Sceptre first edition - 2009
Having been slightly dissatisfied with the portrait of Rupert Brooke in John Frayn Turner's near hagiography, I thought I would purchase and read this fictionalised version. One might use that ugly word 'faction' as the novel weaves real persons, Brooke above all, and real events (the author has read his and others' letters, as well as extracts from his poems), around the fictional Nell Golightly.
There's a clever introduction to the novel, in the shape of a letter, dated le 23 avril 1982, sent by the real life sixty-seven year-old Arlice Rapoto from Tahiti to any 'Kind Stranger' living in Granchester, Cambridge. She is asking for information about Rupert Brooke, her father. Her mother was Taatamata, who met up with Brooke when he came to Tahiti in 1914 and stayed for three months. His relationship with Taatamata led to Arlice's birth, something which was not revealed in the early biographies of Brooke. Mike Read's Forever England. The Life of Rupert Brooke (Mainstream Publishing, 1997) dealt with the event in some length. Early in 1936, Dudley Ward, the close friend of Brooke, began to make enquiries as to a child who would have been born to Taatamata towards the end of 1915. After a convoluted chain, including Viscount Hastings and Norman Hall (who had recently directed Mutiny on the Bounty), eventually Hall's daughter Nancy confirmed that her mother had always known that Arlice was Brooke's daughter. Not only does Read's book have a photograph of Taatamata, but there is one of Arlice, taken around 1950. Whether Brooke knew he had a daughter is a matter of conjecture.
Arlice Rapoto is second from the right
The fictitious ninety year-old Nell Sanderson (née Golightly) replies to Arlice from Granchester. Like Arlice's mother, she too had loved Brooke and, possibly, had a child by him (her eldest son, but this is only implicit; she has three daughters as well). Back in 1909, as a teenage girl, she met the poet when he took up digs at the Orchard House in Grantchester. She reveals she has written a biography of Brooke, based on her relationship with him. She is now widowed (My Tom died in 1965, having had a good innings, as we say - he was seventy-four) but she says one of her daughters, Janet - quite an expert on Literature here in Cambridge (she's retired now)... told me that Rupert's poetry was sentimental and it was unfortunate that he wrote such patriotic nonsense when other poets were about to see for themselves how bad the war was. The rest of the novel is Nell's 'biography' and it is a very compelling account of Brooke's character and relationships with other real-life people - such as Justin Brooke, Noel Olivier, Ka Cox, James Strachey, Augustus John, Denham Russell-Smith, Eddie Marsh, Phyllis Gardner (who does not come out of it well) and Cathleen Nesbitt.
It alternates between Nelly's reminiscences and Brooke's own account of his life between 1909 and 1914 and they complement each other quite naturally. After the Great War, Nelly took several courses at Night School and had stories published in magazines such as Woman's Realm and Woman's Weekly. That explains the well-crafted biography of Brooke! Her letter to Arlice includes one or two mildly caustic comments about Brooke's character: his letters...are full of loving sentiments - he was good at that, in writing!... in your father's early letters there's a fair bit of showing off. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying you father was a false man. But he was a clever letter-writer... he was a difficult man to pin down, and he was in the habit of saying things playfully that he did not mean at all, or were quite the opposite of his meaning, so maybe it's true he was a little more of a slippery fish than some. This appears spot on!
In her Acknowledgements at the end of the book, Jill Dawson writes: This is a novel. I have made things up. Nell and her family are made up, as are the other maids. Of course I made Rupert up, too, as he is 'my' Rupert Brooke, a figure from my imagination, fused from his poetry, his letters, his travel writing and essays, photographs, guesswork, the things I know about his life blended with my own dreams of him, and impressions. It is an amazing, life-like blend and the further notes in the Acknowledgements reveal a detailed research and study of the biographies and letters of Christopher Hassall, Geoffrey Keynes, Phyllis Gardner, John Lehmann, Gwen Raverat, Noel Olivier, Nigel Jones and Michael Hastings. The result of Dawson's researches and skills as a writer have produced a first-class rendering of 'her' Rupert Brooke.
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