Richard Forrest (1864-1948) grew up on the streets of Southampton as an urchin following his father Jack Forrest’s (1838-1910) 1874-1910 imprisonment for murder and fraud in 1874, and the deaths of his mother Claire (1840-71) and sister Mary (1871-7). He worked (1877-9) as a pickpocket before being sent to prison in 1879 for six months for street brawling. After his release, he worked as an orphanage janitor for four years, 1879-83, before attending Southampton University, from 1883-7, and qualifying as a teacher for the orphanage, in 1887. Five years thereafter, in 1892, he was offered and took a PhD course at Oxford to study mathematics; he qualified with flying colours and became a teacher in 1895; he moved from the orphanage the following year, 1896, to work at a school elsewhere in Southampton, setting up a charitable drive in the city six months before his intended departure; after six years at this school he in 1902 accepted the headmaster position, and held it for five years before, in 1907, accepting an entry-level position at the Ministry of Defence. After rising through the ranks, four years later, in 1911, after having lived and worked in Oxford since the turn of 1910, he joined the Merchant Navy as a navigator, and changed to the Royal Navy after two years, in 1913. The year following that, 1914, the war broke out, and he served with distinction, losing the sight in one eye in 1916 and being posted back behind the lines, where he lost a foot in 1918. He suffered and recovered in early 1919 from the Spanish flu which claimed his third wife, and in 1925, by which time he was working as a mathematician for the government in London, he discovered that his youngest child of five, Sebastian (1905-92), who had the previous year, 1924, left university in Nottingham studying to become an architect, had met a German woman named Matilde Crael (1903-43) during a six-month spell in Berlin, had fallen in love with her and had accepted a job in Berlin, to begin in 1926.
Richard was, by that time and as during the war, fiercely anti-German, a trait picked up in the 1900s during the arms race, although not shared by his then fourth wife, 49-year-old Coventry-born nurse Louise Middleton (1876-1939), his eldest and third sons – James (1888-1944), a Bristol-based doctor, and William (1895-1971), a shipyard worker in his father’s native Southampton, or his daughter Rosemary (1900-2001), a florist, gardener and landscape architect in Halifax. He was supported by his second son, Adam Forrest (1890-1950), a legal clerk in Hammersmith. He had met his first wife, London-born doctor Lily Everest (1858-1911) in 1881, while janitoring in Southampton; they had married in early 1884, while he was at Southampton University. However, he had an affair in the summer of 1885 with fellow student and prospective history and geography teacher Jane Brackett (1866-1920), natively of Bradford; his marriage to Lily broke up in the winter of early 1886 – she went back to London - and he married Jane on Christmas Day 1887; their son James was born on November 1st 1888 in Cheltenham, at the home of Jane’s sister. Their second son, born in their Southampton home on October 20th 1890, was Adam. However, their marriage began to show signs of strain in the spring of 1893 and they began divorce proceedings in February of 1894. In Portsmouth in June 1894, a month before their divorce was finalised, and shortly after the culmination of his second PhD year at Oxford, he met 22-year-old Evelyn Kennedy (1872-1919), who at the time was working as a third-level assistant in a Portsmouth butcher’s shop.
By the time they got married on March 22nd 1900, after having already had one child out of wedlock, William, on April 7th, 1895, she was the immediate assistant, second-in-command and with a lot of say in the running of the shop, given her brother’s position as first-in-command. She was an astute businesswoman and, like Richard, had a profoundly strong grasp of mathematics. In 1898 she had begun taking steps to franchise the butcher’s, which had been established in 1717 by the ancestor of her former boss, but had never left those premises in Portsmouth until now. On June 1st, 1900, they opened their third shop, in Oxford as well as in Southampton. On December 27th, 1900, his one and only daughter, Rosemary, named in part after his late sister, was born, his second child with Evelyn and fourth overall. By the turn of 1901, Jane, from whom he had now been divorced for over six years, had met Cowes-born ferry musician Arnold Sterling (1868-1939) in October of 1897; they engaged to marry on New Year’s Eve 1900, thus giving his two eldest children, James and Adam, the imminent new prospect of a stepfather, which became fact the following July 17th.
