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The orderlies, normally two to a ward, came under the jurisdiction of the Ward Sister. Their duties combined those of a modern hospital porter with those of a ward auxiliary. They had to make beds – Bedmaking; do dressings, as in scraping the dead skin from a patient’s foot in Patient Suffering from Frostbite; and scrub and polish everything in sight – Ablutions, Scrubbing the Floor and Washing Lockers:
I have done nothing else but scrub since I have been here. I think it has done me good. I think with pleasure of the number of men I have bathed every Wednesday morning. I have to bath patients at 6.00 a.m.; I do it in an hour and a half. When I am seeking the Kingdom of Heaven I shall tell God to take into consideration the number of men I have cleaned and the number of floors I have scrubbed, as well as the excellence of my pictures, so as to let me in.
Stanley found himself fetching and carrying from the Stores and Kitchens – Filling Tea Urns; preparing tea – Tea in the Ward; and sorting and fetching the ward linen and laundry – Sorting Laundry – together with other activities he records in his memoirs but did not illustrate. Later we shall need to ask ourselves why he chose these specific events for painting.
In addition to ward duties, the orderlies were required to attend military parades and to join in physical training: ‘I remember being rather glad the sergeant who took us on our morning’s route march and double had a girl at one of the cottages en route, so we were allowed a long halt outside this cottage and sometimes she came out and reviewed us pawing the ground and champing at the bit.’
It was a long day. Reveille was at 5.00 a.m.; on duty from 6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. or even 8.00 p.m., with breaks for parades and meals. Off duty, the orderlies could on occasions get a leave pass into Bristol until 10.00 p.m.; they would be inspected for their turn-out by the gate sergeant, Sam Vickery. Otherwise they could relax in their quarters or play cards, chess or billiards.
Their duties were regulated from the office of the Hospital Sergeant-Major, William Kench. He was one of the few men Stanley met who utterly terrified him. Even the ‘most martenesh’ of the Sisters avoided him if they could. He was, says Stanley, ‘a gigantic man, whose eyes paralysed me. … He was quite terrifying enough even when he did not wear puttees. But if you came anywhere near him when he did wear puttees’ – that is, when he was in formal parade dress – ‘God help you!’
Stanley remembered in particular his huge hands, and the way he walked with them stuck into his tunic pockets so that only his ‘fat thumbs’ protruded. Then aged fifty-three, Kench had served when younger in the Royal Marines and had joined the Asylum staff as Head Male Nurse about 1906. He lived with his wife and family in a hospital house and had the habit of exercising his large Airedale dog in the hospital grounds. Only one orderly, according to Stanley, ever had the temerity to try and make friends with the dog. Stanley himself, in passing it, ‘felt all apologetic, sort of, saying to myself, well that’s all right. … I would imagine the expression on my face would be stern but hopeful and guarded. Not a bit of it – terrified and furtive more likely!’
Kench’s office was off the corridor system which runs transversely through the administrative block, windowed and tile-floored at the reception end but darker and stone-flagged where it entered the main service area at the rear. A clerk did the paperwork and one of the male ‘loonies’, known as ‘Deborah’, acted as Kench’s orderly or runner: ‘His face was long and egg-shaped with a short scrubby white beard and bald head. I felt he could claim some mystical discipleship with the Sergeant-Major. If the Sergeant-Major was God, Deborah was St Peter. He slunk about with short shuffling steps and never looked up. If he did, it was only when he thought no one was looking.’ Whatever Stanley’s strictures on him, Kench was evidently an NCO of the old type doing his best to knock into shape a clutter of intelligent, hard-working, responsible, but largely unmilitary volunteers and, more urgently, to keep control of a rumbustious horde of lively young convalescents delighted to be in Blighty for a while and out to make the best of their luck.
Stanley found himself assigned to a group of wards towards the end of the male wing which surrounded one of the newly built operating theatres.* (#litres_trial_promo) His reactions in his memoirs and his letters offer a valuable glimpse of the unique way his mind worked. Except for occasional comments, he was not interested in recording his activities. He is silent too on highlight events at the hospital which excited the other orderlies – a royal visit by King George V and Queen Mary,* (#litres_trial_promo) hospital billiards and chess matches, sports competitions, stage shows and entertainments, the daily gossip of any closed institution. He was not supercilious or forgetful about them, indeed they amused him as greatly as they did the other orderlies, but they had no bearing on his need to analyse and explain to himself his art and vision. It was to the service of his vision that all else had to be subordinated, and he saw the hospital and his life there only in the light of its contribution or damage to his creative life. Thus his writings on the hospital – indeed his war writings generally – give a picture of life which does not intend to be descriptive, but explains only those spiritual or visionary aspects of the total experience which held meaning for him.
