1922

1922

At this time Lewis was sharing a house with Mrs Moore and her daughter, Maureen, in 28 Warneford Road, two miles from the centre of Oxford. Maureen was a day pupil in Headington School. In 1920 Lewis had taken a First Class Degree in Classical Moderations—Greek and Latin Classical writers. Now he was preparing for his examination (8–14 June) in Literae Humaniores or ‘Greats’—Greek and Latin historians and philosophers. He was hoping to find a Fellowship in one of the Oxford colleges, and for this he would have a better chance with another First. ‘D’ was Mrs Moore.

Saturday 1 April: I walked to Iffley in the morning and called in at the Askins. The Doc has foolishly knocked himself up by walking too far and wd. not come to Headington in the afternoon. He talked about Atlantis, on which there is apparently a plentiful philosophical literature: nobody seems to realise that a Platonic myth is fiction, not legend, and therefore no base for speculation. We also spoke of the Old Testament and anthropology: ridiculous remarks by Mary. A fine day.

Went to the show at Headington School after tea . . . They did a scene from Nicholas Nickelby wh. was not badly acted and for a moment made me remember the Wynyard terrors—a high, but subjective tribute to amateurs. They also did Arnold’s Tristram (v. badly) and Yeats’ Land of Heart’s Desire: even school girl acting could not quite spoil its wonderful beauty.

Sunday 2 April: A beautiful spring day. D busy cutting oranges for marmalade. I sat in my own bedroom by an open window in bright sunshine and started a poem on ‘Dymer’ in rhyme royal. I walked on Shotover in the afternoon, much disturbed by all the boys and girls out for their Sunday walk. In the evening we played bridge—very dull hands all round, and Maureen talking all the time. I read Colonel Repington’s book aloud, which we are enjoying very much. Late getting to bed. Still very worried by the non-arrival of D’s pass book.

Monday 3 April: Got a letter from home in the morning . . . My father seems in good form. It snowed hard all day: in the afternoon I had good fun shovelling and trying to get the roof clear, as it was sending down sudden drifts in front of the hall door, with a noise like thunder. I worked at Roman history notes all the morning and at Adamson’s chapters on Aristotle after lunch. A rather depressing day: in the evening more history and more Repington. Maureen in wonderful spirits.

Tuesday 4 April: I walked into Oxford and left two poems (‘Misfire’ and the ‘Offa’ one) to be typewritten. Remembering yesterday, I set out in a coat and suffered from heat—the day turning out sunny and beautiful—all the more so for the drifts of snow lying under the hedges etc.

Worked at Adamson before lunch: I am beginning to get the hang of Aristotle’s theory of eidee. Form and matter are almost the same as actuality and potentiality . . . This leads to Soul as the realisation of organic potentialities: the ‘living body’, a great advance on the old Animism of Body plus Ghost, tho’ seemingly fatal to immortality. Can’t see why nous whd. be on a different footing.

A letter came from Arthur today asking me to spend a few days with him in London: wh. wd. be rather pleasant but is not possible. Roman History all afternoon and some in evening, besides Bk. II of the Republic. In bed shortly after 12.

Wednesday 5 April: Started revising Greek History today. At first I found my notes etc. in great confusion, but when that was straightened out I worked with more interest and pleasure than I had expected.

A pretty woman called this morning with the enlargement of Paddy’s photo: it is not ‘finished’ yet and (perhaps for that reason) seems to me to be more lively and interesting than the old one. After lunch I called on Miss Baker to get the details about a performance at Cumnor in which Masefield is to act as Lear: she did not know, and Maureen is to find out from the O’Maleys.

I also got the two poems (typed v. accurately for 1/-) and saw Stead in order to get the address of the London Mercury. He told me with a solemn face and admirable naivety how he had got his accepted. Two or three were sent back by return post, whereupon he went up to London and called on the Editor, saying, ‘Look here Mr Squire, you haven’t taken these poems of mine and I want to know what’s wrong with them!!’ If the story ended there, it would be merely a side light on Stead, but the joke is that Squire said, ‘I’m glad you’ve come to talk it over: that’s just what I want people to do’ and actually accepted what he’d formerly refused. Truly the ways of editors are past finding out!

Stead gave me the proof of his new book, The Sweet Miracle, wh. I took away. So far it seems rather dull. Worked for the rest of the day, except for a nightcap of Repington.

Thursday 6 April: D woke me up with alarming news from Ireland. It appears that ‘Hi’ has called at the bank and that the bank’s letters to D have been returned, once more by the stupidity of the Bristol post office. It is therefore very probable that the Beast has been informed, and the bank’s mention of letters (as opposed to pass book) suggests that D is overdrawn. Of course we have the wind up, since, if the Beast ceases payment it will be very hard to see our way: Maureen’s school, for instance, must go to blazes: our joint incomes will hardly suffice for bare rent and food.

We move today to Red Gables, which Lady Gonner has very kindly lent us during her fortnight’s absence (it only needs a few more such kindnesses to land us in the workhouse!).

A day disturbed with packing, besides mental anxiety, yet I managed to do a fair morning’s work. It was a strange, lurid afternoon, ready to thunder. We reached Red Gables at 6 p.m. by taxi. It is a very charming house with an excellent library, where I found and started Mallock’s New Republic. After supper I had meant to do History Notes but was very tired: so read the 4th Bk. of the Republic instead. Maureen has got tomorrow’s post. D rather done up by the move and the wind up: only Maureen, thro’ stupidity or heroism, remains in excellent spirits . . .

Friday 7 April: Nothing from Ireland by this morning’s post—only my two poems returned by the Mercury. Settled down after breakfast and had done two hours very satisfactory work memorising Gk. History notes up to date, when I was interrupted by the arrival of Joy Whicher and her mother . . .

I went to Warneford Rd. in the hope of letters, but there was no one in the house. I find that Maureen tried again after supper and very foolishly burgled the house from the back: it is to be hoped that Miss Featherstone will not mind. D and I propounded the strongest letter we could to the Bristol P.O. thro’ whose bungling the whole situation has come about. With the absence of news, the wind up continues. D is very worn out with the move and indigestion.

I woke up with a sore throat but it seems to have gone. As I said this afternoon, I wish life and death were not the only alternatives, for I don’t like either: one could imagine a via media . . .

Saturday 8 April: D woke me up this morning coming into my room with the joyful news that the pass book had come: no financial or personal crisis having materialised. I went to town immediately after breakfast for meat: got back shortly before eleven and put in good work on Gk. History till lunch, and after lunch again until tea time . . .

Maureen tells me that while she was in a shop today an unknown undergraduate entered and announced to all and sundry that he had taken his degree—this beats ‘Corsica’ Boswell!

Heard from Dorothy that Miss Featherstone is talking of coming back to Warneford Rd., which is serious news. After supper I read most of the 5th Bk. of the Republic. A beastly headache and feeling generally fagged: D rather better, but not as well as before we left. As an intellectual nightcap have been puzzling over our accounts, which come out to a different figure each time. Not a pleasant day, but thank God for this morning’s news.

(Finished The Everlasting Mercy, in my opinion much the poorest thing of Masefield that I have read yet—nearly all of it could have been composed extempore; but perhaps I was a dull reader today.)

Have just remembered to record that Pasley and ‘Johnnie’ Hamber were married today. It must be one of the horrors of marriage to reflect at such a time how many kind friends know exactly what you are doing.

Sunday 9 April: Today I finished Masefield’s Pompey the Great, with very great pleasure: it has the merit of forcing you to ACT each speech as you go along, it is finely realistic and moving. Next to Dauber and parts of Reynard, the best thing of his I have read. Afterwards I walked on Shotover, getting back before lunch.

I tried very hard to write something today, but it was like drawing blood from a stone. In spite of promising myself not to be influenced by the decision of the Mercury—and I know from what they publish that their canon is wrong—the rejection of my things has made me rather despond . . .

Monday 10 April: A letter from Pasley written on the second day of his honeymoon—the eighth he had written that afternoon. D considers it a curious way of spending such a time, but he sounds pleased.

Put in a very satisfactory morning’s work, going over Roman Hist. (the wars of ad 69, I’m glad to find the Gk. hasn’t put them out of my head) and then Gk. notes up to date. Went out a little before lunch to enjoy the sunshine and drink a bottle of Guinness next door in the ‘White Horse’.

After lunch I copied out the poem beginning ‘The last star of the night’ meaning with it to try the Mercury again, and to send the Mercury’s refusals to the English Review. I accordingly walked into Oxford: a beautiful warm day. Left the poem at the typists and sent off the two others: looking in a copy of the English Review for its address, I was disgusted by the poetry in it—all in the worst modern tradition—and half thought of not sending mine. But I decided I need not be nice, as I shall almost certainly be rejected anyway . . .

Tuesday 11 April: We were all much amused by the arrival of Maureen’s report today, in which she is marked as ‘improving’ in two subjects she doesn’t do—a good example of the methods of this school.

Put in a good morning’s work on Gk. History and read most of the 6th Bk. of the Republic after lunch. Went into Oxford after tea . . .

Found the Doc here when I came back, looking very much better: he soon goes to Clevedon. He stayed for supper: afterwards we talked of the Napoleonic wars, a subject on which he has funds of information . . . I walked to the bus with him afterwards: we began on Christina dreams, but, as always with him, ended on immortality. . . .

Friday 14 April: Last night I had a ridiculous dream of Squire’s sending back my poem and saying he could not accept it because I spelt the word ‘receive’ wrongly: and sure enough, the first post brought the poem back! I intend to hammer away for a bit at him yet.

Did Gk. History until lunch time—rather a slow morning. In the afternoon I walked up the field path which represents the Roman road, along the road which skirts Stowe Woods, and back by the footpath starting through Elsfield church . . .

Put in good work after tea and again after supper. Another beautiful day, with a very fine sunset at supper time: a wind was just rising then, soon followed by rain, and there is a glorious storm now. D has a wonderful Dundalk newspaper from one of her ‘gens’ in Ireland called the Democrat: among other treasures, we found someone in the Deaths column described as ‘a thoroughly decent woman’ . . .

Saturday 15 April: D reminds me that it was this day four years ago I was wounded at Mt. Bernenchon. Worked in the morning. After lunch I walked into Oxford to call in College and buy some things. A beautiful sunny and windy day, but in town detestable on account of the dust and crowds of holiday makers. College looking very deserted and dismal. I took from the library Grundy’s Persian War which is indispensable . . .

Tried to work at ‘Dymer’ and covered some paper: but I am very dispirited about my work at present—especially as I find it impossible to invent a new opening for the ‘Wild Hunt’. The old one is full of clichés and will never do. I have leaned much too much on the idea of being able to write poetry and if this is a frost I shall be rather stranded.

Another fine sunset. I see I have never yet mentioned the cat in this house: it is very large, and bleats like a sheep in the most irritating way. Read some more Repington. A dissatisfying day, but, praise God, no more headaches. (This stay at Lady Gonner’s is, as we expected, proving terribly expensive: while Miss Featherstone is turning the other house upside down in our absence.)

Sunday 16 April: Today being Easter Sunday I was somehow persuaded to go with Maureen to Highfield Church. I was struck with the extraordinary sternness of Mr Clarke in his official capacity—he looked a regular fighting priest. He preached a good little sermon with a flavour of metaphysic wh. one would not expect from his conversation—but perhaps it was out of a book. He is a jerky little man, like a wagtail, and it is surprising that he is not more popular with the Demos.

After lunch I worked at ‘Dymer’ and made some progress: but it will need more guts soon than I can at present put into it . . .

Monday 17 April: . . . Miss Brayne, Maureen’s violin teacher, came to tea. I went to another room and worked at memorising and afterwards did some walking in the garden. D had a long talk with Miss Brayne, whom she likes. She (Miss B.) says that London or Brussels is absolutely necessary for serious music. Unless I happen to get a London job funds will never run to it.

After supper I finished the 7th and began the 8th book of the Republic. A most amusing and encouraging letter came to me today from Aunt Lily, telling me how she had put several people on to Spirits in Bondage and recording many nice things said. Also a piece of wedding cake from the Pasleys.

Tuesday 18 April: Worked in the morning. In the afternoon I walked into Oxford and looked up Civil Service examination papers in the Union. ‘Greats’ is child’s play compared with them . . .

Before supper I called and saw Arthur Stevenson and his mother, hoping to hear something of the Civil Service. He has however given it up. He tells me there is no vacancy this year in the Home Civil, and that probably there will be none next. This is owing partly to Geddism, partly to the nominations of so many ex-officers without examination. It was in this way that ‘Diz’ got his post. Stevenson thought that the slackness of life in the C. S. was greatly exaggerated, and that people were often kept late at their offices. Thus ends the dream of a Civil Service career as suddenly as it began: I feel at once that I have been in alien territory—not mine, and deep down, impossible.

In the evening I copied out ‘Joy’ and worked a new ending: it is now ready to be typed. D in poor form . . .

Wednesday 19 April: . . . We were not best pleased at the unexpected appearance of Cranny. His bald head steamed (he had walked up in an overcoat from Warneford Rd.) but he refused my offer of a wash . . . Cranny and I talked theology. I asked him why people in his position, who didn’t believe that Jesus was a God, spent their time in patching up a sinking ship instead of setting to work on the new one. He said he didn’t think there was going to be anything new. He thought that evolution had first of all tried successive types, then settled down to the development of one type, MAN: in the same way we had first had successive religions and would now settle down to the development of one. I wonder if the mastodon talk in the same way.

He told me that Stead, after discussing various people, had said ‘Lewis, of course, is inclined to Roman Catholicism’. Amazing man, Stead! Cranny is very keen on the Doc’s becoming ordained: but there are many difficulties. He stayed for an interminable time and broached every conceivable subject: D and I were exhausted. He said that the present distress was rather exaggerated and that many of the unemployed at Childrey were living at the cinema. I don’t think he has much real sympathy. I had a bad headache before he went . . .

Thursday 20 April: A somewhat dull morning’s work. Went to the White Horse before lunch. In the afternoon I went into Oxford to try and get back ‘Joy’ but found (wh. I knew already if I had remembered) that it was early closing day. We left Lady Gonner’s by taxi at three o’clock. The maids have grown very fond of D and would hardly let us go: they are Dorothy and Beatrice (pronounced Beetrus), both v. ill trained country girls, lazy, noisy and inefficient, but warm hearted and great fun.

We found Miss Featherstone in good form, but looking wretchedly ill. She made no proposal to come back. I think, and D agrees with me, that she has decided to put up with us and is playing out her part thro’ pure virtue. Very busy settling in from tea to supper time. D has stood the move and the packing well, and is much stronger than when we went away. Maureen very sick at leaving: D and I miss the garden but on the whole find the change (as someone said ‘Warneford Rd. isn’t even suburban’) less unpleasant than we expected. Dorothy (Broad) still away. I shouldn’t mind being back to my plates and dishes if it weren’t for work: I am hoping to lose less by taking tomorrow as Sunday and working on the real Sunday.

After supper I began to copy out ‘Nimue’ with many corrections: I am pleasantly satisfied with it. Whether I succeed or fail, how ridiculous that will read some day! . . .

Friday 21 April: Got up shortly before seven, cleaned the grate, lit the fire, made tea, ‘did’ the drawing room, made toast, bathed, shaved, breakfasted, washed up, put the new piece of ham on to boil, and was out by half past ten . . .

I got ‘Joy’ at last from the typist for 1/9d. In all the things they have typed so far, I have not found a single error . . .

Got back about 12 o’c: found to my disgust that Maureen was out and left D cooking—the first time since her illness. Washed up after lunch. Worked at Gk. History notes until tea when Miss Baker came. Had got settled to work when D called me down ‘for five minutes’ to talk about Maureen’s programme for next term. This would not have mattered, but before I could make my escape, Miss Baker began to be ‘just going’ and continued so. When she finally got away it was time to get supper and to clear the tea things which Maureen had kindly left in status quo. A good hour thus wasted altogether . . . Worked again after supper, leaving washing up to Maureen. D keeping much better.

Saturday 22 April: Got up about 6.30 and did the same jobs as yesterday. Was settled to work by 9.5 o’clock and put in an excellent morning . . .

Sheila Gonner—jolly child—came to tea. Dorothy is to come back tomorrow: so we shall no longer be servantless. At her request I lent her my crib to Tacitus’ History for her sister Rose—I wonder what makes her imagine that she wd. like it? Possibly early Christian novels of the Quo Vadis type.

Worked again after tea, and from supper till ten o’clock, finishing Herodotus. The last few pages of the IXth Bk. I now read for the first time, having got tired of it on my first reading . . .

Sunday 23 April: In the morning I finished fair copying ‘Nimue’: if ‘Joy’ is accepted I shall use the resulting money to type it . . .

In the afternoon I called on Mrs Stevenson to talk houses. The man Raisin (or Rayson) is building two more which he may let, and while Mrs St. assails the existing house, we are to try for one of the new ones. They are all at the foot of Shotover on the Roman Road and under Professor Jack’s wood . . .

Monday 24 April: Yesterday I finished my notes to Herodotus and started to memorise them en masse today. Put in good work from 9 to 11 in the morning, then went in to town with Maureen to see her off for Bristol, where she will stay for some days . . .

I then called at the office of Rayson the architect, 15 Broad St. He is a chatty and cheerful little man and may be honest. He told me that his project of building two new houses near the one Mrs Stevenson is after is still in the vague future. He wd. not begin them until he had disposed of the present one. I explained our own position and asked him to tell me frankly if anyone was before us on the waiting list. He said there was no one and took D’s name down. He tells me the roof of the Bodleian was made of copper: we both commented on the beautiful colour.

Worked after lunch: after tea I walked on Shotover. A boisterous day with fierce showers and bright sunshine. I stayed some time looking out over the plain to the Chilterns and watching the clouds. For some reason I was specially struck today by the enormous scale of the cloud landscape, especially from a hill. Worked after supper: earlier to bed.

A cheerful letter from my father today, announcing that Warnie has been at home (from Sierra Leone) for twelve days and is well: also that he has paid in my allowance for the coming term.

Tuesday 25 April: A hard day’s work. The woman-with-the-false-eyebrows-who-tells-lies called today for Dorothy who is becoming one of her customers: she confided to her some details about us which were the subject of conversation among our next door neighbours. Dorothy told D as soon as the woman was gone. It was most illuminating: and how the dogs can know so many facts about me as they do, passes my comprehension. D said it was the worst part of being poor—to have to live among them . . .

D hung today a curtain we have made for the drawing room door. The base was an army blanket: on a design of mine D worked a tree (unknown to naturalists) and storks and lilies and a moon with stars. All in wool, bright flat colours. It goes admirably with the walls, and I am very pleased with it . . .

Wednesday 26 April: Having finished the Herodotus period I am now making up the Pentekontaetia: a hard and enjoyable days work. If I had only a few months more I could manage well.

A card from Maureen to say that after an hour with Miss Whitty she finds her music ‘hopeless’ and a letter from Miss W. saying that her technique has been disgracefully neglected. After putting in some well deserved curses against the thorough inefficiency of the school in every branch, D and I discovered to our surprise that we did not know what technique was in music . . .

Thursday 27 April: Term began today. Worked hard on the Athenian politics of the Pentekontaetia: very hard to find out the facts. Grundy full of learning but writes abominably and it is almost impossible to see the connection of thought between some of his paragraphs. Before lunch I went into Oxford and got Whibley’s book out of the Union: but I find it was written before the discovery of the Ath. Pol. and is therefore useless. Worked again from lunch till tea. It is really rather hard not only to have to learn history but to write it first! . . .

Friday 28 April: Went into College early and found that we had collections in hall at 9.30. Philosophy papers, but Stevenson handed them round, saying that Carritt had mumps. He implored us to take them seriously, but everyone remained very cheerful: Blunt, Wyllie, Watling, P. O. Simpson, Montagu, Hastings, Haig, and Salvesen—the latter ‘a steady rumble in the distance’ as Haig said. Everyone talked and ragged and talked. Everyone always appeals to the rest for any fact he has forgotten, and gets a dozen suggestions: but I doubt if anyone writes down the varied and often irreconcilable information thus obtained. Blunt said that Plato was born too soon and was fitted by nature for an orthodox English parson. I said I didn’t think we was as bad as that. Got out about 12.30. Looked into Wadham to see if Baker was up yet, but no sign of him.

After lunch went on with Gk. History. Stead came in, obviously wanting to have his new proofs praised. Luckily the Sweet Miracle in its quiet way has considerable merits, and I told him so . . . He had a letter from Yeats who is now living in a tower at Gort on Lady Gregory’s estates: it all sounds very well chosen as a setting for the great man . . . He also talked of Bridges. Either Stead is a much better man than he seems to me or else he has pushed like a true American in the literary world . . . D very busy making some ‘nighties’ which Mrs Raymond is going to buy. Letter from Cox’s acknowledging £67 from my father.

Saturday 29 April: Up betimes and into college where we did a general ancient history paper for Stevenson. I was interviewed by him as usual and arranged to do no lectures this term: he warned me ‘not to work too hard’. All the usual people there. Wrote a good deal, but not of high quality . . . Simpson described collections as the effort to write journalese in the tower of Babel . . .

A long letter for D from Miss Whitty today. She says that a serious music career is hopeless for Maureen and that the fault is entirely in the teaching: she has been left to all the original sin that any child will indulge in if allowed, and taught inaccurate, emotional drawing room playing. Her fingers are too old to go back and learn technique now. So her dream has ended as suddenly as mine of the Civil Service: mine was killed by the Geddes Committee, hers by sheer inefficiency at the school. It is very regrettable: apart from the question of a career (and if she marries that doesn’t matter) the immediate psychological effect on her will be very bad. Miss Whitty is furious, and I don’t wonder.

Sunday 30 April: Called for Baker at Wadham and we walked over the fields to Marston, starting through Mesopotamia. A splendid morning. Baker is very busy with rehearsals for a Wycherley play in which he is to appear as a heavy father: it is at the Palace, got up by [Edith] Craig (Ellen Terry’s daughter) and he is one of two or three amateurs in an otherwise professional cast. He has had a good deal of encouragement and has met Mrs Asquith and Princess Bibesco. He described Mrs A. as a horrible old woman with queer garters.

He has had a poem accepted by the Beacon: he says that Barfield is now as good as sub-editor. So probably my ‘Joy’ has gone to him. I don’t much envy Barfield his job of refusing all his friend’s poems for the next year or so! . . .

After lunch worked at ‘Dymer’. D writing off arrears of letters. Miss Featherstone called while I was out: D says she was in wretched health. After tea put up curtains in D’s room with the new gadget called Rawlplugs: their advertisement claims are untrue, but a clever idea.

After supper finished and fair copied the first canto of ‘Dymer’ . . .

Monday 1 May: This morning the fates tried to infuriate me but carried it too far, so that it became merely funny. D got at breakfast time an answer from a house agent, telling of a bungalow called Waldencot to let in Headington. So rushed off after swallowing a meal, only to find that it was the ‘stable’ . . .

Worked all afternoon at Thucydides, an author I love. A letter from Barfield accepting ‘Joy’ for the Beacon and saying nice things: he describes himself as ‘acting, unpaid, sub lance-editor’ . . .

Tuesday 2 May: Worked in the morning memorising notes on the Pentecontaetia and reading Thucydides.

Maureen went up to Headington and got into the ‘stable’, since we think it worth trying for. Maureen got in with a lady, another prespective tenant and rival, and did good work in pointing out to her all the disadvantages of the place.

After lunch I called to try and see Jenkin, but he was out. Left ‘Nimue’ to be typed. I walked slowly and pleasantly thro’ Mesopotamia and by rope ferry to Marston, thence up the lane to Headington via the small cemetary. A beautiful day and plenty of cuckoos. Thinking for once—and free from Christina dreams . . .

Got back in time to put in some more work before supper. Concocted with D a letter to Dr Ley of Christ Church asking him to recommend a good music teacher for Maureen: she has been removed from Miss Ploughman under some euphemism about ‘times not fitting in’—if Miss Ploughman will ever notice whether she turns up or not! . . .

Wednesday 3 May: A wet morning. Worked on the Thucydides text, with great interest, but finding many passages which, for the mere translation, it is wise to go over.

Went into town after lunch, and after looking in vain for Jenkin in Merton St., met him in the High. It had now cleared and we walked down St Aldate’s and over the waterworks to Hincksey.

I talked of staying up for another year and lamented that all my friends would be down: he said he had not got to know any new people of interest since his first year. We both agreed that to find people who had any interest in literature and who were not, at the same time, dam’d affected dillettanti talking ‘l’art pour l’art’ etc., etc., was almost impossible—in fact he put Baker, Barfield and me as the only exceptions in his own circle: and even the ‘hearty’ men were preferable to the usual literary sort . . .

We talked about religion, on which his views are traditional and quite different to mine. He quoted a good (and true) perversion of an old platitude—‘To the pure all things are impure’ . . .

D, after trying a new cure for indigestion, presented by Miss Featherstone, is very poorly, with a bad head. Worked at Thucydides again in the evening. Early to bed.

Thursday 4 May: A bright, windy, and beautiful day. D very sick as a result of Miss Featherstone’s vile drug (heaven save us from our friends) and finding her sight queer—seeing the paper which I was reading at breakfast as if blue. This wore off to some extent during the day. Miss Featherstone, as an old nurse, ought to know better than to give this sort of drug to a patient without medical advice.

Went into town early. Called on Baker in Wadham. He asked me several questions about the Sophists. He said he wd. probably see Barfield today and I asked him to get Barfield to leave some message saying when he and I could meet. He showed me the May number of the Beacon: it is slowly improving from month to month.

Went to college at 10.30 for Stevenson’s class: Watling, Wyllie, Blunt, Montagu, Haig, and (later) Hastings. Stevenson had marked my paper A minus. Blunt was a great nuisance, keeping us relentlessly to some damned chronological problem about intercalary months and eclipses, partly I think because Stevenson does not shine on these subjects . . .

Went to Cornmarket and got back ‘Nimue’ accurately typed for 3/6: sent it to Squire in the afternoon, not so much in any hope that he will accept it, but ‘in order that he may fill up the measure of his iniquities’.

Worked at an English text of the Politics in the afternoon, with some interest, and went for a short stroll up Headington before supper. Thucydides (note making) in the evening . . . Worried today by shooting pains in my left armpit near the old wound, but very slight.

Friday 5 May: . . . Met Barfield at 2.30 by Headington Post Office. A bright day: we walked over Bayswater brook (where I saw the snake) and had tea in a little house on the London Rd. We talked of Baker and the mysterious fragments of his previous life that one got, and compared our knowledge . . . He said Baker’s mystifying way of referring to things was quite unconscious, and we had a good laugh over it.

