The Later Years

Abstract

The title Abinger Harvest given by E. M. Forster to a number of pieces he collected in 1936 was a gesture to the village near Dorking where he lived for twenty years with his mother in a house built by his father called West Hackhurst. He was deeply attached to this house, as he had been to Rook’s Nest at Stevenage, the original of ‘Howards End’; and when his mother died in 1945 he was outraged (I suspect, with a characteristic stifling of reasonableness by emotion) that the ground lease was not renewed. He was left uprooted. Not long afterwards it happened that he was elected an Honorary Fellow of King’s, his old Cambridge college; and I well remember the meeting of the College Council at which George Rylands proposed that he should be invited to reside, a privilege not normally accorded to Honorary Fellows. Amid general approval there were some qualms about precedent: should we go so far as to allow him to sleep in College? At this point I recollected that my wife and I would have two small rooms to let in a house, 3 Trumpington Street, a little beyond Addenbrooke’s Hospital (it is now the University Dental Clinic), which we had recently taken on lease. It was agreed that we should offer him these rooms. He thus became our lodger for the next seven years, and a close friend for the remaining twenty-four years of his life; and this, I have to confess, is the only qualification I have for [speaking about him].

‘E. M. Forster: The Later Years.’ Not previously published. A lecture to the English Association at the Alliance Hall, Westminster, 21 October 1972 (Forster papers, King’s College, Cambridge).