By the new year of 1905, sixteen-year-old James and 14-year-old Adam were still living and going to school in Southampton, living with their 38-year-old mother, 36-year-old stepfather, and a new half-sister, Jennifer (1903-75), who had been born on September 1st, 1903. Contrastingly, also in Southampton, not two miles away, lived 40-year-old Richard, 32-year-old Evelyn, 9-year-old William and newly 4-year-old Rosemary. Evelyn was now joint boss of her butcher’s operation with her brother (Wesley Kennedy 1868-1942) and they commanded eight shops: Portsmouth, Southampton, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Exeter, and two in London – Hammersmith and Wapping. The year of 1905, besides instilling in Richard the first real sense of danger from European revolutions, with the failed revolution in Russia and the armament of Germany, as well as the Russian-Japanese war, would eventually prove a race of nativity between the former marital partners: in the closing months of 1905, Richard and Jane each witnessed the birth of their final child: Jane gave birth to Arnold Sterling’s daughter Jessica (1905-81) on November 9th; and Evelyn gave birth on December 11th to his fifth child and fourth son, Sebastian. In August 1906, after leaving school in Southampton, James informed his parents and step-parents, as well as his siblings, that he and four friends intended to take a tour of the world for a year before he would enrol in medical school (he was already applying and intended to keep up correspondence with prospective universities). Richard was resistant, but Jane and Evelyn both persuaded him to look more favourably on his son’s plans (which included 15 countries over 300 days, and eventually constituted 11 over 287), and as a result James’ departure on September 10th 1906 for Paris was not a contested one. During this period James acquired more liberal sensibilities than those of his father, visiting France, Germany, Russia, China and Japan as well as the Netherlands, Sweden, Persia, India, Australia and the USA. When James returned to Southampton on June 24th 1907, one of the first things he did was to register as a paying member of the Liberal Party. He left the house on September 11th 1907 to study medicine in Manchester, promoting Richard’s most devoted child Adam, now sixteen and approaching seventeen, to his eldest protégé, despite the fact that Adam had not been raised jointly by Richard since the age of three and had a grudging respect for Arnold Sterling, who had been his mother’s boyfriend since he was seven and his stepfather since he was approaching eleven. James, older and less reactionary, had done a much better job than his sole full sibling of dividing his loyalties between the two men. Adam was a relatively isolated child; James had focused more on friends than family; and both the next pairs of half-siblings, Jennifer and Jessica through his mother, and William and Rosemary through his father, tended more to stick to each other – this was helped by the nearly identical age of Jessica and Sebastian, who would later become classmates. Stepsisters Rosemary, 7 come 1908, and Jennifer, by then four, were also close, the former often acting as a mentor to and for the latter.
The teenage Adam became ever more his father’s acolyte throughout 1908 and 1909, particularly as the European tensions began to mount. By the last week of August 1909, three weeks before Adam was due to leave his father’s side to study law in London, his father had spent nearly two years working as a mathematician for the Ministry of Defence, and was about to receive a second promotion, one which would move the family to Oxford as of January 5th 1910. Richard’s MoD work had increased his sense of xenophobia, particularly towards the Germans who had invaded France in 1870, when he had been six years old: to an extent he had always seen the influx of French refugees as a reason for his father’s bartending slump which led to his involvement in the Southampton mafia and the ultimate disintegration of the family, but over many years, protective paternal instincts and working at an enjoyable job which was devoted to patriotic sentiment, the 45-year-old Richard had no compunction in telling his son, that afternoon as they burnt leaves in the early-autumn garden, that, “whatever you do in life, son, do it for England, because her beauty is greater than that of most women.”This was August 27th, 1909: Adam left for London on September 17th, determined to put patriotism into his daily and working lives: it was behind his relatively innocuous selection of poverty law as a specialty in 1912, the more sinister choice of immigration law in 1914, and the abrupt switch in November 1914 to military law. On September 11th, 1909, six days before Adam departed from Southampton for London, Richard was offered a promotion by the Ministry of Defence; he discussed it with Evelyn, who agreed that the base of their now 13-shop business operations could be moved to their Oxford outlet, and, with almost no contact with Jane, whose children were now none of his concern, since the last that was his was now an adult, he and Evelyn on December 29th, 1909 moved their belongings, their home, and their remaining protégés, fourteen-year-old William, nine-year-old Rosemary (whose ninth birthday had come only two days before) and four-year-old Sebastian, to Oxford, ignoring the initial dismay felt by William and Rosemary (Sebastian was barely old enough then to echo it) that they would be moved away from their stepsiblings, friends and, in Sebastian and Jessica’s case, classmates, Jennifer and Jessica Sterling, respectively now six and four in the Southampton care of their mother, Jane, 43, and father Arnold, 41. Thus for the designated Forrest family, of which Jane, Jennifer and Jessica were not a part (for Richard, who considered his opinions the family opinions), 1910 began in Oxford, the city where he had attended university from 1892 to 1895.
