Free Hand in Glove by Robert Goddard Page A

first published in 1977. Derek, whose taste in literature seldom led him beyond the realm of light detective fiction, was surprised by how absorbed he rapidly became in the life-story of an avant-garde pre-war poet. Perhaps he should not have been, however, since Tristram Abberley: A Critical Biography had assumed for him the characteristics of a convoluted whodunnit. The only real difference was that, in this case, the mystery did not begin until long after the book had ended.
    From the first, Derek found himself sharing McKitrick’s evident frustration. Who was Tristram Abberley? What manner of man was he? Sportsman; idler; intellectual poseur; spendthrift; communist; homosexual; womanizer; traveller; wastrel; husband; father; soldier;

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    poet. He had apparently been all of these and more. Yet, at the end of his life, it was possible to believe that he had been none.
    He was born at Indsleigh Hall, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on 4
    June 1907, the third and youngest child of Joseph and Margaret Abberley. The other children were Lionel (born 1895) and Beatrix (born 1902). Joseph Abberley was a partner in a Walsall soap manufacturing business, Abberley & Timmins. He was a man of humble origins who had risen, thanks entirely to his own efforts, to considerable prosperity.
    His aspirations for his children were that they should enjoy all the social and educational opportunities he had been denied. But what they made of those opportunities was, as such men often find, not what he had anticipated.
    For this—and most other insights into Tristram’s early years—
    McKitrick was indebted, as he made clear, to the poet’s sister, Beatrix, the only living witness to many of the events he described. The thought that she too was now dead struck home at Derek. It transformed what must have been mere reminiscence when related to the author into a fixed and final historical statement. No more than what it told could ever now be told.
    Lionel Abberley was, according to Beatrix, a young man of exceptional sporting and intellectual prowess. Destined for a place at Oxford in the autumn of 1914, he enlisted instead in the Army at the outbreak of the First World War and was killed early the following year. His mother, devastated by the loss, entered a physical and mental decline that ended in her death in November 1916.
    How these two blows affected the character of young Tristram was not certain. What was certain was that his father invested all his hopes for the future in his remaining son and that Beatrix was obliged to assume a maternal role in the family despite her tender years.
    Tristram followed in his brother’s footsteps at Rugby without ever quite fitting them and went up to Worcester College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1926. He had till then displayed neither poetic vocation nor political conviction, but both were soon to blossom. Oxford in the late twenties was, of course, an ideal environment for this to happen in and McKitrick went to great lengths to demonstrate how Tristram was influenced by and associated with such contemporaries as W.H.
    Auden and Louis MacNiece. Excessive lengths, Derek felt, since actual links between them appeared to have been few.
    Joseph Abberley’s reaction to the publication of Tristram’s first 52

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    full-length poem, “Blindfold,” in the anthology Oxford Poetry in 1928 was said by Beatrix to have been mixed, revealing as the work did a socialist sentiment to which the old man was bound to object.
    He objected even more to the friends Tristram invited to Indsleigh Hall, suspecting that those who were not communists were homosexuals and that many of them were both. Predictably, McKitrick looked for evidence of homosexuality in Tristram’s behaviour at this time, and claimed to find some. If he did, it was not in the testimony of Beatrix Abberley. She maintained that what misled her father was merely a dandified pose on her brother’s