The Hill: A Romance of Friendship

THE HILL

A ROMANCE OF FRIENDSHIP

HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL

With an Introduction by Keith Hale

London

© 2018 by Watersgreen House

All rights reserved.

6 x 9 (15.24 x 22.86 cm) 

Black & White on White paper

ISBN-13: 978-1723184314 

ISBN-10: 1723184314

BISAC: Fiction / Coming of Age

BISAC: Fiction / Classics

The introduction first appeared as part of Rupert Brooke of Rugby, by Keith Hale. Copyright © 2018 by Keith Hale.

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Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative.

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The Hill is really much more complex, much deeper than a simple rivalry between two boys over a third. As a rare book that specifically deals with 19th century/early 20th century boarding school romance between boys, it’s a significant addition to the library of historical gay fiction enthusiasts.

-Hayden Thorne, Speak Its Name

What raises the book above the ordinary level of such stories and connects it with life, is the love for Harrow. … Mr. Vachell writes with such tact and delicacy that we do not think his book will offend either Harrovians or those who love another school."

- Academy

It is a moving story, in no idle sense of the phrase; with its purity, its sanity, its pure boyishness—its true boys.

- W. H. Boynton, Bookman

It is no exaggeration to proclaim that not since Tom Brown have we had a school story of such vitality and significance.

- Literary Digest

An admirable book for boys.

- Outlook

There are many clever touches in the book, and some scenes are spirited.

- Saturday Review

The Hill may be commended as a detailed as well as attractive record of five years at a great English public school.

- The Spectator

Rupert Brooke, the 1914 Generation, and The Hill

By Keith Hale

Horace Annesley Vachell (1861-1955), of Sydenham, Kent, served in the British army’s Rifle Brigade then spent seventeen years in California, where he married. After his wife died following the birth of their second child, Vachell returned to England. He wrote more than fifty volumes of fiction including a novel and a play that became films. His fourth volume, The Hill, is an idealized account of life at Harrow, the boarding school he himself attended. It is the romantic friendship between two boys at the school that captured the imagination of the generation of Englishmen that would soon go off to war.

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has written a book on each of the two major influences on the 1914 generation: nannies and public schools (The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny and The Public School Phenomenon). The 1914 generation was raised by persons other than their parents. Their early years were spent with nannies; they were the last generation to be brought up in sailor suits. Their later youth was spent in boarding schools, and the gender segregation of this school system extended through their university years. Women were admitted to Oxford and Cambridge, but they had colleges of their own, usually on the outskirts of campus, and were not often encountered.

In Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, a chapter titled Soldier Boys outlines the dominant homosexual thread in English culture at the outbreak of the war. Fussell maintains that it was because the soldier boys found other soldiers objects of attraction and affection that they at first considered war a heroic pursuit. Blond soldiers like the poet Rupert Brooke were especially popular.

There has been a plethora of books written about the prevalence of homoeroticism in British culture at the turn of the century. Indeed, A.L. Rowse not only devoted a chapter of his Homosexuals in History to the Cambridge Apostles, he devoted another chapter to Edwardians and Georgians, and yet another to The Great War. The common thread linking all the books on this subject is the British public-school system. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, in The Old School Tie, estimates that one-fourth of all public-school boys had sex with each other regularly and that "where twenty-five per cent had lust affairs, at the same time, and quite distinct from these, ninety per cent, in fact or fantasy, had love affairs. The response to Michael Campbell’s classic public-school novel Lord, Dismiss Us certainly gives credence to Gathorne-Hardy’s estimates (see pages 171-72 of The Old School Tie for a thorough discussion of the response to Campbell’s book). Both Eby and Fussell mention that public-school boys were, as Eby puts it, saturated with classical texts lauding homophilic relationships. The boys were also largely taught by bachelor masters and found it natural to turn their sexual energies inward upon each other. Eby also believes that Contributing to the problem were unheated rooms so that boys crept like puppies into others’ beds for warmth. Because of Victorian reticence about sexual subjects, boys sometimes engaged in love affairs without even knowing their behavior was improper. Headmasters and housemasters, too, often tried to pretend that nothing was amiss, differentiating romantic friendships from homosexual activity. But as Peter Parker points out, To anyone but the most blinkered pedagogue it would be clear that the two were closely entwined, as indeed all too often were the participants.

Parker also remarks that during the Edwardian period, boyhood’s charms were elevated into a cult: Perhaps the surfeit of publicity for the gilded youth of the public school was responsible for this. Books, newspapers and magazines all extolled these young gods, leaving one with the impression that for the Edwardians beauty was youth, youth beauty.