1910 saw James continue the third of his five years of medical studies in Manchester, attending several student Liberal Party meetings along the way; running and setting up charitable and political fundraising drives as well as contributing to research facilities. He was particularly happy with the government social reforms taking place in Britain at that time, in contrast to the opinions from London of his brother Adam, still in his first year of law school and embracing work above, though not at the expense of, entertainment. Frequently William and Rosemary sent letters and made telephone calls to Jennifer and Jessica, and helped Sebastian to write similar missives. They even increased friendliness with Jane, who prior to then had been a peripheral figure, and this increased friendliness occurred despite Richard’s would-be disapproval of it. In 1910, however, he did not discover it – the first thing of major personal note he discovered occurred on June 13th, 1910, when he was contacted by a prison official at the Norwich institution where his father had spent the last eight years, to say that his father Jack had died at the age of 72, of old age. Richard expressed no interest in claiming responsibility for his father’s body, and told only James and Adam – James by letter, Adam by telephone – of the death and his own plans to attend the funeral at Norwich Prison on June 15th. James did not discover the missive until lunchtime on June 15th, by which time Richard had already left for the funeral at 11am, telling Evelyn only that he was going to “a funeral” and would be back the following day. It was not until the evening of the 16th that he told her whose funeral it was. Adam, however, attended. Looking down on the casket as it was lowered into the ground by uniformly grey-clad prison officers, Richard murmured to his second son, “This is what happens to you if you stop loving your country.” Adam, like his siblings, was extremely familiar with the graves of his grandmother and infant aunt, side by side in Southampton, and his father’s stories of his life with them.
On November 3rd, 1910, at a Bonfire Night celebration at a friend’s house in Manchester, James was introduced to freshman music student Elizabeth Hockney, 19, who had been raised first in Penzance and then in Oswestry. They bonded over opera and Liberalism, and first dated that evening the eighth anniversary of which would be the first Armistice Day. On November 30th, James persuaded her to travel down from her parents’ in Oswestry to Oxford for Boxing Day; he had also made arrangements to spend thirty hours or so with his mother, stepfather and stepsisters in Southampton, unbeknownst to his father. On December 20th, Adam arrived in Oxford from London with positive first-term results from his second year and a slight nervous tic of the left eyebrow from overwork. Christmas Day 1910 in Oxford was attended by Richard, 46, Evelyn, 38, their still-charges William, 15, Rosemary, who was two days shy of turning ten, and Sebastian, who was two weeks into his sixth year. James had arrived in the evening of December 22nd, and the following morning had announced that his girlfriend Lizzie would be joining them on Boxing Day late afternoon, before both of them would then head down to Southampton on the morning of the 29th, to see his mother, Jennifer and Jessica, before returning to Manchester on the 31st, in time for a student New Year’s Eve party. Richard was predictably irked by James’ planned association with Jennifer and Jessica, but did not try to forcibly stop it, unlike his reaction to William and Rosemary’s pleas to go and take Sebastian. Rosemary spent a significant portion of her tenth birthday sulking.
Militaristic affairs began to interest Richard more and more as the winter of early 1911 progressed towards spring, and he began ordering a large number of military-themed news and education magazines. He increasingly sought contact with military personnel at his MoD job in Oxford, and on March 23rd, 1911, asked a colleague for information on how to join the local chapter of any military institution. On the evening of April 11th, 1911, he returned to the house and put to Evelyn the proposal of his applying for a position as a navigator in the Merchant Navy, using his mathematical skills for stretches of up to two months at a time in British waters and around the country as a promoter of patriotism and English business. She persuaded him, this time, to ask the opinion of the children, and he did so at their family dinner on the evening of April 13th, six days after William had turned 16. William, who was not particularly inclined to cherish his father’s presence, said very little, as did, understandably, five-year-old Sebastian, but Rosemary, 10, achieved a balance between regret and support: she said, not insincerely, that she would be sorry to be without him but that he should do it if it helped England: he was, after all, always talking about how much he loved England. At noon on April 14th, 1911, Richard began the process of a job application for the Merchant Navy; he was granted an interview in Oxford on April 27th, and was informed, with the arrival of the post on May 1st, that the job was his if he telephoned them within 48 hours with the news that he still wanted it. He made the phone call less than two hours later, and was instructed to arrive at a training programme in Liverpool at 8am on May 23rd. Two days later, at 4.45pm on May 3rd, after a day’s work in Oxford, he handed in his formal two weeks’ notice to his MoD department, and was scheduled on May 5th for a formal interview to determine his continued commitment to the relevant sections of the Official Secrets Act, which took place on May 6th, passing him fit for resignation, which took effect at 5pm on May 17th. On May 22nd, after saying goodbye to his wife and three remaining charges, he set off for Liverpool, where, the following morning at 8am, he began his four-month training programme. This left the stoic William as the head child of the household indefinitely. William had for a long time had an on-again off-again relationship with his father, and the latter’s absence gave William what he saw as an interesting opportunity to explore his identity and new freedoms and powers. Not particularly an academic success, he took a paper round job on June 1st, but his interest was quickly subsumed by a rival interest in the Oxford paper factory of the Whitestaff company. He took a job working as a messenger boy there on June 27th, but lasted only two weeks before July 11th saw him work in a clerking position. After leaving school on July 19th, 1911, he kept up this work with increasing enthusiasm, especially considering his mother’s now 24-shop butcher’s empire made it unnecessary for him to work to support his family, and on September 1st was successfully interviewed for a position as a long-distance lorry driver: he completed his first company drive on September 10th, a thirty-mile distance, and his first long-distance trip came on September 16th, from Oxford to Middlesbrough to deliver paper. Nor was he the only one to embark upon a significant career upgrade around this time: Rosemary’s school grades had been described as “stellar” by one teacher, and very, very favourably by many others. On July 25th, 1911, the headmaster of Rosemary’s school called Evelyn in for a meeting, during which he proposed that Rosemary be skipped ahead a year, a process which would mean her starting secondary school just six weeks later – he had, he assured Evelyn, already achieved a place for her at a local high-achieving secondary school, should she so desire it. Evelyn consulted with Richard and Rosemary, and the latter, who was not particularly attached to her primary school or her classmates, agreed, once Evelyn had reassured her that it wasn’t worth worrying about the reactions of classmates who’d be jealous of her success, to start secondary school that September.
