Forster also had a fling with a bus driver named Arthur, which ended after Arthur's wife kicked up a stink. Daley regularly entertained Ackerley, Duncan Grant and Forster at the Hammersmith Section House, treating them to bacon and eggs and boxing matches. His relationship with Buckingham was not his first with a policeman: he'd already enjoyed a brief dalliance with Harry Daley, who was, for the Bloomsbury set of the 1920s and 30s, something of a celebrity young tough. A "real" man, bluff, beefy and beautiful, was evidently irresistible to this mole, both as lover and protector. Even at Cambridge, where he discovered real camaraderie and love between men, Lytton Strachey christened him "the Taupe". At Tonbridge Prep School, where the motto was "Perish every laggard, and let us all be men", Forster was, predictably, badly bullied. As a child, he was cast in the role of the "delicate" boy, always wrapped up and fussed over by his mother Lily, and always with half an eye on the farm boys next door.
It's easy to see why Buckingham's vigour and toughness were attractive qualities for Forster. Who else but Forster could end up becoming firm friends with his lover's wife, and godparent to her child? Perhaps this is not so surprising for the writer who valued personal relationships above all else, and for whom the motto "only connect" applied as much to his private life as to his novels. No wife ever failed to interfere with me." The same was true for Forster, but the wife who "interfered" in his life – Buckingham's wife, May – also became his friend and nursemaid. the Ideal Friend could have a girl or wife if he wished, so long as she did not interfere with me. In his memoir My Father and Myself, Forster's great friend JR Ackerley wrote that the problem of the girlfriend was "all too liable to be found in the lives of normal boys … Since women could not be excluded they had to be admitted. But this was a relationship in which there were three people. They shared holidays, friends, interests, and – on many weekends – a domestic and sexual life in Forster's Brunswick Square flat. Buckingham was 28, Forster 51, when the two met.
F or 40 years, EM Forster and the policeman Bob Buckingham were in a loving relationship.
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