Rupert Brooke is famous for writing ‘The Soldier’ – possibly the best-known twentieth-century sonnet – and for dying at sea on St George’s Day 1915, as his infantry division sailed for Gallipoli. He is not a major poet, and if Parkleys had been built a decade later I doubt a court would have been named for him. By the mid-1960s the patriotic idealism of Brooke’s generation might have been thought naive, but ten years earlier, when Parkleys was built on a former nursery garden, enough of its romance survived to set Brooke alongside Milton and Shelley.
‘Over the smooth green lawns of the Edwardian era’, says the Headmaster in Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On, ‘the sun seemed always to shine, like one’s last summer term at school that memory has turned all to gold.’ This is Rupert Brooke’s England, and his most famous poem is an elegy to it:
If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
In the event, the foreign field was on the Greek island of Skyros, imbued by his remains, Brooke imagined, with flowers, sunshine, laughter, and gentleness. But perhaps he would also have been pleased to think that, forty years on, some corner of an English field fitting that description would become Brooke Court.