In the meantime, Richard had on July 1st 1911 received news in Liverpool from London that his first wife, Lily Everest, had died in the latter city at the age of 52, after having contracted a disease from one of her patients. Richard cared little for this information, having not seen or spoken to Lily in almost twenty-one years (just as he had not now spoken to Jane in almost three), but he cared enough to mention it to Evelyn, in a telephone call on the evening of July 7th. Evelyn suggested he might go, but he emphatically declined: remembering, however, that Jane’s relationship with Richard had been instigated as a cheat on Lily, back in 1885, Evelyn solicited the date of the funeral – July 11th – out of Richard, and the following evening called Jane in Southampton – the first time Evelyn had spoken herself to Jane in a little over four months – to suggest that she go. Eventually, both of them journeyed to London together, leaving William in charge of Rosemary and Sebastian for fifty-eight hours, between 10am on July 10th and 8pm on July 12th. William, who always enjoyed his younger siblings’ company, enjoyed this responsibility almost as much, regretting that it would likely come little to him given the conflict between his demanding job and his siblings’ place of residence. As a result of their attendance of Lily’s funeral, Evelyn and Jane, who hitherto had been very little more than acquaintances, established something of their own long-distance friendship, which was easier to maintain given that Richard, who would have disapproved of it, was sequestered in Liverpool and embarked upon an even more long-distance career than William’s had become. For the first time ever, one of the two women attended the other’s birthday celebration on October 24th, 1911, when Evelyn journeyed to Southampton to join in Jane and her family’s celebration of her 45th. During the visit, Evelyn, 39, also bonded with her stepdaughters, eight-year-old Jennifer and nearly-six-year-old Jessica, and even with Jane’s husband, the now 43-year-old Arnold Sterling. Fearing Richard’s response to this fact, however, she neglected to mention to any of her children the fact of her attendance at this event, and Jane agreed not to mention it to her sons with Richard, James or Adam, in case they were to let it slip to him.
By this point, James and Adam were progressing well with their university degrees in Manchester and London respectively. When James turned 23 on November 1st 1911 in Manchester, he was in his final year of medical school, extremely fit and athletic, and newly inaugurated for the year 1911-12 as President of MULS (the Manchester University Liberal Society – or, as it was known informally by many of the students, occasionally including James himself – “Men Under Lots of Stress”). The only cloud on James’ horizon was that, over the summer of 1911, his relationship with the then 19- and now 20-year-old Elizabeth Hockney was beginning to sour; it had been going downhill steadily and unevenly, with the occasional jump slightly back up, since they had had an argument in the summer break over their plans for their relationship after James graduated the following summer. Elizabeth, meanwhile, had only just finished the first of her four scheduled years studying music at the university, and their argument had petered out without a proper answer, but had kept resurfacing here and there as summer turned into autumn. Eventually, after a particularly large blowout on the evening of November 26th, 1911, the couple did not speak to each other for three days: on the evening of November 30th, they sat down together and thrashed out their difficulties: by the time the sun rose on December, they had agreed that they would no longer be dating. They parted friends, but parted nonetheless. Adam, meanwhile, had come out of his shell significantly as his second year had progressed into his third: he was now a prominent participant in beer and debating societies, as well as a keen pool-player and dabbling chef. He had embarked upon a string of one-night stands between late March and mid-June 1911, as his revision and exams began to take their toll in a way they had not the previous summer: this eventually translated into his longest relationship to date, from July 7th to August 23rd, with local barmaid Sophie Strachan. He was single as he sat in his shared and rented house in north-west London, sipping coffee, watching the sun rise and not knowing that, miles away in southern Manchester, his elder brother was doing the same thing from a couch on which a slightly younger girl also sat, both staring at the greying and pinking sky movelessly and with identical expressions of wearied melancholy, their hands no more than a few inches apart from each other on the settee’s cushions, but apart nonetheless.
