J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. Humphrey Carpenter

New Year did not begin well. Ronald and Hilary were confined to bed with measles followed by whooping-cough, and in Hilary’s case by pneumonia. The additional strain of nursing them proved too much for their mother, and as she feared it proved ‘impossible to go on’. By April 1904 she was in hospital, and her condition was diagnosed as diabetes.

      The Oliver Road house was closed, the scant furniture was stored, and the boys were sent away to relatives, Hilary to his Suffield grandparents and Ronald to Hove to stay with the family of Edwin Neave, the sandy-haired insurance clerk who was now married to his Aunt Jane. Insulin treatment was not yet available for diabetic patients, and there was much anxiety over Mabel’s condition, but by the summer she had recovered sufficiently to be discharged from hospital. Clearly she must undergo a long and careful convalescence. A plan was proposed by Father Francis Morgan. At Rednal, a Worcestershire hamlet a few miles beyond the Birmingham boundary, Cardinal Newman had built a modest country house which served as a retreat for the Oratory clergy. On the edge of its grounds stood a little cottage occupied by the local postman, whose wife could let them have a bedroom and sitting-room, and could cook for them. It would be an ideal setting for recuperation, and all three of them would benefit from the renewed contact with country air. So, late in June 1904, the boys rejoined their mother and they all went to Rednal for the summer.

      It was as if they had come back to Sarehole. The cottage lay on the corner of a quiet country lane, and behind it were the wooded grounds of the Oratory House with the little cemetery adjoining the chapel where the Oratory fathers and Newman himself were buried. The boys had the freedom of these grounds, and further afield they could roam the steep paths that led through the trees to the high Lickey Hill. Mrs Till the postman’s wife gave them good meals, and a month later Mabel was writing on a postcard to her mother-in-law: ‘Boys look ridiculously well compared to the weak white ghosts that met me on train 4 weeks ago!!! Hilary has got tweed suit and his first Etons today! and looks immense. –We’ve had perfect weather. Boys will write first wet day but what with Bilberry-gathering – Tea in Hay – Kite-flying with Fr Francis – sketching – Tree Climbing – they’ve never enjoyed a holiday so much.’

      Father Francis paid them many visits. He kept a dog at Rednal named ‘Lord Roberts’, and he used to sit on the ivy-covered verandah of the Oratory House smoking a large cherrywood pipe; ‘the more remarkable’, Ronald recalled, ‘since he never smoked except there. Possibly my own later addiction to the Pipe derives from this.’ When Father Francis was not in residence and there was no other priest staying at Rednal, Mabel and the boys would drive to mass in Bromsgrove sharing a hired carriage with Mr and Mrs Church, the gardener and caretaker for the Oratory fathers. It was an idyllic existence.

      Too soon September brought the school term, and Ronald, now fit and well, had to return to King Edward’s. But his mother could not yet bring herself to leave the cottage where they had been so happy, and go back to the smoke and dirt of Birmingham. So for the time being Ronald had to rise early and walk more than a mile to the station to catch a train to school. It was growing dark by the time he came home, and Hilary sometimes met him with a lamp.

      Unnoticed by her sons, Mabel’s condition began to deteriorate again. At the beginning of November she collapsed in a way that seemed to them sudden and terrifying. She sank into a diabetic coma, and six days later, on 14 November, with Father Francis and her sister May Incledon at her bedside in the cottage, she died.

1 Barry’s building was demolished after the school had moved to new premises in the nineteen-thirties.

       CHAPTER III ‘PRIVATE LANG.’ – AND EDITH

      ‘My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.’

      Ronald Tolkien wrote this nine years after his mother’s death. It is some indication of the way in which he associated her with his membership of the Catholic Church. Indeed it might be said that after she died his religion took the place in his affections that she had previously occupied. The consolation that it provided was emotional as well as spiritual. Perhaps her death also had a cementing effect on his study of languages. It was she, after all, who had been his first teacher and who had encouraged him to take an interest in words. Now that she was gone he would pursue that path relentlessly. And certainly the loss of his mother had a profound effect on his personality. It made him into a pessimist.

      Or rather, it made him into two people. He was by nature a cheerful almost irrepressible person with a great zest for life. He loved good talk and physical activity. He had a deep sense of humour and a great capacity for making friends. But from now onwards there was to be a second side, more private but predominant in his diaries and letters. This side of him was capable of bouts of profound despair. More precisely, and more closely related to his mother’s death, when he was in this mood he had a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won for ever.

      Mabel Tolkien was buried in the Catholic churchyard at Bromsgrove. Over her grave Father Francis Morgan placed a stone cross of the same design as that used for each of the Oratory clergy in their Rednal cemetery. In her will Mabel had appointed him to be guardian of her two sons, and it proved a wise choice, for he displayed unfailing generosity and affection to them. His generosity took a practical form, for he had a private income from his family’s sherry business, and since as an Oratorian he was not obliged to surrender his property to the community he could use his money for his own purposes. Mabel had left only eight hundred pounds of invested capital with which to support the boys, but Father Francis quietly augmented this from his own pocket, and ensured that Ronald and Hilary did not go short of anything essential for their well-being.

      Immediately after their mother’s death he had to find somewhere for them to live: a tricky problem, for while ideally they should be housed by their own relatives there was a danger that the Suffield and Tolkien aunts and uncles might try to snatch them from the grasp of the Catholic Church. Already there had been some talk of contesting Mabel’s will and of sending the boys to a Protestant boarding-school. There was however one relative, an aunt by marriage, who had no particular religious views and had a room to let. She lived in Birmingham near the Oratory, and Father Francis decided that her house would be as good a home as any for the moment. So a few weeks after their mother’s death Ronald and Hilary (now aged thirteen and eleven) moved into their aunt’s top-floor bedroom.

      Her name was Beatrice Suffield. She lived in a dark house in Stirling Road, a long side-street in the district of Edgbaston. The boys had a large room to themselves, and Hilary was happy leaning out of the window and throwing stones at cats below. But Ronald, still numb from the shock of his mother’s death, hated the view of almost unbroken rooftops with the factory chimneys beyond. The green countryside was just visible in the distance, but it now belonged to a remote past that could not be regained. He was trapped in the city. His mother’s death had severed him from the open air, from Lickey Hill where he had gathered bilberries, and from the Rednal cottage where they had been so happy. And because it was the loss of his mother that had taken him away from all these things, he came to associate them with her. His feelings towards the rural landscape, already sharp from the earlier severance that had taken him from Sarehole, now became emotionally charged with personal bereavement. This love for the memory of the countryside of his youth was later to become a central part of his writing, and it was intimately bound up with his love for the memory of his mother.

      Aunt Beatrice gave him and his brother board and lodging, but little more. She had been widowed not long before, and she was childless and poorly off. Sadly, she was also deficient in affection, and she showed little understanding of the boys’ state of mind. One day Ronald came into her kitchen, saw a pile of ashes in the grate, and discovered that she had burnt all his mother’s personal papers and letters. She had never considered that he might wish to keep them.

      Fortunately the Oratory