THE SECOND I SAW YOU . by Lorna C. Beckett . (British Library £16.99) During his Easter sermon of 1915, the Dean of St Paul’s read out Rupert Brooke’s poem The Soldier, which begins: ‘If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.’ Rupert Brooke's (pictured) poem The Soldier made him famous outside of literary circles . Before then, Brooke was known only in literary circles. But when the newspapers reprinted The Soldier the following day, he became properly famous for the rest of his life — which, as it turned out, lasted just over a fortnight. Brooke’s death at 27 from blood poisoning en route to Gallipoli duly cemented his image as the poster-boy of heroic self-sacrifice. Yet, as The Second I Saw You richly confirms, he was a lot more interesting than that. The love story it tells was unknown until 2000, when a British Library curator made a thrilling discovery: more than 100 letters exchanged between Brooke and an art student called Phyllis Gardner, together with her secret memoir of their relationship, written in 1918. Now Lorna C. Beckett, chair of the Rupert Brooke Society, has turned them into a chronological narrative, adding the background information we need, plus her own comments. At times, admittedly, those comments do smack of chick- lit clichés (including Brooke’s unwillingness ‘to commit’ and Phyllis’s need to ‘move on’.) But then again so does the story itself. The 21-year-old Phyllis first saw Brooke on the London to Cambridge train in November 1911. Like everyone else who ever set eyes on him, it seems, she was overwhelmed by his beauty and spent the journey sketching him with her handy chalks. S he then carried the sketch around Cambridge, showing it to anyone who might be able to identify him. Luckily, the two moved in similar circles, with Brooke studying at King’s College and Phyllis’s father an archaeology professor. Eventually, having tracked him down, she got her parents to invite him to lunch where, according to her memoir, the effect of his arrival was ‘as though the sun had suddenly risen’. Not all his chat-up lines would work today, though: ‘Your palms sweat,’ he once told her. ‘The Elizabethans said that was a sign of a passionate disposition.’ Nonetheless, Phyllis was smitten, not least after, while on a walk together, the two took off their clothes to wade through a river and she dried him afterwards with her hair. ‘Who was I,’ she wondered, ‘that God should give me such piercing joy?’ The trouble was that Brooke appeared to have accepted such adoration as essentially his due — and not just from Phyllis. (During their time together, the only time he didn’t have one other woman on the go was when he had two). Nor was he entirely satisfied by being dried with hair. In 2000, love letters between Rupert Brooke and Phyllis Gardner were discovered as well as her secret memoir of their relationship which was written in 1918 . When, after a few months, he proposed sex, Phyllis was delighted, on the heart-breaking grounds that ‘I thought of myself as the happy mother of his child’ — until he made it clear they’d be using contraception. Though badly hurt, Phyllis naturally sought to excuse Brooke’s behaviour, somehow managing to see him as a ‘poor, lost angel’ led astray by his racy friends. Even so, she stuck to her guns. ‘As I don’t consider you to be there only for my pleasure,’ she wrote in one letter, ‘so I expect you not to consider me only there for yours’ — adding a little forlornly, ‘Why don’t you want me enough to do so much as consider the possibility of marrying me?’ By comparison, Brooke’s self-justifications seem both faintly irritated and distinctly patronising, especially given that he addresses a woman less than three years his junior as ‘child’. Still, it’s hard to disagree with his final verdict, however brutally expressed: ‘You are meant for love and marriage. I’m a wanderer.’ And that, as far as the relationship went, was largely that. In May 1913, Brooke headed off to the South Seas, where the women, happily, proved more compliant. He continued, though, to write to Phyllis as a friend, returning to Britain just in time for the war. B y retrieving Brooke’s flawed — but wholly recognisable — humanity (let’s face it) from beneath the myth, The Second I Saw You would certainly have met with Virginia Woolf’s approval. ‘Anyone,’ she wrote at the height of Brooke-mania in 1917, ‘who helps us to remember that volatile, irreverent and extremely vivacious spirit before the romantic public took possession of his fame has the right to our gratitude.’ But the book also does full justice to Phyllis herself, who died, unmarried, in 1939 at 48. After being lost to history for so long, she emerges as a hugely likeable and spirited woman who, for all her wilfully over-generous misreading of Brooke’s motives, was never a pushover.
Rupert Brooke's poem The Soldier made him famous throughout England .
He died aged 27 from blood poisoning while en route to Gallipoli .
In 2000, love letters between Brookes and Phyllis Gardner were discovered .
It was then, 85 years after his death, that their love affair was revealed .