Philippa Bernard - No End to Snowdrops: A Biography of Kathleen Raine

No End to Snowdrops

A BIOGRAPHY OF KATHLEEN RAINE

Kathleen Raine at Cambridge

A BIOGRAPHY OF
KATHLEEN RAINE

Philippa Bernard

The snowdrops in the Manse garden were countless,
there were always more, giving a kind of knowledge that
nature is inexhaustible, that multitude is her secret,
her deep mystery. There could be no end to snowdrops.

KATHLEEN RAINE

SHEPHEARD-WALWYN (PUBLISHERS) LTD

Philippa Bernard 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any form without the written permission
of the publisher, Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd

First published in 2009 by
Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd
15 Alder Road
London SW14 8ER

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record of this book
is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-85683-353-3

Typeset by Alacrity,
Sandford, Somerset
Printed and bound through
s | s | media limited, Wallington, Surrey

To Sue

MY THANKS are most particularly due to Kathleen Raines family, especially to her daughter Anna and her son James, who sadly died before this book was completed; and her step-daughter, Professor Victoria Randall, who let me use the Madge Papers at Sussex University and provided some of the photographs. Also to her Literary Executor, Brian Keeble, who has allowed me to quote from her poetry and her prose works, and has talked to me at length about her.

I am also most grateful to all the librarians and archivists who have gone to so much trouble to guide me in the right direction, especially Kate Perry at Girton College, as well as those at the London Library, the British Library, Kings College, Cambridge, the National Library of Scotland, the University of Sussex, Kettles Yard at Cambridge University, Ilford Public Library, the City of Westminster Library, the BBC Sound Archive, the Tate Gallery Archive, for permission to examine Ben Nicholsons papers, the Trustees of Winifred Nicholson, and several others; to the Estate of Edwin and Willa Muir for permission to include extracts from their unpublished papers, and to the Trustees of the Estate of Norman Nicholson, by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd., literary representatives, for permission to include the poem Cockley Moor (from the Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, 1994).

Many of Kathleens other friends have shared their memories and letters with me, including Andrew Roberts, son and Literary Executor of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith; Sir Stephen Lamport, Thetis Blackers Literary Executor; Sir Robin Baring, Cecil Collins Art Executor, and his wife Ann; Brenda Marshall of the College of Psychic Studies; Douglas Botting, Gavin Maxwells friend and biographer; Vinod Tailor, who helped me with Kathleens links with India, and HRH The Prince of Wales who talked to me of his affection for Kathleen and their common interests.

My family have been patient and encouraging, especially my sister Sue Spence, to whom I dedicate this book.

Betweem pages 92 and 93

Jessie Raine as a young woman

The Wilkes family

Kathleen, aged two, with George and Jessie

West View, Ilford

The Church at Bavington

The Manse, Bavington

School House, Bavington

Kathleen as a schoolgirl

Kathleen aged about fourteen

Charles Madge

Kathleen and Charles

Anna and James

Kathleen with Anna and James

Cockley Moor

Aire Force, Ullswater

The Vicarage, Martindale

Tambi, Kathleen and Gavin at 9 Paultons Square

Kathleen with Mij

Gavin with Edal

Kathleen, aged eighty, at Ninfa

Jessie as an old woman

Thetis Blacker with a sample of her batik work

Kathleen with Daisybelle

Kathleen, aged ninety-two, after receiving her CBE

B Y THE ROADSIDE at the edge of the village of Great Bavington in Northumberland is a low grassy bank, where daffodils grow in spring. Beyond the grey stone wall leading to the school, the church and the Manse, are the sweeping hills of the north country, stretching away into the distance to Hadrians Wall. Close to this spot were scattered the ashes of the poet Kathleen Raine, nearly ninety years after her brief stay in the village. She had come there as a child of six, sent from her home in the south at the outbreak of the First World War. Here she had found the one place in the world where she felt afterwards that she truly belonged and where she had been happy. And here she had returned.

*

KATHLEEN JESSIE RAINE was the only child of George Raine and Jessie Wilkie, born in Ilford in Essex in 1908. The Wilkie side of Kathleens family came from Scotland, and she loved them for it. Jessie herself was born in Cumberland, near Gretna Green, in the border country. Her mother Jane was from Edinburgh, her father, Alexander, from Forfar. All that Kathleen could remember of her grandfather was that he was a great fisherman, loved the poetry of John Milton and had a weakness for whisky. In his later years he acted as Secretary to the Shipwrights Society and attached great importance to giving his children a good education. He himself had been a schoolmaster though his father, James, was a miner, and his eldest daughter, Catherine, was also a schoolteacher. When Alexander and Jane, eight years his senior, died in their early forties, the second daughter, Jane after her mother, kept house for the three orphaned girls. They lived then, thanks to Catherines profession, in the School House at Bewshaugh in Northumberland, not far from Hexham, though all three girls were born at Longtown in Cumberland almost within sight of the border with Scotland. Jessie saw to it that her own daughter gradually learned to love the music and poetry and traditions of the country of her ancestors, and she herself kept her soft Scottish lilting accent to the end of her life.

In these quiet Cheviot hills lay Kielder Forest, now mostly underwater after the construction of the great Kielder Dam in the nineteen fifties. Much of the surrounding land was owned by the Percy family, the Earls of Northumberland, and it was in Kielder Kirk (never church) that young Jessie sat with her sisters and her mother near the five beautiful Percy girls, Louisa, Edith, Margaret, Victoria, and Mary, admiring their beautiful hair, a bright gold as with most of the Percy clan. Mary, who married Aymer Maxwell, was the mother of Gavin, who was later to play such an important part in Kathleens own life. As long as she lived Kathleen never failed to be grateful for her Scottish inheritance, only wishing that she had been able to do greater justice to it in her poetry. She did in fact write several poems to her mother. One, published in The Oval Portrait in 1977, reveals something of the beauty in natural things she learned to love from a very early age.

Your gift of life was idleness
As you would set days task aside
To marvel at an opening bud,
Quivering leaf, or spiders veil
On dewy grass in morning spread.

Jessie was sent to study as a trainee teacher at Armstrong College at Newcastle. The college had been founded as The College of Science by the distinguished engineer and shipbuilder William Armstrong and later became the nucleus around which the University of Newcastle was formed. While studying at the college, Jessie stayed at a hostel in Jesmond Dean which had originally been the home built by William Armstrong for his bride. The house and grounds were magnificently furnished and landscaped and when the Armstrongs left they were converted by the college for the use of students and the general public. It was here at the College that Jessie met her future husband, George Raine, a fellow student. He had already taken a degree at Durham University and like Jessie had gone on to take teacher training qualifications.