With this in mind, we can begin to define more precisely how Stanley saw the individual aspects of his hospital experience. Although disorientated at first, physically and emotionally, it did not take him long to adjust physically. His essentially cheerful nature, his sense of responsibility in his duties, his meticulousness and honesty of purpose, together with his prodigious energy, made him a likeable and respected comrade. Unlike Gilbert, he felt no resentment: ‘Please send me my St John’s Ambulance Certificate as soon as you can, as they want it. It is quite all right down here. You get your food all right but you have to push for it. But you get plenty, at least for me. They seem to be quite reasonable, I mean the sergeants etc.’
But his emotional disorientation was more alarming, because that same sensitivity which so elevated his creative instincts made him fearful of failure in a situation which all his instincts told him he should honour, but to the everyday reality of which he knew his values could never fully subscribe.
Stanley could only let impressions flow into him. There was no possibility of any counterflow outwards in imaginative creativity. The disciplined routine of the hospital not only did nothing to encourage creativity, but by the rigidity of its system damped down the least spark of it. Leaves – thirty-six hours every month – were too short for Stanley to do more than turn over his abandoned paintings at Fernlea in nostalgic recollection. As far as the hospital was concerned, 100066 Pte Spencer S. was merely a cipher; two legs and a pair of working hands. Individuality was to be suppressed in conformity with military and medical demands.
Unlike the more restless Gilbert, Stanley, in so far as his duties were concerned, was not at all rebellious. He understood and acquiesced in the need for the suppression of individuality, ‘not to be in the least degree out of my slot.’ The trouble was not that he was unwilling to adapt, but that he found it difficult to do so, and felt depressed and inadequate when he failed. ‘Tickings off’ from sergeants and Sisters which washed over the majority of the orderlies haunted the sensitive Stanley, not in a nervous sense, but because he could not integrate them into his more questioning view of life. Whatever he sensed as natural and instinctive – and therefore joyous – was incomprehensibly forbidden. Even to whistle a few bars of Chopin while passing a ward where a gramophone played was sufficient to earn him a ticking off from a Sister, so that he began to feel that if the sky were blue or the sun shone or the Sergeant-Major remarked in his hearing to the Colonel that it was a glorious day, none of this related to him. The blue sky and the sunshine became equated in his mind with the hospital itself; all including the ‘luscious girls’ who visited belonged solely to the Sergeant-Major. Private Spencer was of no more significance in that world than the stripes on the Sergeant-Major’s shirt, on which every stripe had to match exactly every other in willing deference to their owner: ‘Why should I have been so sensitive to these things, I wonder? Because I had always been easily crushed and because I was sociable and loved human contact when it was harmonious and [was] horrified at the sign of hatred in anyone of myself.’ Stanley’s use of language remained idiosyncratic throughout his life. It is impossible that anyone in the hospital ‘hated’ him; quite the reverse. But by Stanley’s etymology anyone who continually ticked him off or criticized him was not being ‘friendly’, and as the opposite of friendliness can be interpreted as ‘hatred’, so they were, in a deeply argued sense, giving ‘sign of hatred’. By the same reasoning, anyone who kept insisting he do things their way, especially when he was having difficulty in doing it at all, was being ‘bullying’. Hatred and bullying combined to produce an ‘alien atmosphere’ in which he felt his spirit ‘crushed’ in the sense that he was denied the spiritual ‘harmony’ in which his free-ranging mind had the comfort to wander at will.
It is of some importance to reiterate that these sentiments pertained mainly to Stanley’s inner self. They were feelings that he found difficult to explain easily to most of his comrades. One who understood was Lionel Budden, a young lawyer from Dorset, for he and Stanley had discovered that they shared a common interest in music – Budden was a skilled violinist who often organized hospital concerts – and the pair enjoyed long discussions together in walks around the hospital grounds and into Bristol. To the rest of his fellows Stanley was a friendly, hardworking comrade, as amused as they by the incomprehensibilities of military logic and the antics of authority. Perhaps with his ‘obsession for art’ as one orderly there described it in letters to his girl,
he was rather more than they an unmilitary square peg in a military round hole; but, for all that, none found him a dreamy incompetent who could easily be put down or trifled with. His sensitivity may have inwardly torn him apart at times, but he was never a wilting flower in the exterior sense. He had no hesitation in proclaiming his dogmatically puritanical views on such matters as drink, betting and casual sex, but he had the tact not to force his convictions on others. In any case, most of the orderlies were young men of similar background and held comparable views. Nor would Stanley tolerate any mockery of himself or his opinions; he could defend himself with waspish quick-wittedness, as surprising to the recipient as it was wounding.
