Servant, striving to transcend the distress of an unavoidable physical necessity by calling this time on the spiritual resources of his Cookham feelings.
That he felt he was succeeding is evident from a later reference to the painting. He began painting it, he said, in Ship Cottage, and at one point army recruits were undergoing field training in the vicinity: ‘seeing the manoeuvring of troops going on outside, I felt if only there was not this war, what could I not do?’13 He conveyed the feeling in a paean to the Raverats: ‘I am in a great state of excitement, quite a treat to feel like it. I hear the voice of the acceptable year of the Lord, I want to draw everybody in Cookham, to begin at the top of the village and work downwards.’14
What might have been accomplished had Stanley been able to carry out his enthusiasm! Swan Upping, like The Centurion’s Servant, is a hymn of joy to the miracle given him to redeem the apprehension of the unfamiliar through the peace of the known and loved. ‘There is’, he said in later life, ‘greatness in that painting.’15
By the time Stanley was composing it, the intricate lines of trenches and barbed wire had been lengthened across Europe from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. In the Balkans the tragedy of the Dardanelles was about to be played out and Rupert Brooke to die on his way there of a blood infection. On Germany’s eastern frontier, preparations were under way for those Teutonic hammer-blows which were virtually to knock Russia out of the war. At home, volunteers flocked to swell the new Kitchener armies under training. Stanley and Gilbert remained in Cookham, continued their painting and kept up their drill and ambulance training. Stanley read as enthusiastically as ever: ‘I am still reading Dante. I have only just finished Hell. I like reading anything like that very slowly. It is wonderful the part where Virgil embraces and carries Dante. …’16 Handholding?
Alas for Stanley, into the creative exaltations of his Cookham feelings, the upheaval of the times kept breaking. He sensed his isolation from his brothers – ‘My brother Percy who entered the army as a common private is now a lance-sergeant. My brother Horace who is in Nigeria is guarding prisoners. …’ – and, even more forcefully, his isolation from village opinion:
In the barber’s yesterday a married man who had been in the South African war and was just going to the present talked a lot about how he had done his bit and was waiting for the young men to go, but they did not seem to. He waited for me to stand up … and looked me up and down. ‘Now, Master Spencer, you ought to be in the army, you know. Here am I, a married man with children, and I am going tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow!’ My answer was to stand and look at him like an idiot and a lout, and the fact that the barber had parted my hair made me feel more so. ‘Why haven’t you joined?’ he asked. I tried to become dignified but only became more foolish. ‘Well, at any rate,’ I said, ‘I hope you will believe me that there is some honour in a civilian and when he says he cannot, it is because he cannot’; and with that I strode out, feeling I had made a thorough mess of myself. … It is terrible to be a civilian. God says: ‘You must go, but I give you the power to obey or disobey this command.’ If you do not go, then you feel something has gone from you.17
Moreover, as time passed and the wounded – mostly at this early stage of the war regulars, territorials or reservists – came home to convalesce, a further puzzle presented itself: ‘It is funny the difference between the wounded soldiers and the ones not yet gone to France. The ones just going look at you and say: “Be a man. We’re British. Will tha join Kitchener’s Army?” But the wounded are always quiet and never say a word about our not joining. …’18
In May 1915 Stanley sent the Raverats a sympathetic note about Rupert Brooke. Inflation, virtually unknown within living memory, was beginning to be an unsettling phenomenon. Jack Hatch was dropping heavy hints that he would appreciate an increase in the weekly eighteen-pence rental Stanley paid for use of Wistaria Cottage. Should he and Gilbert go? Percy had gone. Horace was on his way home from Africa to join up. Sydney knew that he would be going, and was snatching for those moments of remembered joy that many imminently campaigning soldiers know:
As I came on through Weston [Weston-super-Mare] Woods towards the Old Pier the sun poured down upon the wet sands of the bay. The woods, the green grass and dark furze bushes with fringes of fire crept down as far to the shore as possible. The gulls were lazily crying to each other in the hazy distance and the whole of creation seemed to speak of peace. … I dawdled and picked flowers. I lived and breathed and exulted for a dreamy hour in that old land of peace long vanished for me. … With all the grim prospect of the present, how grateful I am to a God who gives respite to his creatures and makes the full enjoyment of such an afternoon still possible.19
Back at Fernlea, each of the youngest brothers wished to protect the other, and their parents wanted to shield both. But, by May, Gilbert ‘has passed his St John’s Ambulance exam. He has got orders to go to Eastleigh.’20 Eastleigh, near Southampton, was the clearing hospital for the Southern Command group of hospitals which took the brunt of the casualties arriving from France. Rapid expansion of the service demanded more medical orderlies. At the last moment Gilbert’s orders were changed. He was to proceed to Bristol and there enlist in the Home Hospital Service of the Royal Army Medical Corps for duty in a newly created hospital, the Beaufort War Hospital, on the outskirts of the city.
Back in Cookham the family eagerly awaited Gilbert’s news. Pa consoled himself with the thought that ‘the discipline will do him good’, for Gilbert was regarded as the wilder of the two youngest brothers. When his letters came, their message was disconcerting: ‘Gil says that they intend to kill him if they possibly can. He works from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. … the way he is living is unhealthy … the men are horrible … they have not inoculated him and yet there is enteric in the next ward. He wrote his letter to us in bed, he gets no rest. …’21 Gilbert stressed that Stanley should not follow him, at least not to the Beaufort. The work would be too heavy, and he should aim for a convalescent home.
To no avail. Stanley too had now passed his St John’s examination – ‘which was a farce as only about three questions were asked and I don’t remember being asked or answering any of them’22 – and was at last able to persuade his parents to let him volunteer. On 23 July he sent postcards to his friends. To the Raverats he wrote: ‘Am going to Bristol. Ma seems very well about my going away. Sydney now has a commission and is a 2nd Lieutenant in the Norfolks.’23
Stanley put on his straw hat and Burberry raincoat-it threatened thunder – and, carrying a gladstone bag, made his way out of Cookham by a roundabout route along Sutton Road. He had slipped quietly from home to avoid emotional farewells, and taken an unusual direction to minimize lingering memories of the village. On the way the thunder-shower broke and his straw hat was ruined. When he reached Maidenhead Station, he was embarrassed to find that his father had cycled in to see him off and was the only fond parent there. The little party of volunteers presented their Civic Guard instructor with a stick with a horse’s head handle and then, as the train moved out, Pa compounded his son’s embarrassment by calling out to the orderly in charge of the party to take care of him as he was ‘valuable’.
How could they know that he was to become one of the century’s most celebrated artists? Who would tell the ‘rather superior but nice young man’ from the Maidenhead branch of W. H. Smith’s that the eager, talkative, wiry and boyish young man sitting opposite him was someone whose paintings were already attracting attention? To the others in the party he was just another recruit, good at drawing and something of an artist. But, like Stanley, they knew that as the train drubbed westwards they were being carried away from the familiar and, in Stanley’s case, the beloved. The agony of that day was to infuse one of Stanley’s most remarkable paintings, his Christ Carrying the Cross.
Painting with me was the crowning of an already elected king.
Stanley Spencer1