Kitabı oxu: «God’s Fugitive»

Chapter One

There is nothing in the nature of a biography; nor could there, that I can see, be any utility in it. I was born in ’43 and left an orphan when a little child. I am now rather an invalid …

Letter to S. C. Cockerell, Christmas Day 1918

The solid, square flint tower of St Mary’s Church, Martlesham, is almost hidden among the Suffolk trees. It stands a couple of miles away from the modern village – easy to miss for the casual visitor.

Inside are the haphazard treasures of thousands of English country churches: a fifteenth-century wall painting of St Christopher, lovingly preserved; an ancient family pew recessed into a wall of the chancel, and now used to store cleaning materials; a stone font from the fifteenth century and a carved oak pulpit from the seventeenth; an ancient chest, and a few pieces of medieval stained glass gathered into a single panel. And along the walls, the carved memorials that say everything and nothing about the long-dead members of a local family – in this case, the Doughtys.

There are George Doughty, died 1798, and his wife Ann; their son Chester, who died in 1802; Major Ernest Christie Doughty, DSO, of the Suffolk Regiment, who died in 1928; his grandfather, Frederic Ernest, Rector of Martlesham for nearly thirty years. Outside, more Doughtys are at rest in the graveyard: Rear-Admiral Frederick Proby Doughty, who died in 1892, and his wife, the former Mary Arnold, with their child Beatrice May, lie there among their relatives.

Of Charles Montagu Doughty, for whom as a child Martlesham was closer to being a home than anywhere else, there is nothing: his memorial is far away, in a London crematorium. And yet the atmosphere of the simple little church, its unimpeachable, unassuming Englishness and its dignified reserve, reflect one facet of his character. As in churches all over the country, it is the list as a whole, rather than the individual names, which tells the story; of specific characters, particular lives, the memorials are all but silent. There are names, dates, an occasional mention of a life’s work, but it is the tradition, the history, not the individual, which counts.

And that, without the slightest doubt, is what Charles Doughty would have thought the proper attitude.

He always backed away from curiosity about his biography or his early life – and indeed, many Victorian children must have shared his experience of childhood as time spent in a foreign and not particularly friendly country. Even for the offspring of a family with lands, traditions and inheritances on each side going back for generations, it could be an unpredictable and precarious existence.

Doughty was born into a world of privilege and high expectations. His father, also Charles Montagu, was a clergyman, the squire of Theberton in Suffolk, and owner of family estates and properties all over the county – but it was only a few months after his birth on 19 August 1843 that the young Charles Doughty suffered the first of a series of devastating blows. His mother, Frederica, never recovered from the strain of childbirth and, at less than a year old, Doughty was motherless. He himself had not been expected to survive. ‘It is a long time since I came into the world, and so obviously a dying infant life, that I was christened by my own father almost immediately,’ he said later.¹

But it was the mother, and not the child, who died, and for the rest of his life, the few people who talked to Doughty about his childhood commented on his abiding sense of bereavement. Within a year of his own marriage forty-three years later came a mirror-image of the tragedy, with his own stillborn first child carried off to the churchyard while his invalid wife lay and struggled back to health. Small wonder that later, as he gathered together in his painstaking fashion thousands of word-associations and jottings for use in his writing, among the first under the Latin heading ‘Mater’ would be ‘mother’s yearning’, ‘longing’, ‘smiling tears’ and ‘yearning love’.²

One of the first and most lasting lessons for the young Charles Doughty was that love was something that was brutally wrenched away – an ache, not a consolation.

At the end of his life, then, his writing drew not just on six decades of dedicated study, not just on the travels through Arabia which had been his formative experience, but also, crucially, upon the sense of loss which had surrounded his earliest memories. The theme repeatedly comes back to haunt him – in his last poem, Mansoul, for instance, he describes how he faced his own ‘private grief’ on his journey around the underworld. ‘Death cannot dim thy vision,’ he declares at his mother’s grave.

Long cold be those dead lips, that word ne’er spake

Unworth, unsooth; those dying lips, that kissed,

Once kisst (thy nature’s painful travail past)

This last new-born on thy dear breast, alas! …

Mother of my life’s breath, I living lift

O’er thee, these prayer-knit hands … ³

And the grief runs deeper than that simple, almost formalized Victorian sentimentality. In The Dawn in Britain, the story is told of the baby Cusmon, who was abandoned by his mother, the immortal nymph Agygia, but watched over by her throughout his life. Eventually, after his hundredth birthday, they are reunited at his death.

She stooped, and dearly kissed

That bowed down, aged man, and long embraced … ⁴

When he wrote that, Doughty himself was in his seventies. He is a child again, his lost mother restored, and a lifelong sense of bereavement finds its devoutly longed-for but hollow and insubstantial resolution in an old man’s dream. It is significant that he angrily denied suggestions in reviews that this was his own version of an ancient tale: ‘There is no such myth, and there is no such version,’ he declared. ‘The original is that in The Dawn in Britain itself.’⁵ The story clearly remained important to him: he could mourn the loss of his mother, but emotionally, he could never quite accept it.