We talked over old times: then of Barfield’s fortnight in Italy last vac. Partly in Florence, partly walking in the Appenines. He told of how in a restaurant he had a call of nature and after peevishly hunting his phrase book found that the Italian (literally) was ‘Where can she make a little water please?’ In answer to this the garçon replied ‘Wherever she likes.’

We talked of the Beacon and he told me how Appleton had come to take him on. One day Appleton showed him a poem and asked his opinion. ‘Filthy,’ said Barfield. Appleton showed him another: ‘Bloody,’ said Barfield. After that they became fast friends. Barfield seemed perfectly miserable and hoping for nothing. This wretched love affair has gone very deep tho’ it has made him a real poet. I am sure he is going to be great . . .

Saturday 6 May: Went into town after breakfast to see Dr Allchin of 15 Beaumont St. about lessons for Maureen: found he was engaged till twelve.

Tried to work on ‘Psyche’ in the Union (not in the new metre wh. I think almost hopeless) with no success.

Met Wallis, P. O. Simpson, and Blunt. Carritt appears to have been worried over everyone’s collections. Wallis and Watling got Γ = . Went back to Allchin at 12: it was arranged that Maureen shd. go to him at 4.15 on Tuesday next and that after hearing her he was to come and see D. A nice little man.

I reminded him of summer 1917 when he was an officer in the O.T.C. and I was a Cadet: he laughed over the ‘mad things one had to do’—lecturing on subjects that no one knew anything about etc . . .

Sunday 7 May: A leap into summer. Sat in the garden, writing a passage for a new version of ‘Psyche’ in blank verse, not without some success . . .

I found my way out to 14 Chadlington Rd., through the horror of North Oxford on a hot Sunday: villas, gardens, dazzle and Sunday clothes. Stevenson, his wife, his child Helen and a dummy called Mackay from Magdalen: quite a pleasant lunch. Stevenson told me—what I never heard before—that the Master in his youth had lost a studentship at the House for writing a modernist essay on the Resurrection: that was in the days of Pusey.

We sat in the garden after lunch. Stevenson talked of his job at Le Touquet during the war where they had a whole mess of code interpreting experts. He said that in the end, after the duds had been eliminated, it came to consist entirely of classical scholars. As a similar example of strange abilities used for war purposes, Mrs. S. mentioned a futurist painter who was employed on doing ‘dazzled’ ships . . .

Came home to find D in the garden with the Doc, Mary, and the Brat [Peony Askins] . . . We sat in the garden after supper, D writing letters by moonlight: an evening of extraordinary beauty, but an exhausting day. The Doc looks much better, and in khaki shirt, belted slacks, pudding bason hat, tie pin acting as a stud (he is always studless) was an eloquent and characteristic figure.

While at the Walkers I had an amusing conversation with Ziman who now has my old rooms, telling me how much he dislikes my distemper and how old George encouraged him for Mods. by saying that ‘Mr Lewis got a fust sir, and he never worked at all: he was always out fust thing after breakfast.’

Monday 8 May: A blazing day with a light wind. I got to work in the garden at 8.45 and continued, making notes and memorising, till one o’clock.

Went into town after lunch to Jenkin’s rooms. Robson-Scott was with him when I arrived. After his departure J. told me that he had been quite surprised to hear of my removal from the Martlets: he had missed a meeting and he wondered whether the young men had us all degommed by now. Jenkin said he would go to any meeting he cared for, whether he was a member or not. He took me out in his canoe for a short time . . .

Got home about 4 o’clock: tea in the garden and made an analysis of Kant, getting as far as the ‘Anticipations of Experience’. Memorised this after supper, and also my Gk. History notes.

A beautiful day. D very wretched, whether from psychological causes or that the effects of Miss Featherstone’s poison still remain.

Tuesday 9 May: ‘Nimue’ returned from Squire (they call him Jehovah C. I find), with the usual printed refusal. All this is done in order that the Scriptures might be fulfilled.

Another glorious day. Got to work at 8.45 in the garden: did some more of my analysis of Kant and some Thucydides notes. As soon as the sun gets on my bedroom window, I am trying the plan of shutting window and door and drawing curtains so as never to admit hot air: I think it is an improvement . . .

Wednesday 10 May: Back to cold weather and fires. Worked on Gk. History for part of the morning and then went in to town and did two questions in the Union under Schools conditions, one from a Roman History and one from a Logic Paper. I also bought a sham panama hat at Lane’s in Queen St. for 5/11. It is cool and comfortable and the best solution of the sunstroke problem.

Met Watling who tells me that our schools begin on 8 June. I got Jowett’s translation of the Sophists from the library and worked on it after lunch. It is about Nothing and most interesting: beautifully translated, but in his introduction where he talks philosophy, Jowett seems a fool and a self pleasing fool.

Miss Featherstone called today and said that she had been invited to stop with a friend for the summer, and that we need not move unless we chose, which is excellent news. I walked on Shotover after tea: it is gorgeous now and a mass of blackthorn. I was thinking seriously of how I could face the prospect of having to give up poetry, if it came to that . . .

Thursday 11 May: The weather continued wintry. In to town betimes and called to see Baker. I told him about the return of ‘Nimue’ and cursed Jehovah C. I confessed to a fear that there must be something wholly wrong in our attitude: that though we were always ready to admit faults in the things that J.C. returned, perhaps we were really blind to the merits of what he accepted, much of which seems contemptible. Baker said he did not think it was likely.

He gave me back the first Canto of ‘Dymer’ which I had left with him. He spoke encouragingly of most of it, especially the end. He thought some of the flippant parts weak and the first two stanzas tedious, in which I agreed with him. I found that besides the performance with professionals at the Palace, the Wycherley play is being given tonight, Friday and Saturday in the Corn Exchange with amateurs.

I then went to Univ. and saw Carritt. I made him explain what he meant by ‘atmosphere’ in an exam paper and asked him when he had done, ‘In fact, sir, you mean bluff?’ He agreed. Then I went to Stevenson’s class. Watling, Wyllie, Blunt, Montagu, Hasting and Haig. A desperately dull but not a useless morning.

Got home about twelve thirty. Found the Doc here and Maureen very ill. The Doc told D that Cranny had been moving heaven and earth about his (the Doc’s) ordination: but that the idea of his really wishing to be ordained was mainly a fiction of Cranny’s. How typical!

After lunch I did, under school’s conditions, a logic paper which Carritt had given me, greatly to my own satisfaction, and found that three hours gave me plenty of time to spare . . .

Friday 12 May: . . . I worked on my analysis of Kant and then on Gk. History until shortly before lunch: then went into town to see if Jenkin would come to the show tonight. Worked again after lunch, but dully and finding it hard to concentrate.

Lady Gonner and her niece called and I went into another room. The Doc was here twice today: the first occasion—before lunch—he told D a yarn about an undergraduate and an undergraduette living together somewhere in the neighbourhood. As the story is only one of those which ‘everybody knows’ it need not be believed. It is to be hoped that it is untrue, as, when the crash came, it would lead to a lot of silly new statutes for the rest of us . . .

I came back for supper and then returned to wait in the queue at the Corn Exchange. It consisted chiefly of girls: we waited while the ticket holders went in. All the world was there: I noticed Cyril Bailey, Lindsay, Joachim, Carritt, Curtis, Mary and Stead. Great excitement was caused by the arrival of the Asquiths: it was rather a political allegory—everyone whispering ‘Here’s Mrs Asquith’ and nobody taking any notice of poor old Asquith himself, a fat, flabby figure, with a suggestion of John Bunny, flopping out of the car behind her. She had a crone’s face, with thin, very bright lips, wagged her boney fingers at someone, and was kittenish.

The show was, on the whole, good. I had to stand. Allen conducted. The music of the first ballet was from an old virginal book. The second by Purcell round the theme of a Wycherley play: this was the best of the three—a wonderful mad marionette like thing—completely carried one away. Baker capital as Mr Formal: during an interval I heard his performance praised by a theatrical looking stranger. The music was delightful. The third, by Bach, I did not care for quite so much. What struck me particularly was Barfield’s dancing in the rowdier passages: a terrific, infectious gaiety about him and you’d think he cd. never be tired. . . .

Sunday 14 May: . . . Caught a bus into town and returned home shortly after lunch, having got G. K. Chesterton’s Magic and Jones’ Road to Endor from the Union.

Maureen got up before lunch. D and I sat in the little alley way behind the French windows after lunch. I read Magic through. A pleasant little play—I am not sure that I understand it. Afterwards I began to read The Road to Endor aloud, and continued it for the rest of the day. It is the account (now famous) of two British officers’ escape from Yosgad in Asia Minor by means of faked spiritualism. We both enjoyed it greatly. The irony of reading this and Magic on the same day was quite unintentional . . .

Monday 15 May: Got to work at 9.30 and put in a good morning on the Sicilian Expedition, and memorising.

After lunch D read me from the Times the memorial article on Sir Walter Raleigh who has just died: Jenkin was always singing his praises. . . .

I memorised afterwards. While in town I met Poynton, and he gave me a Latin Prose to do, ‘as a trial ball’. He said he would only have time for one and so ‘you might as well put all your howlers into that’. After supper I worked on the Sophist and started the prose which is interesting.

D rather poorly this evening.

Tuesday 16 May: An idle day. Started work after breakfast but soon walked into town to get Freeland’s History of Sicily.

Called on Baker and drank some sherry. He had been rehearsing in London on Saturday and lunched with Ellen Terry: afterwards he had a good talk with Edith Craig at her flat and she said she could get him a job at the Old Vic. He has also been promised a part in M. Harvey’s next play. I asked whether it was not necessary to go through a technical school: he said this applied more to girls. We also talked a good deal about ‘Dymer’. I arranged to walk with him this afternoon . . .

Baker called for me soon after lunch, and we pushed our bikes up Shotover and sat there. He is trying to persuade Barfield to go on the music hall stage. I laughed heartily at the thought of my two chief literary friends ending both on the boards . . .

After tea, until nearly 7 o’clock, Baker and I had a close and good conversation again about ‘Dymer’. We agreed that the great thing was to keep the MYTH true and intrude as little invention or conscious allegory as might be. He is particularly keen on the darkness in the passage where Dymer finds the girl, and opposed to anything like a dialogue. We struck out between us the excellent idea of making the witch a ‘matriarch’. It all made me very keen, and anxious for power to do what needs to be done . . .

Wednesday 17 May: Worked at Gk. History—without much energy or interest—all morning.

A soft, wet day, such as I rather like. The Doc came to see Maureen for a few minutes before lunch. Worked again until tea time. Mrs Raymond came to tea.

I went into town for my tutorial with Carritt: he said there was no vacancy suitable for me and strongly advised me to stay up another year. I read the paper which I had done for him and he approved of it. He made some interesting remarks on Croce’s theory of universals. The true concepts (Truth, Beauty, etc.) are immanent, transcendant: the mathematical are only transcendent—that is, they have no particulars: the pseudo-concepts are only immanent, that is they are mere arbitrary groupings of particulars. He also drew my attention to the difference between Kant’s early and later views of the Noumena, which I must look up. I met Blunt, who tells me that he is starting to read Thucydides for the first time!

Forgot to mention a curious dream I had in the small hours of this morning:—Baker and I were walking in a field when suddenly there appeared from nowhere a huge bull with exaggerated sexual characteristics, going very fast. We leaped over a high wire fence and I hurt my leg. Sounds truly psychoanalytic . . .

Thursday 18 May: Today and yesterday D has had breakfast in bed, as the legs are not getting on well and need still more rest . . .

Worked in the dining room from lunch until tea . . . I then walked through Iffley, crossed the lock, and went along the meadows. Became wonderfully happy for a short time. A boisterous windy day: the river full of brisk waves and everything of an unusual brightness.

After supper I wrote a long letter home, explaining my position and proposing to stay up for another year.

Friday 19 May: A damp morning: I worked on the Revolution of the 400, comparing Thucydides with Aristotle.

After lunch I walked into Oxford with a vague idea of sending off a new venture to a periodical. Calling on Baker to get the address of Youth I found him anxious for my advice. He is to go to the Old Vic. for an audition some day soon, and was trying to choose what lines he will spout . . .

After tea I bussed back to College and called on the Mugger. He had just had a letter from ‘Mr Wyllie’ asking him to recommend some one for a studentship tenable for one year in Cornell University (New York State). He said I was the only person he would care to offer: but as the money, tho’ adequate for the year out there, did not include the travelling expenses, it was hardly to be considered. We then talked of my plans. He said the days were past when one could walk out of the Schools into a Fellowship: even in minor universities there was a demand for men who had done something, and this had been intensified at Oxford by the Royal Commission.

He advised me however to take the extra year. He said that College was very hard up, but that he thought that they could manage to continue my scholarship. I asked him whether if I ‘came a cropper in Greats’ he would still advise the extra year, and he said he would. He said that I should try to pick up another University prize: and that there were possibilities in the University Extension jobs. I thanked him for his kindness. A dear old man, but the inexhaustible loquacity of educated age drove me to the ‘City and University’ to recoup on a Guinness.

A long conversation with D after supper, telling her about old times, Tubbs, Miss Cowie etc.

Afterwards I made a start on my next paper for Carritt and did 45 min . . . An outbreak of feminism from Maureen during supper about the ‘easier life’ of men: D thinks there was no knowledge behind it—but interesting.

Saturday 20 May: Worked in the morning on early Attica and Solon. After lunch I rode to the Union and took out The Admirable Crichton: thence rode beyond Marston with the idea of going to Beckley and seeing Barfield.

I met him, however, just beyond the village, riding in with a suit case, as he was going to the All Souls’ dance. After trying vainly to get into a pub, we went into a field and sat. He has lately seen Peer Gynt at the Old Vic. Archer’s translation in a loose kind of Hiawatha metre, which he says is very effective in dialogue. I congratulated him on his dancing: he is quite seriously thinking of the ‘Halls’. He did not know when I should get the proofs of ‘Joy’. Arranged to lunch with him at the Old Oak at 1 o’clock next Wednesday.

Home for tea, where I found the Doc and Mary who soon went to school sports with Maureen. For the rest of the day I worked on the second Canto of ‘Dymer’, with wonderful enjoyment. A very warm evening with a silver mackerel sky: we had supper in the garden.

Sunday 21 May: A blazing hot day. Rode to Merton St. after breakfast and called for Jenkin. We then cycled through Marston to Elsfield and Beckley, where we called at Bee Cottage. Barfield was out, but Harwood gave us water and we rested for a while. Jenkin arranged to go back there for lunch and I left the 1st Canto of ‘Dymer’ for Barfield’s criticism.

We continued our ride down hill from Beckley, the objective being Joseph’s Stone: but after riding through some very bad marsh country, over ruts of petrified mud, we came to an evil, low lying swamp, and had to stop. Jenkin climbed an oak tree.

He said he never could bring himself to like Harwood—he always found something condescending in his manner. I said it was merely an unlucky voice and face. Baker had had the same trouble, and Barfield used to be very angry with him about it.

Today, for the first time since I have known him, Jenkin complained bitterly of the ill health which is always checking every physical and mental activity he takes up. I hardly knew how to answer him, but congratulated him, in spite of it all, on having refused to become a valetudinarian . . .

Monday 22 May: A stiflingly hot day. Bussed into College, in accordance with a note which arrived at breakfast, and paid Farquharson £5 entrance fee for Schools. Went on and saw Allchin, arranging for Maureen to see him at 3.30 on Friday next. Came home and worked, finishing my notes on Solon. The Doc was in the garden with D most of the morning.

After lunch I bussed out to Wadham and saw Baker. He has had two hours with Bernice de Bergerac preparatory to his audition and is doing Romeo’s speeches before the entrance of the apothecary . . .

I then told him my dream about the bull and this led to a long talk on psychoanalysis . . .

I arrived home to find a wire from P[apy] saying ‘Stay on’ in answer to my letter. This is really very decent good form . . .

Tuesday 23 May: Worked all morning in the alley way, memorising Gk. History notes. Mary and the Doc called.

After lunch I bussed into Oxford, took Croce’s Essence of Aesthetic out of the Union and walked to bathe at Parson’s Pleasure. As I went in, I met Wyllie coming out: we regretted to have missed each other and arranged to bathe together in future. A beautiful bathe (water 63 degrees) but very crowded. Amid so much nudity I was interested to note the passing of my own generation: two years ago every second man had a wound mark, but I did not see one today.

Came home and had tea in the garden, and then finished the paper for Carritt, time compelling me to end in the middle of a sentence. I finished the Croce: a difficult and provocative book. The different activities of the spirits apparently grow out of one another in a cycle. Emotion leads to image, and when we have made the image we want to understand: from understanding we turn to action which leads to new emotion and the cycle repeats. He assumes the unreality of matter, regarding it as we regard the news Queen Anne is dead.

D better today. Early to bed. After coming in from the garden I wrote one ‘gastronomic’ stanza of ‘Dymer’.

Wednesday 24 May: . . . I left home at about 12.45 and bussed into Oxford, meeting Barfield outside the Old Oak. After finding a table we decided to go to the Good Luck instead. An excellent lunch, the ices being particularly good and having, as Barfield says, the true butter like consistency.

From here we walked to Wadham gardens and sat under the trees. We began with Christina dreams: I condemned them—the love dream made a man incapable of real love, the hero dream made him a coward. He took the opposite view and a stubborn argument followed.

We then turned to ‘Dymer’ which he had brought back: to my surprise, his verdict was even more favourable than Baker’s. He said it was ‘by streets’ the best thing I had done, and ‘Could I keep it up?’ He did not feel the weakness of the lighter stanzas. He said Harwood had ‘danced with joy’ over it and had advised me to drop everything else and go on with it. From such a severe critic as Barfield the result was very encouraging. We then drifted into a long talk about ultimates. Like me, he has no belief in immortality etc., and always feels the materialistic pessimism at his elbow.

He is most miserable. He said however that the ‘hard facts’ which worried us, might to posterity appear mere prejudices de siècle, as the ‘facts’ of Dante do to us. Our disease, I said, was really a Victorian one. The conversation ranged over many topics and finally died because it was impossible to hold a court between two devil’s advocates.

The gardens were ripping—lilac and chestnut magnificent. I find Wadham gardens fit my image of Acrasia’s island very well. I walked with him as far as Magdalen, took a turn in the cloisters, and then came home for tea.

This we had in the garden, being suddenly put to flight by a thunderstorm. Went in again to Carritt at 5.45, and read him my paper. Interesting discussion: he was on his usual line of right unrelated to good, which is unanswerable: but so is the other side.

Found a short letter from P. in College confirming his wire. I don’t know why, but something in it was uneasy to me.

Came home to find that the Doc had been here. There appears to be some danger that the pain in D’s arm may be the veins breaking out in a new place. Horrible news! . . .

Thursday 25 May: . . . worked hard on memorising in the morning. The Doc came shortly before lunch and examined D’s arm and shoulder which are very swollen, tho’ less painful than yesterday. He said he would not undertake the case of his own sister, and that if it was not better in a few days, we must get a doctor. He admitted that it might be a lot of unpleasant things. He and D were most afraid of thrombosis or a ‘benign’ tumour. On the other hand it might be merely muscular. This is our iron ration of hope . . .

D and Baker were discussing my going to Ireland when I came in. Baker at first deprecated ‘putting my head in the lion’s mouth’. I said I didn’t omit my stay on account of danger, when my father and my brother were there: especially as nasty things beginning ‘I had hoped’ and ending up ‘far be it from me’ not only might, but would be said. It is of course true that I have had my share of being shot at in greater measure than they—but what can one do? Baker finally agreed with me. He said I shd. go to the Mugger and Truslove if I wanted some tutoring work in September . . .

Friday 26 May: Much cooler today. Bussed into Oxford after breakfast and did a Gk. History translation paper under schools conditions in the Union. Came home shortly after twelve. Maureen out for lunch (which by the by was one of our best, fried sole, new potatoes, and asparagus). Read Bosanquet’s Theory of the State in the afternoon: an attractive book on the whole.

The Doc and Mrs Stevenson came to tea. She was as lively as a tennis ball on a hard court, and singing the praises of Mr Clarke. D advised her to marry him, chiefly for the house.

An excited conversation between the Doc and Mrs S. on spiritualism. D retired as she felt she couldn’t refrain from sceptical interruptions. I was less kind and asked why ghosts always spoke as though they belonged to the lower middle classes. We talked a little of psychoanalysis, condemning Freud . . .

After supper I started reading Strachey’s Queen Victoria to D. A very beautiful sky this evening. D’s arm was much less swollen today and very little pain: the Doc seemed to take an encouraging view of it. Sat up late talking: a memorable conversation.

Saturday 27 May: . . . I called on Stevenson and asked him to let me know of any tutorial work for the vac, which he might hear of. I then called on Carritt and made the same request of him. He also promised to give my name to the Manchester Guardian for some reviewing. In the course of the morning I met Blunt who said he was sure he could get me a school boy to coach from Lynham’s, as he is an O.D. and often there.

I also visited Williams, who is the local agent for Trueman & Knightley: he gave me a form and said that by narrowing the field to Oxford I reduced my chances, but that if there was anything my qualifications would get it. He advised me also to put an advertisement in the Oxford Times . . .

After lunch I worked on ‘Dymer’ in the garden: bicycled to town after tea and bathed (water 68 degrees). Some pups there, who, even naked, I divined to be either Sandhurst cadets or very young officers. They conducted the sort of conversation which proceeds theoretically on the principle that it doesn’t matter how many damned civilians are listening, but of which every word, in practice, is uttered for the benefit of the spectators.

As Harwood, whom I met just outside, said, ‘You can see them looking out of the corners of their eyes to see whether you’re admiring them.’ . . . He praised ‘Dymer’ rather extravagantly . . .

Monday 29 May: After lunch I cycled into town and went to Baker: we at once adjourned to Wadham gardens . . . I at once began talking of my difficulties with the erotic passage in ‘Dymer’. I told him I was putting broad leaves and damp stems in it: he said this altered the symbolism from his point of view and made it auto-erotic. He was reassured when I told him about the smell.

He told me a good story about how he had woken Pasley up in hospital one night and said ‘I’ve thought of a good line’. Pasley grunted and said good lines were a damned nuisance as one was always trying to write poems round them. A few days later Baker showed him a poem. ‘Capital,’ said Pasley, ‘but I’d leave that bit out.’ ‘That bit’ was of course the good line . . .

After tea I had to go and see Miss Wiblin of 43, Hamilton Rd. Allchin had sent us a letter recommending her to teach Maureen technique until he had a vacancy for her. He spoke encouragingly of her natural talents. . . .

Supper of boiled eggs, plums and cream in the garden. We all decided that it was the only meal for this weather. Afterwards Mary and the Doc called. I went indoors and worked on my Latin prose. We are sitting in the dining room tonight.

Thursday 1 June: . . . In College I found a note from Carritt telling me that Farquharson thought he could get me a job in Oxford for the vac. and also drawing my attention to a Fellowship at Magdalen by examination, in today’s Gazette.

I then called on Baker and gave him the new ‘Dymer’. He described the usual blind with which Wadham had celebrated the end of Eights—all the wooden seats removed from the latrines of course, and burned. He agreed with me that this represented stopped energy and lack of originality.

I then came back and saw Farquharson: he thinks he can get me some good tutoring with some people on Boar’s Hill. We discussed my plans. He said he would like College to send me to Germany for a year. I wish this man wasn’t so oily. When I asked if he had some minutes to spare he said he was never too busy to see me. Silly old man!

I left him, had my hair cut, came home, and took a cold bath. Worked in the drawing room, which was coolest, after lunch. Tea in the garden and in to Parson’s Pleasure for a bathe—disturbed by people with a football. I notice that the chestnut bloom is nearly over now.

After supper I read Heitland, going to my own room when Mary and the Doc appeared. When it was dark I went out and talked with him alone in the garden. Starting from sexual cannibalism in insects (which he compared with Sadism) and thence passing to perversion in general, we ended up on ‘blinds’ and anecdotes and the general philosophy of getting drunk . . .

Friday 2 June: Cooler in the morning. I put in good work on Gk. History and started revising Roman—which I seem to retain well—from breakfast to lunch. D busy making cakes: Maureen out for lunch.

I changed and went in to Baker’s tea fight at about 3.45.

Had some talk before his guests arrived. He was very pleased with the new canto on the whole, but said that ‘feeding on vain fancy’ was inexcusable, and that the two stanzas before the last were ‘simply awful’ . . .

Saturday 3 June: . . . I read, in the Union, the preface and some of the poems in Hardy’s new book: the preface written in such strained involved sentences that I could hardly understand it—one or two of the poems magnificent.

I also looked into a copy of Freud’s Introductory Lectures which lay among the new books: got quite a new point of view about perversion, wh. has stuck in my head: i.e. that it is always the substitution of some minor detail for the act itself. Query—from the comparatively naturalistic point of view, is all human love, as opposed to mere appetite, one huge perversion? . . . Took Havelock Ellis’s World of Dreams from the Union and returned home.

In the garden after lunch I read Spenser—the beautiful canto about Phaedria. Sheila Gonner came to tea: Jenkin arrived rather late. We had all sat down to tea and were, as Bozzy says, in extraordinary spirits when Miss Wiblin arrived—a fat, plain, shy, giggling woman. A most insane meal—what the stranger thought of us I cannot imagine.

When things quieted down Jenkin asked me to come on the river: so walked to Magdalen Bridge and thence up the Cher in his canoe. River pretty empty and delightfully cool with a soft evening light. He quoted with approval the remarks of Mr Scrogan in Huxley’s Chrome Yellow on modern ‘serious’ sexuality. We spoke of Don Juan: he was ecstatic in praise of the Haidée cantos—said it was bound to collapse after them. He said that no one had lived who hadn’t been on Haidée’s island. I said in the same way no one had lived who hadn’t done a thousand other things and one had to omit some. He is strongly obsessed by the modern—and ancient—ideal of having every experience. We also spoke of the horrors of marriage. He was also concerned to uphold the difficulties of the English school against the exaggerated prestige of Greats . . .

Sunday 4 June: . . . I read Havelock Ellis’s dream book. He works it out chiefly as physiological events symbolised in image—or rather the physical causes the emotion, which then invents a symbol and the higher centre procedes to ‘logicalise’ these symbols into a world, and so the dream is made. He is by no means a Freudian. (Memo reference to a footnote to Ellis’s Studies in Psychology of Sex vol. III, Chapter on ‘Love and Pain’.)

Maureen very much depressed today. After supper sat for a long time outside talking over old 1917 days: of Somerville, and why he was a strict Anglo-Catholic and yet joined in scoffing at religion—of Brand in the room below Paddy and me, and his loathsome friend—of Sutton etc. . . .

Monday 5 June: . . . I . . . walked into the Cornmarket . . . and ran into Mrs McNeill and Janie, who are staying at Oxenford Hotel. I promised to go to them on Wednesday afternoon. . . .