In the middle of the corridor which connected MC Ward with Ward 5 were three steps which were the unwritten dividing line between the two wards. It is intriguing to find Stanley pondering the significance of these steps in the way he remembered his garden walls at Fernlea. Like the party wall between Fernlea and Belmont, the steps became for him subtle symbols of the division, so apparent in his early paintings, between different ‘atmospheres’. Like his garden at Fernlea, Ward 5 as ‘his’ ward was part of his emotional ‘cosiness’. But when in his scrubbing he reached the three steps he was in a quandary. If he went on and scrubbed the steps, was he trespassing on another ‘atmosphere’, another Sister’s empire and another orderly’s preserve? On the other hand, if he failed to scrub the steps and was thereby ticked off by his own Sister, had he in fact failed to define his proper world? He was perfectly willing to agree to either course of action, but the precise clock-like characteristic in his thinking which made his drawing so accurate in line compelled him to seek mental assurance and to ‘know’ which alternative was correct: ‘I never attempted to dodge any of the inevitable duties. My “dodging” consisted of meeting squarely all the innumerable but analysable shocks which continually beset me.’
All his life, Stanley’s greatest dread was disturbance to the equanimity, the ‘spiritual harmony’ which he continually and painstakingly evolved for himself in any situation. The state of equanimity was built up by ‘analysing’ the puzzles which had beset him in that situation; it was as though he were mentally and emotionally standing outside the situation and formulating his role in it in the way he showed himself contemplating himself in The Centurion’s Servant or was to portray in Christ Carrying the Cross. The possibility of something happening to disturb that equanimity was to him ‘fear of attack’, and he was to attribute much of humanity’s irrational behaviour – sin, evil – to defence against the possibility. He himself loathed being put into a position of such defencelessness.
Says Sister S., ‘Tell Mrs D. [Miss Dunn, the former Asylum Matron] that for the last meal there was barely enough for twenty-two patients, let alone thirty.’ So I am called upon to deliver a slap to this formidable lady. I have to say something, as I know I shall be questioned by Sister S. on my return. I was continually having to be a buffer between two opposing parties.
Such orders, which involved competitiveness or the possibility of failure or the humiliation of a disclosure of personal inadequacy, were ‘shocks’. Under normal circumstances, Stanley could cope with them, find his way through them. But ‘everything at the hospital was so quick’. Shock followed shock too quickly for meaningful adjustment.
There were a few quiet backwaters where Stanley could for a time find calm. He could occasionally slip into the laundry cupboard by the Sister’s office in Ward 4B, always leaving the door open, to refresh himself by thumbing through his precious Gowan and Gray art books. These small inexpensive handbooks were a source of mental comfort and several were among his effects when he died. He found congenial too those sections of the hospital wherein the Sergeant-Major’s writ did not run – the hospital laundry, even though under Miss Dunn, or the Stores, under the Quartermaster-Sergeant, ‘Mr’ King, whom he later described as the Pope to Kench’s Mussolini. These were havens where he could momentarily recapture something of his Cookham life. For similar opportunities of contemplation, Stanley welcomed being sent on routine journeys to other parts of the hospital such as the X-ray department or the pathology laboratory which were in the original female wing. The mirror-image sensation which had captured his imagination in the Fernlea-Belmont neighbourliness at home continued to fascinate him at the Beaufort. In the former female wing everything was repeated but the other way round, and on each journey he had the sensation of entering a looking-glass world.
None of the daily shocks, the reprimands, the agonies of being made responsible for actions not in his power to accomplish, the long hours of tedious physical work and the barren intellectual atmosphere which gave so little opportunity for the contemplation so vital to his nature – none of these would have mattered if only he could have assimilated them into a revelation of some deeper meaning: ‘I did not despise any job I was set to do, and did not mind doing anything so long as I could recognize in it some sort of integral connection with the spiritual meaning that demanded to be clarified.’ The problem at the Beaufort was that the ‘integral connections’ would not materialize in his mind, leaving him confused and frustrated. One of the ‘shocks’ was the frequency with which the ‘atmosphere’ of his ward kept changing:
Every bit of change, no matter how slight or often, would be felt [by Stanley] and the arrival of a convoy – two hundred or more would arrive in the middle of the night – was the most disturbing change in this respect. One had just got used to the patients one had, had mentally and imaginatively visualized them. One’s imagination, once it had taken hold of the whole of an affair, cannot conceive of anything in that affair being altered or different or in any way being added to or detracted from.