Materially, though, both Doughty and his elder brother Henry were well provided for, their place in society apparently fixed by generations of affluence and family tradition. On both sides, the family were well-to-do, landowning gentry: the census return for Theberton for 1841, just two years before Charles’s birth and Frederica’s death, shows the Doughtys with the three-month-old Henry and five adult servants. It was a comfortable life in the sheltered and undemanding tradition of the prosperous Church of England.

The Doughtys of Suffolk had built up extensive lands over the centuries, and occupied a succession of livings; Frederica’s relatives, the Hothams of East Yorkshire, had produced six admirals, three generals, a bishop, a judge and a colonial governor. It was a family that drank in unquestioning patriotism and the peculiarly restrained devotion of the Established Church with its mother’s milk – the sort of family on which the empire had relied for generations.

But it seems, too, to have been a family where the idea of pride and duty replaced any open show of affection. Doughty’s cousin, the Rear-Admiral Frederick Proby Doughty who now lies in Martlesham churchyard, wrote a journal in which he recorded his memories of the various members of his family – and on the Doughtys’ side at least, there does not seem to have been much obvious emotional closeness. ‘We were badly off as children in the matter of relatives – no grandfathers or grandmothers, or relatives that were disposed to do the correct and orthodox “uncle and aunt” business.’⁶ The family would perhaps have been scandalized not to be considered ‘correct and orthodox’, but the message is clear. Of his uncle, the late father of young Charles and Henry, he reminisced: ‘I do not recall much connected with him, except on one occasion when walking with my father at Martlesham. I suppose I was rather busy with my tongue – he said to my father, “Why do you allow that boy to go on chattering? Box his ears …!”’

And there was more for the young Charles Doughty to contend with than the occasional bad temper of a crusty old Victorian clergy man. For all his wealth, Doughty’s father was stretching himself financially, with an ambitious programme of ostentatious building works at Theberton Hall. It seems to have been something of a family failing – only a few years later, after a similar programme of grandiose ‘improvements’, Doughty’s uncle, Frederick Goodwin Doughty, was forced to put his own home of Martlesham Hall, a few miles away, up for sale.

The boys, no doubt, were too young to be aware of the growing problems, but the atmosphere at Theberton Hall cannot have been a happy one. Their father seems to have been shattered by the untimely death of his ‘late dear wife’, who was only thirty-five when she died. No doubt the young Charles was not the only one to feel a sense of loss and bereavement: his father’s own health was not strong, and on 6 April 1850 he put his affairs in order, writing a new will, with an instruction that he should be buried next to Frederica in Theberton Church. Less than three weeks later he was dead, at the age of fifty-two, the doctors giving the cause of death as ‘Exhausted nature following a severe bilious attack’. The two boys were now orphans.

Childhood, it must have seemed, was little more than a harsh preparation for a life of loneliness. Theberton Hall was shut up, and within a few weeks the auctioneers moved in. At 11 a.m. on 28 August they started their sale with Lot 1 – two brown bread pans, a strainer and three baking pans – and over the next four days sold off the entire contents of the house. The Reverend Doughty’s fine wine cellar and his extensive library were split up and put under the hammer; so were his ‘town-built chariot’ and his single-horse phaeton. Even more distressing for the two boys, everything in their nursery was sold – brass mounted fender, fire-irons and pictures off the wall. It was a common practice in the mid nineteenth century to sell off the belongings of the dead – but that made it no less heart-rending for the young boys, who had to see what had once been their home broken up and carried off by strangers.

But if the seeds of Doughty’s later emotional detachment and determined self-sufficiency can be seen in these bleak years of bereavement, there were other members of his immediate family with a brisker, no-nonsense attitude to death. Frederick Proby Doughty’s detached account of his uncle’s financial problems and death seems brutal today, but it probably reflects the severely practical attitude of the family at large.

He had commenced great alterations to Theberton Hall, building enormous stablings, altering the entrance, building a picture gallery, and other expensive undertakings far beyond his means, and out of character with such an estate. Luckily he died, leaving his sons Henry and Charles … a long minority before them to recover and pull through the expenses and debts their father had incurred.

In fact, if his will is anything to go by, Charles Doughty senior still had plenty to leave his two sons. For Henry, there were several houses and estates spread over various parishes in Suffolk – among them Theberton Hall itself.

Charles, as the younger son, was less generously provided for, but he still inherited three farms, all his father’s government funds and securities, and an unspecified amount of cash, annuities and other investments which derived originally from the Hotham family. His guardian was to be his uncle, Frederick Doughty of Martlesham, father of the journal-keeping Frederick Proby Doughty – but the journal gives little cause to suggest that the move to Martlesham brought any fresh lightheartedness or fun into the little boy’s life. The elderly admiral recalled later: ‘I never remember a guest staying in the house, and but one or two dinner parties; and visiting friends were few and far distant.’ Of his mother – the woman who was to share the job of bringing up the young Charles Doughty – he wrote: ‘I fancy she was very delicate – lived mostly when at home stretched out on a sofa. I don’t remember her ever entering into any games or sports with us …’ She had a good education and spoke several languages, but she wasn’t known for her friendliness. ‘Extreme amiability’, her son noted carefully, ‘was never one of my mother’s vices or virtues.’

