which had no relevance. He had reduced himself to the role and status of a ‘servant’. The function of a servant is to ‘fetch and carry’, to ‘do things to men’. By offering to deny his spiritual destiny as artist, he had deliberately ‘chosen to be sacrificed’. The fact that such sacrifice might mean not only artistic but physical death was inconsequential. Sacrifice was a sacrament and Stanley was both priest at this particular sacrifice and the sacrifice itself.
Some such metaphysical revelation – the theme of Christ Carrying the Cross – must have come to Stanley as an ‘emergence’, an exaltation. The meaning to his presence at the Beaufort, ungraspable till now, could at last be visualized. Its impact was joyous. He worshipped and even, in his fashion, loved Chute, who already understood it and had shown it to him. For, at last, with understanding came the urge to compose, to draw, to capture his comprehension:
The sunlight is blazing into the corridor just near the Sergeant-Major’s office and I say inwardly, ‘Oh, how I could paint this feeling I have in me if only there were no war – the feeling of that corridor, of the blazing light, and the Sergeant-Major and his dog – anything, so long as it gave me the feeling the corridor and the circumstance gave me!’ If I was Deborah, the lunatic who doesn’t know there is a war, I could do it. His sullen face and shifty eyes – I envied him the agony of being cut off completely from my soul. I thought in agony how marvellously I could paint this moment in this corridor now. And if at any time this war ends, I will paint it now, that is with all the conviction I feel now; but it can only be done if I feel assured that I am not suddenly going to be knocked off my perch. No! Not quite like that, because that can easily happen. No! Not that! But it was a belief in peace as being the essential need for creative work, not a peace that is merely the accidental lapse between wars, but a peace that, whether war is on or not, is the imperturbable and right state of the human soul; and that is only to be found in the peace of Christ.22
The crucial sentence in the passage must be the curious, ‘I envied him the agony of being cut off completely from my soul.’ It seems to predicate a notion that in our instinct to find a place in which we cannot be ‘knocked off our perch’ – a state of being ‘home’, at ‘peace’ – we seek those miraculous moments which lift us beyond the physical where we are isolated into our separate existence into a spiritual world in which we are not only at one with each other but with the form and meaning of creation itself. Our lives are Odysseys to reach those joyous states. Only in achieving them can Stanley’s desire to paint have meaning. Deborah, however mysteriously, was permanently in such a world, and even if his state was not one Stanley sought for himself, he felt it ‘agony’ that he could offer only sympathy in comprehension, not the empathy of truly spiritual identification.
If the recording of such visionary ecstasy was still impossible at the Beaufort, Stanley at least found the motivation to start drawing again. With his growing reputation came requests for portraits from staff and patients. In later lists he remembered a dozen or so. He was out of practice and the earliest ones dissatisfied him. But later ones ‘showed a great improvement’.23 He invariably gave them to the sitters. Only one seems to have survived, that of ‘a tall chap in the cookhouse’. Stanley does not give the sitter’s name, but it was Jack Witchell. Having been a grocer in civilian life he had been detailed not to the ‘cookhouse’ as such, but to the stores. The head was drawn in Jack’s small autograph album, and Stanley had to run the top of the head across the fold in the leaves. ‘You would smile, dear, to observe young Spencer sketching me,’ wrote Jack to his girl. But the event was more of an ordeal than Jack had anticipated, involving two sessions of two hours each. During the second session Jack played chess with Lionel Budden, ‘so that I look half-asleep’.24 Even so, Stanley did not finish Jack’s ear, an omission which is artistically comprehensible, but which irritated Jack’s precise storeman’s mind. He pressed Stanley to finish it, but ‘he would not’. However, Jack found the drawing ‘very pleasing and quite like me’.
At last Stanley was becoming reconciled. Work went on in the same routine, but even the most fearsome of the dreaded Sisters now treated him with consideration. Being on draft, Stanley was given his overseas injections and was invited to attend lectures and even to watch an operation on an elderly patient named Hawthorn; he was fascinated by the proceedings. But it must have been with relief that his draft of ten men learned that their departure was imminent. It was now well into May 1916: ‘I think it will be Salonika. The Sergeant-Major says so, anyway.’25
Suddenly, at short notice, they were off. Jack Witchell, writing to his girl on 12 May, saw them go:
Budden and nine others have just gone. They had only twenty-four hours’ notice and we gave them a jolly good send-off. Am sorry to lose Budden, he is one of the best men I have ever met and I trust we have not seen the last of one another in this world. Spencer was also with them. I should have been with them. I was able to get their autographs just before they left.
There are only nine signatures in Jack’s album. Budden’s is there, but the missing name is Stanley’s. Probably he had permission to spend his last evening with Desmond Chute and so missed the ‘jolly good send-off’. Desmond had only just managed to make a pencil sketch of him in time (now in the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham).
Their departure left a gap: ‘They will feel us being gone,’26 declared Stanley, and indeed they did, in more ways than one. To his letter Jack Witchell adds a sad little coda: ‘Am feeling a bit down today.’
The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown
Drinkwater used to work in a place where the clouds touched the hills where he worked.
Stanley Spencer to Desmond Chute1
STANLEY’S group of volunteers was destined for the RAMC Training Depot at Tweseldown, near Fleet in Hampshire. But because the Beaufort was administratively responsible to Devonport Military Hospital the party had, by the exigencies of military logic, to proceed to Hampshire by way of Plymouth. Arrived there he immediately wrote to Desmond: ‘We left the Beaufort yesterday Friday morning. I swept the ward out yesterday morning with George [one of the inmates whom the orderlies used to tip to clean their boots]. I felt a bit sad, poor old George was so upset. Have brought my Shakespeare with me. Remember me to your mother and aunt.’2
The draft, being in transit, had little to do at Devonport apart from attending morning parades, persuading the mess orderlies they were entitled to meals, and working out which among the unfamiliar naval uniforms in the town they were supposed to salute. Stanley was able to catch up on his correspondence. Gilbert was in Salonika as an orderly in a Field Hospital. Harold and Natalie, their orchestral work disrupted, were filling in time as cinema pianists at Maidenhead, but aiming to move to London where Natalie, who had fluent Spanish, hoped to work in Intelligence. Horace, back in England, had in March married Marjorie, ‘the youngest of the Hunt girls’;* ‘she is a nice girl and we are all fond of her’ wrote Pa to Will. Transferred to the Royal Engineers, Horace was then posted to France, but by October was to be back in England in hospital after two bouts of malaria. Percy too was in France, in a Field Headquarters, and had been mentioned in despatches. Sydney was an officer instructor in the Home Training Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. Henry Lamb was at Guy’s Hospital completing his training as a doctor. Edward Marsh, frantically busy, nevertheless found time to propose a small Civil List grant for a struggling writer called James Joyce, then in Zürich. To Switzerland too, Will had departed, to be reunited there with Johanna as two among thousands of international refugees – Lenin also among them – who then crowded that neutral if bureaucratic haven. Will was doing little work and Johanna, barred from returning to Germany, was dependent on infrequent money sent from Berlin; Will had to reduce his monthly allotment to Pa from £8 to £6. Johanna’s brother, Max, was reported missing, and Will was anxiously trying to discover from the War Office if he was listed among the Germans taken prisoner.4 There had been floods at Cookham and fierce gales