The medieval roofs of King’s College were just visible across the water meadows, close enough for Rupert to canoe back to The Old Vicarage at midnight after dining in the town. One hot day the Cambridge philosophy don Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson succumbed to the temptation of the cool water walking along the riverbank on his way to Sunday lunch at The Old Vicarage. Leaving all his clothes and his spectacles on the grass he jumped in, and swam to the opposite side. Suddenly a punt appeared round a bend in the river, packed with beautiful girls, rapidly approaching the exact spot where Goldie had left his clothes. Hiding in a reed bed, he decided to wait till they had passed before swimming back to retrieve his things. To his horror, the gay and noisy young people tied up their punt and proceeded to unpack a most elaborate and time-consuming picnic. Slowly the distinguished philosopher, trapped and sightless, sank further into the smelly depths of the river, black mud oozing round his naked limbs. Only hours later did the punt move off with its garrulous cargo, enabling Goldie, stinking and filthy, to make his way at last to The Old Vicarage and the worried party waiting there.

  In a different corner of the south of England another emerging poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who had been a year ahead of Rupert at Cambridge, was living with his mother, a painter sufficiently distinguished to have exhibited at the Royal Academy, in the house where he had been born and grown up; his father had left home when he was five, and died when he was nine. Weirleigh, in the Weald of Kent, was a red-brick Victorian Gothic house with a sixty-foot spire, of considerable hideousness to Sassoon’s eye, and the foxhunting of the winter months had been replaced by cricket, his favourite summer activity. On the village green at Brenchley fat men, their huge moustaches still dripping from the contents of a tankard swallowed in the back of the pavilion, took their wickets with slow yet deceptively lethal bowling. Sassoon was 25, tall and fit, big-eared but handsome, and amember of the TunbridgeWells Blue Mantles Club. He would travel the county for a match, and his average that summer over 51 innings, ten of them not out, was 9 (‘quite a creditable record for a poet’). The fattest member of the teamwasMr Baldwin a wheel-wright;Walter Humphreyswas the most successful member of the side, in a pink flannel shirt with a sneaky home-made flapping sleeve which distracted the batsman’s concentration just as he should have been anticipating the break of the ball. The civilised sport of bat and ball, enjoyed by gentleman and farmers alike, was a symbol for Siegfried of ‘Good Old England holding its own against the modern pandemonium’. Yet the local pandemonium was also considerable. The village cricket match always coincided with the Village Flower Show, and in the competitors’ tent the scent of the sweet peas fought disagreeably with that of the prize onions. Outside, the clashing cymbals of the village brass band struggled for attention against the strident din of steam-organ music blasting out of the gold-and-red carousel, the shriek of the children circling while on top of the painted wooden horses adding to the racket.

  Sassoon had turned down an invitation to a London party to celebrate the Coronation in favour of staying in Kent to play cricket, only for the local match to be scuppered by rain. It was disappointing, but since then there had been plenty of lovely days as July settled into its own warm, comfortable routine. The geese walked slowly in single file across the village green, largely untroubled by the world except for the sound of the occasional motor-car bumping along the dusty roads. For Sassoon 1911 was becoming ‘one of those specially remembered summers, from which one evolves a consistent impression of commingled happiness.’ It was, in fact, apparently perfect. ‘Sitting under the Irish yew,’ he wrote, ‘we seemed to have forgotten that there was such a thing as the future.’ Nothing had changed since his childhood. The routine of his dayswaswell established.Walking at dawn in a garden filled with tea roses, tree peonies and lavender, he would hear the distant sound of the early morning milk train leaving Paddock Wood station where the stationmaster wore a top hat and a baggy black frock coat to greet the arriving London trains. He would hear the sound of pigeons cooing monotonously in their dovecot, awake too early with the rising sun and already bored. He would watch the old white pony pull the mowing machine up and down the lawn, as he always had. The manservant never failed to knock on the door with a jug of boiling water to pour into the hip-bath. Iced coffee and claret cup were served in the intervals between games of tennis. Ladies came over for the day from Tunbridge Wells in their best bonnets to visit Sassoon’s mother, travelling in an open barouche, a journey of nine miles that sometimes took an hour because the kindly coachman preferred to let the horses take the hills at a walk.

