Cherry (29 page)

With the land armies locked in stalemate in France, on 31 May 1916 the Grand Fleet steamed into the Battle of Jutland. Perusing
The Times
while lounging in the revolving summer house in his tweed knickerbockers two days later, Cherry read that Harry Pennell had gone down with the
Queen Mary
. As he let the paper fall, happy memories of the wardroom rose like milk to the boil. The loss of Pennell touched him more profoundly than the columns of the glorious dead he skimmed each morning; what a mundane task that had become. He expressed his grief in a passage he planned to include in his book, but never in fact published. Those feelings were too personal for the public domain. ‘When you have a standard of work set by men like Wilson and Bowers,’ he wrote, you cannot go much higher. But Wilson always said that he could not touch Pennell. I do not know why he never had a nervous breakdown, because he simply could not go to sleep . . . But Wilson, Bowers and Pennell are all gone now – for Pennell was in the
Queen Mary
at Jutland, and we are left to talk of eight-hour days,
³⁶
and even that would not be so bad if we worked them! In Pennell’s heaven they will work thirty hours in the day . . . He will perhaps keep the Celestial Log Book, and the record of the animals sighted . . . And every now and then he would ask for leave to go and take some of his friends in Hell out for dinner. I hope he will ask me.

There had been talk of the ‘Big Push’ since the beginning of June, and it came just as the swifts marked the arrival of summer in Lamer Park. On Saturday 1 July, one of the most horrible days in the history of humanity, the Battle of the Somme began. In the shimmering sunshine the British army suffered higher casualties than on any other day in its existence: almost 20,000 men were killed by German machine-guns. The Somme offensive unfurled in a deadly cascade of misjudgement and mismanagement (though not according to
The Times
) and ended in complete Allied failure. Among British troops it became known as ‘the Great Fuck-Up’. There was a terrible pathos about the self-delusion on the home front. What had been gained on the Somme, except the calligraphy of dry bones? No wonder the likes of Sassoon began their long keen of disillusioned protest. Cherry was beginning to sympathise with the pacifists. He, too, perceived the war through the lens of irony, and could no longer subsume the slaughter into the myth of Arthurian chivalry he had been taught at school. After the Somme, Cherry shared the view of Edmund Blunden that ‘neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning.’

Yet in his park, where he walked each day, so little had changed. The rhododendrons bloomed like pink crinolines and the swifts, noisy at dawn, toiled at their nests under the deep overhanging eaves of the cottages. Cherry’s favourite refuge, after the pirouetting hut, was the old brick arbour at the foot of the bluebell dell. In the peaceful summer evenings, as the bells of St Helen’s tolled faintly over generations of Garrards, the rooks returned to the tall elms, darkening the sky, and the stoaty smell of evening seeped from the wood. The water snails clung to the buttercups in the shallows of the Lea and the baby swallows hung on the twigs of the red willow. The buds swelled and opened and flowered and the leaves fell, and he was still there, doing nothing, while so many were doing so very much.

Towards the end of the war H. G. Wells wrote that for the first time in their lives the men of Cherry’s generation ‘had met direction that believed in itself . . . They were up against something that seemed to be Order and something that had an aim.’ Many of those who had served felt, after the war, that the world had been everlastingly divided into those who had been there, and those who had not. To Cherry that binary vision had been cast before 1914, and the war only served to polarise it further: those who had been south, and those who had not. His psyche never fully engaged with the war. It was still in the Antarctic. ‘Talk of ex-soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘give me ex-antarctics, unsoured and with their ideals intact. They could sweep the world.’

At least he had a new enemy to occupy him, and he was determined that there should be no surrender. The Bishop of Peterborough had appointed a new rector to the living of Wheathampstead after a two-year interval following the death of the last incumbent at the age of eighty-five. The new man, Canon Nance, was sixty-four. This, according to Cherry, was too old, and he informed the Bishop that unless he stopped using Wheathampstead ‘as a dumping ground for his pensioners’ he would be seeing the end of Cherry’s tithe, which amounted to some £300 a year plus extras. The Bishop of St Albans weighed in to defend Peterborough and Nance, and excruciatingly polite acrimonious letters were exchanged. Cherry did not attend church, but he paid his feudal dues, and that, he felt, gave him a proprietorial right to poke his nose in. He did not have faith in any formal sense; like many of his generation, it had vanished with his first pony. As he didn’t feel remotely guilty about it he was able to blunder on, relentlessly beating the clergy on the head with his bank book. But in the secular field of public life he had inherited none of his paternal forbears’ predilection for municipal responsibility, and he was never to develop the slightest leanings in that direction. He was a very private man, and civic duty bored him.

