Bloomsbury's Outsider (10 page)

Bunny saw Frankie almost every day, enjoyed weekends with Duncan and still found time to rendezvous with Ruth Baynes in the country. After one of Ottoline's parties one evening, Bunny was strolling past Harrods with Lytton Strachey, when Lytton turned and kissed him on the lips in full view of the street. Bunny dashed into a taxi, a prudent measure at a time when homosexuals were hounded and routinely harassed by the police. He reflected that it was less a matter of his ‘minding being kissed', than of ‘disliking being kissed in the street by a
bearded
man'.
²¹
In fact Bunny was ready for any number of new experiences. Depressed about college work, he sought consolation with a prostitute, ‘Rose Dolces', who assured him that she was fresh from the country, had a series of connections with married men, and rarely went on the streets.

In February 1915 Duncan moved temporarily to Eleanors, a farmhouse at West Wittering, near Chichester in West Sussex, which Vanessa had taken as an escape from London. When Bunny joined Duncan there towards the end of the month, the two men were blissfully happy, on one occasion raiding the cellar of the artist Henry Tonks's adjacent studio, drinking
wine in the sunlight, and fighting ‘drunkenly & lustfully', before enjoying ‘the sweet lassitude of sleeping in each other's arms'.
²²
But in London Bunny found himself in a situation reminiscent of that which he had experienced with James Strachey in 1912. This time it was James's older brother Lytton who endeavoured to court Bunny, bombarding him with invitations. Although Bunny enjoyed Lytton's clever, witty and risqué conversation, he kept a distance, which Lytton did not fail to notice, writing: ‘It sometimes occurs to me that my persistent invitations may be too much for you; but at other times I fancy that you are very indulgent […] in spite of your not writing to me.'
²³

Bunny and Frankie spent a weekend, that spring, with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence at Greatham, East Hampshire. Lawrence evidently found Bunny so changed by his Bloomsbury friends that he wrote to Ottoline suggesting there was ‘something wrong' with Bunny. ‘Is he also', Lawrence asked, ‘like Keynes and Grant [?]' He said they made him dream ‘of a beetle that bites like a scorpion', a beetle, moreover, which he was able to kill.
²⁴
According to John Worthen, Lawrence's biographer, Lawrence's feeling of revulsion arose because he ‘
knew
this feeling, which was why he found it so disturbing. It was a revelation to him of the way in which he himself might be homosexual, and did not want to be.'
²⁵
Lawrence wrote to Bunny the same day, imploring him to break free of his homosexual friends:

It is foolish of you to say that it doesn't matter either way – the men loving men. It doesn't matter in the public way. But it matters so much, David, to the man himself […] that it is like a blow of triumphant decay, when I meet Birrell or the others. I simply can't bear it […]. Why is there this horrible sense of frowstiness, so repulsive, as if it came from deep inward dirt – a sort of sewer – deep in men like K[eynes] and B[irrell] and D[uncan] G[rant].

[…] Now David, in the name of everything that is called love, leave this set and stop this blasphemy against love.
²⁶

The letter came as a shock to Bunny, for he had written to Edward about the weekend, commenting on Lawrence's good spirits. Eleanor Farjeon, staying in a cottage nearby, recalled a light-hearted weekend, with cricket and croquet.
²⁷
But Bunny stood his ground with Lawrence regarding the ‘men loving men' question. Consequently, in Lawrence's eyes the vigorously masculine Bunny whom he had loved in Germany, was no more. Now he was David and beyond redemption. After this, Bunny saw Lawrence only once more, by accident, on the evening of Armistice Day. But he wrote and told him how much he admired
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, and received a warm letter in reply. Bunny later reflected that Lawrence ‘could charm every human creature who attracted or interested him and at first meeting almost every fresh separate person did attract him. He did, however, use up his human attachments rather fast.'
²⁸

In May Vanessa wrote to Roger Fry, stating she felt ‘happier about Duncan and Bunny because I see that Bunny really does care a good deal for him'. Refuting Fry's contention that she might have feelings for Bunny herself, Vanessa explained that ‘he likes I think to be demonstrative to everyone he likes, but he's not in love with me.'
²⁹
Although Bunny and Duncan had latterly been very happy together, Duncan's jealousy periodically resurfaced. He conceived a notion that Bunny was in love with Maria Nhys, a young woman in Ottoline's employ. Leaving the Morrells' Bedford Square house one afternoon, Bunny was confronted by Duncan rushing towards him white-faced and apparently unable to speak. Duncan seemed so unhinged that Bunny feared he was out of his mind. A few weeks later, after an evening at Ottoline's, Bunny went back to Maynard's Gower Street rooms, where, the worse for whisky, he kissed Maynard in bed. Hovering suspiciously on the threshold, Duncan witnessed the event and became extremely agitated. The situation was compounded by Duncan's prolonged absences at Wittering, where he had too long to speculate about what Bunny was doing and with whom.

