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to Limpsfield, Edward and Constance Garnett followed, to build a house nearby at The Cearne, Crockham Hill. Their only child, Bunny, would have a playmate his own age, the three-year-old Noel, and Constance could translate her Russian novels in the peace of the country. Others were drawn to this nucleus of the Oliviers and Garnetts: political exiles from Russia like the Kropotkins and Stepniaks; Fabians like the Peases and Hobsons; literary visitors like Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, or D.H. Lawrence. Limpsfield was different from both the planned utopian community of Welwyn Garden City and the “beer and cricket” flavour of villages then being colonised by middle-class intellectuals. “There was no church within two miles,” recalled Bunny Garnett, “no rookery, no immemorial elms, no ancient red brick or mellowed ashlar walls, no water, no fertile soil. Instead there was a great horizon, solitude, and the encompassing forest.” 13 Leading such unbounded lives, the children there grew up contemptuous of established society. Rupert admired this freedom of spirit in the Olivier sisters, especially Noel, and tried to emulate it. But his own upbringing and temperament were far more constricted. In Neo-paganism, as it came to be called, there would always be an uneasy coexistence between the pastoral anarchy of Limpsfield and the pastoral reaction of Belloc; and between the new Bedales and the old Rugby.
    When the Neo-pagans came together at Cambridge in 1908, they had no thought of any formal manifesto to found their group. They were friends of Rupert, and friends of each other, who had a common style of youthful unconventionality and overlapping links to Bedales, Fabianism, Cambridge, and the Simple Life. The central group would include Rupert, Justin Brooke, Jacques Raverat, Gwen and Frances Darwin, Ka Cox, and the Olivier sisters. Fringe members included Bunny Garnett, Geoffrey Keynes, Ethel, Sybil, and David Pye, Dudley Ward, Godwin Baynes, and Ferenc Békássy.
    Apart from liking each other, they had various dislikes in common. They agreed that the social conventions of the previous century neededto be consciously trampled on. For some members of the group – Rupert in particular – this meant judiciously snubbing their parents. There were other negative definitions. Being Neo-pagan was something that Young Fabians did when they were not doing politics, or that the children of Fabians did as a way of not following in their parents’ footsteps. They were keeping alive the ideals of H.G. Wells’s
A Modern Utopia
, after the purging of its author and his ideas from the Fabian Society. They were the friends to whom Rupert turned when he wanted to keep James Strachey and the other Apostles at a distance, and in whom Justin Brooke found refuge from his father and Brooke Bond tea. Neo-paganism was, finally, the antidote to the creed of “John Rump,” a retired public school housemaster who was the butt of one of Rupert’s satirical poems. Rump ascends to heaven, with top hat and umbrella, and tells God that what
he
believes in is:
    Safety, regulations, paving-stones,
    Street-lamps, police, and bijou-residences
    Semi-detached. I stand for Sanity,
    Comfort, Content, Prosperity, top-hats,
    Alcohol, collars, meat. 14
    When Beatrice Webb called Amber Reeves “a dreadful little pagan” she had in mind the new feminism of cigarette-smoking and careers, free thought and free love. Neo-paganism was not nearly so radical or aggressive. It was, rather, the paganism of Diana and Juno: of free-thinking but chaste young women, who would live as comrades with both sexes, before entering a devoted and domestic marriage. They thought of themselves as an emancipated new generation, and flouted convention by consorting with young men unchaperoned. But they drew a sharp line at sexual freedom; there, they were as much the “gatekeepers” as their mothers before them. Paradoxically, it