Richard had completed his Merchant Navy training on the last day of September 1911, and from the crack of October dawn had embarked upon professional calculations. The 47-year-old made a large number of new friends over his first six weeks in the position: on November 12th 1911 he was selected as a crew member for a vessel leaving Liverpool and heading round the south coast to Southampton to dock and pick up supplies, before journeying to Amsterdam and back. This was an interesting opportunity for Richard, who had never been anywhere less Anglian than Ireland up until this point, to visit a foreign country, perhaps the first of many, and experience life in the wider world: to learn what it meant to be patriotic and have no allegiance to Blake’s green and pleasant country. The ship departed Liverpool on November 17th and arrived in Southampton three days later: despite his connection with the city, he walked around only a small part of it in the thirty-six hours they were docked there: he had no wish to run into Jane, her husband, or their daughters. In the early afternoon of November 27th, 1911, the ship – and thereby Richard – arrived in Amsterdam, and he was keen to explore the city, where he found microcosms of the social struggles he had one side’s back of in England; his worldview was broadened, and in the process so were his would-be/could-be friends and enemies.
On January 10th, 1912, William, who like the rest of his family had not now seen Richard since a brief period of two days’ leave in late July during his training, was tasked with a job to drive a latest lorry-load of paper from Oxford to Edinburgh, leaving in the early hours of January 12th. On the evening of January 12th, he had his first sexual encounter, all-but sleeping with Edinburgh truck stop waitress Georgina McBride, 20, whose father owned the establishment and three others in Scotland. Whilst William enjoyed the intimacy, being a relatively stoic character whose predisposition before now had been primarily to support rather than being supported, he found the conversation with her, especially their comparisons of their parents’ franchise businesses, far more interesting than the subsequent sexual aspect of their brief relationship. Not wishing to appear weak-willed to his father through his mother, although he doubted she would take such an attitude to his experience, he confided his experience and reflections on it to Rosemary, on the evening of the following Saturday, January 17th, 1912. Rosemary, who had just started her second term of her first year at secondary school, reassured the brother to whom she was closest that it was understandable to be weirded out and confused by new experiences; why, she herself, she said, was finding it strange to experience the hustle and bustle of life at secondary school, and that that was especially true when it came to something as “euch” as sex, which the girls at her school seemed to be always talking about and which she personally – she said with the same half-hidden ambivalence that had accompanied her earlier onomatopoeic deliverance – had no understanding whatsoever of. William thanked her for her wondrous and most magnificent insight, and a few hours later, after some games and taking care of six-year-old Sebastian, he left to drive the three miles across from the west to the northeast side of Oxford, where he had now lived in a small block-based apartment since the previous November.
The winter of early 1912 exposed the travelling Richard, after he had spent 10 days over Christmas with his family in Oxford, to a large portion of the countries of north-western Europe: between January 10th and April 3rd, 1912, he visited France, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Spain before returning to Liverpool with the stated opinion, to a friend and colleague on April 1st, 1912, that “if these Europeans could understand the beauty of English cultural history, they might be valuable allies against these faulty imperial designs we seem so close to being beset with lately.” Whilst he did not come right out and say it – at least not then - he was talking about his increasing worst national enemy – Germany. Often he would tell his friends and colleagues, and anyone – in bars, for example, who happened to listen, that Germany was a dangerous entity which had for decades now been getting above her national station, and that it was “high time she was put back there, where she belongs.” His discourses received mixed reaction among his listeners; often, however, those who opposed him to his face reserved no vitriol for argument. Richard might simply have been the biggest patriot among a group of them, but ultimately all of them – including Richard – were more interested in serving England through the physical labour and effect of their current jobs than by politics. In the middle of April 1912, Richard’s anti-German diatribes were overshadowed for some time by a much more personal and immediate tragedy than any current one he blamed the Germans for: twenty of his colleagues, at least a dozen of whom could be counted as his friends, and three or four who were his regular drinking mates and confidantes in the bars and lonely places of Liverpool, had sailed aboard the Titanic, all workers, expecting to return to Liverpool no more than two months later. All of the people he knew aboard died when the ship sank that mid-April, including six who were never accounted for, but declared dead before the onset of 1914. Richard’s devastation was such that it provoked lengthy phone calls between not only him and his wife, but also him and Jane, to whom he had not spoken in close to four years. Evelyn arrived in Liverpool from Oxford to visit him on April 22nd, shortly into the fortnight’s leave he had been granted in which to grieve, and, shortly after Jane also arrived, in part due to Evelyn’s encouragement, on April 25th, Richard discovered from the mouths of his wife and ex that they had formed a friendship with each other, and his reaction, although cautious and vaguely admonishing, was a mere shadow of what it would likely have been when April had started three weeks or so before. The upshot of all this, following Richard’s return to work on May 3rd, 1912, was that Jane and Evelyn conducted their long-distance friendship completely in the open now, which served to increase the frequency of their communications; also, Jennifer and Jessica, showing an increasing predilection for being referred to as Jenn (two Ns) and Jess, were able, for the first time since the turn of 1910, to physically visit with Rosemary and Sebastian, now that the latter two had no fear of paternal retribution for such fraternising. (William, given his status as an adult since the previous April, had visited the two on five or six occasions in the preceding fourteen months before June 5th, the half-term day during which Rosemary and Sebastian were brought by Evelyn to Southampton.)