Lady Gonner came to tea. Some interesting talk about parents and children: she and D agreed that when things went wrong it was nearly always the parent’s fault. Lady Gonner said that her daughters had always treated her not as ‘an elder sister’ as the sentimentalists would have it, but as a younger sister. We also discused Strachey: she thinks Eminent Victorians better than Queen Victoria. One cannot describe Lady G. better than by saying that tho’ she is very deaf, we do not easily get tired of talking to her . . .

Tuesday 6 June: . . . Jenkin returned ‘Dymer’ which I had lent him on Saturday: he was much less pleased with it than either Baker or Barfield. He says he cannot quite stomach the slang etc., and he has a constitutional inability to like psychological soliloquy. He found the Byronic element very pronounced—but praised one or two passages.

Watling returned, having been round to College: brought me a note from Carritt saying that Wadham wanted a Greats man to act as junior dean and would ‘press’ him to read law and become a law tutor. Would this suit me?

We all repaired to Magdalen Bridge and took Jenkin’s canoe: we went up the Thames, past Folly Bridge and the gas works, into a narrow side stream, and finally to Ferry Hinksey. Here we had a good tea (1/2d a head) in the garden of the pub, which runs down to the water . . . nothing said all afternoon that’s worth recording, but a very pleasant and cheery time. Cool on the water and the river full of beauty—natural and human . . .

Wednesday 7 June: . . . To College to see Carritt about the proposed job at Wadham. He was away for the day . . . I then called on Baker in Wadham and asked his advice about the Wadham job. He described the duties of the junior dean. Could I descend among a crowd of junior blues and say ‘Put out the bonfire!’ in a voice that would command obedience from tight men? We both laughed at the picture, tho’ I was rather depressed with the realisation of what I lack . . . Had a talk with D who quite agrees with Baker’s view of my inability ever to be a junior dean . . .

I worked in the garden till about 3.45 and then went to the McNeills at Oxenford Hall Hotel, and took Janie to the Good Luck. Tolerable tea for two, with ices, for 3/-. I found her desperately boring—tho’ in Ireland I have often regarded her as a bit of the larger world. She went over ancient stories and explained W[arnie]’s psychology to me with a lavish display of ignorance. She is stagnating like the rest, and falling back on matter which has been used over and over again—I am really very sorry for her. She tells me that Aunt Lily goes about saying that I have been promised a Fellowship . . .

Thursday 8 June: Began Greats today: D reminds me that this day five years ago was my first in the army. No sun, and cool out of doors whenever the wind blew, but very oppressive under cover.

Left home early and went to College: saw old George and recovered my mortar board, left there ever since I lived on his staircase. Tried to see Carritt, but he was out.

Repaired to the Schools at 9.30 with Blunt and Montagu. We did Roman History questions until 12.30: not a very nice paper, but my general impression is negative—nothing very hard or very easy and in me, no brilliance, no débâcle. Noticed an amusing affectation on the part of Joan Biggs who brought in—and used—an enormous and perfectly scarlet quill pen.

We all went to see Stevenson afterwards: he was unable to answer most of the gobbets, which were indeed a poor selection. Wyllie has unfortunately got some kind of internal chill, but is carrying on. Lunched in Hall with P. O. Simpson, Blunt, Montagu, Mackenzie, Currie and others, and lay on the grass in the quad afterwards.

Returned to the Schools for Unseens at two o’clock. The Greek—a passage about dreams from Philostratus—was extraordinarily easy: the Latin (from the De Natura Deorum) rather harder. Finished at about 3.45 and came home feeling very tired and with a headache . . .

Friday 9 June: . . . Schools from 9.30 till 12.30, paper on philosophical books. I was quite pleased with my work. It became surprisingly cold during the morning and whether from that or some other reason, I found myself positively staggering when I came out. Lunch in Hall with Montagu, P. O. Simpson, Blunt etc.

Translation of Roman History texts from 2 till 4—quite satisfactory so far as I can judge.

Coming home I found Miss Featherstone and D in the garden. D tells me that Miss F. has been undergoing horrible tortures with her ear of which the drum is now altogether gone. She is wonderfully cheerful. I was much less tired this afternoon than yesterday.

After reading a little Plato I returned to town. I met Wyllie in the High . . . [He] said that girls were not allowed to take Juvenal or Catullus for Schools, which I never knew before . . .

Found Mr Taylor—a nice old boy—with D on my return: some homespun but very sensible conversation. Letter from P. in the afternoon: also a notice from Truslove, drawing my attention to a philosophical lectureship at Bangor, N. Wales, with £300 a year.

Saturday 10 June: In the Schools at 9.30 as usual for Gk. History (questions) paper. This was my bête noir and I was very gratefully surprised to find gobbets—which I dreaded more than anything—excellently suited to me. The rest of the paper was very tolerable and I think I have managed it much better than I have any right to hope.

I came out shortly before time and went with Baker to Wadham: he has been overworking and is going out to Bee Cottage to recoup before his Schools. He showed me one of the finest modern poems I have seen, by an unknown American, in the London Mercury. We lunched together at the Old Oak (plaice with sauce, bread, an ice and coffee, 2/7d). Harwood came over from another table and spoke to us. A very jolly meal, tho’ I remember nothing that was said.

The town was full of people in strange costumes collecting money and selling programmes for the Rag Regatta. No one attacked me—perhaps they thought that a man in a white tie had troubles enough.

Back to the Schools at two o’clock for a paper on translation from Plato and Aristotle which suited me down to the ground and could hardly have been better . . .

After supper I read through the two Cantos of ‘Dymer’: felt fairly satisfied—I don’t think the end of Canto II is half so bad as I imagined. It also occurred to me that a sensual stanza of the kind I have been trying to write would really be rather an anti-climax.

D and I then fell into conversation about ways and means—the summer vac. being always a problem, as my two allowances come so far apart . . . A notice from Truslove today about a Classical Lectureship at Durham, £300 a year.

Sunday 11 June: Rather late getting up; a very beautiful morning. I cycled into Oxford, leaving my bike in College: from there I walked through Christ Church down into Luke St., over the waterworks and up the fold in the hill from Hinksey to the top. Sat down in the patch of wood—all ferns and pines and the very driest sand and the landscape towards Wytham of an almost polished brightness. Got a whiff of the real joy, but only momentary.

I strolled back into the wood and home again: called at the Union to wash my hands which I had torn badly on a wire and to take out Wm. James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. I have been reading this most of the afternoon, a capital book: particularly was I pleased to find for the first time Carlyle’s remark about the lady who said she accepted the universe—‘Gad! she’d better’, and also to find an account of the rise and scope of Bostonese. The more I read the more I see that the sayings of the Doc and his like are simply taken from a tradition which is as much a ready made orthodoxy to them as the Bible and Prayer Book are to old fashioned people.

D very busy—much too busy in my opinion—on her dress making. Have been looking over some of my old philosophy essays as a refresher for tomorrow. Maureen out to tea at the Gonners.

Monday 12 June: . . . In College I found Poynton . . . in tremendous spirits and [he] began in his aged and tremulous falsetto to expound a theory of punishment which no one could understand. The main jist of it was that murderers ought to be let loose and shot by the local farmers because, tho’ Poynton ‘had a vague belief in a future life’ he thought it was a mistake to shut people up and let parsons on them as a preparation: and that they should rather be ‘sent off, shoo!’ (here a magnificent gesture).

Stevenson kept up a gurgling titter and was suppressed by Poynton whenever he tried to speak. Before I came in Poynton had told them that if a man got A Plus on the Logic paper, he had to have a First: this was one of the Arcana Imperii.

We then repaired to the Schools for our Logic paper: I was greatly disappointed in it, and tho’ I certainly did not do a bad one, I have often done very much better ones for Carritt . . .

Went back to Schools at two o’clock and did a pretty easy translation paper. Came home to tea. D (according to the superstition) said she had been afraid I’d get a bad paper this morning because I had been so looking forward to it . . .

I then went to Carritt and talked about the job at Wadham. He said everyone felt shy of being a dean at first, but that there was really very little unpleasantness to face. I said I was no good at ticking people off: he said mysteriously that he thought I was. He said I should see Allen to find out what Law was like. He also told me that Ewing will probably come back from Switzerland to compete for the Magdalen Fellowship, which is unpleasing news . . .

Tuesday 13 June: Went into College and thence to Schools at 9.30 where I found an agreeable General Ancient History paper. I wrote steadily all through the time and I believe did good work.

Heavy rain began to fall during the morning. At 12.30 I rushed through it up to Queen’s Lane to Wadham and called for Baker . . . We talked of Pasley and of the gulf which separates the married from the unmarried: on the same subject in the evening D said she thought it was the one who remained unmarried who unconsciously created the gulf.

Back to Schools at two o’clock for Latin Prose: not a bad piece—a criticism by J. R. Lowell on Carlyle. I came out at about 4.45: it was now so cold that I found myself shivering . . .

Wednesday 14 June: It continued very cold. In to Schools at 9.30 and did a pretty decent paper on Moral and Political philosophy . . .

Lunched in Hall with Montagu, Fasnacht, Currie and others. Greek prose in the afternoon—very few turned up and many stayed only half an hour.

I then came home and had tea: read a little of Wm. James and talked with D on a number of subjects.

Went in again at 7.45 to dine in Senior Common Room with Carritt and Stevenson . . . A very pleasant evening. Stevenson told us that a Univ. man—Zumagrinoff (?) I think his name was—had been the murderer of Rasputin. He was fabulously rich and had brought Carritt an essay on socialism in which he said, ‘A man may haf one motor car or two or three, but ten—No!’ . . .

Carritt described someone’s—Smith perhaps—going for a walk with Bradley the philosopher. Bradley kept rushing off to scold little boys who were throwing papers about or were ‘just going to write their names on walls’. After these painful episodes he would ask ‘Do you like children?’ in a voice which led you, if you were wise, to reply ‘Not very much.’ Then in a tender and encouraging voice, ‘Do you like dogs?’

Carritt, Haig and I then got into a long and interesting conversation on the subconscious which Carritt utterly denies, taking an extreme view and holding that the self literally ceases to exist during sleep. He allowed some force in my argument that a changeling subject might conceivably slip into your particular content next morning. Haig was on the ‘extreme left’ and talked of Coué and Badouin . . .

Thursday 15 June: A free day, at last. I went out walking at 10 o’clock. It was the most delightful, cool, grey skied summer day. I went up Shotover and down the other side to Wheatley, thence to my right over the railway bridge and up past the old windmill where I once went with Jenkin on bicycles. I was in capital form, getting ‘thrills’ from everything, full of unspecified memories and, for some time, almost free from thought.

Got home about quarter to one. Lunch very late. Wrote five stanzas for the third canto of ‘Dymer’ in the afternoon. Miss Wiblin came to give Maureen a lesson and stopped to tea. Desperately plain but quite sensible—except that she remembered herself and had to giggle now and then . . .

Read Wm. James in the afternoon and evening: got as far as the chapter on Mysticism which is the most interesting so far. D in very good form but frightfully busy with her work. We are sitting in the drawing room tonight with a fire. My two poems back from the English Review.

Friday 16 June: . . . A note from Carritt was left for me in the lodge enclosing a ticket for the annual Greek play at Bradfield tomorrow week: went to the bus bureau but they had no details about a bus to Bradfield and I am thinking of biking . . .

Saturday 17 June: A notice from Truslove came by the early post about a classical lectureship for a year at Reading, £300, ‘apply E. R. Dodds, head of their Classical department’. I wondered if this might not be Eric Dodds, the drunken Sinn Féiner and friend of Theobald Butler’s who had been at Univ. Going into town I met Carritt in the library and found that this was so—as he had met Dodds yesterday and my name had been mentioned. He also told me that it was quite possible to bike to Bradfield . . .

I then called on Poynton. He said he thought it very unlikely that my failure to do verse would stick me for the Reading job. I asked for a testimonial whereupon he threw up his hands in horror and exclaimed ‘Oh, my dear boy!’ but promised to write one if Dodds asked for it. I also called on Stevenson who promised me another. He thought a job at Reading for a year would help me to one at Oxford and approved of my idea of taking a season ticket and continuing to live at Oxford if I got it.

I went into the J.C.R. and wrote two letters to Dodds, one a formal application, the other in a jovial strain reminding him of myself and when we had met . . .

Came home. Maureen had been on the river all day with the Rowells . . . Poor D terribly busy finishing a bit of work . . . Supper at 10 o’clock: we then discussed ways and means. It appears that we shall be put to the pin of the collar to get through this long vac . . .

Sunday 18 June: I woke up late this morning in such a state of misery and depression as I never remember to have had. There was no apparent reason. Really rather ridiculous—found myself in tears; for the first time for many a long day, while dressing. I concealed this as well as I could and it passed off after breakfast. I suppose it is some sort of pathological reaction by which I pay for not having had conscious wind up or exhaustion during schools.

Wrote a few stanzas for ‘Dymer’ in the morning and then read Hume’s Of Morals. This contains nearly all my own fallacies in ethics—which look more fallacious in another person’s language.

After lunch I walked up Shotover and went on to the grove of firs at the far end which overlooks the lane to Horsepath. Here I was quite out of reach of the Sunday crowds and sat for some time . . .

After supper I continued the Antigone. Who can have invented the theory that the Greeks were great craftsmen in subordinating the parts to the whole? As a matter of fact they will sell their souls to bring in myths, ‘gnomes’ and purple patches. I notice Creon’s long digression on money, and the chorus and the beautiful Niobe passage in Antigone’s duet with chorus . . .

Monday 19 June: After breakfast I set out determined to waste no money on smokes or busses, leaving my tobacco behind and taking a halfpenny in my pocket . . .

A hot clammy day with much sun. I had a slight toothache but it went away after lunch. D and I sat in the garden, the first time for many days. I wrote some more of the IIIrd Canto of ‘Dymer’ and two political stanzas for a later canto, with some self satisfaction . . .

After tea . . . I walked up to Headington again and [saw] Mrs Hinckley . . . We had an interesting conversation on parents and children and the ‘revolt of youth’. I was inclined to think it was necessary and occurred in every generation: she held strongly that it was peculiar to our own . . . D very bad with sickness and headache but became better after sal volatile.

A letter from Aunt Lily containing a violent and rather silly attack on Sir W. Raleigh and announcing that she is coming to stay at Broadway: also telling me that I should eat at least ‘six or eight oranges a day’! . . .

Wednesday 21 June: Warmer today. Sat in the alley way and wrote Tan’s speech for the IIIrd Canto of ‘Dymer’: then wrote to P and Aunt Lily.

After lunch I bicycled to Beckley and called at Bee Cottage where I found Harwood alone and reading in a pleasant, stumpy 18th Century Bible. He quoted from Genesis ‘Whatever Adam called anything, that was the name of the thing’, as an excellent definition of poetry. He told me that the Chancellor’s prize had not been awarded this year. He put the wind up me by telling me that he thought he had got A on all his translation papers in Greats last year, but really got Γ. He showed me De la Mare’s new book, The Veil which is very fine: the ‘Monologue’ expecially concentrates all misery into the likeness of a nursery rhyme.

After tea he brought out Barfield’s ‘Tower’ and some new pieces of his own, while I gave him the new Canto of ‘Dymer’ to read. The ‘Tower’ is full of magnificent material and never a dead phrase: the new part strong and savage—‘Big Bannister’ is splendid—but very hazy at present. The story is (to me) as hard to follow as Sordello. But what genius! The metre too eccentric for me, but on that subject Barfield has probably forgotten more than I ever knew.

Harwood’s pieces original, quaint and catchy—he has improved: the Dresden China bit about Nausika and ‘nous n’irons plus au bois’ are the two best. He surprised me by saying that Canto II of ‘Dymer’ was better than Canto I: he thinks the end ‘really great’.

We then went out for a walk, through a wood, down to Otmoor. He led me through the poppied garden of a Tudor Manor house with a stagnant moat, tall chimneys and narrow windows. It was still and uncanny. It was said that an eccentric American millionaire and his wife live there alone and do their own work. Got back to Bee Cottage about 7.15. Supped off home cured ham (the best that ever I ate in my life) which they get very cheap in the village.

Left—after a very pleasant afternoon—at 7.45 and biked in to the Martlets in 25 minutes. The first meeting I have been to for ages. Allen, Carritt, Watling, Robson-Scott, Curtis, Ziman, Fasnacht, E. F. Simpson, and unknown, and a dreadful old bore called Dr Counsell. Allen read a paper on Joseph Conrad: very good, tho’ rather aggressively manly. Pretty good discussion afterwards, but was amazed at the stupidity of Allen in a theoretical argument against Carritt and me.

Heard from Carritt that one of the examiners had said to him ‘One of your men seems to think that Plato is always wrong.’ Carritt guessed several people. Finally the other said ‘No:—Lewis. Seems an able fellow anyway’—wh. I suppose is good news . . .

Thursday 22 June: Went into Oxford and left an advertisement at the Oxford Times office for tutoring work in the Vac., at the ridiculous charge of 7/6d for three appearances. . . .

Became convinced today that Canto II of ‘Dymer’ as written up to date will not do. Having now left the myth and being forced to use fiction I find new difficulties springing up and doubt if ‘Tan’ and his revolutionaries are really advisable.

After supper I read the first volume of my diary aloud to D and we both got a laugh or two out of it. D troubled with a sore throat and swollen gland: the Doc calls it neuritis.

Friday 23 June: Letter from Arthur in the morning suggesting that he might come up on the 28th, and would we care to see him.

A bleak and blowing day. I went into town in the morning: first to Blackwell’s where I sold for 25/-my History of Persia, the History of Seventeenth Century France, Joseph’s Logic, two volumes of Sellar, and a volume of the Loeb Euripides. I seem almost to have lost the possessive love of books and shall henceforward be content with very few provided that I am within reach of a library.

I then went to Wadham and was almost alarmed to find a notice on Baker’s door saying he had been moved to the Acland Nursing Home. I walked to the home in Banbury Rd. and saw him. He has had a break down and came in on Thursday with a temperature of 104. The last day of his Schools was a nightmare to him. I noticed that he asked me the same questions several times, forgetting what was said: yet he was able to imitate Dr Counsell to the life, who is attending him and who at that moment came in . . .

I then got a letter in College from Dodds, summoning me to an interview in Reading at 11 A.M. tomorrow—which will alter my route to Bradfield . . .

D suggested that Baker ought to come out and stay here, if he was fit to be moved, as they are rooking him £7–7–0 a week at the Acland: I therefore went back to town after lunch to make this proposal. I was admitted with difficulty. Baker was now much worse, having gone up to 103 again. He thinks he may be able to move on Sunday . . .

Saturday 24 June: Breakfasted before 8 and cycled to the station to catch the 9.10 to Reading: I read the Antigone during the journey. Arriving at Reading I found my way to University College and left my bike at the Lodge. I saw a great many undergraduates of both sexes walking about: a nice looking lot. I then stolled until 11 o’clock when I was taken to the Principal’s room.

Childs, de Burgh and Dodds were present. All very very nice to me, but Childs very firmly ruled out my idea of living anywhere else than at Reading. I was told that most of my pupils would be girls. I had seen so much beauty in the corridors that one born under a less temperate star would have wanted to enter on his duties at once. They seemed anxious to meet me half way (the dons not the girls) and said that ‘no verse’ and Roman history confined to the third period would not matter.

Dodds then took me to his room and we talked for a while. I gather he is no longer a friend of Butler’s. He said Carritt had examined me in 1916 when I got my scholarship and had been ‘astonished at my wide reading’. Dodds does philosophy at Reading (tho’ pure scholarship is his natural line) and is strong on Plotinus. Their staff includes Ure the Historian and Holts the composer. He then showed me round the college which is pleasant and unpretentious, and left me in the Senior Common Room, to wait for lunch, coming back at 1 o’c.

At lunch he introduced me to Miss Powell who is one of their dons. She smoked through a thing like a lorgnette. She discussed the nakedness of pigs. The contempt which her affectation and cheap Sitwellian artistic cynicism provoked in me is best described by saying that she is the sort of woman in whose presence one thinks it worth while to try and make epigrams. Thank God I’ve been through that once and come out the other side.

I left the College at 2 and cycled to Bradfield [to see Sophocles’ Antigone performed in Greek at Bradfield College]: it was raining and blowing. Met Watling and Jenkin outside the theatre. It is perfectly Greek—simple stone steps to sit on and incense burning on the altar of Dionysus in the orchestra. Unfortunately the weather was perfectly English.

It was not well done: most of the actors were inaudible and as the rain increased (beating on the trees) it completely drowned them. The Carritts were there, his Cambridge daughter sitting beside me. Watling and Jenkin left me to find more shelter and when their places were taken by people who talked, I moved too and found that I could see nothing of the stage. The audience were spectacle enough: rows of unhappy people listening to inaudible words in an unknown language and sitting hunched up on stone steps under a steady downpour. If only P[apy] cd. be taken to this show!

I then noticed that Jenkin was standing on the last tier where the amphitheatre merged into the hillside—a steep bank of ivy over-hanging the stone work. Crept up to join him—‘Oh, think of a cup of steaming hot tea,’ said he. We exchanged a pregnant glance: then I led the way and in a trice we had plunged into the bushes, plugged our way on all fours up the ivy bank, and dropped into a lane beyond. Never shall I forget J. shaking streams off his hat and repeating over and over again, ‘Oh, it was a tragedy!’ We then repaired to a marquee and had tea . . .

Came home: D and I had for supper the sandwiches she had made up for my lunch and discussed the Reading job. To live at Reading means my living there alone while the others live at Oxford, or else changing Maureen’s school for a year. The first alternative I don’t care about, the second would be a thousand pities. Also, from the commercial point of view, it is undesirable to lose touch with the dons here . . .

Sunday 25 June: Late getting up. After breakfast, at ten exactly, I set out and walked to Beckley. A beautiful, windy morning with blue sky and great colours. Calling at Bee Cottage where I found Harwood’s brother and Barfield with a game leg, I arranged that Barfield and Harwood should come to tea on Tuesday, and continued my walk . . .

After lunch, while D was practising with Maureen, I wrote seven stanzas of a new Canto III for ‘Dymer’ in my own room. I think I have got back to the right track again . . . Jenkin arrived and we all had tea. D and I were amused to notice again how in his conversation all roads lead to Cornwall. A good talk afterwards on books. I showed him the American poet Robinson’s poem in the Mercury and he agreed with me in praising it.

Baker arrived by taxi, with his Aunt, in a bright blue dressing gown and was put to bed in the back room. His Aunt left almost at once. Jenkin stayed till 7 o’clock. After supper I talked with Baker. He tells me that Beckett sat the Antigone out yesterday and thought it splendid. . . .

Monday 26 June: . . . We had today our first dish of green peas this year—always a moment to be treasured up. After lunch I continued ‘Dymer’ with considerable satisfaction, bringing him to the second view of the ‘matriarch’. Baker got up and came down stairs for tea . . .

After supper while I was doing Latin with Maureen, D appears to have had a long conversation upstairs with Baker on a variety of subjects, including the possibility of my getting married. I sat with him for some time afterwards. He remarked that Harwood was playing Watts Dunton to Barfield’s Swinburne. We talked of H. G. Wells.

A letter from Arthur today: funnily enough he is coming to Waldencote to stay with a Mrs Taunton, a painter. D reminded me that Pasley had seen her and taken a very different view of her profession—and Arthur is paying ‘only 4/-a night’!

Tuesday 27 June: Another close, drizzling day. Most of the morning worked on ‘Dymer’, Canto III, with varying success. After lunch went out for a stroll through St Clement’s and up the old London Rd. A most unpleasant day.

Harwood turned up at about 4 o’clock and Baker came down shortly afterwards. We discussed Doughty. Harwood thought his manner was no more difficult than Milton’s would be if you had not come to it from the Classics and one might have as much survival power as the other. He supported Barfield’s view that there was no essential difference between the Christina and art: Baker and I opposed this. Harwood accepted my suggestion that imagination was ‘disinterested fancy’ . . .

D repeated to me some amusing details of her talk with Mrs Raymond . . . We then spoke of Baker: we quite agree about a certain lack of kindliness in him, and easy acquiescence in the fence which intellect tends to make between a man and the ‘solid folk’, and that this is a great and dangerous fault . . .

Wednesday 28 June: . . . A wire came from Arthur saying that he would arrive by the 5.55. Wrote a little more ‘Dymer’ and went in to meet him thro’ a steady drizzle.

He turned up with many pieces of luggage and in much indecision, but finally taxied out here. D persuaded him to stay with us, after a long and cataclysmic argument wh. amused Baker immensely. Baker and Arthur seemed to take to each other. Arthur is tremendously improved: nearly all the nonsense is gone and he talked interestingly.

Supper, with Miss Wiblin, was a pandemonium: everyone in great form, but Maureen shouting them all down. Afterwards Miss W. played—delightfully: D and I were specially struck with Debussy’s Cathedral. Miss Wiblin discovered that there were two poets present and asked someone to write words for her exercise, which is to be in the manner of Stravinsky: Baker knew Stravinsky and said at once that neither of us could do it. Whitman or a psalm was suggested. It was arranged that Miss Wiblin—who is frightfully overworked—was to come to me for Latin tuition on Friday evenings. We were all late in getting to bed after an enjoyable evening. Arthur occupied my camp bed in my room.

Thursday 29 June: A bright morning. Arthur had been disturbed by my snoring during the night and had got up to plug his ears with India rubber! This was quite like old times.

When I brought Baker his shaving water I showed him ‘Misfire’ which he had not seen before: he was interested in my taking that line, but did not approve. I then settled down to finish and fair copy Canto III of ‘Dymer’. Baker and Arthur spent most of the morning in the drawing room talking psychoanalysis. Just before lunch Arthur and I walked as far as Magdalen to get a taxi, and were rather late in getting back. A very amusing time at lunch . . .

At five to three we said goodbye to Baker. He had to go in order to see Lilian Bayliss about his contract at the Old Vic., tho’ he is not really fit to move. During the last two days he has been more human, less of the ‘spiritual aristocrat’ than I ever knew, and, in that way, I really believe his stay has done him good.

Arthur and I then walked to Waldencote through Mesopotamia and the green lane: it was a cool and showery afternoon—curiously tiring. At Waldencote we saw Mrs Dawes the caretaker. She also hates Hall. The house has a certain attraction—it is nicely furnished—but it is dark and inconvenient.

We then came home to tea. D in very poor form and depressed by the shrieking wind which has a bad effect on her, as on some other people. Arthur read James’ Turn of the Screw while I finished my canto. In the evening D, Arthur and I had started three handed bridge when Mary came in and made a fourth. We had a good evening of it, enough to make D and me sleepy. Arthur moves into the back room tonight. Dorothy came down in the evening with a present of flowers for D, the first thing she had bought out of Baker’s tip.

Friday 30 June: It was another winding and tiring day. After breakfast Arthur and I bussed into Oxford. I called first at the Times office where I found one answer to my advertisement, apparently from a very illiterate person . . .