But now, at the Beaufort where ‘everything was so quick’, although the essential significance of the ward remained inviolable – ‘unchangeable’ – the visualization Stanley needed to express it would, like a will-o’-the-wisp, disintegrate before he had the time to establish it: ‘What will the world be like tomorrow? What about Courtney and Hines when the beds between them are filled? The significance will remain as an eternal factor, but another God-creation takes place in the night, and I will find it in the morning.’ In his repeated attempts at image-forming Stanley found himself like a puppy chasing its tail, going pointlessly round and round: ‘At Bristol there was no essential change, but on the contrary anything that occurred there was clearly intended to ensure the continuity of its unchangeableness.’ Creatively, the hospital was a ‘nothing-happening’ place.
When thus thwarted, Stanley could give way to anger at those who were apparently baffling him by their obtuseness. There were the other orderlies: ‘It is the utterly selfish spirit of these orderlies that makes me wild. … being here is wasting time to no purpose. …
There were the ward Sisters: ‘Ill-natured, cattish, conceited Sisters who are also incompetent; they make the nurses and orderlies their servants.’ And there was the place itself: ‘There is something so damnably smug and settled-down about this place. … If I can, I am going to transfer into something else. I would give anything to belong to the Royal Berks.’
His frustrations were not improved when in September Gilbert was posted away to the main RAMC depot at Tweseldown in Hampshire; Stanley and Budden took him to Carmen at the Bristol Hippodrome on the eve of his departure. Then a fellow-orderly named Tomlin whom Stanley and Gilbert liked took sick and died unexpectedly. Finally, one of the lunatics went berserk and, although Stanley was not shocked in the medical sense, his feeling for the inhumanity of the man’s suffering made the event one of horror for him:
I always get the feeling of a man possessed by devils when I see a man in a mad fit. I remember one man, he was perfectly all right, and then suddenly he was cast down and it took about ten men to hold him. He was put into a room, a padded cell at first, but that was not big enough to hold him, so they spread about 12 mattresses on the floor of a room and put him in there. There he raved a day and a night and spat at everybody, especially when he was being fed. The Sister used to hold his food to his mouth while two or three men held his arms down. His face gave me the feeling that he wanted to pray that the devil would come out of him. He was taken away, but is now all right – in his right mind. Nothing like this is shocking, but to know a man and like him and to know that man is going mad is awful.
So when during October or November of 1915 a notice was pinned on the hospital notice-board asking for volunteers for RAMC service overseas, Stanley thought about it for some days. His parents were the main obstacle. Henry Lamb had written to say that he was about to undertake a crash course at Guy’s Hospital in London to complete his interrupted training as a doctor. He would be commissioned in August 1916 and wanted Stanley to wait and become his batman. But, Stanley decided, he was ‘too impatient’. When he eventually signed the notice, his was only the second name. But gradually thirty-eight more were added, including that of Lionel Budden. Stanley did not immediately tell Ma or Pa and asked his friends not to do so. In those still early months of the war, even though more than a year had passed, medical standards remained high. Of the forty volunteers, only fourteen were passed. Stanley was youthfully gratified to find himself among them and to learn that Budden too would be going with him. However, army bureaucracy took its time. Some of the volunteers did go, but those like Stanley and Budden in the main batch were kept kicking their heels. In the meantime, several surprising things were to happen to Stanley.
The first was that he was scrubbing the floor of the Dispensary one day when a one-legged Dardanelles patient came in, thrust a newspaper under his nose, and demanded to know, ‘Is this you, you little devil?”
Flabbergasted, Stanley read an account of a New English Art Club exhibition in November in which his painting The Centurion’s Servant was highly praised. It transpired that Henry Tonks, having used his surgeon’s training to advise on the establishment in France of the many private hospitals and convalescent homes which British patriotism was endowing, had returned to London and, among other activities, set up an autumn exhibition of the New English Art Club of which he, Steer and Brown were the virtual founders. Not knowing where Stanley was, he had written to Pa to ask if paintings were available and, without telling Stanley, Pa had sent The Centurion’s Servant and another work.* (#litres_trial_promo) Stanley’s reaction was one of fury at Pa’s action and of horror at what the press might make of his picture. Mercifully, however, no reviewer put any untoward interpretation on it, and all praised it for a variety of qualities, most of which Stanley had not intended.
In a closed community like the hospital, the news that young Spencer was a ‘name’ spread quickly. The effect was, said Stanley,
extraordinary. The matron, a great gaunt creature before whom Queen Mary looked quite a crumpled little thing, came down the ward with a veritable sheaf of dailies under her arm determined to track down this great unknown. Even she looked a little less grim and gaunt. These notices were very welcome to me. I had been terribly crushed. They gave rise to such teasing remarks from the Sisters as, ‘When are you going to get that commission, orderly?’ having scented I was a bit different, or thought I was.