On July 22nd, 1912, William, now 17, set out to drive from Oxford to Peterborough with a latest lorry-load of paper. He arrived on schedule in Peterborough at 6.23pm that day, and was allowed the night in the city before driving back at 5am the following morning. He went to a local racing-track and then to a bar, where he got into a discussion with an off-duty police constable, 23-year-old Jason Smith, about football, fishing, a little politics, and how to maintain order. Jason, telling William truthfully that his fiancée, Irish-American actress Meredith Vaughan, 24, was out at a poetry reading that night, invited William to come back to his house a mile and a half away and admire his success. Two hours later they were admiring some other things of each other’s in Jason’s spare bedroom as they had sex, which William found much more enjoyable than his experience in Edinburgh and which lasted until shortly before eleven pm. Afterwards, Jason told William that he had been aware of his attraction solely to men since the age of around twelve, and that he had lost his virginity to a man at sixteen, before agreeing at eighteen to expand his year-long publicly romantic relationship with Meredith, a friend of his since they were both sixteen, into a commitment; they moved in together, mutually supportive, that autumn and had engaged to marry – for Meredith, who was fully aware from very nearly the beginning of Jason’s sexual preference, the greatest incentive for this marriage would be to simultaneously get her parents off her back about taking romance over acting, and also to work towards starting a family with someone she loved, however platonic the word’s definition. Given Jason’s location and commitments in Peterborough and William’s in Oxford, they agreed that there was no opportunity to pursue anything, and parted ways, but William did not leave Peterborough with Jason’s confidence, friendship and phone number or without a new understanding of himself and where any romantic future he might have lay.
As the summer term drew to a close in 1912, Evelyn employed a coach for Rosemary, after discussing it with Richard via telephone: Rosemary’s test results had suffered as her first secondary school year had progressed. Rosemary had bi-weekly sessions on Mondays and Thursdays throughout the summer, including the period August 6 – September 4, when Richard returned to Oxford and Evelyn’s bed for the ninth and longest time since his departure the previous May for training in Liverpool. On September 10, 1912, four days after her father had gone back to Liverpool, Rosemary returned to the Oxford school for her second year with elevated confidence, though not without renewed trepidation at being a relatively isolated figure there. On the evening of August 31st, Richard and Evelyn had had a conversation in bed, shortly after sex, about the future Richard expected to have for his career in the Merchant Navy. In response, Richard warmed to his theme on English patriotism, apologised for his long absences, and said he had got back to Oxford as often as he had felt comfortable with. At the end of the conversation, he agreed that from now on – at least, for the coming academic year – he would try to return to Oxford as often as possible. (They had already discussed the possibility of moving to Liverpool, another location of one of Evelyn’s now 38 butcher’s shops, but Evelyn had rejected it due to Rosemary and Sebastian’s schooling conflicts.)
On July 1, 1912, single James in Manchester had received the results of his medical licensing exams, taken between May 10th and May 28th. He was delighted to learn that he had passed with flying colours, and held a raucous celebration that night with several similarly rewarded friends, with a more formal equivalent on the evening of July 5th. On July 7th, he and his five other particular friends in medicine began corresponding with those hospitals to which they had applied for conditional internships. That same day, James established that he had been accepted as an intern at four different hospitals: Leicester, Glasgow, Sunderland and Bristol. On July 8th he had made his decision, and accepted the offer made from Bristol, along with one of his five medical friends: the other four went two to Liverpool, one to Glasgow and one to London. Due to start his internship on July 23rd, James began looking for housing and located a place to rent on July 9th: by the 11th he had agreed to move into it as of the afternoon of July 19th, and in the early evening of July 12th, he rang his mother Jane in Southampton with the news, followed by his father Richard, and then he made a third call to his stepmother Evelyn, during the course of the latter also celebrating with half-siblings Rosemary and Sebastian. He went out for a pub crawl with his friends on July 13th, and called half-brother William on the morning of the 14th to celebrate the news William had been told via Evelyn the previous morning. On July 23rd he started his Bristol internship.
