The kids had a great time exploring around the orchard while Wendy and I sipped our Earl Grey. After awhile Olivia asked why they hadn’t mown the grass, because her trousers and shoes were all wet with last night’s rain. “It’s more natural this way,” I explained. A blank look. “The English like sitting around in orchards,” I tried again. “Why?” she asked. By this point I knew I was in way over my head. How do you explain Englishness to a seven-year old? “Go play with your brother,” I said, and turned back to my Earl Grey.
Later, we wandered up to the village church. In the picturesque churchyard behind it the kids spotted a small animal that turned out, upon investigation, to be a monkjack. It’s a kind of young deer, but with much shorter legs than a North American fawn. It was very fast and an impressive jumper. A nice woman at the church explained that they were always getting trapped in the church yard because of its high walls, but they eventually find their way out. She gave the kids some orange juice—or what passes for orange juice in this country, which is a highly concentrated liquid to which they add copious amounts of water. The kids were nice about it, at least.
You can’t visit Grantchester without running into the spirit of Rupert Brooke, a mediocre poet who had the good fortune to die young. Brooke was a student at King’s College, Cambridge, and after that he lived at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester (currently occupied by Jeffrey Archer, it turns out). For some reason he impressed various members of the Bloomsbury group, including Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell, and they took him up. He doesn’t seem to have been good for much beyond looking beautiful at their tea parties and composing terrible verses about how lovely life in Grantchester was:
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
I mean, yikes. Still, Brooke certainly looks like a poet; Yeats apparently called him the “handsomest young man in England.”
Brooke enthusiastically signed up for the war in 1915, and died later that year, on his way to a battle in Turkey. If he hadn’t died, he would have been forgotten; as it was, his sonnet “The Soldier” was read from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday, and no less a personage than Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in the Times. Here’s the sonnet, which isn’t bad but tells you everything you need to know about the guy’s penchant for self-mythologization:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Wilfred Owen it’s certainly not. Brooke got to celebrate the war because he never really fought in it. Things were looking pretty different by 1918, when Owen called sentiments likes these “The old Lie.”
Nonetheless, when you go to Grantchester today it feels like it’s still 1914. And, in case you were wondering, there is honey still for tea, though I myself prefer sugar.