We went to College. Arthur went off to look for Bryson of Oriel while I saw Farquharson. He made it pretty plain that he had now no tutoring job up his sleeve for me and hastened to talk about mathematics in the Greek philosophers. I showed him my answer to the advertisement and he advised me to ask Poynton what I should charge. I then showed Arthur the Library, Chapel and the Shelley memorial.

In Chundry’s we saw a curious book of drawings by un nomme Austin Osmond, spare, affected, grotesque and foul, after the manner of Beardsley.

We returned home very tired, buying strawberries in Cowley Road. When lunch was just ready a woman called Malcomson of Islip, to whom Arthur had written, turned up. Arthur, instead of saying that he was staying in digs with me, or simply that he was in Oxford, had volunteered some yarn about ‘friends’. It all seemed so gratuitous that I positively lost my temper. I was made to go into the drawing room for a few minutes and speak to her. She is a grey haired woman with a shrill voice: in her conversation everything in ‘killing’ and ‘no end of a lark’. She stayed an unconscionable time. I think that she wanted to be asked to lunch, but of course it was better that D and she should not meet. It was arranged that Arthur should spend Sunday and Sunday night at Islip.

After lunch I packed up my things for the night and biked into Oxford: failing to see Poynton in College I went on to Beckley through wind and rain. I was warmly welcomed by Barfield and Harwood. M. L. Jacks (brother of Stopford, late Dean of Wadham, headmaster elect of Mill Hill) and his jolly wife came for tea. He was one of the strangers with whom I travelled from Pangbourne last Saturday: a pleasant man, laughs a lot. He tells me Stopford is now in business.

After their departure we got into conversation on fancy and imagination: Barfield cd. not be made to allow any essential difference between Christina dreams and the material of art. In the end we had to come to the conclusion that there is nothing in common between different people’s ways of working, and, as Kipling says, ‘every single one of them is right’.

At supper I drank Cowslip Wine for the first time in my life. It is a real wine, green in colour, bittersweet, as warming as good sherry, but heavy in its results and a trifle rough on the throat—not a bad drink however.

After supper we went out for a walk, into the woods on the edge of Otmoor. Their black and white cat, Pierrot, accompanied us like a dog all the way. Barfield danced round it in a field—with sublime lack of self consciousness and wonderful vigour—for our amusement and that of three horses. There was a chilling wind but it was quite warm in the wood. To wander here, as it got dark, to watch the cat poising after imaginary rabbits and to hear the wind in the trees—in such company—had a strange de la Mare-ish effect. On the way back we started a burlesque poem in terza rima composing a line each in turn: we continued it later, with paper, by candle light. It was very good nonsense. We entitled it ‘The Button Moulder’s story’ and went to bed.

Saturday 1 July: Woke early with a dry and sore throat. Thinking that I heard the others stirring in the next room, I got up. From my small window (framed in thatch) I looked out on Brill Hill. Going downstairs I found nothing doing and walked to the pub to buy a packet of cigarettes. I had to wait a long time for the others and read a Study of Metre—I think by a man called Ormond. A badly written book. We breakfasted at about 9.30.

Afterwards they read the new (IIIrd) Canto of ‘Dymer’ while I read the IIIrd part of Barfield’s ‘Tower’. His hero has got to France by now, and he describes waking up in billets. I thought it very fine. In the IInd part I was quite reconciled to the part about the telephone wires on a second reading.

Barfield and Harwood both approved of the new canto, but found the position of things obscure and could not always make out exactly what was happening. This is an unpardonable sort of offence in this sort of poem. They promised to try and come here before they went down next week.

I left at 12.15 and biked home through hurricanes of wind, feeling rather poorly. At lunch D reminded me that Miss Wiblin was coming, so I went into town to look up ‘Higher Certificate’ papers, but cd. find none . . . Arthur had met the Doc yesterday evening, and (of course) used him as a father confessor.

After tea I went into College and again failed to see Poynton: walked home in torrents of rain under an umbrella lent by Frank. D making strawberry jam—a fine fruity smell pervading the house. Miss W. came for supper and afterwards I did Latin Unseens with her in the drawing room. I think my first ‘tutorial’ went off alright. She wanted to pay but D and I would not allow this.

Sunday 2 July: My sore throat was much better this morning but my cold continued very heavy all day. I read Bernard Shaw’s Irrational Knot which I bought in June 1917 and have never read. Arthur, to whom I had lent it when last at home, brought it back. A crude, silly book, but rather interesting.

The Malcomson woman, in a Ford car, called for Arthur soon after breakfast and he went off to Islip . . . In the evening D and I discussed our plans. It was hard to decide yes or no about the Reading job and D was so anxious not to influence me that I cd. not be quite sure what her wishes were—I am equally in the dark as to what my own real wishes are, apart from the mood of the moment . . .

Monday 3 July: My cold was so heavy in the morning that I ‘allowed myself to be persuaded’ by D to stop in bed—i.e. I accepted her advice as a confirmation of my own sneaking wishes. I finished The Irrational Knot and read Dr Miller’s The New Psychology and the Teacher: a good little book, all about psychoanalysis really, and touching education in the first and last chapters. At about 12.30 I got up, shaved and dressed.

Arthur now re-appeared and we had lunch. He was very full of his visit to Islip which he appears to have enjoyed: he had been taken to see Robert Graves. He went up to see Mrs Taunton in the afternoon. After tea it cleared up and I walked up and down Warneford Rd. in the sunshine.

A letter arrived from Dodds to say that the Reading job has been given to someone with a name like Mabbot at Exeter. Our discussion of the problem must have nearly coincided with their decision which removed the problem. On the whole it is rather a relief to have the difficult alternative out of our minds.

After supper we had an uproarous evening over Maureen’s, Arthur’s and my attempts to do a rider in Geometry. Later I read James’ Turn of the Screw aloud to D and Arthur in his edition. We all liked it immensely, though D called it ‘absurd’. The style certainly is wonderfully unnatural, but it gets there.

Tuesday 4 July: I dreamed that I was in our room at Little Lea and Warnie was in bed, when my mother (or someone I called my mother) came in and announced with malicious triumph her arrangement of some marriage either for W. or for ‘my sister’. I was angry and said ‘God damn you’. P shortly afterwards came in and told me I was to be ‘prosecuted for scandal’ but I laughed at him and said ‘fiddlesticks’.

After breakfast Arthur and I went into town: I called in College, while he went into Blackwells, in the hope of seeing Poynton, but found he was out of Oxford. I then went to the Union and looked round for a while. It began to rain heavily: when it was a little brighter I went to Blackwells and rejoined Arthur.

Returning to the Union, I took out for him Jung’s Analytical Psychology and Rivers’ Instinct and the Subconscious at his own request, but of course he won’t read them. In the Corn he saw the Malcomson party and rushed after them: he is very anxious for me to follow up this acquaintance. We got home at about one o’clock.

D had had a ‘board and lodging’ letter from Baker, describing his interview with Lilian Bayliss. She, apparently, is a ‘spiritual’ woman who regards her career as an actress-manageress [of the ‘Old Vic’] in the light of a divinely appointed mission: she had a soulful conversation with Baker. But she is also, he says ‘a very, very good business woman’ and ‘doesn’t always clearly distinguish between the temporal and the spiritual’.

After lunch Arthur retired to his room with Dr Miller, Jung, Rivers and ‘Dymer’ to read. Later on he went to tea with the Gonners. D and I had a good deal of talk in the afternoon. After supper I continued reading out The Turn of the Screw. We were all much excited but held different views as to what had happened. This led to a general argument between Arthur and me about ‘obscurity’ in art. I couldn’t quite understand his point, nor cd. he explain it . . .

Wednesday 5 July: Arthur was late in getting up and hesitated for a long time whether to go out in the morning or not. At last he made up his mind and we went out for a walk together. I took him up Shotover.

We discussed Ireland, home, and fathers. He finds the thought of going home more intolerable each time and dreads, above all, business talks with the old man. The same old man has been trying to get him to make a will and seems to tell a good many lies.

We first sat down on the nearer slope of the first valley: Arthur was in raptures over the flat plain towards Sinodin Hills and the Chilterns. We then went on to the gate on the left looking towards Forest Hill, where we surprised the usual congregation of rabbits. Next we went to within sight of my favourite grove above Horsepath Lane, and returned home by the path over the fields by the wood’s edge to Cowley Barracks. It was a fine morning with a soft air, rather windy, grey skied and a little warm at one time when the sun tried to break through. Arthur enjoyed the country immensely and it was quite like old times: he was collecting ideas for his competition picture under the title of ‘The Picnic’.

After lunch he went into town. I read a little in Rivers’ Instinct and the Unconscious and chatted with D who is in good form. It now began to rain and continued for the rest of the day. Arthur returned for tea, having found no more answers for me at the Times office.

We then settled down to draw pictures for the school sale. It became very dark. Furniture got moved into wrong places. The dining room does not comfortably hold four people. A lot of ragging. Arthur made a ghastly failure of a comic drawing in the Heath Robinson style: I made an equal mess of a symbolic thing in Indian ink.

At eight o’clock Miss Wiblin arrived and we had supper. She gave Maureen a lesson and I looked over her Latin Prose. D and I very late in getting to bed. We talked over the awful time we had had the term before last: I said again that the Askins were not ultimately forgivable.

Thursday 6 July: A grey and damp day. I took Arthur out for a walk, going as far as Carfax by bus: thence down St Aldate’s and by Lake St. over the water works. The dampness of the air began to thicken into rain. Beyond Hinksey the mud on the field path was almost continental. Arthur was very tired from the first, and soon began to lag, tho’ resisting for some time my suggestions that we should turn. Near the farm the rain became so heavy that we beat a retreat. Very tiring, but the tremendous wind, among so many fields of corn and trees, made it beautiful.

I put Arthur on a bus at Carfax, did some shopping, and called in College. Here I found a notice saying that candidates for the Magdalen Fellowship might send in a dissertation in addition to doing the exam. I was so engrossed in this news that I cannot remember whether I walked or bussed home. After lunch Arthur retired to ‘lie down’ according to his usual practice: D was hard at work for the sale: I began a ‘dissertation’ on the hegemony of the moral value . . .

After supper we all settled down to work for the sale. I drew an Indian ink drawing of which Arthur approved parts. D slaving away at some wretched work for the same sale, and we were not in bed till nearly 2 o’clock.

Friday 7 July: Another damp cold day. Set to work on a prose for Miss Wiblin after breakfast: as we had been very late in getting up, this took me until lunch time. Just before we sat down, Barfield appeared to ask if he and Harwood might come to tea. I of course gladly agreed—then realised that I must be in town and at the Sale before their arrival.

Gobbled down some lunch and bussed into Oxford: left Livy back in College and took out a volume of Cicero for Miss Wiblin. Then, by bus to Headington where Arthur was to meet me. He turned up very late, a rather ridiculous figure on my bicycle with his knees coming up to his chin at each stroke of the pedal. We entered the sale—a very dull show, tho’ some of the paintings by the girls were interesting . . .

Barfield and Harwood turned up, both tired with packing and distressed at leaving Bee Cottage, where a S. African lady is now installed. Sic transit gloria. D and Barfield hit it off splendidly and he remained with her while Harwood came into the drawing room and looked over the version I had done for Miss Wiblin. Coming back to the others we were joined by Arthur, who began to sketch Barfield, and fell into a long and strangely heartfelt conversation on happiness. We were rather pessimistic.

It rained hard. D now found out that Harwood was sleeping at the House, and that Barfield was looking for a room for the night. He accepted her invitation to stay with us, and I put up the camp bed in my room. A 8 o’clock Miss Wiblin arrived, and we sat down seven strong to supper: all in good spirits now, and plenty of ragging. Afterwards the others played bridge, while I retired with Miss W. to the drawing room. We had about an hour and a half and stopped because she was dead beat: this plain and therefore unnoticed girl has all the pluck in the world and works for at least eight hours a day teaching, while reading for exams as well. After the lesson we had some tea and she and Arthur played to us. Barfield went to bed at about 12.30 and I at about 1.30. Harwood had to leave early.

Saturday 8 July: We were all late getting up. Harwood turned up during breakfast to speak to Barfield for a minute and then went on to ride through wind and rain beyond Dorchester. We had some good talk over the breakfast table, but I cannot remember what it was about.

A letter from Pasley offering to come here for £2–10–0 a week while we are at Mrs Raymond’s house which she is lending us for August. I did not notice his language much at the time and replied at once offering it for £2. Afterwards D drew my attention to a curious tone in Pasley’s letter which suggested that they were coming merely as a kindness to us and that with an ill grace. We decided to write another letter tomorrow explaining ourselves.

Arthur went off to sketch on Shotover and Barfield left us at about 11.30. I did not go out, my cold being very heavy. We had lunch alone, leaving cold things for Arthur who was out till nearly four o’clock. In the afternoon I read Cicero’s De Finibus—a not very inspired work. Supper at about 8 o’clock, when Harwood came. A variety of subjects were raised. Harwood made a statement about blancs manges which D and I found very amusing. Afterwards, he, Arthur and Maureen played. Rather earlier to bed, thank goodness.

Sunday 9 July: Set to work after breakfast to write a letter to Pasley explaining that we had meant to draw attention merely to the possible coincidence of his convenience and ours, not to ask him for a favour. D vetoed my first draft as offensive and likely to cause a quarrel—it reflected, tho’ not deliberately, the tone of Pasley’s letter, which I like less the more I read it. A friend dead is to be mourned: a friend married is to be guarded against, both being equally lost. I then wrote again in a more genial style and we let the second version go.

I read the IVth Book of Paradise Lost through in the morning, with much enjoyment. It stopt raining at about noon and I walked up Shotover, where Arthur had gone earlier, but couldn’t meet him and came back to lunch at 1. Maureen was rather poorly with rheumatic pains. It was so cold that we lit the fire in the drawing room and sat there. A slack afternoon, D not in good form. Arthur came back for late lunch just before tea time and soon retired to his room. I tried my hand at a lyrical epilogue to ‘Dymer’ but with no success.

Just as we were sitting down to supper, in came Jenkin who is up till Wednesday for his viva. We were delighted to see him. He has been bicycling in the Forest of Dean with Watling and goes from there to Cornwall. We discussed The Turn of the Screw: he agrees with me that the boy is ‘saved’ in the last scene. We talked of Emma: he liked it, but parts of it made him ‘writhe’. We then listened to him on mining. He said that 50 years ago when mines were beginning to be deep but before lifts were introduced, men, after eight hours work, used to climb up naked lengths of ladder in the shaft, to four times the height of St Paul’s, often hanging on their arms when the angle of ascent was this side of perpendicular. He went off, borrowing ‘Dymer’, at 10.30.

Arthur said he enjoyed Jenkin’s conversation more than the others because it was about things you could understand. D and I were astonished, for Barfield and Co. had talked no literary shop at all, but general talk on subjects of interest to all men and women. Arthur is an incorrigible baby after all.

D and I sat up late. She said it was strange that I liked Baker more than the Bee Cottage people: we concluded it must be because Baker liked me more than they did, also he is my equal, while Barfield towers above us all. D liked him and Harwood exceedingly . . .

Monday 10 July: . . . After lunch (Arthur was out painting as usual) came Jenkin and we cycled together up Shotover, going as far as a gate on the bridlepath to Horsepath where we sat. It was a warm, miraculously quiet afternoon—sounds muffled by dampness, flies humming, and a hint of possible thunder in the air. The landscape eastwards over Wheatley to the Chilterns was very fine in the sunshine. We talked at random and most pleasantly, of the ‘stability’ of the English countryside, of philosophy, of 17th Century prose.

On the way home Jenkin observed that there was more real humanity in the atmosphere of the 18th Century than in the ‘humanitarian’ romantics that came after Rousseau, for these first began to regard . . . the man in the street, the bourgeois as an alien to be shocked and mocked or disregarded . . . Such a view made my heart warm toward Jenkin, tho’ I pointed out that the man in the street was so much stronger than we and so ready to hit that one could not indulge one’s sympathy too much.

Arthur was here when we came back, tired from his morning’s work. Jenkin departed soon after tea. I read River’s book with great interest, though many of the technicalities were Greek to me. I was struck with the idea that the ‘subconscious’ might sometime be an ‘alternate consciousness’ such as we get in dual personality and that such alternative consciousness might be normal say in amphibian animals . . .

Tuesday 11 July: It was a perfect, pearly grey morning, cool and dewy, with a promise of much heat to come, and the strangest touch of autumn in the air, unseasonable but delightful . . .

Arthur and I left at 11.30 and proceeded—after some hesitation—to the first gap on Shotover, where he settled down to paint. It was all delightful. I had Shelley with me and read some of the best parts of the IVth Act of Prometheus. Later I walked round the whole amphitheatre of the first gap, penetrating many bits where I have not been before. Arthur had brought sandwiches but I left him at 12.30 and came home to lunch . . .

Arthur came home at about 6.30 in a state of exhaustion, having worked on Shotover all day and had no tea. This is a fine advance on anything he wd. have dreamed of two years ago. He had done a landscape in oils, which we all admired, unintelligently enough no doubt.

After supper I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the garden. Miss Wiblin called and left a Latin prose—better style than the last, but shocking grammar howlers, poor girl. A letter from Pasley making it plain that it is all O.K. about his coming here . . .

Wednesday 12 July: . . . It was a warm day. D hard at work on a petticoat for Lady Gonner. I worked on my dissertation in the garden until suddenly informed that it was 4.35 and that we must be at Meadowlands at 5.

I dashed off on foot while Arthur followed on my bicycle: I finally arrived in good time. Mrs Hinckley, Veronica, Arthur and I had tea in the shrubbery beyond her hill—quite a pleasant time. Veronica is going to teach French at Maureen’s school next term. Mrs H. gave us a wonderful account of her cousin aged 78. This redoubtable old woman arrived before lunch, having biked from London, sleeping the night at High Wycombe. She then (after lunch) biked in to see a friend in Woodstock Rd., returned, had tea, walked all round Mrs Hinckley’s wilderness, and biked twenty miles next morning. She told them that she had enjoyed the last twenty years of her life more than any period which had gone before . . .

Miss Wiblin came and we did about half an hour’s lesson before supper, to which Jenkin came. A jolly meal, improved by mushroom stew. Afterwards I finished Miss Wiblin’s lesson and we came back and all had tea and cakes in the dining room. Jenkin had told D about his father who died suddenly while riding with him, so that he had the awful job of telling his mother. He spoke very bitterly about the uselessness of his friends once they get married. He invited me to come and stay with him at St Ive’s, but of course railway fares make that impossible . . .

Thursday 13 July: . . . I worked all morning on my dissertation with great enjoyment, and again after lunch until Miss Wiblin came for Maureen.

Just at that moment a bulky figure loomed in sight and Cranny entered the hall. D at once asked him if he had been ill—and indeed he looked shrunk and changed. He said he had been worried and came into the dining room with D and me. His story came out by degrees. He was utterly changed. He said his effort to exchange with a London parish had fallen through and his wife had been ‘very much upset’. Further, they had invited a girl down to distract his son from an undesirable girl, but the decoy had worked too well and the son was distracted to the extent of getting engaged to the girl provided by the family.

Cranny said he lived among mad people and he thought he was going mad himself. It can’t be his son’s engagement, for he’s used to trouble with the son: more probably his wife has nagged him half dead. He kept repeating that he wanted a change. D said ‘a change from his family’ and he did not contradict her. He said his time was done: he had nothing to live for. He was quite unable to talk in his old style—soon tired of his own troubles, yet incapable of changing to other topics. I never saw a man so utterly at sea: yet even so, poor devil, he didn’t forget his invariable little present of cigarettes for D.

Miss Featherstone, who came for tea, thought that there was a touch of madness about him. After the meal she and D foregathered in D’s room: Arthur, Cranny and I remained in the dining room and talked a little about spiritualism, but it was all constrained and miserable. He departed at about 6.

Arthur and I walked to Headington, turned right along the Barracks Rd., thence by the Green Lane to the Horsepath Rd., and home via the golf links. We joyously compared an evening walk under these conditions to one which brought us back to our respective fathers . . .

Friday 14 July: A wet morning. Sat in the drawing room and wrote a few stanzas for the IVth Canto of ‘Dymer’. Arthur went out to the Gonners, taking Maureen’s violin with him.

It cleared up later and I went into College and saw Farquharson. He gave me some Latin proses and good advice, recommending Rivington’s ‘Class Books’ of Latin Unseens for Miss Wiblin. I then went for a short time to the Union and then returned home. Arthur in, Maureen out, for lunch.

Afterwards Arthur and I went up Shotover . . . I took him over the stile to the left to show him the ‘crab apple’ landscape. We then proceeded to the bracken ridge above Horsepath. He had brought sandwiches and milk. I left him to paint and returned for tea—very strong sun by now and a plague of flies.

Found D and Dorothy making jam and joined them in snagging red currants—a beastly job—till tea at five. Did a little more snagging afterwards and read Hingley’s Psychoanalysis: he seems to belong to a different school from River: it is a better written book . . .

Saturday 15 July: A beautiful morning. After breakfast I foolishly trusted to Arthur’s timing, who was characteristically sitting down to the piano when I found we had only 20 min. in which to reach the Parks. We hastened into town and met Veronica—Sylvia Stevenson whom I seem happily fated not to meet had gone up to town. We walked to L.M.H. and there took a canoe. Veronica and I paddled while Arthur made himself comfortable with the cushions.

We first went down as far as Parson’s Pleasure, then up again a longish way between pleasant banks and under a fine sky—hard stony blue, veined with white showing through fleet after fleet of puffy clouds, some of them very large. We landed for a few minutes in a field where horses were pulling raking machines over new mown hay. We sat on the hay: there were ticks in it: Arthur tried to draw Veronica.

Embarking again, we continued upstream to the Cherwell Hotel: I was struck with the delightful little formal gardens coming down to the water. Here we had ginger beer through straws—unhappily Arthur considered it humorous to make a bubbling noise and Veronica followed suit, I think from sheer devilment, divining my shudder. She made one good remark—that an educational career is a school of hypocrisy in which you spend your life teaching others observances which you have rejected yourself.

On the return journey we yielded to Arthur’s request to paddle, but he always desisted after three strokes until spurred into activity again. His violent and impulsive movements were near to having us over and once gave me a real fright. The river was perfectly empty and we might have been in a lost continent.

On the way back we looked into L.M.H. (which from the gardens is very jolly). I was amused by the stiff little J.C.R. with its irredeemably drawing room air.

Got home at about 2: found jam making still in progress and D looking very tired—for which I cd. willingly have every fruit tree in England burnt down . . .

Arthur told us today how he and all his brothers and sisters were baptised in bathing suits by immersion in the bath of the Bernagh bathroom when he was about 12—in the presence of a gathering of the faithful. I begin to see that his father is not at all temperamentally devout—goes to theatres when away from home—is religious from a sense of duty only—is cold and sullen by his own nature . . .

Sunday 16 July: . . . I found Miss Wiblin here and we settled to work. First we did grammar: I do not seem to shine in teaching this even where I know it, but I think she is fairly sound. We then went to Unseens for the rest of the morning: she stayed for lunch. D rather poorly these days but I think earlier hours make some difference. Afterwards we discovered that Miss W. had to go somewhere to tea from here and might as well stay. She asked to be allowed to work and I gave her some more Latin till four o’c.

I was rather fagged after my morning and afternoon session—but after Maureen’s stupidity, devilment, and amazing faculty for forgetting, it is rather a relief to work with anyone who moves. Arthur went to tea at the Gonners. Later Maureen and I bussed into New College where we met Arthur and went to chapel. I enjoyed the music immensely, especially the psalms and Stanford’s Magnificat: I wondered why I had never troubled to go before—the last time I was there was with Cherry Robbins in 1917 . . .

Monday 17 July: . . . After lunch Arthur and I set off with baskets of food and thermoi. We found Veronica at L.M.H. who greeted us with the cheerful news that she was bringing ‘two other females’. As we had provided tea for only four, I thought this rather cool. The two parasites turned out to be Miss Wigg (who is recovering from paratyphoid, and anyhow seems a nonentity) and Miss Hugon—a grey faced, broad shouldered, slow spoken Frenchwoman, after the style of Miss Powell at Reading, over educated, affected, vain, flippant and insufferable. Yet she would have impressed me once. She said Masefield ‘took himself too seriously’ this being a form of words applied indifferently to everyone by fools of her type.

Arthur punted us up the river with some success. We had tea under the trees opposite the Cherwell Hotel during a shower. We dropped the Hugon woman at the L.M.H. landing stage at five o’clock: then proceeded to a suitable place beside the Parks and tied up. Arthur began painting Veronica, with lavish burlesque criticism and encouragement from us.

All very merry till 7 o’clock when we came home. Getting back, we were surprised to find Baker who had been there since 2 o’clock. He had his viva this morning and swears that he is ploughed. He also gave us a further account of Lilian Bayliss: they sat with their knees touching and agreed to share their joys and sorrows while she addressed him as ‘dear boy’. After she had been talking for some minutes he felt it obligatory to make noises in his throat: after quarter of an hour he laid aside his gloves and took out his handkerchief, pulling up his trousers in momentary expectation that he might have to kneel with her in prayer. He is up here for a fortnight to rehearse and act in a melodrama by Bernice de Bergerac at the House. . . .

Tuesday 18 July: I forgot to call Arthur this morning and going late into his room was privileged to see the pellet of India rubber in situ in his hither ear. D and I with some difficulty persuaded him to postpone his departure till tomorrow.

D much better today. Shortly after breakfast Baker arrived: the three of us sat in the drawing room where he read out some of the more absurd passages in the melodrama. Later on we were joined by the Doc, who has been in London. He has spent most of his time at the Coué Institute and had ça passe treatment on his rheumatic arm. He said it did stop the pain: but when we asked for how long, he had to admit ‘for about twenty minutes’. This naturally led to a conversation on kindred subjects and in a few minutes the Doc was expounding his philosophy of the primal One and its objectification. My suggestion that people of his ilk really ignored the antithesis of mind and body proved an excellent hare wh. we followed all morning. I thought the Doc confused—but was delighted at his description of solipsism as ‘that old gag’. It was very good talk anyway. We walked out for a short while before lunch.

At 2.30 came Miss Wiblin. I understood that she was to give Maureen a lesson but it appeared that she was to have one from me instead: so we set to our Latin prose until nearly five o’clock, having tea brought to us.

It was now a glorious evening. I walked over to Iffley where I found Arthur with the Doc: Mary was also there, having come from London by a later train. We all walked to Iffley church and admired the Norman tower and arches: while we were inside, the parson—Clarendon, possibly a Ewart connection—came in and said that a service was about to begin: whereupon we all went out shamelessly and sat above the weir on the Lincoln bridge. The Doc gave us a vivid description of his sail 1500 miles up the Amazon. Speaking of the project of exploring central Brazil, Arthur said ‘That’s the sort of thing I’d like to do!!’

