan were staying at Monte Fiano with Will Arnold-Forster, and Geoffrey Young would be there for a little while also. George met the Turners in Verona – where else? It was all too perfectly Shakespearean! Perfectly George – and on a spring afternoon in a meadow heaped in blue flax, he fell in love with Ruth. By the time he got to Monte Fiano and Will he was all raptures, and he told Will immediately that he was hopelessly in love with the ‘most perfect’ girl. Pretty had nothing to do with her. Ruth was Botticellian, the highest compliment he could give; and she was true – true not only in telling the truth, though she was honest in a very child-like way – but that she saw with deep clarity into the heart of things that mattered. There was no artifice about her whatever; what you saw is what she was. Will urged that he make no delay, and indeed George didn’t, for they became engaged on May Day that year. As he said to me of it, ‘I will not make the same mistake twice. I have been granted a grace in Ruth, and I have, I hope, now the wisdom and maturity to appreciate it.’

Ruth’s aunt, the late Mrs. W. A. Wills, the wife of another great mountaineer, wrote to me in May of 1914, ‘My niece, Ruth Turner, is engaged to be married. She is one of the “twice-born”: a soul of the most crystal wisdom, simplicity, goodness – pure gold all through. She is going to marry a young Charterhouse master, George Mallory... I hope he is good enough for her, but it is hardly possible.’

I was furious! How could she, sight unseen, so ill-judge George simply based on her opinion of Ruth? I had not met Ruth then, and this championship by her aunt, which amounted to a kind of snobbishness, did not dispose me to like her – though I could hardly imagine that George would fall in love with a girl capable of condoning such behaviour, as it went against everything that he had written of her to me. It gave me great satisfaction to write back to Rosalind Wills that, as I knew him personally to be, George was one of the rarest spirits of his generation and her niece, in marrying him, as it sounded on the whole, might be nearly good enough for him! I might have given up any hope of romance with George, but in no way was I going to stand silently by and let any person abuse his worthiness to be happily married.

Such was, indeed, the impression of both sets of friends – that here was a conjunction of two creatures of unique abilities and goodness, though of widely differing qualities. And the impression was not confined simply to their friends. A total stranger, meeting both at Pen-y-Pass soon after their marriage, told me of the actual shock of delight and astonishment which they produced. ‘They seemed too good to be true,’ he wrote.

They were married at the end of July in Godalming. George’s father married them and Geoffrey Young stood as best man. Despite Owen’s objections – I was due to have my baby any day – I went down for the wedding, for I couldn’t miss it, even if it meant a precipitous delivery. It was probably as well that I did go then, as I can hardly have been perceived of as a threat by the bride when sailing in like a steamship. In the event, I had a very good time meeting Ruth – she really was the sort of dear adorable little thing I had always imagined George fancying – for she was lovely and charming and gracious, vivacious without being catty or coy or flirtatious. She made people comfortable in her presence – even me – and seemed, as she indeed became, the perfect friend. I shall never forget when I greeted her at the reception in the garden at Westbrook: she clasped my hands and beamed up at me with real pleasure, lovely in her simple silk frock with its trailing sash of tulle, saying,
‘Oh, Mary Anne, I am so very happy to meet you at last! I do hope we will be real friends. You and Owen must come down to stay once the baby’s come.’
All fear was gone. My heart melted. How could it not? She was simply dear and true blue, just as George had said.

My baby decently waited to be born until I got home, but she came quite soon after, and she was named Jane Diana Sabina, but for twelve years was called only Diana. George had offered to stand as godfather but when the christening occurred he was away on his honeymoon – he hadn’t planned to be married when he agreed – and we had a proxy. He did, however, send a beautiful lapis lazuli necklace for the child, rather than the more usual coral, with a card that said, May the blessings of all things beautiful surround mother and child in the earthly paradise. A reference to the thrilling painting brought by Aurel Stein to The British Museum.

As for their honeymoon, they had planned to go to the Alps, but everyone, from Geoffrey to George’s father were against it, for various reasons – Ruth was not a climber, for a start, and the memory of the death of Humphrey and Muriel Jones on their honeymoon in the Alps was vivid in everyone’s memories – and in the end they only went camping in Devon and on the Sussex coast because the war had began. The war frenzy created a very interesting little adventure: suspicious of a tent on the strand, the locals called in the constabulary and George and Ruth were taken to the station for questioning about being German spies.