He lived a solitary life with few servants, though he had engaged a middle-aged spinster, Eliza Merchant, as his housekeeper. By the middle of September he was able to walk about 300 yards. The loyal Farrer took the train up from Euston, and once they had got their business out of the way they strolled in the park and talked things over in a more general way. It did Cherry good to hear about events beyond the house and garden from a living person rather than a newspaper. But when, the following spring, he suggested a little partridge and pheasant shooting, Farrer declined on moral grounds: it seemed obscene to go out shooting when young men were being shot by the thousand across the Channel.

An anti-aircraft detachment had appeared on Gustard Wood Common a mile away, the officers billeted in the Mid-Herts Golf Club and the men in the thatched cottages clustered nearby. Soon a smaller one sprang up in Ayot St Lawrence, the leafy hamlet north-east of Lamer. From his bedroom window Cherry watched the silvery rods of the searchlights roam, briefly freezing the gentle Hertfordshire hills in a cold, grey-white frame. That portion of the county was a popular destination for Zeppelins. One night in October his heart ‘stood still for about half a minute’ as one flew low above the house; it went on to drop more than thirty bombs before being shot down over a field. Cherry got a good view, ‘so vivid that I fancied I could feel the heat coming from her’. The next day, a rainy one, the bodies of the crew were laid out in a barn, and crowds pressed in on the police cordon to catch a glimpse of a genuine dead German. The tallest man had the best view. His name was George Bernard Shaw.

GBS was thirty years Cherry’s senior. He was the most famous author in the world, and had been a household name for half a generation. He had married Charlotte Payne-Townshend in 1896, and a decade later, while Cherry was at Christ Church, they had rented the rectory in Ayot, once described by Shaw as ‘a village where nobody dreams of dressing’. Shortly after the war they bought the house, and it became known as ‘Shaw’s Corner’. Compared to Lamer it was a mean little Victorian dwelling (actually it was built in 1902), but it had eight bedrooms, and a revolving hut of its own at the bottom of the garden to which the master could escape to work.
³⁷
The Shaws kept a flat in London and flitted between town and country. They were committed travellers, both in the UK and abroad, and Ayot was their bolt-hole away from the glare of public attention and the wearisome business of packing and repacking.
Au fond
, Shaw liked his own company, and at Ayot, more than anywhere else, he got it.

One day during Cherry’s long convalescence, Charlotte Shaw had appeared at the house to ask if there was anything she or her husband could do to help. The rectory was only a quarter of a mile from Lamer, and the Shaws’ land abutted the park. Cherry didn’t need help, but he needed company, and as soon as he was able to walk properly he got into the habit of strolling down the avenue of lime trees and over the footpaths to Ayot.

Cherry and the Shaws became intimate friends, in touch weekly and often daily until GBS died in 1950. The mundane detail of everyday living was the glue of their long relationship. They discussed fences and birds’ nests and what was to be done about rubbish collection, ate each other’s leftovers and took up the threads of each other’s conversation. The Shaws’ West Highland terrior, Kim, shrank at the approach of Kris, and the vegetarian GBS raised his exflorescent eyebrows in mock horror as Cherry turned up at the back door with a dead rabbit in one hand and a gun in the other. They colluded over local affairs, campaigning jointly against municipal neglect and doubling then quadrupling charitable collections raised by pious villagers. (Cherry was unwilling to take on civic responsibility, but willing to complain if he felt aggrieved.) When one or the other was away, they corresponded. Shaw had bought his first car in 1908, thereby imperilling the hapless villagers on a regular basis, and he was always on hand to advise Cherry on the purchase and maintenance of his own vehicles, a subject about which neither of them knew anything, or to take him on a spin through the previously quiet lanes around Ayot. The villagers did not know what to make of either man.

