T. H. White writes The Once and Future King at Doolistown

Some refusals look from the outside like flight. A man steps off the train, takes a farmhouse in a neutral country, and is taken by his contemporaries for a deserter of the age. Yet there are refusals that are also a setting-to-work, where the act of aside from one war becomes the long labour of writing against war itself. The hinge is not the announcement; it is the morning after, when the man sits down at the kitchen table and decides what the next seven years are for.

THE SCHOOLMASTER AT THIRTY-THREE

Terence Hanbury White was born at Bombay on 29 May 1906, the son of Garrick Hanbury White of the Indian Civil Service police and Constance Aston, a marriage that produced one child and a great deal of unhappiness. Cheltenham College he later set down as the senior English unhappy-public-school experience of his generation; Queens' College Cambridge gave him a First in English in 1928 and an attachment to L. J. Potts that would last him the rest of his life. By 1936 he was head of English at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, and writing on the side: a fishing book, a hunting book, a falconry apprenticeship called The Goshawk that he could not yet bring himself to publish. In 1938 he had brought out The Sword in the Stone, a comic prelude in which a small boy called Wart is turned by his tutor Merlyn into a fish, a hawk, an ant, a badger, on the principle that the cure for the world's wickedness was, as Merlyn would later put it, to learn something. The book sold. It was a Book Society choice. The reviews used the word charming. He had begun the second volume, The Witch in the Wood, in the summer of 1938, and by the late summer of 1939 he was on its third draft, in a rented cottage at Stowe Ridings, watching the European weather darken through the windows.

THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER

The morning broke clear over Meath. He had crossed already, in March, from Stowe Ridings to Ireland: first to Sheskin in Mayo, then in April to a labourer's farmhouse at Doolistown outside Trim, fifteen miles north of Dublin, rented from the McDonagh family at a pound a week. The kitchen had a flagged floor, a turf range, a deal table on which the third draft of The Witch in the Wood lay in a stack weighted with a stone. The Irish Independent came up the lane with the milk. On the table that morning of 1 September 1939 the headline ran black above the fold: the Wehrmacht had crossed into Poland in the small hours. He read it twice. He drank his tea. He went out to feed the dogs.

The country round about was the medieval-pastoral landscape that the Arthurian sequence required of him, drumlin and hawthorn and the slow Boyne running east through Trim and the ruined castle of de Lacy, the same country into which Henry II had ridden in 1171 to receive the submission of the Irish kings. Here the twelfth century lay nearer the surface than the twentieth. Here the war would be, as he was already writing in his journal, not so much an interruption as a kind of weather, the background conditions against which the real work proceeded.

THE HINGE

He came back into the kitchen and sat down. The decision had been made overnight, in the way real decisions are made, below the level of argument; what remained was to write it out in a letter to Potts and a letter to David Garnett and a third letter, the hardest, to his publisher Collins. He was not a pacifist by political conviction. He had no programme. He had only the plain animal knowledge that he could not kill a man and would not be made to learn. He would register, when registration came, as a conscientious objector. He would stay in Ireland. He would finish the four volumes.

And the four volumes, he saw now, were not the four volumes he had been writing. The Sword in the Stone was a children's book about a boy and a wizard. The Witch in the Wood, in its third draft, was a Celtic farce. But the thing whose shape he had begun to glimpse through them, the thing the war had clarified the way a hard frost clarifies a landscape, was a single long book about the impossible political question at the centre of the Malory: how an idealistic king might rule without violence, and why the attempt destroys him. The central theme of the Morte d'Arthur, he would write to Potts that winter, is to find an antidote to war. Arthur's project had failed. Hitler's was succeeding. The question between them was the only question worth a writer's seven years.

He set down the Independent. He took up a fresh sheet. He began to rewrite the second volume from the first page, slower now, with the Malory open at his elbow and the Welsh sources from the Dublin libraries stacked behind. The hare he had been hunting that summer had left a print in the mud by the door. He noticed it, and noted it, and went on.

THE SEVEN YEARS

He stayed at Doolistown until September 1946. He flew a goshawk and then a peregrine. He bred red setters. He fished the Boyne for trout and the Blackwater for salmon. He learned, badly and then well, to course a hare. He drank, sometimes alarmingly. He kept the journal that would become The Godstone and the Blackymor. He revised The Witch in the Wood into the book that the 1958 collected edition would retitle The Queen of Air and Darkness, a darker book than the first draft, the comedy now serving a study in the inheritance of cruelty through the house of Orkney. He wrote The Ill-Made Knight, the Lancelot book, in 1940, and finished the fourth volume The Candle in the Wind by July 1941. Collins, citing the wartime paper shortage, held them. He wrote a fifth book, The Book of Merlyn, in which the old animals of the first volume return to debate with the dying king the nature of human aggression; Collins would not take it either. He bicycled into Dublin for the libraries and out again the same day. He grew his beard. He was, by his own account in a letter of 1942, happier than I have ever been or am ever likely to be again.

THE NEUTRAL COUNTRY

Around him, Ireland kept its Emergency. The lights stayed on in Trim while London burned. German and British airmen came down in the bogs and were interned alike at the Curragh. De Valera held the line of neutrality through every pressure Churchill could bring. White, who had no political affection for de Valera and a strong one for England, accepted the protection of the policy without quite endorsing it. He sent money home. He wrote to friends in London with a guilt that never quite resolved into the wish to be there. When the news of the camps came through in 1945 he sat for a long time at the deal table and then wrote in his journal that the war had been, after all, a necessary war, and I was wrong about my own part in it, though right about the book. The distinction held him. He kept it.

THE LONG AFTERMATH

He returned to England in 1946, then to Alderney in the Channel Islands, where he lived out the rest of his life with a red setter called Brownie and an increasingly solitary regimen of work and drink. Collins published the assembled The Once and Future King in November 1958. Lerner and Loewe opened Camelot at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway on 3 December 1960, with Richard Burton as Arthur and Julie Andrews as Guenevere. Disney's The Sword in the Stone opened on 25 December 1963. White himself died of a coronary on a cruise ship in the Aegean off Piraeus on 17 January 1964, fifty-seven years old, and was buried in the Athens First Cemetery. Eleven months earlier, John Kennedy had been killed in Dallas, and Jacqueline Kennedy had given Theodore White of Life the line about her husband's favourite record, the cast album of Camelot, and the couplet don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot. The American political mythology of the Kennedy White House dates from that interview. The line traces back through Lerner, through White, through Malory, to a question first asked at Doolistown across a kitchen table on the first morning of the war.

Some refusals are settings-to-work. The man who stood aside in September 1939 did so not from cowardice and not from creed but because he had glimpsed, on the kitchen table beside the headline, the book he was being asked to write instead. He finished it. The book outlived him, and the war, and the empire that had sent his father to Bombay, and stands now as the senior twentieth-century English retelling of the matter of Britain. At Doolistown the farmhouse is still there, lime-washed, the lane running down past it toward the Boyne; in the grass by the door, in the right slant of evening light, a man with a good eye for tracks can still pick out the print of a hare.