We then returned home. Jam making still continued and I helped D to snag currants in the kitchen. Even when this was done, we had a long wait for supper, as the mushroom stew was not quite cooked. Seeing Arthur’s misery I could not refrain from remarking on the gluttony which so demoralised my father if a meal were late. Whereupon he replied ‘Oh but some people do really get sick if they don’t have their meals at the regular times. Mother does. I’m just the same!’ So we gave him bread and butter and he struggled on somehow.

The reference to his mother reminds me of his reply which I forgot to put down the other day. After D had left the breakfast table and while he was still feeding, I ventured to say something about the sucking, squeaking, crunching noises he makes in eating, from which D and I suffer tortures. ‘I know. Sorry. It’s in the family. Mother does it too!’ . . .

Wednesday 19 July: Up betimes and a fine morning. Arthur took to his packing and I wrote a storm passage for the beginning of ‘Dymer’ IV. He departed with many and I think true regrets: I accompanied him in his taxi to the station.

Came back and found that jam making had set in with unusual severity. After helping for a little longer I began to be afraid that Baker wd. arrive before we had lunch, and had a cold meal alone. The result was that he did not come till half past two.

We walked up Shotover. Not much serious conversation. He spoke of an American woman whom he had recently met, whose ruling passion for twenty years had been astrology. She had taken his horoscope: tho’ ignorant of his circumstances she had said that teaching was not his real job, begged him to go on the stage and prophesied an early success. He would not get fame by writing. He would never have much domestic happiness: and if he married or had an affair before he was thirty, it would cause great trouble. His health would always be bad. We came back here for tea. D and I, after the charm of Barfield, were struck by the unfortunate brusqueness of his manners.

Not long after tea—Baker being gone—the Doc and Mary arrived. I had a few words alone with him: he admitted that he had suffered from what I call Arthur’s ‘mania for confession’ . . .

Saturday 22 July: We think that it will never stop raining again. In all morning, working on my dissertation. I was in poor form and seemed to be writing nonsense. Afterwards I read the Chanson de Roland. The Doc was here in the morning. After lunch came Baker: he must be royally bored in his digs if he finds us, in our present state, diverting. It is high time we were in Headington. After tea Maureen and I made him play ‘boys’ names’ which he did with great gusto—he is certainly improving. Miss Wiblin came in the evening for Latin . . .

Sunday 23 July: Another wet day. After lateish breakfast I settled down in the drawing room and read more than half of Henry VI, Part I, at first with great pleasure, but later I grew tired of the too wide field of action, the monotony of the verse and the continual intrusion of merely ‘public’ interests on the real play.

Between this, chatting, sauntering and reading the Sunday Times, I got to luncheon. D rather poorly with rheumatism and indigestion—both results of the weather. After lunch I read Bradley’s Appearance and Reality—the chapter on Reality. It is most difficult: he seems to do the very thing he protests against, namely, pass from the necessary consistency of the Absolute for thought to its harmony for feeling, using the word ‘inharmonious’ in an ambiguous sense. But probably I do not understand him . . .

At six o’clock came Miss Wiblin and I did Latin with her until supper time. After she was gone, D and I talked. The question is whether Maureen is to leave school and give all her time to music or not: certainly there is no education, musical or otherwise, to be had at Headington . . .

Monday 24 July: . . . At about 2.30 Baker came. He had been at Tetsworth yesterday with the Kennedys, who took him to see Vaughan Williams. As if by arrangement, he was at work on his new symphony when they arrived, and was quite ready to talk of music. He is the largest man Baker has ever seen—Chestertonian both in figure and habits. He eats biscuits all the time while composing. He said that after he had written the first bar on the page of a full score, the rest was all mechanical drudgery and that in every art there was 10% of real ‘making’ to 90% of spadework. He has a beautiful wife who keeps a pet badger—Baker saw it playing both with the dog and the kittens and it licked his hand . . .

Tuesday 25 July: . . . Allchin had been to see D in the morning and the whole question of Maureen’s schooling had been discussed, the general result being that she must choose between music and school. The Doc, Baker and I sat like a jury on the sofa while D summed up: by some curious freak the conversation took only two minutes to degenerate in a really preposterous dialogue between Baker and the Doc on the educational merits of Holy Scripture, in which neither got on to the other’s line of argument for a moment . . .

Miss Wiblin came as usual after tea. Her exam starts tomorrow and there is no doubt she has knowledge enough for a sporting chance, but with overwork and wind up she has got into a state in which anything may happen.

. . . the school problem was of course left entirely to Maureen: and she definitely decided to leave, tho’ doubtless with regrets.

Wednesday 26 July: Fair weather. Went over my books and papers and made a few notes for the viva. Having waited till 11 o’clock did a little more gardening and went in to the Union, where I could not find anything of much use. What I did find was the VIth volume of Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex which is curious. The most interesting part was quotation expecially from Hindu and Persian books. Apropos of the ignorance of girls he quotes an amazing case of an American girl who was homosexual and was twice married (in disguise) to other women, neither of whom ever realised that she was not a man. Memo to look up Oneida where Plato’s Communism seems to have been practised with some success.

Came back for lunch. D very much better, but busy. Baker came shortly after lunch and I persuaded him to accompany me to the show at Headington School. It was a dreadful business. The first item was a Latin play about H. Coccles, including a battle on the stage at which everyone, including the performers, roared with laughter. Who can have been the idiot who allowed them to do this? Next came a kind of fairy play, cheap mysticism from beginning to end, an undigested mass of Shelley, Maeterlinck, Walt Whitman, Trine, Barrie and Algernon Blackwood. I writhed at it. Lastly we had the murder scene from Macbeth . . .

Before supper—which was very late on account of D’s work—I nailed up the peeling paper in various parts of the house. In the evening wrote to P, whose letter arrived this morning with an enclosure of £30.

Thursday 27 July: Did some work after breakfast, but with incredible reluctance. A lovely morning and I have seven devils in me. Baker came at about 10.30. He is now thoroughly depressed about Glorious England of which he showed us an absurd bill in the most ignorant attempt at mediaeval English, with ‘ye’ for ‘the’ and other tomfoolery. He is also worried by the girl who plays daughter to him and who has to ‘cling passionately’ to his dead body: she is so shy that she is afraid to come near his face—the result being that she clings to his waist with embarrassing effect.

We walked to Headington by the cemetery and sat on a stone wall. The sun was intensely strong. We talked of group marriage as a remedy for monogamy. I pleaded that it was better than prostitution and a thousand times better than [an] affaire de coeur, but he didn’t think much of it.

He said very truly of Mrs Hinckley that the only thing about her was her sincerity: she said things that ought to make you writhe but in a way that made them all right. They had talked of the school, and to Baker’s onslaught she had replied ‘Don’t you think that Mrs Moore is rather prejudiced?’: to which absurdity Baker replied ‘Yes, she is. But what’s the origin of the prejudice?’ I’m afraid my opinion of Mrs Hinckley sinks steadily . . .

Friday 28 July: Heaven, to do it justice, granted me my prayer. Up betimes in white tie and ‘subfusc’ and in to my viva. We all presented ourselves (I knew none of the others) at 9.30. Myers, looking his most piratical, called over our names and read out the times at which we were to come, but not in alphabetical order. Two others and myself were told to stay and I was immediately called out, thus being the first victim of the day.

My operator was Joseph. He was very civil and made every effort to be agreeable. He asked what I meant by the contradiction of the pleonexia, why I applied the word ‘disgusting’ to my quotation from Pater, how I wd. distinguish a schoolmaster’s from a state’s right to punish, and if I cd. suggest any way of making ‘poor old Plato’ less ridiculous than he appeared in my account, of ‘the lie in the Soul’. I showed some forgetfulness of the text in answering this, but I don’t think it was serious. The whole show took about 5 minutes. From the phrase ‘poor old Plato’ I fancy Joseph must have been Carritt’s informant (v. June 21st) . . .

Saturday 29 July: . . . Baker came again after lunch and I sat with him in the garden. We talked of reincarnation. He now thinks that most of his youthful ‘reincarnation experiences’ and visions were fancy, with three exceptions which he still regards as objective. He thought his faculty of seeing the aura had been merely a hallucination accompanying (by way of bluff) a real intuition of character. I remarked that his sketches of character tended to caricature, that he had a faculty for getting the worst out of people. He admitted that he had a tendency to exaggerate. We came indoors and had tea. Conversation turned to international politics, and this meant a rather perilous argument between D and Baker—dogmatisms on both sides and no hope of an issue.

. . . D being far from well, already overworked, and a move hanging over us, it has seemed to her a suitable moment to make gooseberry jam. Maureen and I picked all the ripe ones. After that I sat on the steps with D and read Hamilton’s book. It was swelteringly hot. Supper very late.

Sunday 30 July: Up rather late to find D already dressed, breakfasted, and at work. After my own breakfast I repaired to the drawing room and started re-writing Canto IV of ‘Dymer’, with which I am finding great difficulties.

Presently came Baker in a state of great indignation at having an extra performance put on tomorrow evening. I walked with him up Shotover—a fine cool morning. We sat on a stile above the descent to Quarry, talking about the probable symbolism of Maureen in a dream of his, about ‘anima’ in general, and later about ‘Dymer’.

Came home to lunch here. Baker and Maureen played duets afterwards. He stayed till about quarter to four and I must confess I was glad when he went. There are of friends, very few, whose visits if daily repeated, do not pall in a week. It is quite different if even the same friends are stopping in the house: there a sort of modus vivendi is established: they are digested and assimilated . . .

D was a good deal better today, tho’ still far from well. In discussing Baker and boredom we decided that the great trouble was his lack of ‘chat’. Humour of the best kind, uproarious farce, he has: serious discussion he has: but mere chat you can’t get from him.

We are all surprised at hearing no news from Mlle Cahen and begin to wonder if she has taken fright.

Monday 31 July: . . . At 2.30 Miss Wiblin came: Maureen and I had decided to bike despite the weather, as if we bussed Miss W. would leave her bike here: if she left it, she would call for it afterwards: if she did that, she would stay till midnight.

Luckily it cleared up and was a glorious blue and white sky when the three of us reached Christ Church. We waited at the steps outside hall till Baker appeared, dressed but not made up, and led us through Dr Locke’s door into the Priory gardens where the show was to be. A long wait was worth the free seats we thus obtained, and pleasant too for the extreme beauty of the garden. Baker had warned me that Glorious England was bad: he had not overstated it. The dialogue was contemptible, the fable childish, and all continually interrupted by interminable bad dances, ill danced to wretched music. The high wind often carried away the voices of the actors: in fact this and the Antigone have convinced me that outdoor theatricals in this country are a mistake. Some of the performers were professionals, but they were all bad. Baker was in a different sphere. His part was the crudest melodrama. (Ha! The mann must die-ie etc.!) But it was surprising how well he carried it off. The part of Saracen villain had a certain grotesque suitability.

As soon as we had got out we hastened to College where our bikes were left. I then found the History lists up and returned, as arranged, to tell Baker his fate . . . As he had expected to be ploughed he was delighted to hear that he had taken a third. I was introduced to Mlle de Bergerac—she looked a fit authoress for such tripe as Glorious England . . .

Lewis and Mrs Moore were offered the chance to live free of charge in ‘Hillsboro’, 14 Holyoake Road, Headington, during the period 1 August–4 September. The property was owned by Mr Raymond, who planned to be away part of this time. They sub-let 28 Warneford Road to Mr and Mrs Rodney Pasley during part of August, and Lewis and Mrs Moore economised further by taking in a Paying Guest—Mlle Andrée Cahen, from Paris.

Tuesday 1 August: . . . Up betimes and to our packing. Hard at it all morning and afternoon, everyone busy, but all in good form. A letter from [Mlle] Cahen by second post: she is to arrive on Thursday and we shall know her by her ‘brown costume and brown hat with coloured ribbon round it’ . . .

We were in great confusion through not knowing when the Pasleys would turn up until a wire came fixing their arrival for 6 . . . I went to buy some things in Cowley Rd. Coming back I found Pasley and his wife already here and talking to D in the kitchen while they unloaded their kitten from a basket. Pasley was plump and in good form. D and I remarked afterwards how old the girl looks, though she is really his junior. I think she is a decent sort.

It began to rain just as our taxi arrived. Maureen and I biked as D and the luggage completely filled the car. Tibbie in her basket was forgotten and this delayed D so that we arrived here as soon as she did. A busy evening settling in. A well earned supper at 8.30 after which Miss Wiblin and I washed up—Dorothy, who is to sleep in while we are here, having a headache and being dead beat. All of us pretty tired but I think D is none the worse. I am very favourably impressed with the house and the nice little garden: but the gas is poor and there are no good books.

Wednesday 2 August: I was wakened at 2 o’c by noises and getting up found that D’s bed and herself had been soaked, as I seem—for the first time in my life—not to have screwed up her hot water bottle securely. I only hope that there will be no ill results. Later I dreamed that I had got a 2nd.

Immediately after breakfast I bussed into College and called on Farquharson. Apparently I am not too late to take my B.A. on Saturday. He kept me a long time, talking about the edition of Cooke Wilson’s various writings which he is bringing out. He also discussed exams and kept saying that everyone knew my abilities and would not change their opinions if I happened to get a second. From a don, such talk has its uncomfortable side—I hope there is nothing behind it more than his general desire of flattery.

I then returned and took my share of getting things straight. Miss Wiblin came and helped. This house is full of unnecessary ornaments in the sitting rooms: beyond them, in the kitchen etc., we found a state of indescribable filth: bottles of cheap champagne in the cellar. Trash for the drawing room, dirt for the kitchen, second rate luxury for the table—an epitome of a ‘decent English household’.

After lunch a note came from Mrs Stevenson asking us to entertain her French boy for the afternoon as all her people were going out. This is impertinence: if she is taking money for him, why can she not play fair? Answer, because she is a spiritualist, an idealist, an enthusiast, a new thought-ist, not of the common clay.

The boy was quite nice. I went with him to watch Miss W. (‘Smudge’ as we have christened her), Mary, Maureen, and Helen Rowell playing tennis on the school court. He knows very little English.

All back for tea here. Afterwards the others returned to their tennis while D and I had a little peace—dog tired by now. Supper at about 8.15. We are greatly afraid that Dorothy may be getting ill as she has a bad headache and dissolved into tears on misunderstanding a most innocent remark of mine. Heaven help us if she does.

We were just preparing to go to bed when three figures and one suitcase appeared at the hall door. We held our breath. It turned out to be the Pasleys and Mlle Cahen who had arrived a day before we expected her and gone to Warneford Rd. She had eaten nothing since 1 o’c., so it was all hands on deck again to feed her. When we cast our net we little thought that we should catch such odd fish. She is a Jewess, very striking in appearance, speaking the best English I have ever heard from a foreigner. She is going to ‘translate for the lawcourts’ as soon as she has got her degree. One of her sisters is a Doctor, the other an engineer. She may be 18 as she says: has the self assurance of 50. D and I agree that we should be sorry to pit our wits against this young woman. Altogether a formidable and stimulating if somewhat unlovable character . . .

Thursday 3 August: Up betimes and a fair morning. At her request I went with Andrée into town and showed her the sights. I liked her better than on the previous evening. We talked of various things, largely of books. She told me—as I had always suspected—that French people could get no music out of Latin verse. We returned for a late-ish lunch.

The Pasleys came shortly afterward. I had a good deal of talk with Johnnie. It was tiring to shout, but she seemed alright—an oldish face and lined, though she is supposed to be younger than Pasley.

After tea I hastened into town and met Warnie at the Roebuck; dined with him at Buols with a bottle of Heidsieck. He has certainly grown enormously fat. He was in excellent form. I mooted the proposal of his coming out here: he did not seem inclined to take it up. I left my diary to read to put him en rapport with the life.

Friday 4 August: Bussed into town with Andrée and left her at Carfax. I then met W and we strolled to the Schools to see if my lists would be out in the evening. It gave me rather a shock to find them already up. I had a first: Wyllie a second: everyone else from College a third. The whole thing was rather too sudden to be as pleasant as it sounds on paper. I wired at once to P and went to lunch with W at Buols.

During the meal I thought I had arranged for him to come and meet the family at tea: but quite suddenly while sitting in the garden of the Union he changed his mind and refused pertinaciously either to come to tea or to consider staying with us. I therefore came back to tea alone. The Pasleys were here and Smudge. An amusing game of croquet followed after which I returned to W, and dined. He was now totally changed. He introduced the idea of coming to stay off his own bat and promised to come out tomorrow. Late home and straight to bed.

Saturday 5 August: Went to College after breakfast and saw Poynton about money matters. Found to my surprise and delight that after paying all fees I had a balance in my favour—but I shall not see it until September . . .

I then bussed out to Headington, changed rapidly into white tie and subfusc suit, and returned to lunch with W at Buols. At 2 o’clock I assembled with the others at Univ. porch to be taken under Farquharson’s wing for degrees. A long and very ridiculous ceremony making us B.A.s—as Watling said, we felt no different beyond being ‘hot and bothered’.

I met W again at the Roebuck and came up here. Everyone present for tea and got on well. Maureen formulated her first impressions of W. epigramatically by saying ‘he looks as if he were a good swimmer’. Back to town for dinner.

Sunday 6 August: We had arranged to go on the river today but it rained. W came out with his luggage. Bridge in the afternoon. A wet night.

Tuesday 8 August: Owing to rush of events and having lent my diary to W., regular entry has become all but impossible. Yesterday was chiefly remarkable for the behavior of Smudge, whose condition is a cause of uneasiness to both D and me. It is strange that such a thing should have happened to me—of all people least desirous, least able to cope with such a situation. But I hope it is chiefly nerves. I also had tea with the Stevensons.

Today, despite a morning that opened with teeming rain, W and I proceeded to carry out a long treasured project of visiting Watford. We started by bus and it was fine before we reached the station. Caught the 11.30 for Bletchley . . .

Reaching Bletchley we found that the 1.30, by which we had hoped to go on, was not running. We had an excellent lunch at the station and caught the 2.40, arriving pretty late at Watford. With curious sensations, oppressive but by contrast delicious, we went up to Wynyard. it is now called Northfield and is a girls’ school. An absurd woman showed us round—pointing out improvements and telling us that the house looked ‘prettier in the front’!!

Vindictive memories and Christina dreams of hate were brought before my mind. We both remarked how absolutely right the school boy is in his envy of ‘grown ups’. It was a hot day. Same old flinty roads, same old dusty town. We had tea in the garden of a hotel near the station and caught the 6.9 back.

Changed at Bletchley where we had a sandwich and a whiskey and soda. A pleasant return journey in evening sunlight through country which I like for our jolly stay at Crendon last year. We had supper at Buols. Here I had an interesting talk with W, but I don’t know how much he weighed his words. He said he supposed he wd. grow up some day. Then home by bus in glorious moonlight.

The others met us at the terminus where they were seeing Smudge off—who, says D, has been much better today. Letters of congratulation from the Ainley-Walkers, Carritt, Lionel Lord, Stevenson and Benecke. Carritt says I got A = for all the Philosophy papers, Aβ for ancient history, β = for the other histories, and β = for classics, which is a shock. He also recalls Stock’s dictum that ‘I am not a real philosopher, but quite brilliant’. As consolation for all this, Stevenson tells me that I am one of the very few firsts who didn’t get a serious viva.

Wednesday 9 August: . . . We were rather late for lunch at which Smudge was present. Afterwards I had intended to do a little work, but was beguiled into playing with W at pingpong which we continued very strenuously till tea time. Then came the Pasleys and Helen Munro. Pasley gave me a very poor account of the lectures for teachers which he is attending. They talk to them like babies and it must give strangers an odd impression of Oxford.

The rain, wh. had been heavy all afternoon, had now cleared and while I washed up the others played croquet. I managed a little reading of Bradley, alone in the drawing room with D, and then played myself. During the game I amused Helen and Maureen by surreptitiously clipping nearly all the clothes pegs on to the tail of W’s coat . . .

Thursday 10 August: . . . At about 2 o’c. Smudge, Andrée, W, and I set out with tea baskets etc. and proceeded to Magdalen Bridge. In spite of Smudge’s advice I insisted on taking a canoe, which was very foolish of me. For four of us it was too cramped and the state of the river after the recent rains made it rather dangerous. At the rollers the landing stage was completely under water and in many places the current defied my poor skill in steering. I paddled alone all the time with occasional emergency help from Smudge. W in the bow, wedged tightly into a small space with legs apart and a flybutton showing, dressed in a suit of P’s, was rather a funny sight. It was a beautiful afternoon. We landed in a meadow on the left bank just above the Parks, and had tea in the hay. Plenty of ragging. Back to Magdalen bridge about seven, where the man said he was very glad to see us again!

The girls went home: W and I to College to look for post, thence to drink in the yard of the Mitre. Here he urged me definitely to say whether I would be home in September and I said probably not. This resulted in a complete cessation of talk.

Just before mounting our bus I met Beckett and agreed to lunch with him tomorrow. Home for supper and Smudge played for us. D in rather poor form. I am a little sick of our present life and specially of the work it makes for her and the total lack of privacy. Oh for a day alone.

Friday–Monday 11–14 August: These days I can hardly manage my diary. After we had gone to bed on Thursday W continued to sulk and presently announced his intention of returning home next Monday. Wishing to keep things on a friendly basis I made some conventional question of ‘why’, to which he replied at once, ‘Oh, I can bore myself for nothing at home.’ I am now convinced that this was mere temper and not seriously to be resented from one who habitually lives (with me) in a thoroughly schoolboy atmosphere. At the time, though I only answered ‘that’s true’, it delivered me up to the usual circle of foolish and angry anti-Christinas.

In the morning discussion was renewed. He continued to sulk and I was so disgusted at this childish sort of compulsion that I was tempted to reject all thought of going home. His argument that I had to go sooner or later and that it was a pity not to acquire merit by being there when his presence made it easier, seemed to carry some weight. Besides conscience was pricking me on P’s account.

I talked it over with D and walked into town with W, through Mesopotamia after breakfast, when I told him I would do as he wished. I also said that he must be quite clear that I had not given way because of his fit of temper and that that line would not work again. He affected not to understand . . .

I lunched with Beckett in All Souls. He advised me to try for a fellowship there. We fed in the buttery with a man called Lawrence (formerly of Jesus) and an older one whose name I did not catch. Both were most interesting and agreeable. We drank beer bottled in the 19th century: it is clear red, tastes and smells like toffee, and is very strong . . .

On Sunday we played a good deal of croquet. I amused Andrée with my attempt to translate the opening of Aeneid II into French alexandrines. In the evening we tried to go to the Cowley Fathers to hear plainsong, but got landed instead in the Catholic Church where we were royally bored and where the priest (possibly the Father Burdett S.J. whose name appeared on the door of the confessional) was about the nastiest little man I have ever seen. However, I was glad on the whole, for I have never been to a Mass before, and some of the singing was good.

On Monday we went on the river—Smudge, Andrée, Maureen, W and I in a punt. A good day on the whole, tho’ Maureen was rather a nuisance. No doubt it is good for W to be teased by her, but it is very bad for her to learn this sort of licensed buffoonery. A great rag in the garden after supper. W got from the Union a book on Social France in the XVII Century by Cécile Hugon, who appears to be the woman I met on July 17th.

All these days D has been in good form whenever I have had a moment with her, and everything goes well. Smudge is much better. Andrée in great form, W seems to get on well . . .

Tuesday 15 August: A fine day. W went into town in the morning and I settled to work on my dissertation, continuing till lunch time and making fair head way . . .

During the afternoon I went to D’s room to find a box of matches and ran into her sitting with Maisie Hawes who was in tears. D told me the whole story afterwards and it is just what one would have expected from that foul hag Mrs Hawes. Maisie had always been badly treated—usual Cinderella story—did all the work—cursed and struck in the face—taken away from school—forbidden dancing at which she has real talent and told she must take up nursing which she loathes. Last year they told her she was not their child, but the illegitimate child of her sister. Characteristically they told the other children too. Since then things have become worse. Even the children throw their boots at her, she is constantly hit and is not allowed a single penny of her own. What she dreads most of all is the return next month of Commander Hawes, that gallant officer: when he is at home she is literally imprisoned in the house.

The thing is so bad that other people have noticed it and occasionally ticked the children off for their behaviour to Maisie. On these occasions the little dears go to their mother and say that Maisie has been ‘making mischief’: then she gets hell from the old woman and physical violence. She also said that both Mrs H. and the Commander ‘gushed over’ her in public. A sickening story.

D and I racked our brains to think of anything we could do. Unfortunately it seems not quite bad enough for effective police interference and anything short of that only makes matters worse. As the Hawes know nobody there is no possibility of influencing them by public opinion, and the wretched Maisie has sworn us to secrecy . . .

Wednesday 16 August: In the morning I accompanied W into town in order to return some books to the Union, walking in through Mesopotamia. We spent a pleasant morning, chancing on an unusual number of celebrated curiosities in the bookshop windows and finishing up with beer in the courtyard of the Mitre.

Home to a very late lunch. While we were still at the table the Pasleys appeared and delayed us for some time before the whole lot set out to tennis. W and I of course remained, and played pingpong till tea time . . . Thence to the nameless pub in Old Headington to drink beer in the back room.

On returning we found the others ministering to Smudge, who had collapsed during tennis. She proved a most intractable patient and insisted on walking upstairs: D thinks it was no real faint, but hysteria and I am afraid the analytic explanation is sufficiently obvious.

At supper D told the story of Frank and our brush with the Ludgershall doctor in 1918, which amused W hugely. I went with him after supper to buy rum and D made Smudge an egg flip. It now became necessary for someone to take her home, and W very decently offered to bear me company. We accordingly bussed to Summertown, a pleasant enough drive through the twilight. We had to run to catch the return bus after seeing Smudge to her house and thus avoided a terrible route march home . . .

I forgot to say that Maisie was here to tea, escaped under pretence of going somewhere else. Plain of face, she has an admirable figure: seems honest, cheerful, intelligent and has so small a touch of vulgar accent that one wonders how that witches cave of a home has not affected her more. We all liked her: she played tennis with the others after tea. As soon as I can have a talk with her I am to write to Barfield about any opening in dancing, as she has been trained by some famous woman whose name I cannot catch.

Thursday 17 August: . . . As soon as our late lunch was over I took the bus, having been asked to tea with the Carritts. A beautiful afternoon. Bussed to Carfax and thence to Abingdon Turn, arriving at Heath Barrows at 4.15. Tennis was in progress. I was introduced to Basil Murray of New College, who seems a clever fellow. Carritt promised to criticise my dissertation if I sent it to him. Murray teased him with questions about symbolic logic and the relations of mathematics and philosophy. Carritt frankly had no opinion of their supposed connection. He mentioned a lecture which he had heard in which the point was that because you had no really accurate measuring rod, therefore things equal to the same thing were not equal to one another, which was childish. After tea tennis set in again, so I departed, making W my excuse and walked to Carfax through S. Hinksey with great enjoyment.

