The Great Lover (and Others Not So Good?)

Image of Jill Dawson by Tim Allen

The Great Lover by Jill Dawson, 2009, Hodder and Stoughton centres on Rupert Brooke through the eyes mainly of a young maid at The Orchard Tea Gardens near Cambridge with the poet regularly lodging nearby. The casualness with which Jill Dawson allows Brooke and cronies to spurn the law and convention feels real. But can you imagine a clique of academics as the celebrities of their time?  Personally, I can. I think she got it right.

Image by Wikipedia

Brooke had charisma and you are alienated from him at first by his awareness of it. Then you realise it wasn't his fault. He was just being realistic.  Remembering that there was no television and such instant recognisability then: public wasn't quite so public. However, Brooke still seems vain and his clique arrogant. But he did have talent.

"If I should die, think only this of me ..."

is the first line of his poem The Soldier written at the time of the First World War. It had a great effect on me as a teenage conscript at the middle of the last century. Fortunately I was not presented with any chances to die.

The Great Lover is the title of another poem by Brooke in which he archly and amusingly professes his love for a list of everyday objects - like teapots. I read the novel with Rupert Brooke, The Complete Poems, pub 1942 Sidgwick and Jackson alongside me ready to consult. Jill Dawson's book stimulated all kinds of feelings including envy of his gifts and fear of the power of words. Strangely, there was also dislike for Jeffrey Archer and his wife for owning the Old Vicarage, Grantchester of which Brooke wrote from Berlin in 1912,

"Yet stands the Church clock at ten to three?"

A criminal like Archer with more mercenary talents should have kept his distance.