It was not only the hospital staff who found the event of interest. In the residential suburb of Clifton, a tall elegant young man of twenty also read the notices and recalled Stanley as a celebrated predecessor at the Slade. He had studied there with Gilbert, but had not met Stanley. His name was Desmond Macready Chute – the ‘chu’ pronounced as in ‘chew’ – and he was a collateral descendant of the great Victorian tragedian Macready. His actor-manager grandfather had run the Theatres Royal in Bristol and Bath and introduced as ingénues stars of the calibre of Ellen Terry. Although Desmond had innumerable aunts, uncles and cousins, his own branch of the family had been scythed by consumption. His father had died in 1912, and now only he and his mother Abigail remained to carry on the family theatrical business, centred by then on the considerable Prince’s Theatre in Bristol. Tall, good-looking, highly intelligent, literary in bent, deeply read, a capable organizer – he had been Head of School at Downside – a dedicated musician, sensitive pianist and competent artist, his artistic and religious aspirations soared beyond the limitations of the family theatre. He was, however, withdrawn by nature and showed a tendency to ‘nervous prostration’. His indifferent health precluded thought of military service.
The ties between the Prince’s Theatre and the Beaufort were particularly close – visiting artistes freely gave their time to military hospital entertainment – and it cannot have been long before talk of Stanley reached Chute. The result was another surprise for Stanley:
It was about this time when I was wondering how to get the mental energy to make the work bearable … that I had a visit from a young intellectual of sixteen who, like Christ visiting Hell, came one day walking to me along a stone passage with glass-coloured windows all down one side and a highly patterned tile floor. … I had a sack tied round my waist and a bucket of dirty water in my hand. I was amazed to note that this youth in a beautiful civilian suit was walking towards me as if he meant to speak to me; the usual visitors to the hospital passed us orderlies by as they would pass a row of bedpans. The nearer he came, the more deferential his deportment, until at last he stood and asked me with the utmost respect whether I was Stanley Spencer.
This account of their meeting is repeated several times in Stanley’s later reminiscences and misled biographers about Desmond’s age. In fact it is somewhat dramatized. Writing to the Raverats at the time, Stanley is more factual: ‘Desmond Chute is a youth of 20. … When I first met him … I was on my way to the Stores. …’
All his life, Stanley would show a tendency to overcolour some experiences. Invariably they are experiences in which he suffered some ‘spiritual’ hurt. The tendency was part of his make-up, part of the process by which he transcended the hurt in precisely the way he used his art. At all other times his accounts of experiences are accurate. In this case the spiritual hurt lay some years ahead. At the time Chute’s arrival was salvation:
If I were able to express how much this hospital life and atmosphere was cut off and out of the power of any other power than itself, I could make it clear what I felt at the moment of meeting. Compared with the crushed feeling the place gave me, the army and the war took upon themselves something of the feeling of freedom that one felt about civilian life in peacetime. The appearance of this young man was a godsend. He was terribly good and kind to me and appreciated the mental suffering I was going through.
During the first months of their friendship Desmond was fit, and they were able during Stanley’s time off-duty to explore Clifton together. Engrossed in conversation, they must have made an odd-looking pair, Desmond well over six feet tall, slim and languid, with reddish hair and the beginning of a beard, and Stanley a slight, dark-haired and brisk figure beside him. They contrasted too in personality, Desmond intellectually reserved, Stanley the eager terrier zigzagging after ideas which would set his imagination alight. There were visits to Desmond’s home, sometimes with Budden, to meet his mother and his aunts. There were visits to the bookshops of Bristol where fine secondhand bargains were to be found. There were ‘at homes’ at Desmond’s friends and with the Clifton hostesses of the day:
I go down to Mrs Daniell’s to hear some singing on my half-days. Mrs Daniell has a fine voice and so has her daughter. I felt quite ‘crackey’ with delight to hear some duets out of Figaro and they sang them well. They sing heaps of early French things. A young Slade student named Desmond Chute does the arranging for these visits and he plays the piano. I shall always feel grateful to Mrs Daniell.
Desmond for his part found Stanley an ideal pupil. For although he was four years younger than Stanley and lacked Stanley’s intuitive genius, his love of literature and music matched Stanley’s instincts.
When I [Stanley] used to visit him, he used to translate so much [of the Odyssey] and then read it in the original. Mind you, if he was to read about two pages he could go through to order, whether he had the book or not. Sometimes when we have been out for a walk – wonderful walks – I would begin to ask him about some particular novelist and he would go through the whole novel quoting pages and pages, quite unconsciously.