Arrived home to find the others fresh from bridge with Mrs Stevenson. Andrée, Maureen, W and I played croquet till supper time: afterwards Andrée and I had very poor luck at bridge against D and W. Earlyish to bed. D in good form—my own neuralgia nearly gone.

Friday 18 August: W and I bussed into Oxford after a late breakfast and he went to have his hair cut. After our usual beer drinking at the Mitre we went to All Souls. Beckett was not in his rooms—or rather in those of Sir John Simon, which he uses—but by good luck we met a porter who led us to the Codrington Library. We were both much impressed with the room, where we’d never been before. Beckett was dug out of one of the smaller rooms. I introduced him to W and he promised to come out to lunch.

After a drink at the Roebuck we two came home and Beckett arrived shortly afterwards. Everyone seemed favourably impressed by him. I found to my surprise that he is twenty six years old. During lunch we talked of the legal status of men and women: Beckett said there were actually more injustices in the woman’s favour than in the man’s. I find that that cheery old boy I met on the 12th of August was Zulueta, the Professor of Roman Law and the son of the ex-Spanish Ambassador. D remarked afterwards that a close friendship between Baker and Beckett was not what one would have expected.

After lunch I worked on my dissertation and started recopying it. I find that the second draft will be very different from the first and I am not sure that I have even broken the back of the job.

Both the Pasleys were here for tea. They, Smudge and I (afterwards joined by W) played pingpong and I was badly beaten by everyone. After supper D, Andrée, W and I played bridge—in which I was equally unsuccessful. Smudge started home on her bicycle at about 10, but returned in a few minutes, very much rattled as she had been followed by a Headington rough. W and I accordingly turned out (it was now raining) and walked with her to the White Horse . . .

Forgot to mention our argument during supper in which D and W maintained that education was a cause of unhappiness and that the labourers of the early 19th century, with all their miseries, were happier than those of the present day. I of course took the opposite view.

Saturday 19 August: A fine morning. Into town with W through Mesopotamia, as has become customary, after breakfast. Found an extraordinary cheap pipe for 2/6d which I got—it seems to be a success.

As we were returning by bus, we fell to talk of our father. W said that in spite of the old rows, despotisms and absurdities of our childhood, P could have made a friend of him in the last five years if he had had any serious will to do so, and had not consistently sneered at his profession. I thought the same was true of me: quite recently it was still possible for a slight effort on P’s part to remove the barriers, but that effort had not been made and the cleavage—moral, intellectual and of habit—is permanently fixed . . .

Supper late: everyone in great spirits. Afterwards Maisie danced to us. In so small a room one cannot get a picture of the whole body, and of course the effort is much too visible. She seemed good to me but I know nothing of dancing.

It was now a lovely pitchblack night, and I suggested hide and seek in the garden: this looked like developing into a good rag, but Smudge had to go and she was in such a state of nerves that I accompanied her to the top of Headington Hill. She was in poor form—shell shock I call it. Her father died heavily in debt and as the others were too young, she has had everything to do for six years. I am afraid something is going to snap if the strain goes on much longer.

I came back to find that W had seen Maisie home and he had returned in semi-comic dudgeon after having blundered over all the ditches of Highfield in the dark . . .

Sunday 20 August: I spent the morning at work on my dissertation and made some progress. Shortly before lunch I walked out with W. to our usual pub, where we sat in an unusual room—same where I sat with Pasley discussing marriage two years ago—and drank cider. W said it had not the tang of the Worcester cider, and I think he was right. After lunch I played croquet with him—absolutely off my game, could hit nothing.

I then changed and cycled to Warneford Rd. Mrs P told me that Pasley had just left and I overtook him (on foot) this side of college. We then went together to call on the Mugger. We found his wife in the garden and were soon joined by himself. We talked of Hutchinson’s novels. The Mugger said the style suggested an effort to out-herod Carlyle.

The maid then appeared from the house, trying to keep ahead of a couple of visitors: the woman however outstripped (her) and arrived a short head in time to announce herself. ‘I’m Dr Meade and this is my husband.’ They were Americans. Pasley says the man had gold links in his right cuff and silver in his left, but I did not notice it myself. He opened the conversation by saying ‘Our town is just the other side of Connecticut’ and described it at some length. He then asked the Mugger ‘Can you tell me what are the functions of a Master of a College in this University?’ The Mugger replied ‘Hm—hm—rather hard to explain—hm—hm—looks after the administration and the—er—administration of finance—tho’ to be sure the Bursar looks after that—hm.’ He also told the Mugger that many of the MS in the Bodleian were irreplaceable! Dr Meade enquired of Pasley and me ‘What are you two young men doing here at this time of year?’

When we left, the Mugger affectionately armed me to the door and asked me about my plans. He said they wd. be very pleased to see me again if I wanted to stay up another year. Pasley accompanied me along the Iffley Rd. talking about his chances of an All Souls Fellowship.

We met Andrée, Smudge, and W outside Cowley St John: Pasley departed and the rest of us went in. Quite an interesting show: plainsong seemed to me curious rather than beautiful, but in parts it had a faint charm.

From here I went to Warneford Rd. to have supper with the Pasleys. In spite of all prepossessions in her favour, I have not succeeded in liking ‘Johnnie’. She seems empty, plain, and a little bit common: but it is true that I found my evening less unpleasant than I had feared.

Pasley seems still happy and that is the great thing. He talked about history—also about immortality—usual negatively hopeful attitude that you couldn’t disprove. He told me the idea of a play he hoped to write, turning on the progress of toleration which was reaching such a point that since every opinion ‘had much to be said for it’ no single opinion could be held at all. I said he was the extreme example himself: for his play would preach toleration of intolerance . . .

Monday 21 August: Despite all my efforts we have slipped into late hours again and, finding the Headington air sleepy on its own account, come always to breakfast in a kind of coma . . .

Andrée, W. and I went into town after breakfast, only to find the library already shut and no order about return of books . . . We then went to [University College] chapel where I showed them the Dutch windows and held a crowd at bay while W took a photo. We then went to Merton and saw the library and chapel where I have never been before: afterwards to the House to see the pictures. We went to the courtyard of the Mitre where W and I drank beer while Andrée put away a cocktail in the manner born.

. . . Supper in fairly good time after which Andrée and W went to the Stevensons to play bridge. Left alone, we fell to talking of W. D said he was nice and ‘just missed being very nice indeed’ but one couldn’t tell how. I said probably because you felt that he had no need for you. She admired his slow, whimsical way of talking, which was attractive and which one found oneself unconsciously imitating . . . Later in the evening I had a conversation with D, memorable both for its exceedingly tortuous course, and for its content which certainly was an eye opener.

Tuesday 22 August: When I woke up I felt that the events of the previous night had happened in a dream. Smudge was here at breakfast time: we were all relieved to hear that she had an invitation to spend a few days at Brill. I eagerly advised her to accept this . . .

After lunch I worked on my dissertation till tea time, having first washed up whatever of the lunch things were left by Dorothy and Ivy, and laid as much of the tea things as I could.

After tea Maureen, W and I bussed in to the station to meet Daisy Perrott—silly woman—and to look for the cake which is supposed to be on its way from Little Lea. After Daisy’s arrival W and I dawdled behind, looked for the cake in both stations, and finally came on to the Mitre. W asked me about Daisy: I restrained a desire to pour out the vials of my dislike and described her merely as a dud. ‘The Dud’ she has accordingly become in our conversation.

Home and to supper, after which Maisie danced to us. This poor girl wins golden opinions on all sides. Tomorrow there is talk of her being taken to London by the bitch she calls mother, I don’t know with what devil’s purpose of forcing her into nursing or worse, against her will. Perhaps we shall not see her again.

Smudge behaved very strangely. W and I played bridge against Andrée and D. Daisy’s meaningless face overhung the game and D had to keep up an intermittent conversation with her wh. led to a mistake and lost them the rubber. I had a few minutes alone with D. She thinks I have gone to the other extreme today and been almost rude to Smudge. She is doubtless right, but I hardly know whether I am on my head or my heels and heartily wish Smudge out of the house, tho’ to be sure I am still heartily sorry for her.

Wednesday 23 August: . . . After tea, as Andrée looked restive, I suggested a walk. She and Smudge accompanied me up the fieldpath through what used to be ‘The Red Land’. Rather a rum conversation on Paramnesia (Andrée, who introduced the subject, calls it ‘fausse reminiscence’), were-wolves, damnation and decapitation.

I had just gone up to my room after our return when Smudge knocked at the door. She had come to apologise for going for a walk: she had thought we were all coming and wouldn’t have come if she had known it was Andrée and me—we could have had a much better walk without her—etc., etc. Little ass! On the spur of the moment I said ‘Oh rot!—it’s so much easier to keep up a conversation between three people than between two’: realised afterwards what an admirable and pregnant reply I had made . . .

Thursday 24 August: A tolerable morning. Daisy and Andrée decided to go into town and W. and I went also, but independently . . .

On coming home we found Smudge starting an early lunch in order to be ready for her departure for Brill. It was at this juncture that an adventure happened: D—the only witness—described its first reel. She saw a figure at the door whom she took for an unusually ugly errand boy. Just as she was going to ask him his business, Andrée appeared at the head of the stairs, paused a minute, then rushed forwards crying ‘A-A-Aah! Gerges. C’est tu!’

It was her cousin—Georges Sée—and D asked him to lunch . . . A more repulsive looking dago I have never set eyes on. He and Andrée left us immediately after lunch and Maisie appeared. The plot now began to unfold. Andrée it appeared had spoken to D about ‘rooms’ and later, by imperceptible change, about ‘a room’ for the . . . boy, and it had gradually become apparent that she was proposing to feed her curio at our table. Of payment, there had of course been no suggestion. I can hardly describe the state of horror into which this threw every single member of the household: but as the thing had been assumed by Andrée and not requested, as the monster had been slipped into our midst with admirable coolness—we had no notion how to proceed. . . .

We were then joined by D and W and another feverish council of war took place. D was for sticking it till Monday when Mrs Raymond’s return would make a natural excuse to eject him. The rest of us were agreed in urging early and forcible action, but no one could decide on a feasible plan . . .

We now concluded that D must speak plainly to Andrée when she returned. W. and I then went to our pub to drink large whiskies. W had a headache. We came back and continued our croquet until Maureen rushed out to tell me that Andrée was come.

Going in, I found her with D in the kitchen. D asked her if she had found rooms for her cousin. Andrée said she had heard of something in Windmill Rd. ‘But can they do for him there?’ ‘Do for him? What do you mean?’ ‘I mean can they feed him?’ ‘Aah! But can you not do that?’ D explained as politely as possible that this was out of the question. Andrée gave way at once. Her face was rather an odd colour and rather an odd shape. To be frank, she did not strike me as one who had made an embarrassing blunder by accident. I thought she knew—and knew that we knew—and that we knew that she knew—that she had attempted a monstrous imposition and failed . . .

Pasley had returned ‘Dymer’ with some interesting criticisms. He likes Canto II the best: disapproves of ‘C.C. S.’ as ‘inexcusable modernism’: objects to ‘the intrusion of allegory’ in III (what is the allegory?) and concludes ‘Go on and prosper but use the knife freely.’ In bed about 12.

Friday 25 August: . . . W and I then went into town to make our arrangements about tomorrow’s travelling, paid a farewell visit to the Mitre and returned home. Andrée returned soon afterwards without Mr Sée, which relieved us from any fear her morning’s conversation had caused. Maisie Hawes came after lunch. She and I played croquet against W and Andrée, leading for the first half of the game: then my aim went to pieces and we were beaten. D and Maureen went out after tea . . .

Both the Pasleys came to supper. He showed me a cartoon which he had drawn to represent the adventure of yesterday. The drawing may not be academic, but it is an amusing relic. After supper we had a great rag playing ‘French and English’ on the lawn: the clothes line was used to divide the grounds. D tells me we could be heard all over Headington. W and I had not taken such violent exercise since Lord-knows-when.

Saturday 26 August: . . . W. and I did most of our packing before breakfast. We were delayed for a few minutes to have a photo taken by Maureen, and then departed, carrying his tin trunk between us. His visit here has been a great pleasure to me—a great advance too towards connecting up my real life with all that is pleasantest in my Irish life. Fortunately everyone liked him and I think he liked them. We found that we were running it very close for my 10.50 so I had to jump for the station bus and leave him to manipulate his box alone.

I arrived just as the train was ready to go and got put in a 1st Class compt. alone in which I travelled to London in great comfort. Baker met me at Paddington and took me (via tube to Baker St.) to lunch at Karraways where, he said, ‘The Baker millions are made’. Here we met another of his aunts: the one I met at Aclands has conjunctivitis. Baker was pale and not very well, but I was delighted to see him.

From here we went to the Haymarket to see A. A. Milne’s The Dover Road. Tho’ it collapses in the third act, this is one of the most amusing things I have ever seen. Henry Ainley (as Latimer) was not very good, except in his brief authoritative speeches. In the long ones he adopted a strange parsonical monotone which (Baker said) must be ‘for a purpose’ but was very bad. John Deverill (as ‘Nicholas’) pleased me best.

Back to Karraway’s for tea and thence out to 9 Staverton Rd. Here we met Baker’s third Aunt, the most interesting of the three, tho’ all are kindly and sensible women. After supper they sang old English carols—a new kind of music to me, and very unlike what is usually called a carol. At the time I thought I would give all the great composers for a budget like these. A most enjoyable day. Early to bed after some chat with Baker in his room.

Sunday 27 August: I walked with Baker in the morning through suburban avenues and parks, finally through mean streets. As I remarked ‘London is very like Belfast’, he replied ‘Of course it is.’ As we went on I told him about Maisie Hawes. I said something must be done quickly as the Commander was coming next week and then it appeared they would try to rush her into a nursing home. On the other hand everything hinged on the legal position. If her ‘parents’ really had power to bring her back, it would be no good finding her a job . . .

Back for lunch. Afterwards he and I were left alone with his sensible aunt and the question of Maisie was raised again. She was positive that at 19 a girl could not be forced to live with her parents if she could support herself. I then retired to my own room to write up arrears of diary.

After tea they sang carols again, to my great delight: in the evening he gave us what he called an ‘orgy’ on his gramophone. I heard the Kreutzer Sonata for the first time: also the death scene from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov sung by Chaliapin. I am beginning to get a solid impression of this household. The aunt whom we saw at Oxford is an unbearable woman. It is she who usually manages Karraway’s: during her illness this is being done by Aunt No. 2—a plain, sensible, but dull creature. Both are religious. The third is very different: more common in face and voice than her sisters, she has humour and humanity. She runs a club for young girls on the stage and works on the medical board of a district. She alone approves of Baker’s going on the stage.

Baker—the mightly Baker—is lamb-like in his own house and bears the nagging of his eldest Aunt with a patience which I cannot too much admire. He even goes to church with her, tho’ he has now quite passed the religious phase. Yet he tells me he had an altar in his bedroom two years ago!

I laughingly reminded him of the part he had played in our arguments in 1919 and of his prophecy that my chimney stack would turn into a spire . . .

Monday 28 August: A muggy, thunderous day. Shortly after breakfast I went with Baker to the Old Vic where he begins his job today. When we emerged from Waterloo I remembered for the first time that I had been to hear Carmen (very bad) at the Old Vic years before on my way to Bookham. He was naturally rather rattled: as he said ‘In any profession the first day is hell.’ Saw him disappear through the door and walked back over Waterloo Bridge . . .

I took the desperate resolve of entering the National Gallery, where I finally came to the conclusion that I have no taste for painting. I could make nothing of the Titians. The only things (besides portraits) that I cared for much were Botticelli’s Mars and Venus with satyrs, and Veronese’s (?) ‘Unfaithfulness’ in which I liked the design, tho’ I confess the actual figures always seem dull to me. However, the Italian rooms are nothing like so boring as the English.

From Trafalgar Square I tubed to Waterloo and waited for Baker at the stage door of the Old Vic. He came out at half past four after I had spent half an hour admiring Waterloo Rd. and been scowled at by a very villainous stage carpenter. We tubed to Karraways and he talked about his day. He seems to have been well treated, all things considered. He is to play Westmorland in Henry IV and to be a basket bearer in the Merry Wives. They went all through Henry IV today—over and over some parts again—in a small room with a shut window. We then went to Paddington where I caught the 6.5.

I have enjoyed my stay with these people very well, except of course the eldest aunt. After a very pleasant journey I arrived at Hillsboro about 8.30. D was in poor form after a very hard day, interrupted by many visitors, including Cranny, who really seems to be going off his head. Earlyish to bed.

Tuesday 29 August: Dreamed that Andrée made a series of attempts to stab me. I behaved like the prig hero of an adventure story, each time gently forcing the dagger away and appealing to her better nature. Finally I gave her a long and paternal lecture and kissed her hand: she gave it up in despair and departed—presumably to a convent!

In the morning I worked on my dissertation. Maisie came before lunch and we held a consultation over her. She has had another offer of a job and the Bitch won’t allow her to go to London for an interview. And the Commander is returning on Saturday. We decided we must get clear about the legalities. After lunch I therefore bussed into town and made an appointment for 3 o’clock tomorrow with Walsh, the solicitor. Back again and helped D with the plum jam which she has to make for Mrs Raymond. Andrée and Maisie went to the theatre in the evening.

Mr Raymond turned up . . . Lord, I never knew he was such a bore! A little dapper man with a grey moustache, his conversation consists in a steady outpour of absolutely trivial information about everything he has done for the last week. If you start any other subject he just waits till you’ve done and then begins again. He occupies my room and I am sleeping at Mrs Wards.

Wednesday 30 August: Since the arrival of Father Raymond our life has run on Leeborough lines: we look forward with joy to the end of breakfast and dread the approach of evening. This morning he mooted the proposal that D should bottle his plums for him. Of course we couldn’t directly refuse, as we are under an obligation to him for the house, and for this, as for most ‘kindnesses’, he apparently proposes to get his return in one way or another. Fortunately it was a wet day, so further picking and jam making were impossible.

However, it was range day and joint day so D was pretty busy and I spent most of the morning helping. Dorothy’s sister Ivy is now with us—a very pleasant girl. After lunch Maisie appeared and went into town with D.

I tried to get on with my dissertation, having finished my attack on Hedonism and arrived at Kant. I was dissatisfied with my former argument, but could not get on without a text, so I fell, idly enough, to turning over the pages of Ian Hay’s A Man’s Man. Technically he knows how to string a novel together, but his ideas and ideals are fourth rate Kipling and water and his crude wish-fulfilments only fit for the Christinas of a school girl. The only redeeming feature is the humour . . .

As soon as I could get D alone I heard the result of her visit to the solicitor. The interview had been rather funny at first, because he took D for Maisie’s mother, and when she asked what power a parent or a guardian had over a daughter of 19, replied severely ‘None whatever, Madam, none whatever!’ This was eminently satisfactory. Walsh was very kind and promised free advice to Maisie if she needed it again. He advised her to take out a summons against the Commander or his wife if they struck her again. He said that they had no power at all, except to turn her adrift.

We were all jubilant. I wrote at once to Baker asking if his aunt cd. meet Maisie in town and take her to her interview some day soon: also a ‘board and lodging letter’ to the other aunt . . .

Smudge . . . got into a terrible state of nerves before going to bed: I had to go upstairs and show her that there was really nothing in any of the cupboards and also kill two spiders . . . Maureen is sleeping at Lady Gonner’s and Smudge is in D’s room.

Thursday 31 August: Harris the plumber arrived before breakfast to see to the waste pipe in the scullery sink which was blocked. He put it right very promptly for 2/-and we were hoping to keep a discreet silence about the affair: but it had not escaped old Raymond who observed at breakfast ‘I saw Harris going away Mrs Moore. Anything wrong?’ So we told him and he replied ‘Hmh’ after his fashion . . . After lunch we all picked plums and Andrée (who is becoming highly domesticated) very kindly offered to stone them for D while I went to my dissertation.

I found I was utterly useless and could think of no new arguments: then an infernal Salvation Army band established itself in Windmill Rd. and began singing hymns punctuated with five minute sermons. Religion proved more than a match for philosophy and I had to give it up . . . and then went to help D with the jam.

Old Raymond returned and went out to mess with his new ferns in the garden. We went on hard with the jam. Every now and then he came in out of the rain and fidgeted about and talked about the jam: never a word of thanks or any reference to the trouble we were having. Of course he is quite right: he lent the house and we’ve got to do his jam. Once he observed pleasantly ‘You look very busy.’ . . .

Friday 1 September: All morning I sat in the dining room and worked on my dissertation, trying to prove that no pleasure could be considered bad, considered in itself. I found it necessary to descend into pathology and rather doubt if I have done wisely . . .

Poor D had been making jam again, but I think it is done with now: may it be as molten lead in their mouths and as dragonets in their stomachs! She tells me that old Raymond is in very good form over it. Like most egotistical bores, he is just a child after all, easily pleased and easily put out.

After supper I took Maureen to the Gonners. On the way we met Smudge who had been home, and I had to walk back with her. She told me she had passed her exam, but made me promise not to tell the others till tomorrow as ‘she couldn’t stand any remarks tonight’.

She asked if there was anything she could do in return for my coaching. I said I’d tell her if there ever was, and laughingly suggested that I might ask her to murder someone. She replied gravely ‘I would if you told me.’ Then she remarked how ‘utterly miserable she was tonight’. Altogether an infernally uncomfortable tête-à-tête.

Then, of course when we got back there was a spider in the drawing room and she rushed out into the garden. After a lot of calling, Andrée and I found her lying on the lawn under the apple tree: as usual, not a real faint . . .

Saturday 2 September: . . . I spent the morning at my work in the dining room, writing about the concept of desert with great interest and enjoyment.

Mr R. was in for lunch: Maisie also turned up just as we were finishing. We are all glad to hear that The Bitch has a painful attack of lumbago. She had been grousing in bed and Maisie said ‘For goodness sake put a better face on things.’ The little woman growled at her ‘Ach-h—if I could get up I’d take a stick to ye.’ ‘No you wouldn’t,’ said Maisie. ‘You wouldn’t dare. If you ever try that again I’ll take out a summons against you.’ The Bitch simply gaped at her and said nothing.

I had a letter from Baker which I gave Maisie to read. His aunt has found out about Iris de Villiers of New Bond St. with whom Maisie was to have an interview. She appears to be rather a fraud: her plan is to see the candidate dance, say that she needs a little more training and offer to give it at a nominal price, pending a final engagement. The whole thing is just a dodge for getting pupils . . .

Sunday 3 September: . . . The Commander returned yesterday. The Bitch told [Maisie] she might go out today as it would be the last time she would ever go out anywhere. She also made a variety of complaints about her to the Commander, mostly untrue. The Commander said Maisie didn’t work, and therefore he wouldn’t start her in a dancing career: they both settled down to write long letters—presumably making some arrangements about her.

During the afternoon Smudge’s brother came out: he is a very quiet youth whom I think I rather like. We play croquet, Andrée and I against Maisie and Mr Wiblin.

After tea I went out to do some message or other—I forget what: as I came back into Western Road I passed one of the Hawes children leaving ‘Hillsboro’ on a bike. ‘That means trouble,’ thought I. I cut her, more through preoccupation than anything else. As soon as I got back I found that the child had been sent with a peremptory message for Maisie’s return. Maisie had sent back asking for a few moments’ grace as she was in the middle of a game, and the child had come again with the message ‘Maisie is to come home at once.’ She was now preparing to obey: she was quite unnerved for once, and everyone felt that there was going to be an outburst.

At her request I accompanied her home, after D and I had both advised her to escape to us if things became unbearable. She led me round to the back of her house where we found the whole family ‘joined in synod unbenign’. I said we had promised all our guests that Maisie shd. dance for them and I hoped very much that it would be possible for her to stay to supper. Whereupon a figure that sat with its back to me, turned half round and said that we could promise what we liked but ‘She cannot, she CAN NOT: and that’s why I sent for her, for I’m not going to have her going out and leavin’ the place like a pig stye, so there, and she can understand that.’ (All this seemed to be delivered in a strong Belfast accent, tho’ I suppose it must really be Scotch.)

The Bitch at this point showed a desire to keep up the fiction of friendliness and interrupted ‘My dear, this is Mr Lewis.’ The figure—a very fat blue figure with a red face—then turned fully round and extended a right hand from which two or three fingers were missing. I took it—it seemed better so. He then poured out a good deal more of the same sort with a lot of abuse of Maisie. Finally I said ‘Good bye,’ glancing in her direction, and came away.

Came home in a sort of drunk state of agitation and had supper: old Raymond was fortunately out. Afterwards I helped to wash up and then read two tales of Tolstoi, Where God Is, There Is Love and The Godson: the latter is the better, but neither impressed me much.

Old Raymond came in and began talking about Peru. Then, at about 11.30 came a tap at the door: I went, and there was Maisie saying ‘I’ve come.’ She had crept out after all the devils were in bed and carried all her clothes away with her.

As soon as Raymond went to bed, D, Andrée, Smudge and I met in conclave in the drawing room. As soon as I had left, the Bitch and her husband had started a row with Maisie. The pretext was the untidiness of her room . . . The Bitch supplied an obbligato to this row by throwing knives and forks about. The Commander was going to strike her but she cowed him by the mere mention of a summons. They said he would take her back to Belfast when he went there and make her a nurse. As a parting shot the Commander told her to ‘do out’ the whole ground floor of the house before she went to bed. The others (including the kids) then retired to have some champagne in the parent’s bedroom, and so to bed. Maisie also went to bed (in her clothes): then got up again and came to us.

We now thought out our plans—arguing a good deal in circles: Andrée showed very clear insight. Our chief object was to guard against the possibility of a visit from the Commander on the morrow, as we could not have a scene in Mr R’s house while Mr W. was there. It was decided that Maisie should sleep the night at Mrs Wards and go up to London in the morning to see Miss de Villiers: not that we doubted Baker’s advice about that lady, but so that we could truthfully declare that she was not in Oxford. She then wrote a note to the Commander explaining that she was gone, and gone to London, and adding that further communications should be addressed to Walsh the solicitor.

It was arranged that I should take this note. Maisie then went to Mrs W’s to sleep in the room which I have been using: I wrapped D’s scarf round me (my coat being at Mrs W’s) and set off with my note: it obviously had to be delivered at once (if the red herring was to work) and delivered without waking anyone. I felt as if I were on a veritable patrol. A cold cloudy morning with diffused moonlight.