Meanwhile, in London, Adam was embarking that September on his final year of law school in London. Still a prominent member of several political conservative, consumptive and sporting societies, he had grown close over the summer to Lesley Waterman, a friend of a friend working as a legal secretary for a firm in the City: six months (and thus one academic year) his senior, she was an alumnus of the same university – they marvelled that they had never met before they were introduced as part of a private non-university careers seminar on the afternoon of July 2nd. They grew closer throughout July and August, and first kissed during a night in together on September 10th, then again, more vigorously, at a party on September 13th. By the start of the second week of 1912’s October, the two were officially dating, and, despite a five-week breakup which occurred during the early summer (June-July) of the following year (over Adam’s job prospects: he eventually took a job with the same firm as hers on August 1st 1913), they were still dating just under two years later, on June 28th, 1914.
Richard kept his word: he got back to Oxford several more times over the following months than he had the previous year of his work, persisting(albeit less enthusiastically) even after he was dressed down by a superior for a lapse in his work quality likely caused, at least in part, by his increased time spent with his wife, on February 4th, 1913, just after arriving back from his fifth visit to her, which incorporated his twenty-seventh day with her, since departing for Liverpool the previous early September. Rosemary’s school grades had picked up significantly, though they were not as high as her parents – and she too, though perhaps less extensively – had hoped for. Rosemary was becoming more confident, and her schoolwork was being, if not deprioritised, then shunted to roughly the side of her slightly burgeoning social life – she developed two good friends as 1913 began to spring into life, Rebecca Fulton and Jim Holt, both in her year, though inevitably an academic year younger than she. Although her parents, especially Richard, were deeply uneasy about her spending so much time with a boy at the mere age of 12, Rosemary, Rebecca and Jim, with particular help from Jim’s parents, a local physics teacher and childminder father and mother respectively, a highly liberal couple, especially for 1913 – Jim’s elder brother Stanley Holt was the Labour MP for Oxford Central between 1906 and 1914. However, her grades began to suffer again as Easter developed into early summer, and by the time the last week of June had arrived, they were worse than they had been under her previous slump. After a long debate held in person between Rosemary’s headmaster, Evelyn, and the temporarily returned Richard, they rejected the prospect of returning her to her original age group, but eventually selected another option, on the last day of June, that had been inspired by a burgeoning desire of Richard’s for yet another, though this time less significant a departure, career change.
As Richard had become more and more familiar with the people, traders and politics of continental Western Europe over the past year since the Titanic disaster, he had become more and more convinced of the need for patriotic display of territorial English pride, to ward off the highly suspect aims of the counter-imperialists. Often, when he used the aforementioned phrase, many observers struggled or indeed failed entirely to hear its pluralisation: he insisted, however, that he had always indeed pluralised it; conceding later, after WWI had broken out in earnest, that perhaps he had subconsciously been envisioning one particular antagonist whenever he spoke of the dangers of foreign European powers’ uppittiness. All the same, Richard, as 1913 had developed, found himself more and more attracted beyond the commercial tourism and camaraderie of the Merchant Navy, towards its far more obviously patriotic Royal equivalent. “Imagine that,” he told several friends and colleagues over February and March 1913, and finally breathed in fervent apology to Evelyn on the night of April 1st, “instead of making money and flexing muscles to show your hidden enemy who and how mighty are the English, to demonstrate that same might by force against enemies who break cover and run at England with their guns and sharpened battleaxes! How much more a patriotic act can there be, than to defend our Green and Pleasant Land – he audibly capitalised the non-conjunctions of Blake’s phrase every time he spoke it – against those who would destroy it and all its glory, all its majesty – in the name of His Majesty, the King!” This passion of his grew more and more fervent as April turned into May; by the time May had reached its midpoint, he had begun again the frenetic and excited research he had conducted into the Merchant Navy, now focused on the Royal Navy. All throughout May and June he made contacts, and procured an interview in Liverpool on June 26th, 1913, which went particularly well, and which was confirmed as having done so by a phone call he received on the evening of June 29th, telling him to return the call by the end of the working day of July 1st, if he still desired a position as a Royal Navy navigator. On the evening of June 30th, after the meeting with Rosemary’s headmaster, Richard and Evelyn returned home to Oxford and put their mammoth proposal to Rosemary and Sebastian: Richard to join the Royal Navy based in Liverpool, Evelyn to run the butcher business from their Liverpool outlet; Rosemary to enrol at the same advanced level at the more education-intensive and private boarding school in North Liverpool, the 1386-established Bellgrove Academy for Girls? Rosemary asked to discuss it with her friends, and was begrudgingly given, at