The ‘furious revolution’ began in earnest when he and Ruth settled down at The Holt in October. Here, in the house which they had made beautiful with such ardent and delighted care, George found himself surrounded to an unprecedented extent with what he called the apparatus of life – servants and furniture and relations and social obligations. George had hitherto lived a good deal in the clouds, conducting his life with detachment – or at least in a world of his own where literary and intellectual considerations were paramount, where practical matters were treated with a casualness which bordered on the sublime. Or, if they seemed of sufficient importance, with a good deal of rather elaborate discussion. He could never simply do what needed doing in a practical, timely, and straightforward manner. Now he must do, at least for Ruth’s sake and for their mutual concerns. For, to complete the revolution, his companion in this new life was a person of the utmost simplicity and transcendent practicality, who dealt with all the everyday concerns of life with a quick and prompt efficiency – and was wont to dispose of George’s subjectively more weighty problems with a summary and almost, by contrast to him, irreverent common sense. Seldom are two people more perfectly adapted to the purpose of modifying, sounding off, and complementing one another.

They had very much in common, notably courage, gaiety, generosity, and a love of all beautiful things, but Ruth was an artist and could make beautiful things as well as appreciate them; and George could give expression to aspects of beauty of which she was perhaps only mutely aware. She was not by nature or training interested in literature or the philosophical aspects of art, or politics – all his dearest subjects. She was happier with a piece of embroidery than with a book, or with painting china than indulging in metaphysical discussion. She simply didn’t care, as he did, what it all meant. She was so dearly practical.

George for his part was still inclined to feel rather overwhelmed with the apparatus of life, to be impatient of domesticities and their claims on time and attention. This sort of thing is inevitable in marriage, and they had their share of it. Both were conscious of the need for adjustment. What was remarkable in their case was the merry happiness and good-tempered frankness with which they set about the work of adjustment. George perhaps did have the larger share of adjustments. His life had been very full before; his great impersonal objects of worship – mountains, art, humanity in bulk – were confronted with a new personal devotion, and their place in relation to it had to be sought. It was soon found – more as an illumination shed on everything else by this new light than as a re-orientation of fixed objects. The gain to him was extraordinary – by one person, finely known, he came to know all men better; by this profounder experience, this fresh security and happiness, he was at last brought into a more direct and personal contact with life at all points – no longer by self-imposed effort, but by a spontaneous impulse.

All his friends must have their own memories of The Holt, was his house for the next seven years. It stood perched right on the edge of a steep coombe, full of a tangled growth of scrubby oaks and hazels, in which, in spite of the houses all about, nightingales and black-caps nested and sang. From windows and garden the eye travelled across the treetops to the playing fields of Charterhouse and beyond, down the Valley of the Wey, to the hills behind Farnham; while round to the southwest, the great bulk of Hindhead stood up against the sky – a real mountainscape, as George said. It was not a beautiful house originally, nor ever externally, but technical skill in plenty was available to transform it for their use. A big bricked loggia was thrown out beyond the drawing room, and continued in a broad low parapet wall overhanging the steep lower reaches of the garden – a perfect place to sit and swing the heels in discourse. For those who objected to sitting on brick, an oaken seat of vast and dignified proportions waited in the formal garden above the lawn where two cemented lily-ponds at once delighted the child and threatened the peace of the parent. Inside, the beauty of the house presented a surprising contrast to its rather unpromising exterior: the sober grace of old furniture, the fresh gaiety of patterned and bright materials, the complicated richness of rugs, the fantasy of porcelain, and the satisfactory solidity of good modern oak were all combined into a whole which was at once harmonious, striking, and above all very comfortable.

No one who knew them then could forget the delight which George took in this work of beautification. He did not rely, as some officious auntie had feared, on outrageous ‘Postie’ design and colour scheme, nor, perhaps to their disappointment, on the skills of friends at the Omega institute. His vision was strongly Arts and Crafts – taken directly from his in-laws’ influence. His very strong aesthetic sense could now express itself in a concrete way as never before, and he proved rather surprisingly good at the practical business of producing the fact of beauty from the idea. He showed, for instance, a most discerning and adventurous taste in colour and pattern and was an unexpectedly wise and astute buyer of antique furniture. He’d have made a wonderful house designer, if he had ever chosen to turn that way for a career. The completed house was, as a house should be, a very pleasant expression of them both.

Perhaps the most individual place of all was George’s study – a long low room on the first floor with an abundance of books; an immense table presided over by a coloured plaster group of Roger Fry’s and the bust of Hypnos; and one or two armchairs of a mellow and agreeable shabbiness. The black plumes of some Scots firs cut the sky at the level of the western window. He was exceptionally sensitive to his surroundings always; beauty and ugliness had a kind of spiritual importance for him, beyond their external significance; and the actual material perfection of this house of theirs really contributed to his peace and strength, and capacity.

