You’re becoming quite a hero in your absence, and I can always command a large and attentive audience by spinning yarns about ‘The other day my brother, who is at the front etc.’ Hope is here now, and the Captain was home for a few days–I suppose you saw that he is now a Major? Why couldn’t you manage to get a few days off? You would at any rate have a change of clothes and diet if you did. Last week we went to the Messiah with Carrie Tubb80 as soprano–she can sing, but she’s as ugly as the day is long. The contralto, altho she hadn’t much of a voice, was an improvement in that way–really quite a magnificent creature. Rather like the woman whom we met in France going about with the Katinarsky’s. I wondered if it was the same, but I suppose not, as the other would be younger. Of course Handel is not your ideal or mine as a composer: but it is always fair to remember that he wrote in the days of spinets and harpsichords, before anyone had discovered that there could be any point in music beyond a sort of abstract prettiness. Of course the inappropriateness of his tunes is appalling–as for instance where he makes the chorus repeat some twenty times that they have all gone astray like sheep in the same tone of cheerful placidity that they’d use for saying it was a fine evening.
Yes: the Kirk arrangement is absolutely it. The war is mainly interesting to him as illustrating some remark he made to ‘Mr. Dods’ fifty years ago. The only trouble about Bookham is our dear Mrs. Crutwell. I don’t know if it was the same in your time, but she has lately developed a mania for ‘seeing young people enjoying themselves’–and you know what that means. Write some time.
Yours, Jack
P.S. Did you ever get the letter I wrote from Larne?
1 William Eyre Hamilton Quennel (1898-?) entered School House the same term as Jack, and left Malvern in 1916. From there he went to Sandhurst, and in 1917 was gazetted into the 7th Dragoon Guards. He was promoted to lieutenant the same year. After the war he trained to be a doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. During World War II he served as medical officer in the Essex Yeomanry
2 ‘The good matron’ was Miss Backhurst, of whom Warnie wrote: ‘She was better known and abominated by many generations of School House boys under her usual appellation of “The Old Bitch”. She was a weak, spiteful, fussy, prying old woman, absurdly sensitive on the point of dignity, and like so many stupid women, always seeing ridicule where none was intended’ (LP IV: 131).
3 Sir Arnold Lunn, The Harrovians (1913).
4 James Craig, first Viscount Craigavon (1871-1940), statesman. He was born in Belfast and was the MP for East Down 1906-18; MP for Mid-Down 1918-21; parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Pensions 1919-20 and to the Admiralty 1920-1. He was chief secretary to Sir Edward Carson in opposing home rule, and was active in organizing means of resistance in Ulster. He was the first prime minister of Northern Ireland 1921-40. Captain Craig, as he was in 1914, was a very popular figure in the North of Ireland, and his house was about a hundred yards from Little Lea.
5 H.M.A. Guerber, Myths of the Norsemen from the Eddas and Sagas (1908).
6 Gerard Parker (1896-?) was in School House 1910-14, and was school prefect. After leaving Malvern he went to Sandhurst, passing from there in 1915 into the Devon Regiment. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1917 and during the war he was mentioned in despatches. He made captain in 1926, and retired in 1931.
7 Canon James had been succeeded as headmaster by Frank Sansome Preston (1875-1970) who had been educated at Marlborough College and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was an assistant master at Marlborough 1899-1914, and headmaster of Malvern 1914-37.
8 In SBJ VII Lewis said that while ‘Smewgy’ was the major blessing of Malvern, the other ‘undisguised blessing of the Coll was “the Gurney”, the school library; not because it was a library, but because it was a sanctuary As the negro used to become free on touching English soil, so the meanest boy was “unfaggable” once he was inside the Gurney.’
9 Robert Bridges (1844-1930), Poet Laureate from 1913. His poetry appeared in a single volume in 1912, and this was probably what Lewis was reading.
10 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847).
11 Annie Strahan was the cook-housekeeper at Little Lea, 1911-17.
12 The tragedy, Norse in subject and Greek in form, which Lewis was writing.
13 The Greeves’s home in Circular Road was directly across from Little Lea.
14 Joel 1:4.
15 Arthur Christopher Benson, The Upton Letters (1905).
16 The Times (2 June 1914), p. 9.
17 Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934), composer, who rose to international fame about 1900 through his choral and orchestral music. He was living in Worcester at this time.
18 John Henry Newman, Verses on Various Occasions (1868).
19 Newman’s Dream of Gerontius depicts the journey of the soul to God at the hour of death. In 1900 it was set to music by Elgar, who regarded the work as his masterpiece. Lewis came to like the Dream very much in later life and in a discussion of Purgatory in chapter 20 of Letters to Malcolm (1964) he said ‘the right view returns magnificently in Newman’s Dream.
20 Cedric Edwin Hamley (1899-1997) was an exact contemporary of Jack Lewis in School House, having arrived in the third term of 1913. He left in 1915 and served in the war with the London Rifle Brigade. He was afterwards a 2nd lieutenant in the RAF, and a captain in the 3rd London Fusiliers from 1922-28. He worked in the family business, C. Hamley Ltd. in London.
21 It is reproduced in LP IV: 198-200.
22 William Shakespeare, As You Like It (1623).
23 Oliver Goldsmith, The