Free Hand in Glove by Robert Goddard Page B

part.
    After leaving Oxford, Tristram lived for a year in London with assorted friends, writing sporadic but unpublished verse. He continued to accept a generous allowance from his father, who cherished the hope that he would eventually return home and take over the reins at Abberley & Timmins.
    In the summer of 1930, Tristram embarked on a European tour to which his father had agreed only as prelude to his settling down to some kind of career. At Joseph Abberley’s insistence, Beatrix accompanied her brother. In the course of the next year, they visited nearly every country in Europe, including Russia, Germany, Italy, France—and Spain. Tristram’s exposure to the widespread economic distress they saw, coupled with a rosy-hued view of Stalin and an aversion to Mussolini, completed his conversion to socialism, though it was never to extend to a formal acceptance of Communism. What was to emerge from the rash of poems inspired by the tour was a coolly con-trolled anger at the abuse of political and economic power coupled with a keen sympathy for the underdog. Tristram Abberley struck many of those who met him in the early thirties as a witty pleasure-loving young man, but beneath this image—as the poems proved—a robust and articulate mind was at work, analysing humanity on a grand as well as a minor scale. Yet he seemed also to crave personal involvement in the events of the day, a craving rooted, as McKitrick saw it, in his presence in Madrid at the time of the anti-monarchist riots of May 1931, when he became convinced that only concerted action by the common people could achieve genuine political change.
    Back in England in the autumn of 1931, Tristram at last complied with his father’s wishes and accepted a junior managerial position at Abberley & Timmins. It was a disastrous move. Within a few months, he had put his socialist principles into practice by encouraging the

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    workforce to resist a pay cut. A complete rift between father and son ensued. Tristram was dismissed and his allowance cancelled. Beatrix sided with her brother and was similarly disowned. They moved to London and lived together in straitened circumstances, Tristram scraping along as a journalist with various left-wing weeklies.
    Tristram’s first collection of verse, The Brow of the Hill , was published in October 1932. Although it made little impact at the time, it contained what McKitrick categorized as his best and most heart-felt poems, including the frequently anthologized “False Gods.”
    The sudden death of Joseph Abberley early in 1933 transformed his children’s finances. Tristram was able to abandon journalism and take up a free and easy existence in London society, whilst Beatrix left London to settle in Rye. Brother and sister drifted apart from then on and, at this point in the book, McKitrick was obliged to resort to more varied sources of opinion about his subject’s development.
    The general view was that Tristram was a hedonist with an un-easy conscience. The wealth he had inherited from his father enabled him to lead an extravagant and irresponsible life, indulging his enthusiasm for travel, fast cars and beautiful women. The poems he wrote served to assuage the guilt he felt at such activities. And all the while a basic inclination towards socialism, apparent in his verse if not in his behaviour, ensured that he could not ignore the problems of the age.
    After spending much of 1934 in the United States, he returned to England to put the finishing touches to his second collection of verse, The Other Side , published in the spring of 1935. This collection met with widespread critical approval, even though, in McKitrick’s judgement, the poems generally failed to match the originality and imme-diacy of his earlier work.
    That spring also saw his engagement to Mary Brereton, a twenty-one-year-old secretary at his publisher’s offices, a girl far removed from the female company he had lately been