In the spring of 1916 Desmond suffered one of his attacks of nervous prostration, and their meetings had to take place in Chute’s bedroom:
When I think of the wonderful quiet evenings I have spent in Chute’s bedroom with the sunlight filling the room and Desmond surrounded by the wildflowers which he loved [in later life Chute became a knowledgeable gardener]. I used to sit looking out of the wide-open window and listen to him translate Homer and Odyssey, Iliad and Cyclops and the men escaping under the sheep, oh my goodness, it really did frighten me.
It is noteworthy that Stanley is affected as much by the drama of this forefather of all adventure stories as by its verse.
I have looked at different translations of Homer, but nothing to approach Desmond’s. … Our evenings were so satisfying. He read me Midsummer Night’s Dream one night and on another night he read me As You Like It. I think it is a wonderful play. The colour of Chute’s hair is a brilliant rust-gold. It glistened as the sunlight fell on it as he sat up in bed reading. … He reminded me in character of John the Baptist. Of course, having studied at Downside, Desmond has a natural grace that makes it satisfying to be with him. [Chute was a devout Roman Catholic]. I mean he has a mind so quickened by God that you can do nothing but live when you are with him.
It was Desmond’s patient coaxing which at last gave Stanley a glimpse of the spiritual meaning to be found in his military life. Desmond was reading aloud from St Augustine, and there Stanley found a quotation, a notion, which seemed to provide the key to the redemption he so desperately sought: ‘St Augustine says about God “fetching and carrying”. I am always thinking of those words. It makes me want to do pictures. The bas-reliefs in the Giotto Campanile give me the same feeling.’ The quotation is a paraphrase of a passage from St Augustine’s Confessions: ‘ever busy yet ever at rest, gathering yet never needing, bearing, filling, guarding, creating, nourishing, perfecting’.
Other passages in St Augustine could have similarly inspired him:
Therefore He who is the true Mediator – inasmuch as by taking the form of a servant he became the Mediator between God and Man, the man Jesus Christ – in the form of God accepts sacrifice along with the Father, together with whom he is one God. Yet in the form of a servant he chose for himself to be sacrificed rather than to receive it. … In this way he is at the same time the priest, since it is he who offers the sacrifice, and he is the offering as well.
The dedication of Stanley’s whole existence, the sacrifice of himself to the spiritual sources of his art, destined his art to be a ‘mediator between God and Man’, a perpetual theme in his writings. If he had not enlisted but stayed at home painting, he would have continued to ‘accept’ or ‘receive’ the sacrifice of himself to his art. But by volunteering into the army, he had yielded the nobility of sacrifice demanded by his art to lesser commitments 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.
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’.
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’.
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.’
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,’
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.’
CHAPTER TWELVE (#ulink_5d4bb685-80a1-5b60-854a-b934f32802dd)
The Burghclere Chapel: Tweseldown (#ulink_5d4bb685-80a1-5b60-854a-b934f32802dd)
Drinkwater used to work in a place where the clouds touched the hills where he worked.
Stanley Spencer to Desmond Chute
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.’
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’;* (#litres_trial_promo) ‘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.
There had been floods at Cookham and fierce gales had uprooted hundreds of trees there.
Stanley was not sorry to leave for Tweseldown after a few days. The hutted camp was on the open slope below the racecourse on the down. He was delighted to be able to see the sweep of the sky again: ‘Training is all out in the open, and this is what I like.’
It was, however, strict. The Kit Inspection panel at Burghclere records Stanley’s dislike of the mindless regimentation of depot life. The purpose of the training was to fit him for active service in a Field Ambulance. The function of a Field Ambulance is essentially to collect the sick and wounded from front-line fighting units and to convey them back to Field Hospitals, giving them on the way such emergency aid as could be provided in the Advanced Dressing Stations which the Field Ambulance would set up. Stretcher drill, practical scouting – searching for stray wounded during a battle – the recovery of wounded from the difficult confines of trenches and dugouts, the handling of mules and wagons – normally done in action by Army Service Corps drivers – operation of the vital watercarts with the testing and purification of water sources, and, of course, first-aid and medical procedures, all these topics had to be learned and practised. At the time Stanley thought that the training, though interesting, would not apply to him, as he was convinced that only the strongest and most resourceful orderlies would be assigned to Field Ambulances; he assumed that he would be detailed to hospital work overseas.
Desmond Chute wrote every day, pouring out the stream of encouragement begun at the Beaufort. Stanley wrote to the Raverats: ‘Chute has sent me a translation of Odyssey Book 6, the coming of Odysseus to the Phaiacians [it was a personal, hand-written translation, not a copy of another’s] and as I was hut orderly today I was able to go through it this afternoon. It is all so nimbly written … that you feel you have the original wonderful rhythms with you.’