At the end of the Hawes road I met a bike: crept down to the Hawes: found lights still on in the house opposite. I went to the hall door with considerable caution and managed to get the note through the letter box without making much row. This done, I came down to Warneford Rd. and let myself in: very much of an empty house with all the windows bolted and a disused smell. I looked through some 14 stout bottles left by the Pasleys but found never a drop. The bed was still made in my own room and I retired at 1.35 to sleep in my shirt and be wakened by the crying child next door.

Monday 4 September: . . . As we were all in momentary expectation of a visit from the Commander we could not prevent a rather windy and comfortless atmosphere from pervading the group mind. Maisie had gone off to town by the earliest train with letters to introduce herself to Baker’s aunt. We breakfasted. As soon as old Raymond was out of the house, Andrée, following a pleasant idea of her own, biked to the Hawes’: during her absence I shaved in D’s room. Andrée then came back and told us her adventure.

She had seen the Bitch: said she came round to say good bye: was the Commander there? No—in Oxford. Well wd. Mrs Hawes say goodbye to him for her? and could she see Maisie? ‘Maisie’s out,’ said the Bitch: ‘I’m not quite sure where. She isn’t round with you is she?’ ‘No,’ said Andrée, ‘I haven’t seen her today.’

As soon as I had heard this story I bussed into town and called on Walsh the solicitor, after hanging about for some time to make sure that I shd. not meet the Commander in the waiting room. Walsh proved to be the jolliest old gentleman I ever met: he has a big nosed, big toothed face like a rabbit, and very bright eyes. Over his mantelpiece a notice catches your eye:—‘When in doubt tell the truth.’

I explained who I was and told him the situation up to date. He said that D had not mentioned me, and that I, simply because of the sex, made a difference. He was horrified to hear that Maisie had slept in what was my room and asked if I wanted them to bring me before the city court for abduction. This was quite a new idea to me, and rather alarming. However, he presently decided that a girl of 19 couldn’t be abducted anyway ‘though they change the age so often these days that you’ll soon be able to abduct a woman of eighty’.

I spoke of our efforts to avoid a scene between the Commander and Mr R. ‘You surely don’t mean,’ said he ‘that this Commander is going to commit an assault on an innocent old gentleman pulling up dandelions in front of a hall door!’ He advised us to tell no lies, to refuse to see the Commander, and to answer no questions. There appears to be no legal bother at all. I showed him Beckett’s alarmist letter and he simply handed it back with a smile and a shrug. So much for a first in jurisprudence! I parted from him in great good humour.

Came back to find that no visit had taken place . . . A wire came from Maisie ‘Return Paddington 7’: we could find no such train in the guide book.

Then came a ring at the door. I answered it, bracing myself for another encounter with the Commander, and found instead a Nun, who said ‘I’m Sister Hilary—a friend of Maisie Hawes. May I see Mrs Moore?’ Had a hurried consultation with D over this development and decided that no information must be given, whatever the Nun seemed like. Then D went to see her in the dining room. Went out to take chaircovers to the wash etc. After a long wait D emerged from the dining room and told me her story. Sister H. is a friend whom Maisie has mentioned as trustworthy. She came to D from the Hawes. The latter are not much worried about Maisie’s disappearance and think she is still in Headington, probably with us.

The Sister is naturally worried about her. She had noticed ‘things’ when Maisie was a child and wondered about her treatment: she said it was a case of ‘misunderstanding’ between her and her parents. She said that the Commander had admitted that he lost his temper last night and said things he hadn’t meant—both to Maisie and me. He said that they were proposing to take Maisie to London on Wednesday and get her a dancing job: that the nursing yarn and the Belfast yarn were only threats. He had also complained that Maisie did no work in the house. D replied by a few facts about Maisie’s real life in that house: and the Nun certainly opened her eyes. She agreed that the Commander’s story about ‘having arranged to settle about Maisie’s dancing on Wednesday’ was probably a lie—and a very clever lie too, if it is designed to make us believe we’ve been on a fool’s errand.

The Nun then asked D directly if she knew anything about Maisie. D refused to say: but promised to tell her if Maisie wrote to her, and said that she knew Maisie had friends in London who would look after her. The Nun did not press any of her questions. She said she would tell the devils only that D said she was not in the least surprised at Maisie’s flight. They parted on excellent terms although the interview had been difficult, each naturally regarding the other with suspicion.

From the Ry. Guide we now perceived that one of the trains which Maisie might mean by ‘the 7’ would be in any moment and some one must go down and let Maisie into Warneford Rd. where she was to sleep tonight. Rushed down to the tennis court and sent Smudge to do so . . . Smudge turned up towards the end of the meal—Maisie not having arrived.

As she insisted—God knows why—that her brother must not know of the matter—it naturally became necessary for me to go down in time for the next train: which was imprudent. Then D had to go and smuggle the key of Warneford Rd. out of Smudge’s pocket—Smudge being still at supper and on the duty list, listening to old Raymond. As soon as this had been successfully done I took a basket of food for Maisie’s supper and breakfast and hurried down to Warneford Rd. Came in and lit the gas so that it could be seen thro’ the fanlight. Maisie soon turned up, having had an excellent day with Baker’s aunt, and mindful of Walsh’s advice I left her at once and came up.

At the end of Gipsy Lane I met Smudge, walking down to sleep with Maisie at Warneford Rd. Saw her back as far as the lamp posts—the last thing on God’s earth that I wanted to do.

Home at last, very footsore and tired: positively giddy with one of the worst colds I’ve ever had—now developing into a cough . . .

Tuesday 5 September: Rose feeling more tired than I have been since we left the Jeffreys—whom God reject! We set to work as soon as we could and slaved . . . all day, packing against time. We all kept up wonderful spirits considering everything.

Andrée went off by the 10.50, Mr Sée calling for her and carrying her case. She is a remarkable character. This last week she has shown herself at her best, taking a hand in everything and helping us . . . Perhaps there has been a real change in her—D has a great knack of getting the best out of people . . .

We got down to Warneford Rd. at about five. D and Maisie did most of the work upstairs while I worked in great haste below, settling in. Ivy gave us a fright by getting a bad heart attack. She had not told us that she was subject to them, but apparently she is—and if so, it is small wonder that the frightful pressure we’ve been going at has brought on one. Went twice to the pub to get brandy.

In the midst of all this confusion Smudge flitted from room to room saying she thought she’d better go home tonight. A thousand times I felt tempted to reply ‘Well then GO!’, but of course she always yielded to D’s pressure. Indeed she has been very good and has not spared herself in helping: but I must confess I find her presence an intolerable addition to the strain of these days . . .

Found that D, with a momentary lapse from common sense, perhaps in pride at being alive after such a day, was making Smudge play. So we had to sit and listen and I felt I didn’t care if the roof fell in. When that was over there was endless delay in getting to bed and of course, as the last straw to a perfect day, I was left alone with Smudge. To bed at last, and I had a few moments alone with D, who stands this bad time wonderfully. Cold seems rather worse.

Wednesday 6 September: Still feeling pretty rotten. By the morning post Ivy got a letter from her fiancé saying he would arrive at Carfax by car at 9.30 and would she meet him. She of course was for going, but D thought this very dangerous as she had had another bad turn this same morning. Ivy proved obdurate and the only thing was for me to rush into town and try and forestall her by bringing the youth out.

Ivy, by the by, is rather wonderful: the daughter of a shepherd, herself a trained nurse and yet content to do domestic work for us so as to give Dorothy a holiday . . .

In the afternoon I sat in my own room and wrote up arrears of diary. Very tired and full of cold. D is still busy settling in and Maisie works like a brick.

Thursday 7 September: A bad, feverish night—all full of confused dreams and no good from my sleep . . . In the afternoon I tried to work but felt too fuddled and ended by lying on my bed. A letter from Walsh saying the Commander had been to him and asked for Maisie’s address, which he had truthfully replied he did not know. He now has a letter from her. Early to bed.

Friday 8 September: Stayed in bed till tea time. Called for the Odyssey and beginning at Bk. V read to the middle of Bk. VIII with great pleasure. Cold still pretty bad.

Saturday–Saturday 9–23 September: Between my Friday’s entry and my departure for Ireland the only event of importance has been an interview between D, Ivy and myself. The origin of this was some trouble between Ivy’s people and herself . . .

On Monday (11th) I travelled to Belfast, by Liverpool. On Thursday morning my first vision was of the town in its familiar squalor under heavy rain . . .

My Father made some considerable opposition to my returning in ten days time, but I showed a firm front and after this preliminary unpleasantness he was really, with a few exceptions, at his best during my stay.

W was in good form and he and I did a lot of motorbiking. Besides short rides over the hills to Holywood—the objective usually being a drink in the ‘Central Hotel’—he took me to Island Magee, to Newcastle, and to Browns Bay where we lunched with Kelsie and Gundred at K’s hut. The country is very beautiful and if only I could deport the Ulstermen and fill their land with a populace of my own choosing, I should ask no better place to live in. By the by it is quite a mistake to think that Ulster is inhabited by loyalists: the mountains beyond Newcastle and the Antrim ‘hinterlands’ are all Green.

At this time I read Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga: one of the finest novels I have ever read, and mercilessly true. I spoke of it to Mrs Greeves, herself a Forsyte, wife of a Forsyte, mother and daughter of Forsytes: she had read, and enjoyed it apparently, but without the least comprehension of the author’s purpose. She could not understand what I meant when I said the Forsytes were terrible people and thought ‘it was a great pity of Soames’. The sinister figure of Soames is the great creation of the book—and Irene, one of the very few heroines whose beauty is made convincing, though it is never described.

I also read the greater part of James Stephens’ Irish Fairy Tales: his curious humour and profundity of course peep out in places—but the author of The Crock of Gold is simply wasted on other people’s tales. Beyond these two I read nothing.

W had rigged up the croquet lawn, after some ten years lying idle. During this time the hoops have got lost or been stolen, and he had erected pairs of sticks to serve in their place—which presented a very curious appearance to me on my arrival. We played a certain amount, and until the very end, I was incredibly bad. We also persuaded our father to play, which he did in the funniest way imaginable, sometimes regarding the whole thing with lordly tolerance, and at others becoming intensely serious. After a while he developed powers by no means contemptible.

Croquet and rain brought it about that we had very little of the after dinner strolling which is de rigeur there in the summer. I had a curious feeling that my father has ‘given me up’: I feel that he has ceased to ask questions about me, regards me as a hopeless enigma. The strain of conversing with him, the hopelessness of trying to make him understand a position, are of course old news: but this time one felt—rather pathetically—that the effort was over for good on his side. I can truly say I am sorry I have contributed so little to his happiness: whether he deserves it or not is another matter. Almost the only pleasure he can derive from me is that which may come from academic or literary successes in my career.

In the evening W and I often played chess with varying fortune, but I think he usually won. Arthur was at home when I arrived, intending to sail for England the next day. This, however, was prevented by a chill which brought him to bed and after that he put off his departure from day to day so that I could not let D know many days ahead: consequently she was able to send me only one letter during my stay. I saw Arthur frequently. Whether it was his health or my absorption in other things I don’t know, but we found practically nothing to say to each other. I worked on my dissertation nearly every day and finished it.

On Thursday 21st W and I left and crossed to England by Heysham. This route was new to both of us. If you can face the early start—5.45 boat train from Heysham—it has every advantage. The boats are more comfortable than either the Liverpool or the Fleetwood and—what is unique—they give you really good coffee. We travelled first class all the way and had a most comfortable journey: a breakfast-car came on at Leeds in which we had a capital meal, and, later, a morning drink. We had a compt. to ourselves. I was reading H. G. Well’s Modern Utopia—a poor, hazy, affected book.

On reaching St Pancras we went at once to Karraway’s where Baker, according to a letter from me, had left tickets for the St Martin’s. I got these and spoke to his aunts—they tell me he has got the part of Page in the Merry Wives—and then rejoined W. After lunching at the Euston Hotel we drove to the theatre—one of the nicest small houses I have been in and very quietly decorated. We saw Galsworthy’s Loyalties and Barrie’s Shall We Join the Ladies? The latter was rather poorly acted, but an amusing conception. Loyalties was as well done as anything I could have imagined: every part a little masterpiece in itself and yet subordinate. A capital play, though, to my mind, it errs in concentrating the interest of the last act on Dancy and thus leading to a rather obvious ending, while the real issue—the issue suggested in the title—is dropt out of sight. But perhaps I have not quite understood it.

From the St Martin’s we returned to have a whiskey at Euston, and thence to Paddington where [Warnie] saw me off. He is under orders for Colchester—not the best place in the world, but good enough, provided they don’t send him to this infernal Turkish war.

I travelled down to Oxford comfortably enough, nearly asleep, and arrived home at 9. D in good form. Maisie still here, but in touch with a good job at Cardiff.

Saturday 23 September: After breakfast I went into town and gave my dissertation to the typist who promised to have it ready by Thursday. I then went to College and got from Frank the notice about the Magdalen Fellowship. I there found to my horror that the dissertation and testimonials were to be handed in on Monday and not on the 30th as I had supposed.

I therefore went to Magdalen and spoke to the porter who told me that I had better see the President. I accordingly called at his residence—opposite the great gate—and was admitted to a blue panelled ante room which I shared for 20 minutes with a female secretary who did not ask me to sit down.

Sir Herbert Warren proved to be a stout man with a short grey beard, thick lips, and an affable manner. He has the reputation of being a great snob but is supposed to be a good champion to all who have a College claim in him. He said I might certainly send in my dissertation in MS if I liked. I then went to the Union and wrote to the Master, to Carritt, and to Stevenson asking for testimonials. I found in College that the Mugger was not in College, so I shall hardly have his reply by Monday . . .

Sunday 24 September: It was a glorious morning and we decided that Moppie (Maisie Hawes), Maureen and I should go out. I washed up after breakfast and laid lunch while Moppie ‘did’ the rooms: but we had been so late in getting up that we were not on the road till 12 . . .

After lunch I helped D to compose a letter to Moppie’s prospective employer Miss Quinlan of Cardiff. She had sent a form of agreement involving the father’s signature and we had to explain why this was impossible.

Later on I started Maureen on an English essay and tried to give her some ideas about structure. I am to teach her Latin and English for the ‘School Certificate’ and the task—especially the English—appalls me. After supper Smudge arrived, looking much better for her holiday. Sat up with D alone after the others had dispersed and talked for some time . . .

Monday 25 September: . . . I bussed into Oxford and called at the typists: she had not yet finished my dissertation and asked me to return at a quarter to six. I spent the interval in the Union reading Chesterton’s Browning. At quarter to six the typescript was indeed finished but not collected so I had to take the MS after all.

I called in Univ. where kind testimonials from Carritt and Stevenson had been left for me and, armed with these, proceeded to Magdalen. Here I met Ewing back from Geneva and competing: later on Dodds turned up (from Reading) also competing. There are about eleven candidates—one rumour made it 60—one of whom is Freeman of the House. Our interviews with Warren were very short and we filled up forms.

Home by about 7.30 to find Smudge here. This evening I was bitterly tired and I can’t think why: D says that possibly I miss the drinks that I have got into the habit of with W. I am accordingly finishing in small tots the brandy which was bought for Ivy.

Tuesday 26 September: I was woken this morning by Moppie putting her head round the door and shouting ‘I’m going to Cardiff.’ This turned out to mean that there was an answer from Miss Quinlan saying that she would take her without the form of contract. She is to go on Thursday and they ‘will discuss matters when she arrives’. It will be pleasant to be by ourselves again, but we will miss Moppie’s odd presence. She is terribly, childishly naive and retains many obstinate vulgarities from her upbringing: but there isn’t a spark of bad in her. In fact she is rather like a large and intelligent dog about the house. I have hopes that, in this case at least, D’s kindness has not been misplaced.

After breakfast I walked to Magdalen and from 10 to 1 we did an English essay on ‘The use and abuse of satire’. I should be sorry to have my production survive as a specimen of my work—but I think there was enough guts in it to attract attention . . .

At 3 I returned to Magdalen: meeting D on the bus. From 3 to 6 we did ‘literary unseens’: Hesiod, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Ausonius. I found the Hesiod rather difficult. Tea was brought to us in hall at 4.30—an admirable innovation in exam methods . . .

To bed at about 11. I was much less tired and am beginning to slough my Little Lea skin.

Wednesday 27 September: . . . After breakfast to Magdalen by 10 o’clock and did a Philosophy paper. I think I put in some good work on the importance of Time to ethics and on generalisation: but my answer to the Kant question was uneven and I foolishly wrote a lot of poor pudding about Pragmatism.

Walked home to lunch . . . Back again to Magdalen at 3 to write a Latin Prose. This afternoon one courageous candidate set the precedent of lighting a cigarette and we all followed. I sit beneath the portrait of Lord Selbourne and wonder what he thinks of it.

Home by bus to find D very busy mending clothes for Moppie and teaching her how to pack. I sat and wrote ‘M. Blake’ on tapes with marking ink, as Moppie has decided to use Moira Blake (my invention) as a professional name . . . I wrote out some notes for Maureen as an introduction to the Aeneid—a few picturesque details about Vergil’s life and an explanation of what an epic is. Late to bed at quarter to one.

Thursday 28 September: In to Magdalen as usual after breakfast—a bright, autumnal morning. We did a paper on Ancient History and Political Philosophy with which I was fairly satisfied. I answered at great length a question as to whether the Greeks recognised the difference between East and West: also one on the mixture of obligation and violence in sovereignty.

I walked home rather late to find that the others had already lunched and Moppie was on the point of departure. She went off firmly but D tells me that she had cried at saying good bye to her before I came back.

I hastened over my lunch so as to be able to wash up before I went and was just starting to do so when D asked me to get out some old rolls of carpet which Miss Featherstone wanted and for which she might call any day . . . I finally unearthed them with some difficulty from the cupboard beneath the stairs, hurriedly completed my washing up and bussed back to Magdalen.

Here we did Philosophical Unseens—a piece of Plato, one of Aristotle, and one of Tertullian. I could make very little of the latter and had to leave it unfinished . . .

I bussed home to find D tired and in rather poor form. As soon as I had written my diary for the previous day I laid supper. Without disrespect to Moppie it is delightful to be by ourselves again, almost for the first time this summer which seems, as I look back, to be time lost, full of vanity and vexation of spirit. We were finished and washed up by half past eight.

In the evening at D’s request I read to her my diary for June from the beginning of this volume. We were early to bed.

Friday 29 September: Walked into Magdalen after breakfast. Meeting some of my rivals in the cloister, I discovered that it was Greek prose this morning and decided that I would do myself no good by going in and spoiling paper. I therefore came away to the Union.

I now decided to act as though I had not got the fellowship and make such beginnings as I could for the English School by making up Milton, whom I shall take for my special subject. After looking through some old papers—which seemed pretty easy—I took out Mark Pattison’s Milton and the second volume of Masson’s edition, which looks possibly out of date, but contains a chronological table of the early works . . .

In the afternoon I returned to do French Unseens. The first was a criticism by Rostand on Borrier ‘Fille de Roland’. This is the first prose of Rostand I have seen, and it impressed me very favourably. The second was a passage in Alexandrines by Victor Hugo about the boyhood of Palestrina (who was Palestrina?) rather influenced by the Prelude and quite good. Both contained several words I did not know but I made hardly guesses and, from the purely literary point of view, I was rather pleased with my rendering of the Rostand.

I came out soon after tea and bussed home. Supper early. Before lunch I had finished an analysis of the Aeneid up to the point where we begin, for Maureen.

I now applied myself to ‘Dymer’ and worked hard. I began to feel with Rasselas that ‘it is impossible to be a poet’: not so much a dissatisfaction with my own powers in particular as a conviction in general that good poetry is beyond the reach of human endeavour altogether. I know that it has been written but that doesn’t alter the feeling somehow. Sometimes I fancy that the English language has completed its cycle.

After Maureen had gone to bed I read to D my diary for July. She was less tired tonight . . .

Saturday 30 September: I forgot to record in its place a singularly beautiful dream which I had yesterday morning. I seemed to be reading an Irish fairy tale, but passed gradually from the position of reader to that of actor. I and another—who was at first labelled Warnie but became a nonentity—were visiting a brother and sister: their house looked rather like Leeborough, but I understood that it was a house in faery and that our hosts were Danaan people. I was floating to and fro in the air in and out through the branches of a tree with very feathery leaves which I kept shredding off and throwing at the girl who lay on her back in the long grass. She was very fair and dressed in blue I think—or possibly yellow. The whole thing was extraordinarily luminous and airy and a delight to remember.

This morning, as there was only Greek and Latin verse to do, I did not go in to Magdalen. After breakfast I washed up and did the dining room. I then went to my room and started to work again on the VIth Canto of ‘Dymer’. I got on splendidly—the first good work I have done since a long time . . .

After supper I worked on ‘Dymer’, bringing it to the end of the storm. I was so transported with what I considered my success that I became insolent and said to myself that it was the voice of a god.

After Maureen had gone up I continued reading my diary to D up to date. Then read some Pattison and late to bed.

I forgot to mention an absurd episode during lunch. Maureen had started saying she didn’t mind which of two alternative sweets she had: and D, who is always worried by these indecisions, had begun to beg her to make up her mind in rather a weary voice. Thus developed one of those little mild wrangles about nothing which a wise man accepts as in the nature of things. I, however, being in a sublime mood, and unprepared for jams, allowed a silent irritation to rise and sought relief in jabbing violently at a piece of pastry. As a result I covered myself in a fine shower of custard and juice: my melodramatic gesture was thus deservedly exposed and everyone roared with laughter.

Sunday 1 October: . . . After washing up I went to sit by an open window and work on ‘Dymer’. What I wrote was not as good as yesterday but I thought that resulted from the difference of subject and since there must be ups and downs in a narrative poem, I was not dissatisfied . . . D was pretty busy all day with sewing, but in pretty good form . . .

Monday 2 October: . . . I . . . looked into a book on Mozart and read the story of the Magic Flute which I found very suggestive. The opposition of Sarastro and the Queen and the meeting ground in the girl makes a good myth—as already used by Lowes Dickinson, but he left most of his opportunities untouched. I thought curiously of how this might be used for a big poem some day. I believe a modern poem about Ultimate must not be, like Paradise Lost, about good and evil but must exhibit what Hegel calls dialectic: and a poem on Sarastro gives the opportunity for this . . .

Smudge came for lunch and afterwards, till four o’clock, I did Unseens with her. Miss Featherstone came but did not stay for tea. Ivy, tho’ unasked, is staying till tomorrow—an arrangement which D and I—hungry for peace and quiet after all these months—do not much care for . . .

When the others were in bed we had a long talk together, D and I, about Moppie. Baker’s letter in wh. he asked me ‘for the nicest motives and in the strictest confidence’ for Moppie’s own account of her day in London, together with the fact that she had spent an unaccountable lot of money, suggested that she told us at least a silent lie . . .

Tuesday 3 October: Worked all morning in the drawing room at Milton making notes on the earlier poems and writing down quotations to remember . . .

D was in very poor form in the afternoon. During my absence she had made an unwilling third to a quarrel between Ivy (who went today) and Dorothy who came back this morning. The details are hardly worth recording but it seems to have been a silly business. After tea I went repeatedly over some Virgil which Maureen is to prepare for tomorrow: then, alone, I wrote out a vocabulary containing almost every word in it and a few explanatory notes. This took me till supper time . . .

Wednesday 4 October: To my room immediately after breakfast and continued my notes on Milton. Coming as far as Il Penseroso, I got up the Anatomy of Melancholy from the dining room to look at the prefatory poem. I was snared in Burton and wasted some time reading his passage about scholars: but finally recovered myself and finished L’Allegro and Il Penseroso—greatly struck by the nonsensical discussions in Masson, trying to locate all the scenery. Critics are past praying for. After lunch I walked to the Union to get out some book which would give me a historical background for the times.

I looked into Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion—a most attractive work which I hope I shall some day find time to read. I took out the 3rd volume of Green’s Short History and Vol. II of Hamilton’s Gallipoli Diary in a hope of being (at last) able to finish reading it to D. I then walked home again.

A wet afternoon. After tea I read a good deal of Green, of whose profundity and style I do not somehow think very much. Later I read to D till supper time. For supper came Smudge and afterwards I worked with her on Tacitus’s Agricola which she is reading for Pass Mods. We got on well. After she had gone I read to D again. Lateish to bed. Every night this week I have enjoyed wonderful moonlight in my room.

Thursday 5 October: . . . I called on Walsh in St Aldate’s and showed him the new agreement which Miss Quinlan has sent us, in which D instead of the Commander appears as guarantor of the £50 payable in the case of Moppie’s breaking the contract. I explained that she could not possibly raise £50 and he replied—as he had before replied to D—that this was all the more reason for signing. He said that the document was only there to impress us and that the clause in wh. Moppie is forbidden to teach in Cardiff within three years of the expiration of her contract is illegal according to the latest decisions . . .

I found D and Dorothy busy getting the back room ready. A P.G. [paying guest] is expected tomorrow. Lady Gonner asked us to take this woman for a few days, and we could not well refuse. We now find that the few days is to be two or three weeks. I need not write down my feelings at thus having our long deferred privacy taken away from us before we have had time to taste it—I shall remember them well enough.

I put in some good work in my own room before lunch. In the afternoon I sat with D in the dining room and continued Milton, finishing Comus and Lycidas. Comus I think I have never enjoyed more . . .

Friday 6 October: . . . I . . . worked pretty well and got half way through the 2nd Book of Paradise Lost. I find it rather hard to spot possible gobbets as hardly any line raises conscious difficulties. I enjoyed the reading of it immensely—I have lost some of the old thrills but there are other new ones . . .

At six o’clock came Mrs Hankin, our compulsory P.G. She is best described by recording that when D and I came in the evening to ask each other what we thought about her we found that neither of us had thought anything.

I went to my room till supper time and read part of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and the whole of the Tractate on Education, both of which are interesting. Poor D had a good deal of extra fixing up for supper—and I, of course, some extra washing up afterwards—as both Smudge and Mrs Hankin were here. This was our first real winter night and we had a fire in the drawing room. Mrs Hankin went early to bed—a very laudable practice which we devoutly hope she will continue. I read Keat’s letters in the evening.

This whole day is overshadowed by the news in the evening papers. Our negotiations with the Turks have broken down and I cannot for the life of me see how a war can be avoided. Miss Featherstone has heard from some big wig that such a war wd. involve taking on all Islam and that conscription would be applied at once—not that that matters much, for I suppose one would have to go anyway. Late to bed, with a headache.

Sunday 8 October: . . . After tea I walked to College and found Carlyle out again. The town looked so fine in the wintry evening light that I decided to walk down Holywell, where by good luck I saw a light in the windows of the Carlyle house. I rang and his daughter came to the door—the family having returned unexpectedly without maids. I was with Carlyle for about three quarters of an hour. He said he was glad to hear that I had managed the Magdalen exam comfortably. I said I thought that I had done pretty badly, but he told me that, to his knowledge, the Magdalen dons were ‘favourably impressed’.