least nominally, the following day to do so: when Evelyn collected her from school at 3.21pm, she expressed her continuing ambivalence, the same feeling experienced by Becky and Jim when she informed them. Eventually, however, the family came at around 4pm to a slightly uneasy coalition, and at 4.32pm Richard called the Royal Navy in Liverpool and accepted the position. At 9.18am the following day, through Rosemary’s headmaster, her position at the boarding school was also accepted. After making all the necessary arrangements, the family upped sticks and moved en masse from western Oxford to south-western Liverpool, on August 16th, 1913. Rosemary and Sebastian enrolled at new schools on September 12th and 4th respectively. Sebastian’s was located just 900 yards north-east of the Forrests’ new home, and Rosemary’s was three point eight miles due north, though compulsorily boarding, which meant that Rosemary slept there during the week and at home during most weekends, at least initially. More suited to the pace and environment, she made a decent circle of half a dozen or so friends fairly quickly, and spent only one weekend at home between Hallowe’en and the Christmas holidays of 1913, after having spent four of the first six of the term at home. By the time she arrived back for Christmas in Liverpool on December 20th, 1913, the morning after term had ended, she was exuberant and high-achieving again, having found a particular interest in nature and an aptitude for biology, stimulated in no small part by the abundant plant and occasional wildlife of the boarding school complex. Her particular friends were Felicity “Fliss” Morgan, who she described to Sebastian and her parents and by telephone and letter to Jenn, Jess, William and Jane as her best friend, and Melanie Lipton, who she described most prominently as her “crazy friend”, though always with a big grin on her face. That Christmas, the last peaceful one for four years, as 1913 melted seamlessly into 1914, she talked about her half-dozen friends repeatedly, and the two emphasised above were emphasised more strongly and more often than all of the others, good friends though they were, put together.
Back in Oxford, William had felt a great increase in freedom now that his parents were not only back together, but also a long distance away and constantly occupied with work, life and family. He missed Sebastian and especially Rosemary (as they – especially Rosemary – missed him), but, in the autumn and late winter of 1913, both his work quality and his social life rapidly improved. During the period September – December 1913, he made several new friends both inside and outside work, and slept with a couple of men into the bargain – one known for less than two days, the other who remained a vague acquaintance thereafter. He was invited to the company Christmas party on December 19th, 1913, which is where one of his (platonic) contacts, having taken particular note of the high quality of his organisational ideas over the past three months, offered to recommend him for one of the vacancies opening up as a lorry driver and schedule co-ordinator at an all-forms-of-stationery firm in Banbury. He agreed, and went for a double interview on January 8th, 1914. On January 12th, he was informed that he had been turned down, for the time being, for the co-ordinator’s job, but that he was accepted as a lorry-driver if he still wished, with a view to possible interdepartmental – or otherwise - promotion within the company. He accepted it, and, on January 18th, found an apartment in Banbury, considerably bigger than the one he had had in Oxford, and with two flatmates as opposed to alone. He moved in there on January 22nd, three days after signing the lease, and began his lorry-driving position on January 25th. His organisational ideas impressed his employers so much, over the next three weeks, that come February 14th he was offered and accepted the chance to go on less frequent and more local driving runs for slightly elevated pay, the employers’ motive being largely that he would be a good influence to have in the office, and to have there as often as possible. That night, he celebrated by buying three colleagues, two of whom were friends, and his two flatmates, 28-year-old postman David Jennings and 25-year-old hairdresser Catherine Simpson, several drinks, and them all buying them for him in return. After at one point during the evening snogging first Catherine and then David, he ended up in a lengthy conversation with 27-year-old paramedic Edward Libby, there celebrating his birthday: the evening culminated with the two going back to Libby’s house and having sex. After several similar encounters, by the end of April 1914 each was comfortably the other’s boyfriend. By a strange coincidence, the night of March 2nd, 1914, one of the nights William and Edward had sex (they didn’t define it as “making love” until April the twenty-seventh), was also the night of the first time, in their dormitory and watched by two giggling onlookers, that Rosemary first kissed Melanie Lipton, cracking a joke about the latter’s surname shortly afterwards, and despite the giggling being done by Francine Shepherd and Sarah McCallister, and to an extent even by Rosemary and Melanie themselves (Fliss wasn’t in yet, and neither was the relative outsider of the dorm, Jenny Ellis), Rosemary sensed that the kiss was not the entirely silly affair the other two thought it was, and that thought brought forth another one the first thought had implied – Rosemary didn’t think Melanie thought it was wholly silly, either.
Which brings us to June 28th, 1914.
The short version is: shit happens.
The long version will be brought to you after the narrator has had a stiff drink and feels appropriately capable.
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