To Chute himself he wrote:
It is grand to take your translation out of my haversack and read it during intervals of drill … I should like a photo of you. Now that I am here I look back on the time I spent with you and it appears so beautiful to me. It clears my head which gets muddled at times.
The illumination provided by St Augustine’s ‘fetching and carrying’ continued to enthuse his imagination:
When I used to have a full day at the Beaufort, full of every kind of job you could think of, I felt very deeply the stimulating effect ‘doing’ had upon me. … ‘Doing things’ is just the thing to make you paint. I have washed up the dinner things at the Beaufort a hundred times. How much more wonderfully could a man washing plates be painted by me now than before the war. … Every necessary act is like anointing oil poured forth. … I am looking back on Beaufort days and now that I am away from it I must do some pictures of it – frescoes. I should love to fill all the hundred square spaces in this [wooden frame] hut with hospital work [paintings] but I have a lot to get over, especially my bed picture propensity. …
A curious thing was unsettling Stanley. He was discovering that as his experience and understanding broadened he was seeing his earlier work with fresh eyes. He had just been home on leave and found that his pictures there, although good, were perhaps not as successful in conveying the deeper substance of his vision as he had thought when he painted them. It was a problem which was to engage him all his life. He could only paint from the personal association of a specific time. What was to happen when subsequent associations became more apt?
I really feel at times doubtful if what inspires me will really reach out and achieve all the qualities and perfections that a work of art should contain. I have always gone on the basis that pure inspiration contains within itself all the necessary apparatus, practical and spiritual, for carrying it out. If I have found that in carrying out a picture the carrying out was not doing this or not giving me any great pleasure, then I have concluded that the initial inspiration was somehow wrong or else had to go arm-in-arm with some notion to which it was not perfectly related. But I have not put it down to lack of knowledge; knowledge, that is, as separate from inspiration; something I ought to know and study quite apart from what I want to express.
So in letters home we find Stanley pestering, pleading with, cajoling whoever will listen – Florence, Henry Lamb, Desmond Chute – for books and reading-matter.
An unexpected piece of news which pleased him was that two friends wanted to buy his ‘Kowl’ painting – Mending Cowls, Cookham. One was Henry Lamb, the other James (‘Jas’) Wood. Stanley had met Wood before enlisting. He was a young man of independent means and outlook who had studied painting in Paris and Germany, and had reluctantly – he saw no point in taking up arms against his old Bavarian friends – joined the Royal Field Artillery. As both were known to Stanley, he wanted both of them to have it, but tactfully he left them to sort it out between them. Lamb won.
As a recruit stationed at Trowbridge in Wiltshire, Jas Wood was miserable for many of the same reasons as Stanley had been during his early days at the Beaufort. Since Trowbridge is not far from Bristol, Stanley thought it might help Wood to meet Chute:
Am going to write to a man named Wood and ask him to come and see you. His military life is getting on his nerves and in fact he has had little chance at any time of doing what he would have done. He has just sent me a book of Donatello, and the other day he sent me a book on the life of Gaudier-Brzeska which you mentioned as having seen in George’s [a Bristol bookshop]. I hated Gaudier when I knew him but I agree with you that he is extraordinarily true and certain in his drawing.’* (#litres_trial_promo)
To Wood, Stanley wrote:
I rather envy you being in the RFA [Royal Field Artillery] and for the draft. Chute has been sending me [pictures of] a series of corbels in Exeter Cathedral. … This life quickens the soul. I am laying in a goodly store [of ideas]. I am still thinking about the Beaufort War Hospital which the more I think about it, the more it inspires me. … I am determined that when I get the chance I am going to do some wonderful things, a whole lot of big frescoes. Of the square pictures there will be The Convoy (I have that) and The Operation (and that). … I think there is something wonderful in hospital life … the act of ‘doing things’ to men is wonderful.
Stanley’s training was nearly over. By August 1916 he was telling Henry Lamb, by then commissioned as a doctor in the RAMC, ‘It is true that we are just going. We are even now ready, down to writing our wills. If you have your clothes [uniform] come in them as you will have less trouble getting into the camp.’
It must have been a brief visit, but it cheered Stanley: ‘It seemed almost too good to be true when I saw you coming down the street. I felt these times were over. It seemed uncanny.’
