The Knox Brothers. Richard Holmes
by the Rev. J. C. Wood.
The influence of this book, which gave him his first glimpse of independence, was disproportionate. From the first picture (of a man raising a bottle to his lips, contrasted with a noble lion, and titled: “Between man and brutes there is an impassable barrier, over which man can never fall, or beasts hope to climb”), Ronnie was as if hypnotized. When, sixty years later, he went to Africa, he judged both flora and fauna by the steel engravings in Wood. He knew the whole book by heart, and professed to believe it all; the animals were all graded by their usefulness to man, which meant that the Labrador came top (“many must have perished but for its timely aid”). Yet, as he said himself, in spite of the years at Edmundthorpe, outside the book he could not tell a bullfinch from a chaffinch.
Absurd though it may seem, Wood had an even deeper effect on Ronnie; this was because of his praise of reason. “It were an easy task to prove the unity of mankind by scriptural proofs,” Wood wrote in his introduction, “but I thought it better to use rational arguments.” This went deep. Ronnie told Eddie that there were “rational arguments” why he should be allowed to join the brothers’ inner group—the St Philip’s Pioneering and Military Tramway Society; they were not accepted, he had to pass the set tests, but Ronnie remained convinced of the supreme saving power of reason.
Ronnie could not help knowing that he was clever for his age, and that much was expected of him, and he hoped not to disappoint anybody. Meanwhile his elders, the fixed stars of his firmament, sometimes praised him, and sometimes took him to a football match; for sheer quality of happiness, he did not think one could beat the moments when Aston Villa won at home, and his brothers allowed him to wave a flag.
The Bishop’s tasks multiplied. Queen Victoria did not take kindly to Evangelicals, and tried to exclude them from high responsibilities until they were too old to give trouble. Knox was an exception. Rejecting, to the relief of his family, the offer of the bishopric of Madras, he fought on until “dignified Worcester and placid Coventry began to look upon Birmingham as something more than a rather heathen shopping town.” In 1896 the last of the lovely Burne-Jones windows were installed at St Philip’s, and the church was worthy of becoming what it now is, the Cathedral of Birmingham.
Preoccupied as he often was, deep in church affairs to the exclusion of all others, he remained a family man, confident of his children’s support. He could be, and often was, exceedingly angry with them, and sometimes cuffed the elder boys all the way round his study, but he was perfectly tolerant of their jokes at the expense of his dignity. One Sunday his private chapel was mysteriously full of the scent of Popish incense; once, when he was on a visitation, he found that his hostess had been told (by Eddie) to be sure to supply him with a bottle of whisky—“the Bishop could not do with less”—and with a pair of black silk stockings, in case he had forgotten his own. Once a representative of the press called at their holiday rectory, and since there were no servants and Mrs K. felt that the family might be considered too informal, Winnie and Ethel obligingly did duty as cook and parlour maid; only Eddie told the reporter that both of them were deaf and dumb, and could be addressed only in sign language; this caused Winnie to drop the soup. The Bishop marvelled, thinking of his own industrious and obedient boyhood, at where such ideas could come from.
St Philip’s Rectory never became completely settled territory. There was always an unpredictable element. But the boys were going ahead unchecked, maintaining their early promise. All were winning prizes and scholarships, and their father was accustomed to measure progress by such things. As soon as it was dark, wherever they were, there was a cry, as though from the Inferno, for lamps and candles, so that the children could get down to their studies. Beyond his knowledge, however, there were stirrings, intimations of nature and poetry and human weakness, which could never be confided either in him or in Mrs K., who, in Eddie’s phrase, in spite of her sterling qualities, seemed to them “rather drawing-roomy”. There were certain aspects of sea and cloud and open country that brought to them, as it did to Housman’s Shropshire Lad, “into my heart an air that kills”—certain poetry, too, that would always have the power to bring them together, Sylvie and Bruno, Catullus, Matthew Arnold, Housman himself, Cory’s epitaph:
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
I wept when I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
They knew that this was nothing more than an inaccurate translation from the Greek, made by an Eton schoolmaster to help out his class; later, they knew that the schoolmaster had had to leave Eton under a cloud, and take a different name. But the power of the two verses to remind them of each other, across time and space, was beyond this, and indeed beyond “rational argument”.
Still, every morning, at family prayers, the whole household knelt down together, while the ancient coffee-machine simmered ferociously in the background, and the unity and peace, like that of England itself, seemed unlikely to be broken.
III 1901–1907 “We imagined other people might think we were peculiar”
ON THEIR SUMMER HOLIDAY OF 1900, the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign, the Knoxes lost their holdall, containing all their waterproofs, umbrellas, fishing rods and tweed coats. Mrs K. believed, with a serene optimism which the years never dimmed, that it would turn up, perhaps on the next train. The boys, with their inborn melancholy and natural relish for disaster, declared that it would not, and it did not.
The holiday that year was in a large house on the desolate fringe of Dartmoor. “We should have been warned,” Winnie wrote, “by the low rent demanded, but this my father held was due to its being in so remote a spot, so far from any railway station.” They arrived in two open waggonettes through the Devonshire lanes thick with honeysuckle, all of them drenched with rain, Ronnie with a pitiful cough on which he had decided to write a treatise. In the damp house itself, mice ran over the girls as they knelt at their evening prayers, and Ronnie, still coughing, had to meow like a cat (he had a talent for animal imitations) to keep them at bay. In the morning spirits revived, and Eddie and Wilfred went down to the rushing stream to fish, but there was a sensation, not to be shaken off, of something coming to an end. The family was dividing into children and those whose childhood was past.
Eddie was nineteen, Dilly seventeen, two pipe-smoking, Norfolk-jacketed young men. The sight of them, both unattached, was maddening to local hostesses in this remote district; “calls” had to be paid and returned. But Ronnie at twelve still clung to childhood, while Wilfred, fourteen, imperturbably arranged his Bits of Old Churches. These were souvenirs, stones and chippings which must genuinely have fallen off and been honestly picked up, otherwise they did not “count”, though Eddie and Dilly sometimes assisted with a good hard blow at the church wall which Wilfred never suspected. Dilly handed over to Ronnie his collection of 231 railway tickets; they no longer interested him.
In the autumn Eddie would be going to Corpus and Ronnie to Eton. In this family which breathed the air of scholarship, but had constant difficulty in making ends meet, education was the key to the future, and the Bishop believed that he could look forward with sober confidence. Although it was clear that Ethel, increasingly deaf and much slower than the others, would never leave home, Winnie was destined for University and, surely, for a brilliant clerical marriage, the three elder boys for the Civil Service, Ronnie for the Evangelical ministry. The Bishop was exceedingly busy, both with his pastorate and with the immense task of raising £100,000 for church extension. It is probable that he did not notice certain disturbing undercurrents, and that Mrs K. did not like to mention them. Neither Eddie nor Dilly felt certain any longer about the truth of Christianity. Their bookboxes