Bunny was always ready for an adventure, and when, one evening at the Café Royal, he was given the nod by a lovely young artists' model, he quickly acceded to her request to obtain cocaine from a chemist. Betty May was extremely pretty with an olive complexion, and deep-violet-blue eyes set wide apart. She was only five feet tall, but with her fierce and feisty disposition, was known as ‘Tiger Woman'. Bunny assumed she was eighteen, but at twenty-two, she was only one year younger than him. At
Pond Place he lit a fire, they undressed, and in order to show willing, Bunny took some cocaine. Under the influence, Betty started a row, to which Bunny responded angrily, telling her that he did not regard her as a prostitute, ‘but as a human being full of lust like myself'.
³⁰
Later they talked, and Bunny, who had decided to reform her, insisted that Betty give up drugs, which she promised to do. The next morning, according to Bunny's journal, Betty was ‘full of love' for him, so he gave her ten shillings. And so began a relationship in which Bunny furnished Betty with occasional hand-outs for the next sixty years.

‘My opinions had been formed by what I had seen of the war and by the people I had been working among.'
¹

Bunny's university career ended in June 1915. Constance worried that he would enlist, as Bunny oscillated between enlisting and following her advice not to. But Bunny made a surprising decision: he elected to join Frankie Birrell and undertake reconstructive work for the Friends Relief Mission in France. Thus he could contribute to the war effort without having to fight. Although he could not tolerate organised religion, even in the pared down contemplative form which the Friends' worship took, he believed he could be of practical use building accommodation in villages which the Germans had destroyed.

There may have been another underlying motive for Bunny's decision. His love life had taken a complicated turn, as there had been a development in his relationship with Lytton Strachey. Lytton had redoubled his pursuit, repeatedly inviting Bunny to the Lacket. Bunny obviously capitulated, as before leaving for
France, he wrote to Lytton asking him to ‘Give me your blessing my dear', adding, ‘don't lets wrangle each day seriously who first shall post off the message of his love. I love you – I was innocent & you were a long while letting my pride and my love for you quarrel with each other.'
²
Lytton replied, imploring Bunny to come to the Lacket one more time. ‘Of course', he added, ‘I know that I must ask you to forgive me a great deal. The difficulty is one cannot wear one's heart on one's sleeve for daws to peck at.'
³

Aware that he could be summoned to the Quakers any day, Bunny threw himself into a whirlwind of activity, attending parties, dining with friends, visiting his mother, and upsetting Duncan by having sex with Betty May in his studio. On 30 June he wrote in wobbly handwriting, atop a double-decker bus, to thank Lytton for sending him his poems, which Bunny carried with him, on the first stage of his journey to France.

The previous day Bunny had lunched with his father. Over a carafe of wine Edward began to clear his throat with what appeared to be embarrassment. Remembering the parental advice proffered before his trip to Germany, Bunny felt sure he was to be given a similar homily, but was delighted when his father's hand opened to reveal a pocket corkscrew. Thus armed, and garbed in the Quakers' grey uniform with the emblematic red and black star on cap and sleeve, Bunny and Frankie set off for the Marne, in Northwestern France. In the train en route, they found themselves at the receiving end of a lecture from a Scottish Quaker about the supposed immorality of French women. This did not augur well, and on arriving at Sermaize where the Friends were based, the all-pervasive air of piety did little to raise their spirits.