  Preoccupied as he was by sport and by poetry, Sassoon welcomed the timelessness and dependability of the returning seasons, and the pace of life they dictated. He said later that his poetic consciousness had been stirred when he was five and, convalescing from pneumonia in the garden at Weirleigh, had became aware of the restorative effect of that peaceful place. In this perfect summer, while Rupert Brooke was trading words with Virginia Stephen in Cambridgeshire, Sassoon was bent in thought over the Brenchley tennis court, clutching a dandelion root between finger and thumb, a broken kitchen knife in the other hand. His elderly friend and champion Helen Wirgman, known to everyone who loved her as Wirgie, was staying at Weirleigh for her annual summer visit, and stood watching him. ‘The way you wriggled that root up’, she remarked, ‘makes me think that you ought to become rather a good workman with words.’ A slip on a polished floor and a cracked rib caused Wirgie to cancel a planned extended visit to St Ives, and during the next few weeks she remained in Kent, encouraging her young friend.

  Wirgie’s enthusiasm for his writing and John Masefield’s poem The Everlasting Mercy on the shelf inspired Sassoon to write an ‘extravagantly unoriginal’ pastiche, which he sent to Edmund Gosse, literary critic and Librarian to the House of Lords, whose own collected poems were being published that year. Gosse was married to one of his mother’s great friends, and Sassoon had met him earlier that summer at his house in Regent’s Park. Emboldened to write after the warmth of Gosse’s reception then, Sassoon was delighted when he wrote back offering advice and encouragement.

  Another guest joined the Weirleigh party that week. Sassoon had met Nevill Forbes, a former pupil of his governess, several years before, and they had liked each other. Nevill played the piano beautifully, but it was the way he rubbed his glasses and blew out the candles and smiled after a performance that attracted Sassoon’s attention that summer. He had not the self-confidence to ask Forbes himself or Wirgie to sympathise with him about his emerging suspicion that he might be a homosexual – a suspicion yet to be put to a practical test. Instead, in between cricket matches and tending the tennis court, Sassoon wrote to Edward Carpenter, a one-time musical academic and ordained curate at Cambridge and now a writer who stirred up controversy with his outspokenness over his own publicly admitted homosexuality. It was only 6 years since the prosecution and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for his illegal homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas; homosexuality was still illegal but, remarkably, Carpenter avoided the law. The police several times investigated his books on the grounds of their suspect moral content, but Carpenter successfully avoided a prison sentence – perhaps his isolation in the Derbyshire countryside helped.

  Sassoon had heard of Carpenter from Forbes. He introduced himself by sending Carpenter two photographs of himself and copies of his two privately-printed books of poetry. Praising Carpenter’s new book Intermediate Sex, Sassoon confided in another person for the first time his own ‘intense attraction’ to men and his ‘antipathy for women’. Carpenter replied immediately, returning one of the photographs and inviting Sassoon to stay with him in Derbyshire. But Sassoon’s courage failed him, and he remained at home in Kent.

  The emotional disruption that Sassoon felt in publicly confessing his sexual inclinations was alleviated by the almost spiritual stability he enjoyed in the seasonal rhythm of his rural life. But John, son of Tom Richardson, coachman and groom to the Sassoon family and the inspiration behind Sassoon’s passion for foxhunting, saw rural idealisation from a different perspective. John Richardson felt that the romanticising and poetising of ‘red tiled villages with ancient grey stone churches; the outlying farms with their oast houses and barns’ had become a rich man’s smoke screen against the true hardships of rural life. Sassoon saw the wives of the farm workers knitting and chatting in contented friendship during long, lazy, Saturday afternoons as they prepared the cricket tea; John knew that those afternoons were among the few moments the women had to themselves all week. He knew that ‘drudgery and hardship lurked beneath the charm of rural beauty in our part of Kent with its wooded hills, its apple, cherry, and plum orchards.’ The inhabitants of the small farm lodgings were known to the gentry as ‘cottagers’, but ‘cottage’ was a euphemism for something little more than a hovel, with straw laid over a bare earth floor and no sanitation except for a foul-smelling hut at the bottom of the garden.

