Augustus John (74 page)

More cavalier still was the farmer, archaeologist
*3
and anti-aircraft pioneer, Trelawney Dayrell Reed, who dropped in for a cup of tea one afternoon, hung on a few years, then bought a farm near by into which he settled with his grim mother, unmarried sister and some eighteenth-century furniture. Black-bearded and fanatic, he looked like a prince in the manner of El Greco, and was much admired for the violence of his Oxford stammer, his loud check tweeds, and socks of revolutionary red. An occasional poet, he also took to painting, executing in his farmhouse a series of vigorous and explicit frescoes. He was attended by two spaniels and his ‘man’, a wide-eyed factotum named Ernest. His air of refinement infuriated John. ‘Huntin’ does give one the opportunity of dressin’ like a gentleman,’ he would drawl. ‘But I’ve always thought the real test was how to undress like a gentleman.’ When asked whether he had pigs on his farm, he had replied: ‘No. The boys have the pigs. I have the boys.’ He liked to sing ballads of extreme bawdiness, accompanying his tuneless voice with free-flowing gestures. A great hero to the children, he was master of many accomplishments from darts to the deepest dialect of Dorset. He was also a landscape and market gardener with a special knowledge of hollyhocks and roses – his chief love. It was in defence of these blooms, his dogs, pigs and an apple tree that he later served his finest hour. Every afternoon he would go to bed, and every afternoon he was woken by aeroplanes which had selected his cottage as a turning point in their local races. He wrote letters, he remonstrated, he complained by every lawful means: but the flying monsters still howled about the chimney pots, creating havoc among his cattle and female relatives. Then, one afternoon, awakened by a deafening racket, he sprang from his bed and let fly with a double-barrelled shotgun, winging one of the brutes. Although no vital damage was done, Trelawney was arrested and tried at Dorchester Assizes on a charge of attempted murder. In opposition to the judge, a man much loved for his severity, the jury (being composed mostly of farmers like himself) acquitted him. It was a triumph for the individual, amateur and eccentric against the ascent of technology; and there was a grand celebration.

To be brought up amid such people constituted an education in itself. John, however, pressed matters to extremes: he hired a tutor. As long ago as May 1910 he had been persuaded that ‘the immediate
necessity
seems
to be an able tutor and major-domo for my family.’
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If the search had been long and hesitant, this was because he needed someone exceptional. On 16 August 1911 he reported to Quinn that ‘I have just secured a young tutor who really seems a jewel’; and a month later
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he was telling Ottoline Morrell that ‘our tutor is an excellent and charming youth.’

His name was John Hope-Johnstone. He was then in his late twenties, a man of many attainments and no profession, an adventurous past and a waxed moustache. He had been educated between Bradfield, Hanover and Trinity College, Cambridge, which he had been obliged to leave prematurely when his mother abandoned her second fortune to the roulette wheel. From this time onwards he lived by his wits. But, as Romilly John observed, ‘he was very fortunate in combining, at that time, extreme poverty with the most epicurean tastes I have ever known.’
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He had a hunger for knowledge that ranged from the intricacies of Arabic to the address of the only place in Britain where a certain toothpaste might be bought. It was part of a programme of self-perfection to which he had dedicated himself pending the death of eleven persons which, he calculated, would bring him into a fortune with a title. Undeterred by a lack of ‘ear’, he mastered the penny whistle and then, by sheer perseverance, the flute.
*4
He was a confirmed wanderer. Before taking up his post as a tutor, he had spent some years pushing a pram charged with grammars and metaphysical works through Asia, reputedly in pursuit of a village where chickens were said to cost a penny each.

He never found it, but arrived instead at Alderney into which, for a time, he fitted very well. Slim and well built, with finely cut features, dark hair and pale skin, he wore heavy hornrimmed spectacles, an innovation at the time. It was not long before he conceived an immense admiration for John and Dorelia and the romantic life they led around their battlemented bungalow, with their entourage of gypsy caravans and ponies and naked children. As a mark of admiration he took to wearing a medley of Bohemian clothes – buff corduroy suits cut by a grand tailor in Savile Row after the style of a dress suit, with swallow tails behind, a coloured handkerchief or ‘diklo’ round his neck and, to complete the bizarre effect, a black felt hat of the kind later made fashionable by Anthony Eden when
Prime Minister, though with a broad rim. To John’s eyes he was every inch a tutor.

