No . 135 The Trusty Servant sincerely of ‘ the endless lovingness of his character and ways , and the childish simplicity of his dutifulness .’
But the archive confirms that he was indeed what we should now call a normal teenager . At his preparatory school – which he unpriggishly called ‘ this beastly place ’ – he was fined ten shillings for ‘ wilfully cutting a table-cloth ’. He wrote silly ( and , for someone then only twelve , rather skilled ) poems about his teachers , of which one survives . It begins :
Old Billy ’ s cold is getting worse , And all the money in his purse On lozenges he ’ s spent .
He was not beyond the sin of pride , founding an elite society for the top years called the Aristocracy , coining rude names for the bad food they were served . His brother Arthur described him as ‘ not by any means a retiring little secluded scholar . He was quick-tempered , entirely fearless , combative , distinctly law-breaking . ... He was full of liveliness and wit , and was rather a good-humoured autocrat in the nursery circle , impulsively affectionate , but severe .’
The aura of saintliness may well have come from his genuine virtues , but at least some of it was a mask he put on for fear of disappointing his father , whose letters give a sense of the heavy demands placed on him even as a boy : ‘ Your fault intellectually is to be rather dreamy , and let the grass grow while you are turning round .’ At Winchester , he was often berated for his dreaminess , but his archive contains some extraordinary products of his imagination .
Martin filled several sketchbooks with his complex , often highly artistic doodles of demons and ( what look like ) Mongol warriors . His talent for calligraphy , combined with his knowledge of medieval history , resulted in some very fine forged documents purporting to be from the time of William of Wykeham granting various outrageous rights to Collegemen .
He was a passionate defender of Winchester ’ s traditions and enraged when some reforming don tried to change them in the slightest way . But he was not in any other sense a conformist . Even at the age of twelve he pestered his father ’ s distinguished guests – including some senior statesmen – to talk to him about politics . At breakfast one morning , he loudly declared himself ‘ a Liberal ’. He had pronounced eccentricities of which he seemed scarcely aware , as when he appeared for a lesson with his shoelaces decked with four tiny Japanese dolls .
He died , aged seventeen , of what was then believed to be viral meningitis (‘ brain fever ’) but may have been the belated effect of an untreated head injury after a fall in College Hall that led to paralysis and aphasia – the inability to move or speak . His parents were able to reach him in time to spend their last days looking over him in what was then called Sick House , with Martin insisting on participating in the Eucharist . His father was convinced that Martin had had a vision of Christ in the moments before he died .
His death , cruelly early , makes it inevitable that the first question about him is the counterfactual one . What marvellous things might he have gone on to do ? Might he , devout and thoughtful as he evidently was , have followed his father into the Church ? Or might he have been swayed to rebellion by the new intellectual currents to which he would have been exposed at Cambridge ? Might he have become , like his uncle , the philosopher Henry Sidgwick , an agnostic ? Or might he – which would , to his father ’ s mind , have been immeasurably worse – have joined his youngest brother Hugh in becoming a Roman Catholic ?
Perhaps his love of history would have made him join his sister Maggie as an archaeologist , excavating Egyptian tombs . Or perhaps his incipient Liberal politics might have turned him into a reforming social activist , like his other sister Nellie . Or perhaps , given his scholarly temperament , he would have become a schoolmaster and academic , like his brother Arthur . Or , given his love of fiction – he especially loved Walter Scott ’ s Waverley books – he would have become a novelist , like his brother Fred . Might he have bucked the family trend by marrying ? None of his siblings did , and a recent monograph about the Benson family is pointedly titled A Very Queer Family Indeed .
An epigram , attributed to the Scottish historian D . W . Brogan , has it that England is the only country in the world where being a schoolboy is an end in itself . Martin Benson made the most of his time as a schoolboy . His reading , his pranks , his doodles – they were not done in anticipation of some future role in which they might be useful . He exhibited an unnerving capacity for full immersion in his reigning obsession , whatever it was : now it was Roman coins , now Romantic literature , now gazing at the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer , now riding across the hilltops of Cornwall .
Perhaps , then , there is another way of thinking of Martin Benson ’ s life , not as the truncated life of a boy who never became a man , but as a boy who lived fully and richly as a boy . His life will have its meaning in what it actually was , not what anyone had planned for it to be .
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