He had settled on Blake’s poetry for his research, for what he thought of as his “opaque simplicity” (“What on earth does that mean?” Sylvie said), but when it came to it he was too restless and abandoned Blake after a term and went home to Fox Corner. He was tired of the analysis and dissection of literature, “like an autopsy,” he said to Hugh, who had invited him into the growlery for a glass of malt and a “little chat” about his future.
“I would like,” Teddy said thoughtfully, “to travel around a bit, to see the country. And perhaps a little of Europe too.” By “the country” he meant England rather than the whole of Britain, and by “Europe” he meant France, but refrained from saying so as Hugh had a rather baffling prejudice against the French. Teddy tried to explain to his father that he wanted to respond directly to the world. “ ‘A life of the senses,’ as you might say. To work on the land and write poetry. The two are not contradictory.” No, no, not at all, Hugh said, Virgil and The Georgics and so on. A “farmer poet.” Or a “poet farmer.” Hugh had been a banker all his life, which was most certainly not a life of the senses.
From the age of twelve Teddy had worked on Ettringham Hall Farm in the holidays, not for the money—he was often unpaid—but for the pleasure of hard labour in the fresh air. (“I can’t think of anything worse,” Izzie said. She had found him helping out in the milking-shed on a visit to Fox Corner and had almost got herself crushed by a cow.) “In my heart I’m not an intellectual,” he said to his father, knowing this was a stance that would appeal to Hugh, who did indeed nod in sympathy. And to be connected to the land, Teddy said, isn’t that the most profound relationship of all? And out of this would come writing that wasn’t just the dry product of the intellect (another nod from Hugh) but was felt, on the pulses. Perhaps even a novel. (How callow he had been!)
“A novel?” Hugh said, unable to stop his eyebrows from rising. “Fiction?” Sylvie was the novel reader, not Hugh. Hugh was a man of his time. He liked facts. But Teddy was one of Hugh’s favourite children. Both Hugh and Sylvie had secret listings for their children, not so secret in Sylvie’s case. They were similar—Pamela came in the middle, Maurice at the bottom, but it was Ursula, low on Sylvie’s list, who was closest to Hugh’s heart. Sylvie’s favourite, of course, was Teddy, her best boy. Teddy wondered who she had preferred before he came along. None of them, he suspected.
“Well, you don’t want to get stuck,” Hugh said. Did his father feel stuck? Is that why he offered Teddy twenty pounds and told him to go and “live life a little”? Teddy refused the money—it was important that he make his own way, wherever that was—but he felt enormously grateful for this show of support from his father.
Not surprisingly, his mother did not give her blessing. “You want to do what?” Sylvie said. “You have a degree from Oxford and you want to wander around like a troubadour?”
“A minstrel,” Hugh said. “A thing of shreds and patches.” He was a great Gilbert and Sullivan fan.
“Exactly,” Sylvie said. “Tramps go from farm to farm looking to be hired for work. Not the Beresfords.”
“He’s a Todd, actually,” Hugh said (unhelpfully). “You’ve become a tremendous snob, Sylvie,” he added, even more unhelpfully.
“I’m not thinking of doing it for ever,” Teddy said. “A year perhaps and then I’ll settle on something.” He was still thinking about Sylvie’s word “troubadour” and how attracted he was to that (very unsettled) idea.
And so he went. He sowed cabbage seed in Lincolnshire, spent the lambing season in Northumberland, helped bring in the wheat harvest in Lancashire, picked strawberries in Kent. He was fed by farmers’ wives at big farmhouse kitchen tables and slept in barns and sheds and dilapidated cottages as the year turned and, during the warm summer nights, in his old canvas tent, somewhat mildewed, that had seen him through Cubs and Kibbo Kift. Its most memorable adventure was yet to take place when in 1938 the tent accompanied Teddy and Nancy on a camping holiday to the Peak District, during which they (finally) ceased to be friends and became lovers.
“Not both?” Teddy puzzled.
“Well, of course,” Nancy said and Teddy realized that he had known Nancy too long and was too familiar with her to suddenly “fall in love” with her. He loved her, of course, but he wasn’t in love and never had been. Would he ever be, he wondered?