Forever England by Mike Read

Author:Mike Read [Mike Read]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849548663
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2015-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Of the one-off escapade at the Orchard he wrote, ‘I wanted to have some fun, and, still more, to see what it was like and to do away with the shame (as I thought it was) of being a virgin.’ He was, inevitably, disillusioned by what he believed was going to be a quantum leap from virginity to sexual knowledge. Despite the rushed, unsatisfactory night in his bedroom at the Orchard, the two remained good friends and did not speak of the moment again. As far as can be ascertained it was Brooke’s only real homosexual experience, apart from schoolboy experimentation at Rugby.

In spite of being run-down, taking strong sedations to help him sleep and living with the knowledge that sooner rather than later he must address the situation with Ka, he joined a summer reading party at a hostelry situated on the extreme north-east edge of Salisbury Plain. Maynard Keynes attempted to go one better than the previous year’s camp at Clifford Bridge by taking over the Crown at Everleigh for a few weeks and inviting a mixture of Apostles and Brooke’s neo-pagan/old Bedalian circle. Keynes had recently become interested in riding, so maybe he discovered the Crown via Cobbett’s Rural Rides or, less likely, through the knowledge that the 1897 (and 1898) Grand National winner, Manifesto, came from the stables at the Crown Inn! The Crown Inn at Everleigh was originally built as the Dower House, being converted to its present use around 1790. The journalist and reformer William Cobbett stayed at the Crown on 27 August 1826, commenting in Rural Rides:

This Inn is one of the nicest, and in Summer one of the pleasantest in England; for I think my experience in this way will justify me in speaking thus positively. The house is large, the stables good, the Landlord a farmer also, and therefore no cribbing your horses in hay or straw, and yourself in eggs and cream. The garden which adjoins the south side of the house is large, of a good shape, consists of well-disposed clumps of shrubs and flowers and of short grass very neatly kept. In the lower part of the garden there are high trees and among these a most populous rookery.

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