Rupert Brooke wrote to his friend, Frances Cornford, I have been happier at Rugby than I can find words to say. As I look back at five years there, I seem to see almost every hour golden and radiant, and always increasing in beauty as I grew more conscious: and I could not, and cannot, hope for or even imagine such happiness elsewhere.

As Parker notes, This sort of dwelling upon the glories of school was so commonplace that one sometimes feels that death was regarded as the only possible climax to such a ‘career’. It was the happiness of their school days that Brooke and many others hoped to find again among their comrades in the war. For a time, Brooke may have succeeded. His letters after his enlistment reflect a happiness not evident since his Rugby school days. His enthusiasm to join up and his stated reasons for doing so are reminiscent of some of the poetry of Hilaire Belloc, whom Brooke greatly admired, as well as Baden-Powell’s scouting propaganda and the patriotic articles of the popular Boy’s Own Paper. As Eby says, it required but few switches of emotional gears to exchange unquestioning loyalty to one’s school for a blind enthusiasm for England’s war.

Adrian Caesar writes of Brooke’s enlistment, After all, joining the Royal Naval Division allowed Brooke to re-enter an all-male society populated by ex-public-schoolboys like himself. It was a world wherein physical expression of homoerotic feeling would be discouraged, but homoerotic solidarity encouraged. It was the world which represented in its clearest form the idealism of public-school life. We are back to David and Jonathan.

Parker and others have mentioned the association many young English soldiers of Brooke’s class made with the biblical warrior friends David and Jonathan. As it happens, as a schoolboy Brooke chose the story of their friendship for his first Bible reading in Rugby Chapel.

Eby notes that the hierarchy of a public school resembled that of a military organization with prefects as noncommissioned officers administering discipline and he quotes Leslie Stephen’s observation that the public schools were closer to the hearts of upper-class Englishmen than any other institution, including the Church. If Stephen is correct, Eby argues, then it can be argued that the English sensibility was shifting from the values traditionally regarded as adult to those of adolescence.

Some soldiers’ dying words were about their schools. Then there is the example of Henry Newbolt’s He Fell Among Thieves, which gives us Lieutenant George Hayward, facing execution at dawn by the Afghans, awake all night thinking about—not his impending death or of loved ones at home—his days as a public-schoolboy. It is not too surprising, then, that it was Newbolt who understood exactly what Brooke had died for: In the last poems of this soldier, England is not a world power nor even a vision of unbuilt hopes, but a land of kindly life and kindly memories. […] how truly Rupert Brooke spoke for his generation when he offered his life for the beauty and the fellowship from which he knew he had received it.

Many young Englishmen so confused the world of the public school with the world of battle that they carried their enthusiasm for sports from one institution to the other, viewing warfare as another game to be won. Peter Parker relates the festive atmosphere of a battalion from Easy Surrey as they launched their first attack of the war: The first sign of the British advance against the German front line before Montauban was a football sailing through the air, kicked by Captain W.P. Neville. Neville reportedly offered a prize to the first platoon to dribble a ball as far as the German trenches, and back home the Evening News proclaimed in its headline: GLORIOUS EAST SURREYS: A Football Match with Death in Picardy (11 July 1916). Neville and his men went over the top with a wild roar, and many, including Neville, were killed instantly. E.B. Osborn commented that The Germans, and even our Allies, cannot understand why this stout old nation persists in thinking of war as a sport. J.M. Barrie also noticed the connection between war and the games boys played at school. In a letter dated 7 September 1920, he wrote, I feel sure that when my English public-school boy shot a Boche he called out ‘Sorry.’ If he was hit himself he cried, ‘Oh, well shot’.

Brooke has sometimes been compared with the title character of Barrie’s Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up. When Kenneth Millard compares Henry Newbolt with Brooke, he says Newbolt chafes at having to grow up. Like a petulant Peter Pan he wants to remain a lad forever. Again, there is a comparison with Rupert Brooke, who bitterly regretted the exigencies of sexual relationships, which threatened his innocent pubescent friendships. Another critic, Graham Chainey, notes Brooke’s Peter Pan humour. Peter Pan, as it happens, was apparently Brooke’s favorite play. He saw it more than ten times, and after one of those performances wrote to his friend Lucas, "I have gone about as one in a dream, quoting to myself all the gorgeous fragments of Peter Pan that I can remember. Brooke was not a Rugby schoolboy but a university man when he wrote this letter. He continued, As I stroll through Cambridge, Trinity Street fades and I find myself walking by the shore of the Mermaid’s Lagoon. King’s Chapel often shrinks before my eyes, and rises, and is suddenly the House in the Tree-tops."

