Too Close to the Sun (7 page)

Meanwhile, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, white men had been leading caravans through Kamba and Maasai country, establishing depots on the main trading routes. In 1893, the Reverend Stuart Watt, his wife, and their five children walked fifty miles through the Taru Desert to set up home at Fort Smith, the first brick fort on the continent. One of the children was a three-month-old baby. Like Geoffrey Buxton, the Watts marveled at the limitless pasturelands and the superb hunting. Life was not as hard as it was for the settlers beating the Canadian wilderness into submission, as there was no native labor in Canada. But it was hard enough, and there were problems with manpower, too. At Limuru, not far from Nairobi, a pair of pioneering brothers setting up a sawmill faced the challenge of shifting hundreds of tons of earth without mechanical assistance. They imported a consignment of wheelbarrows, but when they inspected the works they found laborers filling the barrows and carrying them to the dumping grounds on their heads. This was interpreted as behavior of unfathomable stupidity. But it illustrated the gulf between two ways of thinking.

BACK AT ETON,
at the end of the first week of June 1902, Ronnie Knox, a brilliant boy who went on to become a famously elitist Catholic priest, was soaping himself in the bath when he heard a commotion below. Rushing down clasping a towel around his milky waist, he cried, “Is it peace?” It was. Someone hung a Boer flag from a window at Mr. Broadbent’s house and seven panes of glass were smashed in the mêlée. But beyond the schoolroom the stories that had been emerging from Africa since the glories of Mafeking dampened the mood of the country. Twenty thousand women and children were among Boer casualties, many of them victims of the disease endemic in Kitchener’s camps. Tens of thousands of British men had perished from cholera and enteric fever. The British had burned farms, starved families into submission, and destroyed the livelihood of entire communities as they followed orders to “sweep the veldt clean.” Nobody even knew how many Africans had died. No war is heroic on the ground, but this one was less heroic than most. The teenage Denys, caught up in school celebrations, could not have foreseen that in the next war—one in which so many of his capering Eton peers would be killed—he would be commanded by one of the Boers now languishing in defeat.

A year later, the school itself was literally consumed by fresh tragedy. In the early hours of June 1, 1903, a fire broke out at Mr. Kindersley’s house, a two-hundred-year-old structure of wood, lath, and plaster adjacent to the chapel. Most of the forty boys escaped through the windows of their rooms by climbing down the friendly wisteria. (Among them was Hugh Dalton, the future chancellor of the exchequer, who singed his hair.) But two boys had bars at their windows, and, as the others huddled in the courtyard below, they watched a pair of small white faces caged behind the glass. Kindersley climbed a ladder and struggled with a crowbar, but both boys burned to death. The head panted to the scene in a gray dressing gown and shortly after, standing in his private quarters, dictated a telegram to the boys’ parents as tears slid down his cheeks: “Very grave news. Come at Once.” One of the fathers traveled down from the north of Scotland, and when he changed trains in London he read the news in an evening paper.

BY THE TIME DENYS
was sixteen, he exceeded six feet and weighed more than thirteen stone. Julian Huxley, who was to evolve into a distinguished biologist, was among his intellectual friends. According to him, Denys was “without doubt the handsomest boy in the school.” His hair, no longer greased, rolled away from its parting in waves that broke over the tops of his ears. “I remember seeing him on my return from a before-breakfast Sunday run, standing on top of College Wall in a red silk dressing-gown—an unforgettable Antinous,” Huxley wrote.
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Another contemporary described him “in full sunshine crossing the street…with his peculiar, slouching, rolling gait, half gamin and half seraph. His hat is tilted back, forehead quizzically wrinkled, eyebrows raised, eyes dancing with amusement, and his queer, wide, flexible mouth curling at the corners in that enchanting smile!” Denys’s vitality and restlessness pulled people to him like a centripetal force. Physically, he fitted the hero mold; in the last years of the Edwardian era, the time was ripe for unconventional heroes. In an age that was becoming increasingly mechanized, Denys’s free spirit leaped out from the crowd like a flame. His admission to the Olympian heights of Pop was a foregone conclusion. Although the Eton Society (its proper name) was originally devoted to debating, by the start of the twentieth century it was simply a self-elected club of two dozen senior boys voted in on grounds of popularity, sporting prowess, elegance, vitality, and charm. Denys embodied the Pop ideal of wit, urbanity, and physical favor, and for his last two years he was elected president of this influential social oligarchy.