  Disease and dissatisfaction afflicted the rural poor. A country doctor would arrive to treat the most prevalent illnesses, a surprising sight in his frock coat, with his stethoscope tucked beneath his top hat. Diphtheria and whooping cough were common, typhoid now fairly rare; cancer of the lung was too baffling to be treated effectively. It was well known that pneumonia had become serious when the patient’s fingers began to pluck at the bedclothes that covered them. A doctor and midwife visiting a shy, suspicious woman about to give birth at her gypsy encampment were forced to help with the delivery beneath a tarpaulin barely two feet above the ground. Unfortunately wasps had decided to nest beneath the canvas, and the medics emerged from the darkness holding the baby, but covered in stings.

  Had those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century defenders and celebrators of English country life Gilbert White and William Cobbett (who once threw a village feast to celebrate the failure of a new local bank) returned to England in 1911 they would have been horrified. Cobbett’s fear of the erosion of rural traditions by the increasing industrialisation of life was becoming a reality. Younger farm workers were tempted to head for the cities, where they found better-paid jobs in the mills, factories and shops, but the older generation was as rooted as the new was on the move. At Bateman’s, the small farm in East Sussex belonging to the writer Rudyard Kipling, one of the cattlemen ‘was on terms of terrifying familiarity with the herd-bull, whom he would slap on the nose to make him walk disposedly before us when visitors came.’ The cattleman’s son had no interest in the land, grew up to work in a grocer’s shop, and wore a smart black coat to church on Sundays while his father spent the day in the cowsheds milking the herd. The head of the carpentry shop at Knole near Sevenoaks in Kent was in despair when his son announced that he did not intend to carry on in the family woodworking tradition. In tears, the older man explained to Vita Sackville-West: his son wanted ‘to go into the motor trade. What is engines? What’s screwing up a nut beside handling a nice piece of wood?’ Unable to understand the state of mind of the coming generation, the carpenter concluded that his son was ‘giving up a sure job for a shadow. It seems to me that everything is breaking up.’ Kipling’s great friend Rider Haggard, novelist and writer about countryside matters, looked with some scorn on the cowman’s son’s choice. ‘Nature has little meaning for most of them, and no charms; but they love a gas lamp,’ he scoffed. ‘Nature in my opinion only appeals to the truly educated.’

  The advance of expensive mechanised farm tools, including milking and shearing equipment, made many jobs on the farm redundant. The hereditary skills of thatching and ditching were dying out. The advent of refrigerated ships meant that meat need no longer come exclusively from Britain. The importation of competitively priced beef and mutton from South America, Australia and New Zealand and of corn from North America all contributed to the agricultural slump. Farm rents had crashed over the last thirty years, and in the preceding two decades a steady 45,000 acres a year had been taken out of arable cultivation and either become rough grazing or been put to some non-agricultural use, such as hunting grounds for the rich. Chicken-rearing was so unsuccessful that one farmer offered £50 – the equivalent of a year’s wage for a farm labourer – to anyone who could show an annual profit of that amount. He did not have to part with his money. A loss of confi-dence in the old ways was becoming widespread. New crops such as cucumbers and grapes grown under glass were being developed by wealthier ‘prospecting’ landlords, and in the Vale of Evesham asparagus was found to thrive in the stiff clay. But most landlords were unable to keep up with the cost of repairs to tenants’ accommodation, and the squalor of cottages with broken window-panes and leaking roofs was all too familiar to John Richardson.