Brooke’s desire to never grow up is well-chronicled. He once wrote to Jacques Raverat, We’ll be children seventy years, instead of seven. The same theme is also stated in The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, in which Brooke writes of the village men, They love the Good; they worship Truth; / They laugh uproariously in youth; / (And when they get to feeling old, / They up and shoot themselves, I’m told).

The over-thirty crowd had no chance with Rupert. He wrote to Marsh, There are two classes of Rugby school-masters, those who insult Beauty by ignoring it, and those who insult Beauty by praising it! It was not his education that had made him so happy at Rugby; it was his school friends. Adrian Caesar also notes Brooke’s virulent portraits of old age, as does William Lyon Phelps: He rejoiced in the strength of his youth […] His passionate love of beauty made him see in old age only ugliness […] To him all old people were Struldbrugs.

Soon after Brooke turned twenty-one, he wrote to his friend Hugh Dalton:

The rumor about my age is quite true. […] I found a black square room, and sitting all round, their faces to the walls, staring at me with the backs of their bald heads,

rows of—

Adults— .

Eby says it was as though he visualized life beyond public school as a spiritual waste land. Eby also mentions the homoerotic tendencies which had been inculcated during [Brooke’s] years at public school."

Virtually every critic has had something to say regarding Brooke’s failure to mature. F.R. Leavis says Brooke had the vigour of a prolonged adolescence and that Brooke’s ‘complexity’ amounts to little more than an inhibiting adolescent self-consciousness in an ironical disguise. In its extremer forms it is painfully embarrassing. Julian Tennyson calls his war sonnets school-girlish, and Frank Field says Brooke behaved like an adolescent in matters of love and sex until his death. Vivian de Solo Pinto says Brooke was a wonderfully accomplished versifier in the manner that was orthodox among the pundits of public-school culture in his day, but his mind remained to the end that of a clever public-schoolboy. In its review of Brooke’s Poems, the Times Literary Supplement on 29 August 1912 wrote that Brooke’s swagger and brutality are so obviously boyish (the reviewer also assures us, Mr. Brooke is thoroughly healthy, and something more, whatever that means). Kenneth Millard uses Brooke’s prolonged adolescence as a reason to classify him as an Edwardian rather than a Georgian. Frank Field says Brooke’s final goal in life, to fight on the plains of Troy, proves that Brooke behaved like an adolescent until his death.

Brooke was certainly not alone in adoring Peter Pan. Prior to the war, Peter Pan was the best-attended play in England. Thousands of Englishmen identified with Peter. The question is why, and the answer most likely rests in the latent homosexuality of the age, with so many young Englishmen wishing to recapture the romantic friendships of their days—and nights—in the public schools. In a chapter of The Road to Armageddon titled Peter Pan’s England, Eby discusses J.M. Barrie’s relationship with the Davies boys—his collective model for Peter—and attempts to explain Barrie and his play using Cyril Connolly’s theory of arrested development. This theory held that the experience undergone by boys at the great public schools, their triumphs and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental and in the last analysis homosexual.

Among Eby’s insights using this theory: "Homophilic protocol is as rigidly enforced in Peter Pan as in an English public school. Mermaids, traditionally creatures associated with destructive female sexuality, become the object of jolly hunting expeditions—but they are dangerous game because they pull boys into the water and drown them. Peter Pan restructures the ideal world according to a parthenogenetic model of women as mothers but never wives or lovers."

It is worth remembering the refrain from the play (frequently deleted during performances after the war), To die will be an awfully big adventure. Eby notes that In a sense Peter is already dead […] The only way to arrest growth is to die. Eby says Peter’s death is symbolized by his costume of cobwebs and autumn leaves.

Of course, not every Englishman enjoyed the play, and some men disliked it for the very reason others loved it. Brooke’s friend David Garnett wrote in his autobiography, "I disliked Peter Pan as a child and when I grew up it seemed to me morbid and unhealthy in a particularly unpleasant way. The sexual instinct which in a healthy normal man is aroused by the women painted by Rubens or Renoir, or in a homosexual by a beautiful adult of the same sex, emerges in Barrie as a baby’s bedtime sexuality which revolts me. This watery perversion has come to be a national institution." Garnett was certainly no prude when it came to matters of sexuality. This is the same man who was lovers with both Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, then when Grant and Bell had a daughter together, vowed that he would one day marry her, and did.