Neither Frederick Doughty nor his wife was going to waste much time or affection on their new charge. Within months of his father’s death young Charles was packed off to school at Laleham, on the Thames, to come home only for those parts of the holidays for which they could not find another willing relative or friend to take on the burden of his keep.

For Doughty’s new guardian was going through his own financial problems, and for much the same reasons that his dead brother had done. He had been pouring money into the rebuilding of Martlesham Hall for nearly ten years when his nephew arrived – perhaps the two brothers were competing in the splendour of their ambitions. If so, they paid a heavy price: only death prevented Charles from crippling himself and his two small sons with debt, while Frederick was eventually forced to sell the Hall which was his pride and joy. ‘It was a terrible wrench to all his feelings: the building of the Hall in the Elizabethan style had been the pleasure and the hobby of his life. For years after the sale, the place was never named, or mention made of it,’ Frederick’s son dutifully recorded. By the time Martlesham was sold, Charles Doughty would have been some ten years old – old enough to sense and recognize the fresh misery that the family was going through. Perhaps there is even a hint in his cousin’s journal that the young Charles might have been made to feel some responsibility for the disaster, despite the fact that his father’s will had carefully provided for his upkeep and maintenance.

The sale of the Hall and the estate around it I fancy became inevitable in spite of a hard struggle on the part of my father to make ends meet. The growing up of children and the increasing expense of education in addition to the above sealed its fate … The sale was, I have heard on all sides, a terrible blow to my father.

Laleham, with swimming in the river Thames and cricket in a nearby meadow, seemed initially to be an ideal choice of school for a boy who was used to life in the country, and who was already, not surprisingly, showing signs of being shy and withdrawn. The Revd John Buckland had made his career as headmaster there – he had come to Laleham thirty years before with Dr Thomas Arnold, and the two young schoolmasters had set up their own establishments, Arnold preparing older boys for university, and Buckland building up one of the country’s first preparatory schools.

Arnold, of course, had moved on to greater things at Rugby School after ten years, but Buckland stayed behind. By the time he retired, three years after Charles Doughty arrived, The Times commented that he was running ‘a large and flourishing private school’. The connection with Arnold was still close, and a letter from his son, the poet Matthew Arnold, about a visit in 1848 to the man he still called Uncle Buckland gives an idyllic picture of the establishment as it then was. ‘In the afternoon I went to Penton Hook with Uncle Buckland, Fan, and Martha, and all the school following behind, as I used to follow along the same river bank eighteen years ago. It changes less than any place I ever go to.’⁷

But the memories of a man in his mid twenties, however little the place itself seemed to have changed, were more pleasant than the day-to-day reality for the thirty or so small boys at the school. Even Arnold, in a less lyrical mood, described it as ‘a really bad and injurious school’, and grumbled about ‘that detestable gravel playground’,⁸ while ‘Uncle Buckland’ gloried in a reputation for strict discipline that was anything but avuncular.

One former pupil – who went on to become a bishop in New Zealand⁹ – recalled how he was summoned from breakfast by Buckland to be asked what religion he was. ‘Christian’, apparently, was not a good enough answer, and when the boy stammered nervously that he did not know ‘what sort of Christian’ he was, he was sent off to spend the day locked in the cellar. Eight hours later ‘Uncle Buckland’ unlocked the door, and asked him again – and still the panic-stricken boy had no reply for him. ‘The headmaster replied at last, “Sir, you are a Protestant,” and knocked him down. Hardly a method to encourage Protestantism, the bishop thought, looking back …’

And not one either to encourage a happy atmosphere of learning and scholarship. Doughty was experiencing early the violent religious bigotry that he would meet again in the deserts of Arabia: it is hardly surprising, even though the victim of that attack made his career in the Church, that many of Buckland’s pupils, like Doughty, adopted an ambiguous attitude to the established religion as they grew up.

But Buckland’s no-nonsense attitude would have raised few eyebrows in the mid nineteenth century. The only complaint about the school that Doughty himself made as he grew older was a much less serious one, his wife wrote in a letter, years afterwards. ‘He was six years old, and much resented being made to get out of bed to show visitors what a tall boy he was.’¹⁰

His guardians positively welcomed the strictness of the regime, and around the time that Buckland retired they moved their young charge away from Laleham and off to the nearby school at Elstree. It was a move from one strict disciplinarian to another, even more overbearing one.

Once again, it was a quiet, country establishment, in a seventeenth-century mansion at the top of a hill, with a Spanish chestnut tree said to be over a thousand years old outside the front door – the tree, its huge, contorted branches now severely pruned, still stands outside what is now a nursing home. The curriculum was mainly classics, with a few periods a week of mathematics, occasional science lessons, and desultory French from a visiting Frenchman. There was a gravel yard with a fives court, football from time to time, and cricket on the field in front of the house.