I remember one small instance of this among many, before one of the Everest lectures at Charterhouse after the first expedition. We had tea in the study. George was nervous and clouded and restless. Presently, for some reason, he moved over to the window and his eye was caught by the waving tops of the firs against a windy western sky.
‘Extraordinarily beautiful, that is,’ he murmured, with a sort of relief breathing from him. Then he turned round with ‘it is a good house to live in – it is always doing something to help you like that.’ His restlessness dissolved and he was appeased and quiet for the remainder of the evening.

Ruth soon made his friends her own, for among other aptitudes for friendship, she had the rarest of all gifts – the power at once to see people as they were, weaknesses and all, and yet to love them with generous and faithful affection. An ideal companion for an enthusiast! If it ever happened that she thought George’s swans geese, she would certainly have regarded them nevertheless as very nice geese and treated them accordingly. And how invaluable were her commonsense, justice, and directness in any difficulty or friction!

I remember when she came into the middle of a dispute between myself and her sister Marby at Clare’s christening party; over what I can’t now recall – no, it was about a crass and intolerant remark she had made about George’s politics – she wasn’t any too keen on Fabianism. I, never one to mince words, however blundering, said that was very odd indeed given her father’s relationship to Morris. Well, she asked me rather tartly why I should care what George or anybody believed – implying I suppose that I cared for him more than was appropriate – and just when I was ready to box her ears, Ruth came in saying,
‘Whatever is the matter, dears?’
I told her, bluntly.
‘But Marby dear, Mary Anne has known George simply forever,’ She said to her sister. ‘Of course she will defend him. They love each other. And,’ she went on, turning to me, ‘it is true that while our mother was a student of Julia Huxley and May Morris and a rather emancipated woman, Papa has never really been much taken up with William’s politics on a practical level, though I think he agrees with them in theory.’
That put paid to the dispute, which had promised to get quite ugly. Marby said,
‘Well, well!’ and went into the garden, and I turned to Ruth and hugged her. ‘Oh, you blessed Ruth!’ I exclaimed. She looked up at me, blushing a little and smiling.
‘Thank you, Mary Anne. But it’s all true.’ She took my hands. ‘Now, before I forget what I came in here for! Owen was looking for you….’

So George need not have been anxious about friends after marriage! Ruth had been brought up in a house with almost mediaeval traditions of hospitality, and welcomed everyone he brought, from the smallest boy to the most learned don, with the same simple and direct cordiality. She accepted sudden invasions with unruffled calm, seldom allowing the cares of the housewife to interfere with her pleasure in the guest. This was well, for George’s ideas of entertaining were both expanded and optimistic! On Sundays and ‘halves’ the house swarmed with boys. To the outsider’s eye, at least, the work of getting to know them was now immensely simplified by having a spacious house of his own to invite them to. And friends and colleagues and neighbours were always being brought in, or, more frequently, coming of their own motion. It was such a good house to drop into! One of the two was always there, it seemed, and the other just coming. There was generally some other friend whom it was delightful to meet or meet again. People sat in the loggia, strolled idly about the garden, sat in the great oak seat, or as the weather grew inclement, moved to the fire in living hall across from George’s study, both of which were open to the central passageway. There was always a welcome, and a meal and a sense of freedom and well-being for mind and body in that house – with any amount of good talk; George, with his pipe, was always ready for a go at any subject.

It must remain forever impossible to appraise, to weigh, or measure exactly the gains that one person gets from another. But, intangible as they are, in the case of these two, no one who knew George Mallory well before his marriage and after could doubt but that long and close contact with a person of qualities in many ways so different to his own helped to steady, to sweeten, and to ease his character and his relations with other people to a very remarkable degree. As to what he brought to Ruth, his broad-ranging vision and enthusiasm, I believe, brought more of the outside world into her life and thought. Her concerns became less parochial, though they were always primarily domestic. She had learned a manner of public charity from her father, a concern for the common weal – she was one of the most faithful church sodality ladies I ever knew ¬– and from George she came to understand how this sense of rightness and duty may be expanded to all of mankind. She showed this, never better, in sending him to Everest that last, and fatal, time.

Her adjustments, I believe, were to his temperament, and his need for freedom, which must have been very hard for her. But he never did make her a mountain creature or a philosopher, or change her essential being in the way that he did with others, perhaps because she was when she met him, already, as Rosamund Wills said, wise and of the twice-born. She was as much herself when she died in 1942 as when I met her in 1914: uncomplicated, loving, and frank. I who never expected to like her, came to love her as much as one of my own sisters. George was away for so much of their life together, and I spent most of that time in her company; she was a gift to me, from him, for which I am ever grateful.