The themes become so entangled as to become inseparable: worship of youth and beauty, longing for the romantic friendships of the public schools, homoeroticism, and a death wish. Parker says, The traditional regret that boys grew up, and away, to be sullied by the world was countered by thousands upon thousands of Peter Pans—those killed in the war—who were permanently suspended in their pristine condition. For an age that produced Housman’s lines about lads that will die in their glory and never be old and Saki’s proclamation, To have reached thirty is to have failed in life, Brooke, as a symbol of these Edwardian values, was something of a success.

And then there is The Hill, a poem titled after Horace A. Vachell’s popular 1905 public-school romantic novel of the same name. It was a simple matter for Brooke to transfer the setting from Vachell’s Harrow to his own Rugby, and even simpler for him to imagine Charlie and himself as the protagonists of the romantic friendship. The theme is familiar: the public-school romance, with Brooke left bereft when Lascelles has turned away. All of the sentimentality and romance of Vachell’s novel are kept intact by Brooke.

The Hill

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,

Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;

Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,

When we are old, are old. . . . And when we die

All's over that is ours; and life burns on

Through other lovers, other lips," said I,

— Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!

"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.

Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;

"We shall go down with unreluctant tread

Rose-crowned into the darkness!" . . . Proud we were,

And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.

— And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

As a unit, Brooke’s poems written after The Hill, that is, from 1911 onward, mark a transition from his earlier romantic poems about males to his less enthusiastic poems about heterosexual relationships. The Hill, written at the end of 1910, marked the end of Brooke’s nostalgic poems about pure love.

Many consider The Hill one of the three public-school novels that have had the greatest impact on the British public along with Tom Brown’s School Days and Lord, Dismiss Us. It maintains its relevance today.

To

GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL

I dedicate this Romance of Friendship to you with the sincerest pleasure and affection. You were the first to suggest that I should write a book about contemporary life at Harrow; you gave me the principal idea; you have furnished me with notes innumerable; you have revised every page of the manuscript; and you are a peculiarly keen Harrovian.

In making this public declaration of my obligations to you, I take the opportunity of stating that the characters in The Hill, whether masters or boys, are not portraits, although they may be called, truthfully enough, composite photographs; and that the episodes of Drinking and Gambling are founded on isolated incidents, not on habitual practices. Moreover, in attempting to reproduce the curious admixture of strenuousness and sentiment—your own phrase—which animates so vitally Harrow life, I have been obliged to select the less common types of Harrovian. Only the elect are capable of such friendship as John Verney entertained for Henry Desmond; and few boys, happily, are possessed of such powers as Scaife is shown to exercise. But that there are such boys as Verney and Scaife, nobody knows better than yourself.

Believe me,

Yours most gratefully,

HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL

Beechwood,

February 22, 1905

CHAPTER I

The Manor

"Five hundred faces, and all so strange!

Life in front of me—home behind,

I felt like a waif before the wind

Tossed on an ocean of shock and change.

"Chorus. Yet the time may come, as the years go by,

When your heart will thrill

At the thought of the Hill,

And the day that you came so strange and shy."

The train slid slowly out of Harrow station.

Five minutes before, a man and a boy had been walking up and down the long platform. The boy wondered why the man, his uncle, was so strangely silent. Then, suddenly, the elder John Verney had placed his hands upon the shoulders of the younger John, looking down into eyes as grey and as steady as his own.

You'll find plenty of fellows abusing Harrow, he said quietly; but take it from me, that the fault lies not in Harrow, but in them. Such boys, as a rule, do not come out of the top drawer. Don't look so solemn. You're about to take a header into a big river. In it are rocks and rapids; but you know how to swim, and after the first plunge you'll enjoy it, as I did, amazingly.

Ra—ther, said John.

In the New Forest, where John had spent most of his life at his uncle's place of Verney Boscobel, this uncle, his dead father's only brother, was worshipped as a hero. Indeed he filled so large a space in the boy's imagination, that others were cramped for room. John Verney in India, in Burmah, in Africa (he took continents in his stride), moved colossal. And when uncle and nephew met, behold, the great traveller stood not much taller than John himself! That first moment, the instant shattering of a precious delusion, held anguish. But now, as the train whirled away the silent, thin, little man, he began to expand again. John saw him scaling heights, cutting a path through impenetrable forests, wading across dismal swamps, an ever-moving figure, seeking the hitherto unknowable and irreclaimable, introducing order where chaos reigned supreme, a world-famous pioneer.

How good to think that John Verney was his uncle, blood of his blood, his, his, his—for all time!

And, long ago, John, senior, had come to Harrow; had felt what John, junior, felt to the core—the dull, grinding wrench of separation, the sense, not yet to be analysed by a boy, of standing alone upon the edge of a river, indeed, into which he must