Free Forever England by Mike Read Page B

flower-beds with many flowers, a waterfall, rocks and trees, forests, mountains and the sky. It covers some 20 miles of country and no houses.’
    From under the shadow of Hound Tor to the south west, Becky, or Becka, Falls, tumbles and plunges some 70 feet over vast granite boulders becoming the Becca Brook, which eventually joins the River Bovey to the east of the Falls. The stamp of the Iron andBronze Age inhabitants on the area is very marked, with burrows, cairns and hut circles littering an area rich in natural and spectacular beauty. Manaton, a derivation of Maleston – Robert de Maleston having been given the manor by Edward I – is the parish in which the Falls lie, and at the time when Rupert Brooke, Lytton Strachey and their circle came to write here, there were just 300 or so people living in the area. From late Victorian times Becky Falls farmhouse, with its 60 acres, was occupied by Mr and Mrs Hern and their son Bob, the buildings comprising a sixteenth-century stone farmhouse with three bedrooms, a cowshed, milking parlour and Beechwood cottage, a two-bedroom Victorian structure.
    Lytton Strachey was already staying at the Falls at Rupert’s suggestion, when Brooke and Hugh Russell-Smith arrived, following advice that Rupert should terminate his studies of Classics and concentrate on English Literature for his fourth year at Cambridge. Strachey was working on
Landmarks in French Literature.
In letters to friends, descriptive passages about this part of Devon which he had just discovered flowed from Rupert’s pen, with almost the speed and majesty of the Falls themselves. To Erica he wrote:
    I am leading the healthy life. I rise early, twist myself about on a kind of pulley that is supposed to make my chest immense (but doesn’t), eat no meat, wear very little, do not part my hair, take frequent cold baths, work ten hours a day and rush madly about the mountains in flannels and rainstorms for hours.
    And to his close friend Dudley Ward, ‘Here it rains infinitely. But I – I dance through the rain, singing musically snatches of old Greek roundelays. Have you ever seen me in my mackintosh walking-cape dancing 17 miles in the rain?’ Jacques Raverat also received a missive:
    We walked for hours a day. On one side were woods, strangely covered with green and purple by spring, and on the other great moors. The sunsets were yellow wine. And the wind! – oh! there was never such a wind to take you and shake you and roll you over and set you shouting with laughter.
    The author John Galsworthy lived at Wingston Farm near Manaton for eighteen years until moving into Bury House, Sussex, in 1926. It was here he wrote
The Forsyte Saga
and other works, but there is no record of Brooke having visited him, although his friend David ‘Bunny’ Garnett did in 1914, just before the outbreak of war.
    The Herns, the farmhouse tenants who played host to Brooke, were described by another visitor, Peggy Cornwell: ‘Mr and Mrs Hern were lovely people. Mrs Hern used to come up each morning with a tray of tea for mother and wedges of that home-made bread, spread with clotted cream for us little ones.’ The Herns’ son Bob continued to run the place until the 1950s, when it was described as a ‘large tea garden – set in surroundings of majestic beauty’.
    By April 1909, Rupert was further west, at another gathering of the Apostles on the furthest tip of the Lizard, Cornwall. It was essentially a reading party, organised by G. E. Moore, who had been at Trinity with Edward Marsh and had become an Apostle in the early 1890s, at the same time as Bertrand Russell. Moore, in his early thirties at the time of this ‘coming together’ at the Lizard, was certainly a great influence on Brooke, who found the older man’s philosophies and attitude to life absorbing, and his personality infectious, despite his dislike of Fabianism. Moore was also a gifted pianist and singer. Their base, Penmenner House (‘Pen’ meaning headland