The two young men were soon confronted with the realities of war. They boarded a lorry, and set off on an unforgettable drive through a blasted landscape which became so engraved on Bunny's memory, that he was able to describe it twenty years later with absolute clarity:

The white dust rose behind us and we were carried through chequered light under over-hanging trees – some of which had oddly splintered branches – and all the way along […] and in and out of the shadows of the aspens there were tawdry, decorated scratchings up of earth, over which tricolours fluttered and medals jingled from the wooden crosses. For this road was the extreme limit to which the French army had been pressed back upon itself and from which it had, against Joffre's orders, rebounded like a coiled spring upon the Boches. In some places the graves were strung out as much as fifty yards apart, in others they lined the road a dozen deep. French soldiers were buried where they had fallen and the country of the Marne was like a large-scale map dotted with little flags that showed the course of battle. All through the district we were entering there were fresh graves dotted along the roads, in the fields and at the edges of the woods.
⁴

What Bunny saw before him were the scars left by the Battle of the Marne and by the German invasion of September 1914. He not only encountered a shattered landscape, scattered with
wooden crosses, but the fragmented lives of the survivors, mostly women, the elderly and children, who had lost their homes and loved-ones.

As pacifists, members of the Friends' War Victims' Relief Organisation were not involved in active work which might be construed as validating or supporting war, but their role was to assist the victims of war. Thus Bunny and Frankie were part of a team responsible for erecting temporary housing to provide shelter for the people and their livestock, so that normal life and livelihoods might, as far as possible, be resumed. Bunny was overwhelmed by the stoicism of the French and their determination to rebuild their lives. He sent a postcard to Edward which, he said, gave ‘a vague idea of the ruins. The houses are rubbish heaps – the gardens perfectly spick and span – a strange contrast.'
⁵

Initially based at Nettancourt, Bunny and Frankie worked in nearby Sommeilles, a hilltop village overlooking the Argonne Forest, where only two houses remained standing. As Bunny recalled:

When I first saw the village, it created a strange impression. The roof of the church had been knocked in by shells and burnt; and there was nothing left of the Town Hall but a pair of smiling stone lions, a flight of steps and a handsome portico; up the main street there was one little house standing between the rows of burnt-out walls which stretched up to the top of the hill. Yet if one went in between the walls, one saw behind them neat cultivated gardens, rows of
watered lettuces and bean-sticks, the climbing haricots just in flower; bees going in and out of the hives, and chicks running to shelter under the hen's wing.
⁶

At Sommeilles Bunny and Frankie assembled pre-fabricated wooden frame-houses which varied according to the size of the family, usually consisting of between one and three rooms. Once the frames, joists and planks had arrived by lorry, the Quakers bolted the frames together, laid joists and floors, nailed on the walls, bolted gables and rafters and covered them with planks before finally tiling the roofs. This did not require particular skill, but was physically demanding. Bunny relished this work, revelling in his strength and enjoying the result of his manual labour.

Bunny, Frankie and the hut building contingent soon split off from the main body of Nettancourt Quakers, moving to Sommeilles, where in late July they built themselves a hut. This had one big room and a kitchen; relics of a previous dwelling had been brought in to furnish stone steps and seats on either side of the doorway. In the hot, high summer, the weather was extremely pleasant, ‘the people smile at us & the cherries are thick on the trees'.
⁷
Photographs of Bunny at this time show a muscular bronzed young man, his arms bare in rolled up shirt-sleeves, his hair a tousled sun-bleached thatch. The men lived largely out of doors, washing and shaving in front of the hut, a mirror nailed to the boards. In good weather they slept outside, but while Frankie, the eternal public schoolboy, relished
the proximity of so many young men, Bunny found the all-male environment trying.

They established a routine which began at 4.45 in the morning, when after a cup of tea and with cigarettes clamped between their teeth, they began work. At 7.30 they breakfasted on coffee, porridge and omelette, stopping for lunch at noon. At 5.30 the working day ended, and they would be given a substantial dinner and wine. As Bunny remarked to Lytton, ‘we live like kings & Mr Cadbury pays for it'.
⁸
Bunny and his co-workers were fortunate because although the houses had been demolished, the gardens and cellars remained intact, from which the generous French could supply wine and vegetables, a welcome replacement for the Quaker rations of tinned fish and chocolate. But the war, which raged only twenty miles away, was ever-present in the continuous thudding of heavy guns and the noise of aeroplanes passing overhead. At night they were often woken by the sound of a heavy bombardment, which rattled the window panes, and sometimes they could see the black puffs of exploding shells above the Argonne tree-tops.