Fatal Glamour Read Free Page A

school system, and Rupert can even be seen as a victim of it. Yet a biography is hardly worth writing without an assumption of its subject’spersonal accountability. In the Second World War there was a general system of occupation in France, but individual Frenchmen responded to German rule in radically different ways. Rupert made his own choices, and there is an immense body of evidence about why he made them. We are well placed to understand him, if not to pardon him. Further, the understanding can be applied on many different levels, from national attitudes towards Germany to ideas of mental illness that were applied to his 1912 breakdown. A biography should present its evidence to its readers for them to judge, rather than delivering an already determined verdict.
    Evidence, however, needs to be summed up, into a consistent pattern of action and character. For Rupert, trying to reach that consistency turned out to be a dangerous task. Before 1911 he managed his emotional life by dividing it into separate compartments, keeping his various friends and lovers in the dark about what he was up to with others. His gay circle was shielded from his heterosexual partners (who were also kept ignorant of each other). Politics was another distinct sphere of action. In the background, always, was his formidable mother: at once the most important person in his life, and the one who knew least about his intimate affairs.
    During 1911 Rupert could no longer keep intact the barriers between his different worlds, and the result was the emotional breakdown of the first half of 1912. This coincided with the wreck of the
Titanic
(15 April 1912), and happened for a similar reason: water began to spill over the top of the ship’s watertight compartments, flooding from one to the next until the ship went down. Rupert recovered by cutting troublesome people out of his life, and by constructing a simpler and coarser identity. Thus stripped of the past – cleansed, as he saw it – he was happy to merge his fate with that of the Hood Battalion and to write to Ka Cox his own epitaph: “It’s a good thing I die.”

2
Cambridge: Friendship and Love
October 1906–May 1909
Justin and Jacques
    Rupert Brooke went up to King’s College to read classics because his father had done the same, because his uncle Alan Brooke was dean of the college, and because he had won a scholarship. Until a few years before, King’s had been a college exclusively for Etonians, and it still kept an atmosphere of aristocratic leisure. But within a few days of his arrival at King’s in October 1906, Rupert became friends with two young men who came from a different mould. Justin Brooke (no relation) was at Emmanuel College and sharing lodgings with a fellow student there, Jacques Raverat. Justin’s father was a small grocer in Manchester who single-handedly built up his shop into one of the largest tea merchants in Britain: Brooke Bond. Arthur Brooke could well afford to send his four sons to public school, but, like many progressive Northern businessmen, he mistrusted the education provided for the sons of the gentry. However, he was open-minded enough to send three of his four boys to J.H. Badley’s new progressive school in Sussex, Bedales. Justin Brooke arrived there in 1896, when he was eleven years old. After two years, his father transferred him to Abbotsholme, a more radical establishment. Three years after that, one of the headmaster Cecil Reddie’s regular scandals erupted and Justin was returned to Bedales, where he became head boy in his last year.
    Justin’s life and character fell under the long shadow of his father. Arthur Brooke had the characteristic stubbornness and emotional incompetence of the Victorian self-made man. He forced Justin to give up his natural left-handedness when he was small. When Justin decided that hewanted to become a schoolteacher, like Badley, his father scotched that ambition