On Wednesday 2 March, Edith set out from Duchess Road to go to her new home in Cheltenham. In spite of his guardian’s ban, Ronald prayed that he might catch a final glimpse of her. When the time for her departure came he searched the streets, at first in vain. But then: ‘At Francis Road corner she passed me on bike on way to station. I shall not see her again perhaps for three years.’
Father Francis was not a clever man, and he did not perceive that by compelling Ronald and Edith to part he was transforming a boy-and-girl love-affair into a thwarted romance. Ronald himself wrote thirty years later: ‘Probably nothing else would have hardened the will enough to give such an affair (however genuine a case of true love) permanence.’
In the weeks after Edith’s departure he was morbid and depressed. There was little help to be gained from Father Francis, who was still deeply offended at the deception that had been practised upon him. At Easter, Ronald asked for his guardian’s permission to write to Edith, and this was granted, though grudgingly. He wrote; and she replied, saying that she was happy in her new home, and that ‘all that horrid time at Duchess Road seems only a dream now’.
Indeed she came to find life at Cheltenham to be most congenial. She was staying in the house of C. H. Jessop and his wife, whom she called ‘Uncle’ and ‘Auntie’ though they were not actually related to her. ‘Uncle’ was inclined to be grumpy but ‘Auntie’ always made up for this with kindness. There were few guests at the house beyond the vicar and elderly friends of the Jessops, but Edith could find companionship of her own age with her school-friend Molly Field whose family lived nearby. She practised the piano every day, took lessons on the organ, and began to play for services at the Anglican parish church, which she attended regularly. She involved herself in church affairs, assisting at the Boys’ Club and the choir outings. She joined the Primrose League and went to Conservative Party meetings. She was making a life of her own, a better life than she had known before, which she would find it hard to relinquish when the time came.
For Ronald, school now became the centre of life. Relations with Father Francis were still strained, and the Oratory could not entirely retain its former place in his affections. But at King Edward’s he found good company and friendship. It was a day-school, and there were no ‘Tarts’ or ‘Bloods’ such as revolted C. S. Lewis at his boarding-school (later described by him in Surprised by Joy). Certainly the older boys did have prestige in the eyes of the younger, but it was the prestige of age and achievement rather than of caste, while as to homosexuality Tolkien claimed that at nineteen he did not even know the word. Nevertheless it was into an all-male society that he now threw himself. At the age when many young men were discovering the charms of female company he was endeavouring to forget them and to push romance into the back of his mind. All the pleasures and discoveries of the next three years – and they were vital years in his development, as vital as the years with his mother – were to be shared not with Edith but with others of his sex, so that he came to associate male company with much that was good in life.
The school library was an important institution at King Edward’s. Nominally under the control of an assistant master, it was in practice administered chiefly by a number of senior boys who were granted the title of Librarian. In 1911 these included Ronald Tolkien, Christopher Wiseman, R. Q. Gilson (son of the headmaster), and three or four others. This little clique formed itself into an unofficial group called the Tea Club. Here is Wiseman’s account of its origins, told sixty-four years later:
‘It started in the summer term, with very great daring. Exams went on for six weeks, and if you were not having an exam you really had nothing to do; so we started having tea in the school library. People used to bring “subventions”: I remember someone brought a tin of fish and we didn’t care for it, so up it went on a shelf on top of some books, and stayed there until it was nosed out a long time later! We used to boil a kettle on a spirit-stove; but the great problem was what you were to do with the tea-leaves. Well, the Tea Club often went on after school, and the cleaners would come round with their mops and buckets and brooms, throwing sawdust down and sweeping it all up; so we used to put the tea-leaves in their buckets. Those first teas were in the library cubbyhole. Then, as it was the summer term, we went out and had tea at Barrow’s Stores in Corporation Street. In the Tea Room there was a sort of compartment, a table for six between two large settles, quite secluded; and it was known as the Railway Carriage. This became a favourite place for us, and we changed our title to the Barrovian Society, after Barrow’s Stores. Later, I was editor of the School Chronicle, and I had to print a list of people who had gained various distinctions; so against the people in the list who were members I put an asterisk, and at the bottom of the page by the asterisk it said: “Also members of the T.C., B.S., etc.” It was a seven-day wonder what it stood for!’
The membership of this curious and unofficial body fluctuated a little, but it soon achieved a constant nucleus in the persons of Tolkien, Wiseman, and Robert Quilter Gilson. ‘R. Q.’ had inherited from his father a lively face and a quick brain, but perhaps in reaction to the paternal enthusiasm for scientific invention he devoted his private energies to drawing and design, at which he displayed a talent. He was quiet-spoken but witty, fond of Renaissance painting and the eighteenth century. Here his tastes and expertise contrasted with those of the other two. Wiseman was knowledgeable about natural sciences and music; he had become an excellent mathematician and an amateur composer. ‘John Ronald’, as they called Tolkien, was versed in Germanic languages and philology, and had immersed himself thoroughly in Northern writings. Yet common to these three enthusiastic schoolboys was a thorough knowledge of Latin and Greek literature; and from this balance of similar and dissimilar tastes, shared and unshared knowledge, friendship grew.
Tolkien’s contribution to the ‘T.C.B.S.’, as they came to call it, reflected the wide range of reading he had already encompassed. He delighted his friends with recitations from Beowulf, the Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and recounted horrific episodes from the Norse Völsungasaga, with a passing jibe at Wagner whose interpretation of the myths he held in contempt. These erudite performances in no way struck his friends as odd; indeed, in Wiseman’s words, ‘the T.C.B.S. accepted it as yet another instance of the fact that the T.C.B.S. itself was odd’. Perhaps it was; though such coteries were (and are) not uncommon among well-educated adolescents, who are going through a stage of enthusiastic intellectual discovery.
Later a fourth member was added to the group. This was Geoffrey Bache Smith, a year younger than Gilson and nearly three years junior to Tolkien. He was not a classicist like the others, but came from the Modern side of the school. He lived with his brother and their widowed mother in West Bromwich and possessed what his friends considered to be a Midland wit. The T.C.B.S. took him into its ranks partly for this and partly because he had a qualification all too rare at King Edward’s: he was knowledgeable about English literature, especially poetry; indeed he himself was a practising poet of some competence. Under the influence of ‘G.B.S.’ the T.C.B.S. began to wake up to the significance of poetry – as indeed Tolkien was already doing.
Only two masters at King Edward’s made any serious attempt to teach English literature. One was George Brewerton and the other was R. W. Reynolds. Once a literary critic on a London journal, ‘Dickie’ Reynolds tried to instil into his pupils some idea of taste and style. He was not particularly successful with Ronald Tolkien, who preferred Latin and Greek poetry to Milton and Keats. But Reynolds’s lessons may have had something to do with the fact that when he was eighteen Tolkien began tentatively to write verse. He did not write much, and it was not very good, certainly no better than the average juvenile efforts of the time. Indeed, there was only one sign of anything even faintly unlikely, and that came in July 1910 when he wrote a descriptive piece about a forest scene, entitled ‘Wood-sunshine’. It included these lines:
Come sing ye light fairy things tripping