The Great Lover by Jill Dawson

It is forty years since my boyfriend (now husband) first took me to Grantchester Meadows, two miles along the river from Cambridge. We have been back many times, to walk along the river bank, picnic and take tea in the Orchard tea gardens, relaxing in old-fashioned deckchairs just as Rupert Brooke and his literary friends did before the Great War. The wide Cambridge skyline is unaltered; the river meanders on, green and lush with weeds and all is drenched in birdsong.
My mother passed on a leather-bound volume of Rupert Brooke’s poems, some of which I read to her when she, like Brooke, was dying of septicaemia years ago. I was familiar with his verse from school, even more familiar with sepia photographs of his handsome face but not too fond of his character, as revealed in letters and memoirs. Jill Dawson’s novel reinforces this; he is capricious, confused and complicated in his relationships with friends and lovers. In contrast, Nell Golightly, the fictitious maid with whom Brooke has a liaison, is grounded in hard work and a sense of duty to provide for her family despite her tender years. Although younger and of a lower class she is a much stronger character than Brooke and infinitely more attractive to the reader than his academic, privileged friends.
I love the familiar descriptions of the Old Vicarage and the Orchard at Grantchester: Byron’s Pool and lilac bursting through the poet's bedroom window. Similarly those of Tahiti, where we spent some time last year, abundant with tropical fish and fragrant tiare flowers. Brooke’s mistress, Taatamata, who bore him a daughter, is constant like Nell in her affection for the handsome poet, yet similarly abandoned when he returns to England.
I started this novel on a train to Cambridge yesterday on the way to meet my daughter and continued it on the train home to London. I finished it this afternoon, sitting in the garden; a gentle breeze, to quote Brooke was ‘sobbing’ through the trees. Time stood still as I was transported back to summer days before the Great War, recalled in those sepia photographs of long ago.
‘Was my father a good man?’ the poet’s daughter asks the elderly retired housemaid she contacts by letter years later.
The reader must decide. I would love to say he was but I am unsure. Another reading of the novel will help me make up my mind.