Pa came over to Tweseldown to see him, because during Stanley’s embarkation leave at Fernlea, he had by chance been away visiting Florence in Cambridge. To Desmond Stanley outlined the reading he was taking:
I have sent home my large volume of Shakespeare. Impossible to carry it. Much better to have a play sent [individually] as desired. I am able to take the Canterbury Tales, as it is more pocketable. Also the little blue book you sent me [perhaps a Missal]. Some Gowan and Gray art books and, if possible, Crime and Punishment. The Garden of the Soul. …
News came that he was to leave with Lionel Budden and some 350 others on 23 August. They had been issued with tropical kit. So by train to Paddington and thence to London Docks (‘much sound of steel and repairing of ships’) and aboard the hospital ship Llandovery Castle, ‘the wedge widening as we moved away from the quayside, the throwing of letters to be posted by the be-ostriched-feathered Cockney women come to say goodbye.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#ulink_204e3789-0485-5089-b97b-4c42c78fb612)
The Burghclere Chapel: The left-wall frieze (#ulink_204e3789-0485-5089-b97b-4c42c78fb612)
Am reading Blake and Keats. I love to dwell on the thought that the artist is next in divinity to the saint. He, like the saint, performs miracles.
Stanley Spencer to Desmond Chute
ALTHOUGH in 1916 Salonika with its mosques, narrow streets and polyglot population still had the appearance of a Turkish city, it had long been freed from Ottoman rule. Its importance as a port lay in its situation as the only outlet for Macedonia, the heartland of the Balkans. Possession of this ancient land of mountains, wild terrain, pastoral villages and unsurfaced roads had been disputed by its three neighbours, Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia – the latter roughly the southern half of modern Yugoslavia – in the Balkan Wars of 1912. The three contenders, unable to agree on ownership of Salonika, had been persuaded in the 1913 Treaties of London and Bucharest to make it a free port.
The outbreak of war in 1914 set the three contenders glowering at each other again. Serbia allied herself with France in an effort to avoid the fate of her northern neighbour Bosnia, already gobbled up by the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it was a Bosnian student protest culminating in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria while on a conqueror’s visit to Sarajevo which had sparked the Great War. Bulgaria on the other hand allied herself with Germany, but hesitated to make any aggressive act for fear of formidable Russian and Romanian armies gathered to her north. Greece, in whose territory Salonika lay, was neutral but split in allegiance, her new King favouring Germany and Austria–Hungary while the Prime Minister, Venizelos, urged support of France, Britain and Russia.
By 1915 everything was changing. Russian military power had been virtually eliminated by the German offensive eastwards in the spring. Austria–Hungary had decided to resume her conquest southwards from Bosnia to annex Serbia. The attempt was not very successful until the Bulgarians, satisfied that there was now little likelihood of serious Russian or Romanian interference, decided to join in. The tough Serbs, able to hold off the Austro-Hungarian attack from the north, could not cope with the additional Bulgarian flank attack from the east. They begged help from France, who in turn demanded support from a not over-enthusiastic Britain. Two French divisions and one British were nevertheless landed at Salonika just in time to learn that the battered Serbian armies had given up and were retreating in bitter winter weather away from them over the mountains into a neutral but suspicious Albania. There the French and Royal Navies rescued them and took them down the coast to Corfu to rest and refit. In the meantime the small French and British expeditionary force, meeting head-on the full panoply of the elated Bulgarian armies, fell back to a defensive line around Salonika and howled for help.
The Greeks to their south remained inactively neutral, still undecided which side to join. Reluctant to provoke their hostility, the Germans persuaded the Bulgarians to halt more or less along the Greek frontier. Given this breathing-space and using the free-port status of Salonika as a pretext, the Allies began landing a motley of reinforcements, French, British, Indian, colonial, even a token brigade of Russians. Over the months more formations arrived, including Italians and the Serbian armies from Corfu re-equipped by the French and with British field support. The line lengthened across the peninsula to the Albanian frontier, and the opposing armies settled into an uneasy confrontation across the formidable hills and valleys which divided them.
This was the complex situation into which Stanley and Budden stepped from their lighter on to the waterfront of Salonika. The sea journey had been a wonder to Stanley: ‘the sea turning a pale delicate green as it shallowed a little before the straits of Gibraltar … the pumice-stone corner of land that is Africa, the sea being a dark-blue lapis colour – a Reckitts blue as Budden called it – and looking west, blood-red as the sun is setting …’
But so overwhelmingly did the impressions arrive that even at the sedate speed of a sea journey Stanley found himself unable to digest them as he wanted: ‘Change; but more outrage than change. … One is going beyond as a human what one is made by God to do. One should grow with experience, and one does not do that at that artificial speed. Had I walked to Salonika, I could have changed in exact proportion as where I got to on the journey. …’
There was, however, consolation because he had a companion with whom to share them: ‘It was nice to have Budden. I really did not think [his friendship] was so just what I wanted. It was like discovering yourself.’