In this period, Denys consolidated his friendship with a group of fabled young men who came to represent the gilded, gifted best of the generation swallowed by the trenches. They formed, in retrospect, a magic circle that epitomized the values and rebellions of Edwardian society. One was Julian Grenfell, the son of an Olympic fencer who was raised to the peerage as Lord Desborough in Julian’s penultimate year at Eton. Grenfell was a Byronic figure who rebelled against the socialite lifestyle of his mother, the beautiful Ettie, and wrote a book excoriating it. When she used her influence to prevent publication, he lay on a sofa for six months with a shotgun by his side. Another was Patrick Shaw Stewart, an odd, freckly creature with marmalade hair and a long nose who went on to have an affair with Grenfell’s mother. At Eton he, Julian, and Denys were close to Lord Ribblesdale’s son, Charles Lister. Tall and bony, with a pear-shaped face framed by curling molasses hair, Charles caused a sensation when he joined the Independent Labour Party while he was still at school. (His parents, mildly curious, consulted the prime minister about this aberrant behavior. Arthur Balfour, philosopher king of the glamorous and aristocratic Ribblesdale circle, calmly announced that it was preferable to keeping an actress.) Lister went on to organize a trade union among the shop assistants on High Street. But in general there was little social awareness. “Keir Hardie in his cloth cap was a joke,” wrote Denys’s contemporary L. E. Jones. Pupils were taught to feel sorry for the poor, and trooped in dutiful batches to the school Mission at Hackney Wick, “but it could never have entered our heads that some of the boys we met there might well, in our lifetime, be among her Majesty’s Ministers.” Despite the shift in labor relations and the debacle in South Africa, there was no tremor of the social earthquake to come. “We rode on the backs of the workers,” Jones continued, “with the insouciance of the man who sat on the back of a whale, believing it to be an island.”

Denys’s peers were not the only ones who judged him someone special (although that was striking enough, since, as children, they were not an impressionable group and they lived lives of unimaginable privilege). The masters did, too, despite his unattractive adolescent stunts. This was unusual. Bertie Cranworth, who was an important friend to Denys in the African years, noted, “The headmaster used to…consult Denys on matters concerning the conduct and wellbeing of the school, and it is even a fact that during his last summer he [Denys] gave a supper party on a houseboat on the river, naturally contrary to every known rule, and that more than one master actually accepted and enjoyed his hospitality.” The head asked him to stay on for an extra year in the hope that he would bring on the younger boys. Although it was customary for pupils to remain until their nineteenth birthday, permission to stay on much beyond that was rarely granted. But Denys was a special case. Twenty-five years later, when news reached England that he had been killed, an anonymous contributor wrote an obituary in the school magazine. “Denys was a great figure,” it read, “not only to Masters and Boys, but to the Eton population at large, human and animal…Autocrat and democrat, an adored tyrant.” Acknowledging his sporting excellence, the obituarist went on to note that “athletics were never his preoccupation or his ambition; they were taken in his stride: his real Eton life was in his friends, his mock antipathies, his laughter and his jokes, his catchwords (‘Not a fool at all of course’) and his escapades. And underneath it all, one always knew there was something fine and spacious. How else could he have dominated the school as few boys can ever have dominated it, before or since?” The piece concluded on a poignant note: “It is many years since we have had to do without him, and to think of him happily as going his gay and gallant way in wider and sunnier spaces than we can enjoy. And we must just go on thinking of him like that.”

Overwhelming social success can have a deleterious effect on character. In Denys it promoted the sense, already present, that there was no need for effort. Others learned to disguise ambition at Eton. In Denys’s case, Eton destroyed ambition. He did not leave until he was nineteen and a half. It was the only place he stayed too long.

IN MAY OF 1904,
the Avunculus Hector dropped dead of heart failure on the doorstep of his Pall Mall house as he returned from his morning run around Hyde Park. He was forty-eight. The night before the funeral, Toby, Denys, and their father stayed with the bombazined Edith at the Cedars. “It is very nice having Henry and the boys till Thursday night, when they have to go back to Eton,” she wrote to Muriel. “Denys is over 6 foot now and a wonderfully good looking boy…. I do hope they won’t be spoilt—but it is bad for boys to be so good looking.”

Uncle Harold left his entire estate—later valued at £18,998—to a settler’s wife in Australia. Nobody in the family had ever heard of this woman. But she had predeceased him, as had his eldest brother, Murray, so Henry got it all—including the Harlech estate. The Winchilseas were already sharing the Plas with Harold: they had been visiting regularly for years, and in 1902 Henry had shifted the family permanently to Wales. Harold’s death consolidated their position. The earl and the countess naturally adopted their usual feudal role. Nan took the children to visit the sick in candlelit cottages that smelled of onion resin and herb poultices. When they had tea on the back lawn and children peeped from the gardens of the narrow houses of Tryfar Terrace, she sent a footman over with a plate of cakes and fruit. The new countess was admired by the people of Harlech. Henry was considered austere, but he was a decent landlord, and that was the most important thing. As for the children, Toby and Denys became famous, singing comic duets at concerts and gallantly stepping in to read the lesson at St. Tanwg’s when the vicar had a sore throat. But it was Denys who won all hearts. Elsie Williams, a young servant at the Plas, could still picture him in her eighties. Her mother had also been on the staff. “I remember Denys so well,” Elsie said. “He was tall, extremely handsome, witty and affectionate. He was loved by all Harlech, especially the children, for he would always stop and talk to them. He used to come into the kitchen at the Plas to amuse the staff, often picking mother up into his arms and teasing her unmercifully.” But it was not all cakes and tease. Welsh men who went to sea—and many did, working as crew on merchant schooners—were away for two or three years at a time, sometimes forever. Education for the poor was even worse here than it was in England. Although Welsh was the first language, all teaching was conducted in English. Schools were overcrowded, not least because of the large size of many families. Two households in a village near Harlech had twenty-six children between them, and they all walked into school with a package of bread and dripping and a bottle of cold tea.