It is doubtful if his pupils benefited as much as John and Dorelia did from his encyclopedic tutelage. ‘For Hope the argument – long, persistent, remorseless, carried back to first logical principles – was an almost indispensable element in the day’s hygiene,’ his friend the ‘bright young intellectual’ Gerald Brenan recorded.
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The day began at first light. He would sit over the breakfast table dilating upon Symbolic Logic or Four Dimensional Geometry while the children fled on to the heath. Then Dorelia, who in any case did not believe in education, would murmur: ‘Never mind. Leave them for to-day,’ and the tutor would be free to retreat into the cottage kitchen, which he had converted, with retorts and bottles of coloured fluid, into a laboratory for malodorous experiments. At other moments, possibly when it was raining, he would lead the older boys off and propound to them Latin gender rhymes and the names of the Hebrew kings. They learnt to write Gothic script with calligraphic pens and black ink. He also made a speciality of the Book of Job, parts of which he encouraged them to learn by heart to train their ears for sonorous language, give them a sense of the remote past, and instil patience.
*5
He was not entirely popular, however, with the children, chiefly because of his greed. At table, when the cream jug was passed round, he would ‘accidentally’ spill most of it over his own plate, leaving nothing for them.

To Dorelia, with whom he was a little in love, he made himself more helpful. He was a scholar of ancient herbs and jellies, and she made use of his book-knowledge in the kitchen and when laying out her garden. To John also he tried to make himself useful by persuading him to buy an expensive camera with which to photograph his paintings. But Hope’s technique of photography – ‘losing bits of his machine & tripping over the trypod continually’
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– led to a gradual fading away of all the prints into invisibility. It was an accurate record at Alderney of his waning popularity. John had warmed to him at first as an authentic dilettante – someone magnificently irrelevant to the commerce of modern life. He had been impressed by his mathematics and had liked the way he dived into their rigorously easygoing way of life, accompanying, unshaven, the barefoot boys through the Cotswolds to North Wales with pony and cart. Then John began to tire of him, as he did of everyone whom he saw regularly. He had encouraged Hope as an entertainer, and within a year
his repertoire of tricks and stories had run out. ‘He’s a garrulous creature and extremely irritating sometimes,’ John admitted to Dorelia. ‘The way he makes smoke rings with a cluck.’
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John was never one for encores. The tutor’s capacity for absorbing knowledge, which appeared so limitless, was replenished by his growing library and by John’s depleted one. As a future editor of the
Burlington Magazine,
it was necessary that he should study art, but not perhaps by the method of absconding with John’s own pictures, of which he amassed a good private collection. His passion for argument pierced through the growing barrier of John’s deafness, especially when it developed into vast literary quarrels with Trelawney or with Edie, whose reading was confined to the
Daily Mirror
and romantic novels from the lending library at Parkstone station. So it was with some relief on all sides that in the last week of August 1912, with his entire capital of sixteen pounds, camel-hair sleeping bag and a good many grammars, he wheeled his perambulator off once more in the direction of China. Although he had been tutor for little more than a year, he was regularly to re-enter the lives of the Johns, in Spain, in Italy, at the corner of Oxford Street. Gerald Brenan, with whom he set out for the borders of Outer Mongolia, gives as Hope’s reason for this sudden journey the rainy weather – though it was also rumoured that John had hit on a plan to marry him off to one of his models who was soon to give birth to a child.

After Hope’s disappearance the children’s education stumbled into slightly more conventional lines. ‘The boys go to a beastly school now and seem to like it,’ John complained to their ex-tutor (20 November 1912). Dane Court had been founded at Hunstanton in Norfolk in 1867 by a vicar, with the novelist-to-be Henry Rider Haggard as his solitary pupil. It had moved to Parkstone at the turn of the century and recently been taken over by a newly married couple, Hugh and Michaela Pooley. Hugh Pooley, a hearty player of the piccolo with a rich baritone voice, took music classes. ‘He lectured us in the dormitory on the dangers of masturbation I now realize,’ recalled Romilly, ‘though I was puzzled at the time.’
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If Hugh was the symbol of a headmaster, his wife, a devotee of bicycling with a weakness for astonishing hats, was the ‘progressive’ force in the school and taught French. It was disconcerting for her to find that the Johns already spoke the language. She was a Dane,
*6
the
daughter of Pietro Köbke Krohn, an artist and director of the Künstmuseum in Copenhagen. On the strength of her parentage she would bicycle up uninvited to Alderney with her husband and a tin of sardines to supplement the rations, and seemed deaf to the loud groans which greeted her arrival. While Hugh sang in his baritone for supper, Michaela would swivel her attentions upon John himself. The retired colonels and civil servants with which Hampshire and Dorset seemed filled were little to her taste, whereas John was an ‘attractive man, who made one feel 100% woman – a quality I missed in most Englishmen at that period’.