At first glance there was much that separated them. GBS thrived on public attention, and Cherry recoiled from it. Shaw’s Fabian instincts revolted at the sight of landowners like Cherry raking in unearned income and, as Shaw perceived it, exploiting the working classes. But their friendship was profound and lasting, despite their ideological differences. GBS instinctively questioned the orthodox, and that appealed to Cherry. Neither had much interest in God; both responded deeply to literature. Both naturally rebelled against the idea and the reality of war, and both badly wanted peace (when Shaw visited the front he said that Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British forces, was a very chivalrous man who made him feel that the war would last thirty years). Both were qualified cynics. Above all, the mix of seriousness and frivolity that was the essence of GBS was exactly what Cherry sought from a companion. Shaw never disappointed him.

Shaw towed many in his glittering wake who became regulars at Lamer during these later war years. One was Arnold Bennett, already a grand old man of letters but provincial in his heart, as Cherry was in his. He too toured the front, a companion of the war correspondent George Mair, Cherry’s brilliant Christ Church friend, and went on to occupy a senior post at the Ministry of Information. Bennett was an innately good, honourable man entirely without pretension, and Cherry admired him. (He liked his books, too: he had taken some of them to the Antarctic.) Another Shavian visitor who was a frequent house guest at Lamer for a short period was J. M. Barrie, the strange little man in whom Scott had found an unlikely friend. Although Barrie’s
Peter Pan
had confirmed his position as the most commercially successful dramatist alive, he was shy, like Cherry, and in the case of emotional matters both found writing easier than speaking.

As the autumn advanced Cherry was well enough to acquire a girlfriend, the mysterious
³⁸
Christine Davis, and to take the train down to London to complain to anyone who would listen about his tax bills. But his colitis continued to flare up periodically, and by the middle of October a navy doctor had found him unfit for further service. His commission was terminated, and he was thanked for his contribution to the war effort.

Shortly after his discharge, his doctor despatched him to a nursing home in the north of Scotland. At Duff House in Banff Cherry lived on a diet of Presbyterian severity and took walks along the banks of the Deveron in the perishing autumnal cold that crept off the North Sea. His life of lone splendour set him thinking about the point of having such a vast estate. The first thing he did on his return was to sell an outlying farm called Kimpton Bottom. ‘It is right out of the estate,’ he wrote to Farrer, who dealt with the transaction, ‘and it seemed unwise to go on paying out money in tithes, rates, property tax, insurance and management to a limitless degree. I live in solitary grandeur here. It’s a pity it isn’t someone who enjoys grandeur more!’ Cherry was to see less and less point in owning so much land and property; he had started the process which was going to end, thirty years later, in his owning no land at all.

Stalemate and attrition characterised the war at the end of 1916. At home, Asquith resigned as prime minister, the coalition goverment broke down and Lloyd George took over at Downing Street. Food shortages, rising costs and servant problems had become the norm in country houses. The war had seeped so deeply into daily life that it seemed it had always been there. When Cherry came back from Banff for his first Christmas at Lamer without his mother, he fortunately had Kathleen to jolly him through the cheerless dawn of 1917. She had responded to the war with her usual energy and independence. At first she had organised the transportation of cars and ambulances to France, and had even stayed on the Continent for a time to help set up a French hospital. Then, back in England, she had joined the production line at a Vickers factory that made electrical coils. At the end of 1916 she took up an office job at the Ministry of Pensions. She and the eight-year-old Peter spent that Christmas at Lamer. They all tried to make the most of it: Peter took a stocking into Cherry’s room on Christmas morning, Shaw read them a play about the Kaiser on Boxing Day afternoon, and several guns went shooting. Cherry was an excellent shot, reputedly one of the best in the county, and he always took trouble to ensure that the game coverts in the woods were well stocked.

After Christmas, Kathleen took him back to London with her, ‘for I diagnose cheerful forgetfulness as the quickest cure for him . . . He wants a dose of hilarity or intense interest in something to be quite cured.’ But there was no prospect of cheerfulness: only more sorrow.