  In the summer of 1911 a schoolmaster from Farnham in Surrey named George Sturt was writing a book, Change in the Village, under the pseudonym George Bourne. It was based on conversations with his gardener, Bettesworth, which Sturt felt perfectly illustrated the problems the countryside was experiencing in adapting to the advances of the new century. Innate suspicion combined with inertia in the older generation inhibited change and caused deep distress. Many could not understand the need to alter a way of life that had worked well enough for centuries. Farnham was a place where the names of different varieties of potato – the red-nosed kidney, the magnum bonum – were more famous and regarded with more reverence than the names of any politicians. The heath-land provided robust turf from which to cut sods for thatching, delicious warm smokey flavoured bread was baked in the cottage ovens, the bees in their hives produced plenty of honey, and the small plot of hops at the bottom of the garden provided all the beer a man could drink. No one minded too much about personal hygiene, or that the men smelt of their cows, and there was usually enough water left in the well for washing. If it rained, it was ‘good for the ducks’; if a pig fell sick, it was an opportunity for a big feast. The work was hard and relentless but, as Sturt realised, ‘patience and industry dignified the hardship’. Money was barely relevant, since goods were frequently paid for in kind, and expenses were minimal as in general people were ‘wanting no holiday, independent of books and newspapers, indifferent to anything that happened farther off than the neighbouring town.’ Above all, George Sturt concluded that the experience of living ‘dignified lives of simple and self supporting contentment’ meant that Bettesworth’s generation never knew what it was to feel unfulfilled. The average countryman found his satisfaction ‘in the cow stall, or garden, or cottage, or in the fields or on the heaths,’ and to him these were ‘all absorbing; and as he hurried to thatch his rick before the rain came or to get his turfs home by nightfall, the ideas which thronged his doings crowded out ideas of any other sort.’

  Change was threatening this rooted contentment. The common heath and the land on which the donkeys used to graze had become tennis courts for the rich town folk who had their weekend cottages in the village. The fall in farm incomes created a mood of anxiety, and the pressures were beginning to show. In July 1911 George Sturt was woken in the middle of the night with a jolt to the sound of a woman’s scream followed by a volley of oaths in a deep voice, ringing out across the village – reminding him that drunkenness was just one sign that life was sometimes only tolerable if it was anaesthetised. Physical violence also provided a release of feelings. However resilient, human nature was not in the end impervious to hardship.

  It was common for suspicion to be directed against those who wanted to help. Strangers in a village were stared at with undisguised hostility or given ‘the rapid sideways cautious glance’ that Leonard Woolf, with his Ceylon-darkened skin, habitually attracted. Strangers brought their strange city ways with them, and while publicans might welcome the extra income from bicyclists and out-of-towners, not everyone was pleased by their arrival. In E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End the woodcutter’s son voices his distaste for the city people’s behaviour at Mrs Wilcox’s country funeral: ‘They didn’t ought to have coloured flowers at buryings.’ George Sturt was aware of Bettesworth’s resentment at being used as copy for his book; in the same way, Churchill’s sudden philanthropic beam of light had appalled the Dartmoor shepherd.

  Occasionally pride was swallowed and an appeal for help was made. Leonard Woolf had a housekeeper, Mrs Funell, who kept a white apron behind her door to whip on in case the gentry called unexpectedly, lest they might not think her clean; she had never been further than the local town, just four miles from her home. One day she came to him with ‘a dark fierce but worried look on her broad lined handsome face.’ Having to confess that her young unmarried daughter was about to give birth and ask to borrow a basin and some towels from her employer was a profound humiliation for her, a country shame as deeply felt as any depicted in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles or the American Nathaniel Hawthorne’s earlier book, The Scarlet Letter.

  For poets and painters and thinkers and novelists, the countryside had become an idealised place of ready inspiration, an alternative to the revved-up atmosphere of the cities. While ready to embrace the stimulating arrival of the ballet, the car, the underground, the aeroplane, the cinema and all the other advances offered by life in the city, artists were loth to let go of the romantic sensibility they found in the countryside. Even the Home Secretary had a rose-tinted view of rural life, derived from his nurse Elizabeth Everest, who had spent her childhood in the Weald of Kent. ‘No county could compare with Kent,’ Mrs Everest told Churchill, her nostalgic love inspiring his own profound affection for the county. The age-old pessimism and hand wringing that was the country way was seen patronisingly as ‘charming’. A liberating ‘spontaneity’was to be found outside the towns. There was a movement to renew the charm of down-at-heel villages by injecting hokey-folkiness. The widow of an Eton bursar founded a village singing group, pleased to think she had helped put an end to boredom and decadence. Kenneth Grahame, author of the 908 children’s book The Wind in the Willows, saw through this manufactured vitality. He attended her production of George and the Dragon, which seemed to him ‘to consist of little more than an importing of cheap songs from the London Music Halls.’