Dane Court had eleven pupils and, since its future depended upon swelling this number, the Pooleys had been delighted to receive one morning a letter of inquiry from Alderney Manor – a property, they saw from the map, on Lord Wimborne’s estate. An interview was arranged, and the Pooleys prepared themselves to meet some grand people. ‘From our stand by the window we saw a green Governess cart drawn by a pony approaching up the drive,’ Michaela remembered.

‘A queer square cart – later named “The Marmalade Box” by the boys in the school – and out stepped a lady in a cloak with a large hat and hair cut short… After her a couple of boys tumbled out, their hair cut likewise and they wore coloured tunics. For a moment we thought they were girls… It was soon fixed that the three boys aged 8, 9, 10 should come as day boys. When Mrs John was going, she turned at the door and said: “I think there are two more at home, who might as well come.”’
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That was the beginning and it was not easy for them, knowing only the Latin gender rules, French, and part of the Book of Job. But they were quick to learn, being, the Pooleys judged, ‘a fine lot… intelligent and sturdy, good at work and good at games’. With their long page-style hair and belted pinafores (brightly coloured at first, then khaki to match the brown Norfolk suits the other boys wore) they felt shamefully conspicuous. Yet since they numbered almost half Dane Court and stood shoulder to shoulder against any attack, their entrance into school life was not so painful as it might have been. They formed a community of their own, a family circle with doors that could be opened only from inside. But gradually they edged these doors ajar, Eton collars giving way, under Michaela’s reforming spirit, to allow corduroy suits and earthenware bowls to become the order of the day.

‘David and Caspar now are expert cyclists,’ John reported to Mrs Nettleship after their first term (8 January 1913). ‘…Mr Pooley wants them to be weekly boarders, he thinks they’d get on much faster – and I think it’s no bad idea.’ First the three eldest, then the others, boarded.
Because of their strange ways, they became known as ‘the Persians’. ‘But we shone on the playing fields and won many games of cricket and football for the school’, Caspar remembered. ‘…Augustus once scored a goal – palpably offside – playing for the parents and Old Boys. Unhappily I was the goalkeeper… ,’
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On visiting days, they grew self-conscious, more vulnerable to parent-embarrassment and so far as was possible they tried to keep the parts of their lives – the Nettleship part too – within separate compartments. Details of their home life were guarded from their friends, while about Dane Court they were seldom pestered for information by John and Dorelia.

‘I was especially afraid that one of my brothers would let out some frightful detail of our life at Alderney, and thus ruin us for ever,’ wrote Romilly; ‘a needless alarm, as they were all older and warier than I. I contracted a habit of inserting secretly after the Lord’s Prayer a little clause to the effect that Dorelia might be brought by divine intervention to wear proper clothes; I used also to pray that she and John might not be tempted, by the invitation sent to all parents, to appear at the school sports.’
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During the holidays, Ida’s children often went to stay with Grannie Nettleship. She would see that they had their hair cut and were indistinguishably fitted into regular boys’ uniforms. With their aunts, Ethel and Ursula, they travelled to seaside resorts, spending their days breathing fresh air on long walks, their evenings playing Racing Demon and Up Jenkins – then early to bed.

The boys did pretty well at school; especially David, who was head boy for two years. As the eldest he felt himself to be at least as much a Nettleship as a John and was more successful when away from Alderney. But it was Caspar, Ida’s second son, who cut loose. At the beginning of the Great War he was given a copy of
Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships
and, looking through the lists of warships, two-thirds of them British, decided that this ‘new and orderly society… was the world for me’.
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All the boys were talking of the army, the navy and the Royal Flying Corps. With Hugh Pooley’s encouragement, Caspar eventually approached his father with the notion of making the navy his career. It was a difficult interview. John felt bewildered. He could remember himself having decided at this age to trap beaver on the Arkansas River. David, who had been reading
Coral Island
and who wanted to go to sea on the chance of getting wrecked on such a charming spot, he could understand. But Caspar seemed unaccountably serious. John plainly thought it stupid to subject oneself to such harsh discipline, and he did not scruple to say so. ‘Think again,’ he advised, and brushed the idea aside. ‘I had no encouragement
at home,’ Caspar remembered; ‘I felt a lonely outcast.’ But he persisted, and came against other obstacles – the cadet’s uniform alone cost a hundred and fifty pounds. But once John saw that his son was set on the navy, he paid all bills without objection. It was Dorelia who engineered this change of mind. She had no more interest in the sea than in schooling, but she wanted to get at least one boy off her hands and see him settled. So she organized it all. In September 1916 they harnessed the pony and trap and, she in her long skirts, Caspar in his bright new uniform, they travelled the thirty-five miles to Portsmouth and ‘I was dumped through the dockyard main gate.’
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