We then discussed my idea of taking English if I do not get the Fellowship. He said I should get private tuition for the Anglo-Saxon . . . He said he didn’t know who my regular tutor would be, but that most of them were ‘good literary men you know, but a bit foolish’ . . .

Speaking more generally he said that, with due respect to other poets, Wordsworth was the Romantic Movement, and the great odes were Wordsworth’s. He thought no one in his century was worth reading except Malory. He also drew my attention to the continental influence of Goldsmith, Sterne and the other sentimentalists. Came away and walked after a very pleasant and useful time . . .

Mrs H. has by this time shown herself a talker very much of old Raymond’s type. She spent all supper time telling us of some woman who founded a church in Zanzibar on six pence half-penny and prayer. She is a little, sweet, upright, prim old lady—very much of an officer’s widow—very patriotic—very unemotional—high church—highly correct—a regular pattern of a ‘nice’ old woman. A greater bore I have never met: passions and sympathies I fancy she has never known. Worst of all, she has given up her habit of going to bed immediately after supper.

Monday 9 October: Another cold morning. I went to my room and finished fair copying Canto IV of ‘Dymer’. I read the whole thing through and felt fairly satisfied with the general movement of the story, the faults being, thank goodness, mainly in matters of detail. Some of it seemed too concise.

At 10.30 Smudge came and I went with her to the drawing room to do the Agricola until shortly before lunch. She seems to make progress. D brought us tea and biscuits in the middle of the morning . . .

I also looked again into the book on Mozart where I read that Goethe had written a continuation to the story of the Magic Flute. It is really extraordinary how much this subject has been in my mind lately.

Walked home to find D engaged with a woman who wants her to make a jumper out of two most hideous shades of red silk. In the drawing room I found the Doc and Mary, who returned yesterday. The Doc seemed pretty cheerful. When D’s client had gone we came into the dining room and had tea. The Doc told us some amusing stories of Cranny’s cowardice. Once they had been walking together and met a dog with a loud bark: at which Cranny thrust his stick into the Doc’s hands, saying ‘Do you think you can hold him Johnnie?’ and then took to his heels . . .

Then followed the usual muddled, but enthusiastic talk about psychoanalysis, suggestion and so forth. I made one or two temporary retirements to my room where I started a poetical epistle to Harwood in a super-Augustan style. The Askins did not go till late: a lot of talk about Rob and Grace King, their flirtations together and their joint selfishness towards Edie. Maureen says Grace was detestable at Bristol. . . .

Tuesday 10 October: . . . I settled down to Milton. I read Books II and III of P.L. and went through Masson’s notes to them, finding many new points. D gave me some tea during the morning—very grateful and comforting in this bitter spell of cold.

After lunch I went for a walk. It was by now a beautiful afternoon, cool, but absolutely still: the colouring grows better every day. I walked up Shotover and on to the far end: thence by the bridlepath to meet the main road beyond the railway, then home through Horsepath and along the road turning into the woody lane before Cowley and finishing up through the golf links. Whether my eyes were unusually open I don’t know, but the country was full of good bits . . .

I . . . went to the drawing room myself to do the IV Book of Paradise Lost. Coming to the first entry of Adam and Eve, I was struck by the absolute necessity in poems of the largest sort, of having a subject already familiar and very simple, so that there may be room for a fine obviousness. This rather dashed my recent dream of a Sarastro poem.

D remained with Mrs H. in the other room for a very long time. When I at last heard the other go upstairs I came in to console with D. She however had not been bored. Mrs Hankin had (like everyone else) been making D the confidante of her troubles and D’s sympathy had conquered ennui. Apparently Mrs H. is very poor and really to be pitied: like her I cannot . . . Later I sat with D: we talked of Mrs H’s troubles and of the terrible poverty among the people we know.

Wednesday 11 October: The temperature this morning was 42°. To my work after breakfast and finished the Vth Book of P.L. with much delight. At about 11.30 I started to do Vergil with Maureen. She was readier to think and more intelligent than I have found her before—tho’ she would insist on calling Aeneas ‘Ananias’. We continued till lunch time . . .

I finished my epistle to Harwood and read part of the VIth Book of P.L. I must be losing some of my old powers of accepting an author’s premises with loyalty, for it wrung several laughs from me . . .

Thursday 12 October: Immediately after breakfast I started Virgil with Maureen and continued till 10.30, at which Miss Brayne came to give her a violin lesson. I then retired to my own room where I put on my dressing gown and thus continued comfortable enough, though it was, for the first part of the morning, intensely cold. I finished Book VI and began Book VII: then, after a cup of tea, not feeling very Miltonic, I turned to Chaucer. I read the whole of the Book of the Duchesse, looking out all the words that I didn’t know. I liked it very well—not only the prologue and the dream scenery, but even the speech which is an example of that very rare thing—a panegyric on a woman which really conveys some sense of beauty and freshness.

During lunch D quite unexpectedly found in the Times and read out that the Magdalen fellowship had been given to Price of New College. I find that this has affected my spirits very little.

I then walked into town. In the Union I met Carlyle. He was sorry about my news, but spoke encouragingly about the English School. I then went to College to report, according to Farquharson’s instructions. Term began today and there was a great bustle of cabs at the gate, and luggage and plenty of people.

In the porch I met Poynton. He had heard of my news and came up at once to offer his regrets: he said that I had done well and that Warren had expressed himself ‘greatly impressed’ but that ‘it was hardly my examination’. I explained that I would be ‘up’ this term: he said he supposed my scholarship had ceased. I said this had been discussed at the end of last term and that the Master had held out hopes of its being extended . . .

Friday 13 October: . . . Shortly before one I saw Farquharson. He told me to go to Wilson of Exeter for tuition in English. He then gave me a paternal lecture on an academic career which was not (he said) one of leisure as popularly supposed. His own figure however lessened the force of the argument. He advised me, as he has done before, to go to Germany for a time and learn the language. He prophesied that there would soon be a school of modern European literature and that linguistically qualified Greatsmen would be the first to get the new billets thus created. This was attractive, but of course circumstances make migration impossible for me . . .

Home to lunch: thence rushed back and went to Exeter. Wilson was not there but I found him in his house in Manor Place. He is a fat, youngish man: his face impressed me well. He tells me I shall have my work cut out to manage the work in the time.

Having fixed up work and lectures I hurried home, where I found Jenkin. I strolled out with him before tea. He is staying up to write for his B.Litt.

After tea I went in to see Carlyle . . . He was delighted to hear that I had got Wilson. He gave me a letter of introduction to Miss Wardale and I hurried off to Wellington Square to find her: but it appears that she has left that house . . . Altogether a not very pleasant day: late to bed, very footsore. A mile of pavement walking is more than a five mile country walk.

Saturday 14 October: Hurried over breakfast and went as quickly as I could by bus to St Hugh’s to inquire for Miss Wardale’s address. I found her in a house in Margaret Road. She is an elderly, pallid woman, rendered monstrous by a lower lip hanging loose enough to expose an irregular gum. I am to go to her on Tuesdays at 12.

Having fixed this up I came back, taking a volume of Chaucer from the College library. At home I went to my room where I read till lunch, finishing the first and two thirds of the second book of Troilus. I enjoyed it very much.

After lunch I bicycled to Merton St. as arranged and called for Jenkin. We set off along Parks Road, then through Wolvercote and Port Meadow. We went by the tow path, between golden trees, crossing many bridges, to Wytham village. Here, in defiance of the notice ‘strictly private’ we entered with bated breath just under a game keeper’s house, where my bike made a great noise. We met no one. The wood was glorious. It contains all kinds: in places there are open glades of green trunked oaks and brown bracken, elsewhere the intensest thickets. We got into open country on top of the hill—grassland with a lot of little valleys walled (partly) with some kind of white rock. Below was a huge landscape, behind us the edge of the wood, chiefly silver birches. It was at once so lonely, so wild, so luxurious, that we both thought of Acrasia’s bower of bliss. To add to that suggestion, Jenkin saw at no great distance, a very comely couple in flagrante.

We went down the other side of the hill, emerging on the road at Swinford Bridge. We turned right and came along the river bank under the side of the wood. At Godstow we had a cup of tea in the Trout Inn, and so back to town. Jenkin remarked that natural beauty always affected him as the suggested background of a happiness that wasn’t there: the scene was set, but one couldn’t enjoy the scenery for wondering why the play never began.

At Gadney’s I bought Sweet’s Anglo Saxon Reader. I reached home by 6.30 and was sorry to find that D, since I had expected to be back for tea, had worried about me. After supper I started on a piece in the Reader which Miss Wardale had directed me to—Alfred’s account of ‘Ohthere, the old sea captain’. Late to bed.

Sunday 15 October: . . . Worked all morning in the dining room on my piece in Sweet’s Reader and made some progress. It is very curious that to read the words of King Alfred gives more sense of antiquity than to read those of Sophocles. Also, to be thus realising a dream of learning Anglo-Saxon which dates from Bookham days.

At 12.45 I changed and bicycled to Chadlington Rd. to lunch with the Stevensons. Besides the family there was a pretty woman and a very tall man whose names I did not catch. We all laughed at Stevenson carving. Nothing of much interest was said, but I like both Stevenson and his wife very well. They are thoroughly unacademic.

Home by about 3.30 and did Anglo-Saxon till tea: afterwards went on with Troilus. Smudge came at 6.30 and I did Latin with her till 8, when we had supper. After that and washing up and more Troilus up till nearly the end of Book III. It is amazingly fine stuff. How absolutely anti-Chaucerian Wm. Morris was in all save the externals.

Joined D in the front room as soon as Mrs Hankin was gone to bed. D is becoming very dissatisfied with Dorothy and also with Ivy’s habit of coming here daily almost, and inviting herself to meals in the kitchen . . .

Monday 16 October: Bicycled to the Schools after breakfast to a 10 o’clock lecture: stopping first to buy a bachelor’s gown at the extortionate price of 32/6d. According to a usual practice of the Schools we were allowed to congregate in the room where the lecture was announced, and then suddenly told it would be in the North School: our exodus of course fulfilled the scriptural condition of making the last first and the first last. I had thus plenty of time to feel the atmosphere of the English School which is very different from that of Greats. Women, Indians, and Americans predominate and—I can’t say how—one feels a certain amateurishness in the talk and look of the people.

The lecture was by Wyld on the History of the language. He spoke for an hour and told us nothing that I haven’t known these five years: remarking that language consisted of sounds, not letters, that its growth did not depend on conscious changes by individuals, that two and two make four, and other deep truths of that kind . . .

After lunch I bicycled again to Schools to seek out the library of the English School. I found it at the top of many stories, inhabited by a strange old gentleman who seems to regard it as his private property, talking about ‘I’ and never ‘we’. I got out W. M. Rossetti’s collation of Troilus and Il Filostrato and came home . . .

I went back to Troilus and nearly finished Book V. It is simply amazing. Except Macbeth and one or two of the old ballads I don’t know that any poetry has affected me more. Unfortunately whenever I look up a particularly fine stanza in Rossetti, hoping it will be Chaucer’s own, it always turns out to be pure Boccaccio . . .

Tuesday 17 October: Bicycled to town after breakfast and went to Wyld’s second lecture. Today he was clear and interesting, though still telling us what everyone should know already: the mere giving of names to old conceptions is however useful . . .

I then cycled to 12 Margaret Road to Miss Wardale and had an hour’s lesson. She gave me a kind of scheme of grammar: I am to read the Riddles for next time. She spoke of Classical education and said that for us English, who have no grammar of our own, it was a necessary introduction to the study of language. I thought this perfectly true . . .

From lunch till tea time I worked at an essay on Troilus. My prose style is really abominable, and between poetry and work I suppose I shall never learn to improve it.

Another very warm afternoon. D in excellent form. After tea I walked to Iffley churchyard and back. It was now a fine frosty evening. The village was beautiful, and especially the church with the trees all golden. As I walked, my head began to be full of ideas for the VI Canto of ‘Dymer’. Forgot to mention that I wrote a fragment for the Vth last night, but without very much success . . .

Wednesday 18 October: After breakfast I sat in the dining room doing Vergil with Maureen: bicycled to Schools for a 12 o’clock lecture on Chaucer by Simpson, who turns out to be the old man I found in the English School library. Quite a good lecture.

I found a letter from my father awaiting me in College. He has seen the result of the Magdalen show and writes very kindly. I then rode home (against a strong wind, bitter, tho’ it was very bright) lunched, and retired to my own room. I began to have a headache and to feel very tired: lost control of my thought and finally gave it up. So left my books and walked to the foot of Shotover, thence by the field path to Cowley Barracks and home on the golf links.

I was just starting to work when Jenkin arrived and I went to him in the drawing room. We talked of Troilus and this led us to the question of chivalry. I thought the mere ideal, however unrealised, had been a great advance. He thought the whole thing had been pretty worthless. The various points which I advanced as good results of the Knightly standard he attributed to Christianity. After this Christianity became the main subject. I tried to point out that the mediaeval knight ran his class code and his church code side by side in watertight compartments.

Jenkin said that the typical example of the Christian ideal at work was Paul, while admitting that one would probably have disliked him in real life. I said that one got very little definite teaching in the Gospels: the writers had apparently seen something overwhelming, but been unable to reproduce it. He agreed, but added that this was so with everything worth having . . .

Thursday 19 October: . . . Sat too long over my last cup of tea at breakfast and had to bus into town, thus arriving late at the Schools for my 10 o’clock lecture. This was by Onions on M[iddle] E[nglish] texts. He is a good lecturer, but unfortunately stammers: tho’ I noticed that in quoting verse (which he does well) he got rid of the stammer.

From this I came home and started to read the Hous of Fame, a work I do not much care for. I continued it after lunch until Dorothy suddenly announced that Cranny and his daughter were in the drawing room.

I went in, shook hands with him, and was introduced to her. I saw a girl over six feet high, broad in the shoulder as Tolley, with a large, sullen face, and a gruff, vulgar voice. She seemed to fill the whole room when she rose. ‘She could have ta’en Achilles by the hair.’ She refused to talk and never smiled. D presently joined me. Conversation was rather difficult.

With the girl it was something like this: ‘You have had a pony haven’t you Miss Macran?’ ‘No, worse luck.’ ‘We have had a very poor summer.’ ‘I got plenty of tennis thank goodness.’ ‘Maureen thought your school at Wantage very nice.’ ‘I don’t.’ D remarked that we had a P.G. who was rather stiff: the girl said ‘Bring her to me. I’ll unstiffen her.’ Her father said that the clergyman with whom he had been trying to exchange, seemed to have told him a lot of lies: upon which the girl said ‘Just like a parson.’ I said that Mr Goodacre had been a man with no mind: she shouted ‘Like me!’ After each remark, which she blurted as if some demon were compelling her to break a vow of silence, her face relapsed at once into its settled expression of implacable ferocity and discontent. When I went out to make the tea, D set her to the piano: she vamped some rubbish and then sang a suggestive song in a high soprano—her speaking voice having the timbre of a coalheaver.

At tea Smudge and Maureen turned up from this afternoon’s concert where they had heard Vaughan Williams’ new symphony.

Shortly after them came Jenkin. He persuaded me to come in to his rooms for a few minutes. He showed me one or two poems of Donne’s which I liked: he also read me some ballads recently written by Cornish miners: two of them were the real stuff. I asked him if he ever wrote verse now. He startled me by replying ‘No, you stopped me doing that.’ I asked him what he meant. He said I had told him, after seeing some of his work, that he needed a long course of technical discipline. He had thought this true, but decided that since he wouldn’t give all his energies to it, he might as well give up . . .

Friday 20 October: In to the Schools for an eleven lecture on the O[ld] E[nglish] poetry by Miss Wardale. We had the usual Schools business of being shifted twice before we were finally settled in the North School . . . Miss W., in her cap and gown, looks a very odd figure: quite a good lecture, but her voice is not strong enough and the strain of listening is tiresome. She drew a distinction between the pessimism of O.E. literature and the comparative cheerfulness of the Icelandic.

From there I bicycled through wind and rain to Wilson at 9 Manor Rd. I think I shall like him. He caught me up very sharply when I mentioned Fairfax in my essay, asking ‘What did he write?’ This shows the sort of people he has to deal with, and I really think he was surprised to find that I had read Fairfax. We agreed over most points. He quoted from Legouis a view that Chaucer’s Pandaurus was indistinct and merely a transition between Boccaccio’s and Shakespeare’s. What nonsense! He lent me Ker’s Mediaeval Essays.

I came home. Mrs Hankin departed for London immediately after lunch: this was a delightful event, spoiled only by the prospect of her speedy return. I went to my own room, and after messing about with the prologue to the Legend of Good Women (pretty, but hopelessly mediaeval) I began the Canterbury Tales in great glee. Continued these till supper time, by which [time] I had reached the third part of the Knight’s Tale.

Poor D is in very poor form these days. She has taken on too much work in the sewing line and is worried with it: she is also bothered by the laziness and uselessness of Dorothy . . .

Saturday 21 October: Up rather late and started Vergil with Maureen after breakfast, going on till eleven o’clock. Then I set to on my O.E. Riddles: did not progress very quickly but solved a problem which has been holding me up. Sweet is certainly an infuriating author . . .

D was much more cheerful than she has been for some time and for an hour or so we were quite merry. After tea I went to the drawing room and continued the Tales. Then supper: D’s work, which has all my maledictions, had her worried again by that time, or perhaps it was depression. A delightfully small wash up, thanks to the absence of Mrs Hankin and other visitors. Afterwards I got as far as the end of the Reeve’s Tale, which is pretty poor: but the Miller’s capital.

Sunday 22 October: Up late and a fine cold morning. I went out shortly after breakfast taking Two Gentlemen of Verona in my hand. I finished it during my walk: it has some lines which are pretty in a faint way, and Launce with his dog is good, but on the whole it is poor stuff. I walked up Shotover and home by the wood path and Morris’ works. There was a fine display of colours on the hill, I never saw them better. I remember particularly one tree, golden apple coloured with red bushes underneath.

Home to lunch at one thirty. Afterwards while D worked I sat in the dining room and went on with Chaucer, reading the Man of Law’s Tale—pretty work. D was in good form and we were all very merry at tea.

Afterwards I retired to the drawing room and had a go at the Riddles. I learned a good deal, but found them much too hard for me at present. I finally left them and learnt the passage on Cynewulf and Cyneheard from the Chronicle which I could manage well. Then supper and washing up, after which I started the passage of Aelfred on the state of learning in England.

Last of all D and I settled down by the drawing room fire. She read me from the Sunday Times the week’s instalment of Mrs Asquith’s Biography. This week it was on the shell controversy, wrapped up in a lot of allusion and rhetoric, but with no clear defence that we could see. We talked of Mrs Hankin and her apparent indifference to her son’s return from Spain. To bed, very jolly, at midnight.

Monday 23 October: Walked into town after breakfast to the Schools: there was a greater confusion than ever about the rooms, Wyld being announced ‘unable to go upstairs’. We were finally shepherded into a room that would not hold us, most of the audience standing outside and gradually trickling away. Wyld had a sprained ankle and delivered his lecture sitting: it was pretty interesting. He quoted a passage from Prometheus Unbound and said he didn’t know where it came from.

I came home and did some more O.E. before lunch. Afterwards I sat in the drawing room and worked on Chaucer. My mind was disturbed somewhat by thinking what a poem could be written on the harrowing of hell: and I saw that most of the ideas which occurred to me in connection with Sarastro would come into this . . .

Tuesday 24 October: . . . After breakfast to the Schools to hear Wyld, who managed to come upstairs today. After his lecture I went to College, thence to the Union and to Taphouses to do a message for Maureen. I then bicycled to Margarets Road and did my tutorial with Miss Wardale. I think this old lady will not be much use: she is too much interested in phonology and theory of language, delightful subjects no doubt, but life is short . . .

Wednesday 25 October: . . . I went into town on foot and returned two books to the Union: taking out . . . a volume of Burns to prepare myself for tonight’s Martlets . . .

I . . . went to the J.C.R. where I found Fasnacht, Salveson, Jenkin, Robson-Scott, Davie and others. We had some amusing conversation and then departed to the Martlets meeting in the rooms of one McCissack. These turned out to be the rooms I had when I first came up in 1917. Here I first was brought home drunk: here I wrote some of the poems in Spirits in Bondage. D had been in this room. It was all very reminiscent.

Curtis, who is now secretary, came in late and read the minutes between gasps: for some reason we all, including the secretary, dissolved into laughter and every word of the minutes became pregnant with ridiculous meaning. It was a good example of the group mind at work. Carlyle came in after the paper had begun.

It was on Burns, by a Scot called Dawson, a douce lad, whom I liked very much and shall try to get into touch with. He, Salveson, and I had some talk during the interval: he and I arguing that the good emotions were more intense than the bad and that an amorist might write tolerable songs, but it took a man of one affair to write the Divine Comedy. Salveson did not see the point and remained convinced to the end that we were defending good emotion qua good: whereas we were merely claiming that they happened to be the most interesting. The discussion after the interval was very good.

Carlyle was in great form. Curtis was rather absurd. By the bye, with his large nose, prominent teeth, straight hair and tortoise shell spectacles, he is exactly like the hero of Tons of Money in his parsonical scene. Carlyle said ‘The long poem was a will o’ the wisp.’ I wonder is this a warning.

I walked home part of the way with Jenkin and Robson-Scott: later with a man called Mort. We went very fast along Cowley Road. I couldn’t get him to talk. At last I said ‘You’re the only man in Oxford who walks at a reasonable pace.’ He replied ‘I was just going to say the same thing.’ . . .

Thursday 26 October: Woke very tired and with a headache, taking aspirin before breakfast. Walked to the Schools and heard a lecture by Onions. As I came back I realised I had to finish the Canterbury Tales and write an essay on them by tomorrow: so to my room and went on at the Clerke’s Tale (beastly story) reading at a pace which is rather an insult to the author.

When I came down for lunch D reminded me that Smudge was coming for lunch and lesson: this seemed to take away the last hope and it was so unexpected (I had quite forgotten her) that I am afraid I cursed her aloud in rather an inexcusable way. Soon afterwards she arrived and we had lunch. I did Latin with her till four o’clock and then resumed work.

With breaks for tea, supper, and washing up, I continued till 12 o’clock, by which time I had finished to my comparative satisfaction. Then to bed with sore limbs—the paradoxical result of brain work as I usually find it . . .

Friday 27 October: . . . After breakfast I did Vergil with Maureen till it was time to go to Miss Wardale’s lecture in the Schools. From this I cycled, a very wet ride, to Wilson. I arranged to come to him at 4.45 on Fridays in future instead of at 12, as I was then always necessarily late. He asked me to tea at four next Friday. I read him my essay and we discussed. He very sensibly refused to have any theory about Melibeus and the Monke’s Tale: one could imagine several things . . .

Letter . . . from Carritt. One of the Magdalen examiners has said that I was ‘probably the ablest man in’: but that my fault is timidity and too much caution in letting myself go. He also asks me to come and see him . . .

Saturday 28 October: It grows colder every day. By first post D had a letter from Mrs Hankin saying that her son would not be coming up to Oxford and that she herself was staying in London to look for a job: she might or might not be coming back to us, and would we mind if she should not. Would we mind! . . .

Sunday 29 October: . . . Immediately after breakfast I got out my bicycle and started for Forest Hill. It was one of the coldest days we have had and a strong wind in my face all the way. As a result, tho’ it cannot have been much about freezing, I was dripping with heat by the time I arrived.

She [Aunt Lily] is in a cottage which I once went to see for us a long time ago. From the windows you look across fields to the ridge of Shotover—she did not know of its connection with Shelley and was glad to hear of it. There is a very pleasant kitchen sitting room.

She has been here for about three days and has snubbed a bookseller in Oxford, written to the local paper, crossed swords with the Vicar’s wife, and started a quarrel with her landlord.

The adventure of the Vicar’s wife was good. That lady, meeting her in the Forest Hill bus, asked who she was, and promised to call. Aunt Lily said she might call if she liked, but she wasn’t going to church. Being asked why, she said she had vowed never to enter any church until the clergy as a body came out in defence of the Dog’s Protection Bill. ‘Oh!’ said the priest’s wife in horrified amazement, ‘So you object to vivisection?’ ‘I object to all infamies,’ replied Aunt L.

Nevertheless the Vicar and his wife came to her all humble at the journey’s end and said ‘Even if you don’t come to church, will you come to our whist drive?’ She says all parsons look like scolded dogs when you challenge them on this subject.

I refused an invitation to lunch, but stayed till one o’clock. She talked all the time, with her usual even, interminable fluency, on a variety of subjects. Her conversation is like an old drawer, full both of rubbish and valuable things, but all thrown together in great disorder. She is still engaged on her essay, which, starting three years ago as a tract on the then state of woman suffrage, is still unfinished and now embraces a complete philosophy on the significance of heroism and maternal instinct, the nature of matter, the primal One, the value of Christianity, and the purpose of existence. That purpose by the way is the return of differences to the One through heroism and pain. She thus combines a good deal of Schopenhauer with a good deal of theosophy: besides being indebted to Bergson and Plotinus.

She told me that ectoplasm was done with soap bubbles, that women had no balance and were cruel as doctors, that what I needed for my poetry was a steeping in scientific ideas and terminology, that many prostitutes were extraordinarily purified and Christ like, that Plato was a Bolshevist, that Bateson (?) at Oxford was one of the worst vivisectors in the world, that the importance of Christ could not have lain in what He said, that Pekinese were not dogs at all but dwarfed lions bred from smaller and ever smaller specimens by the Chinese through ages innumerable, that matter was just the stop of motion and that the cardinal error of all religions made by men was the assumption that God existed for, or cared about, us.

I left ‘Dymer’ with her and got away, with some difficulty, at one o’clock. I imagine a morning with Coleridge must have been something like this . . .

Monday 30 October: After breakfast I walked to the Schools and heard Wyld’s lecture. Walked home again and settled down to Anglo-Saxon. Maureen back from a not very successful lesson with Mr Allchin. After lunch I went to the drawing room. Got the wretched Riddles finished at last—the one about the sun and the moon has got a sort of nursery rhyme charm about it which the poet, I am sure, never suspected. Went on with Aelfred’s translation of the Cura Pastoralis . . .

At supper we talked of operas and Maureen asked me some questions about the Ring in a way that looks as if her imagination were coming to life at last . . . After finishing work I sat with D by the drawing room fire. She had a headache and was very worried about Maureen’s slowness and dawdling and consequent inability to manage her work . . .

Tuesday 31 October: To Wyld’s lecture after breakfast. I found a formal letter in College from the Mugger informing me that the Master and Fellows had decided to continue my scholarship. I replied at once in the J.C.R. Then . . . I cycled to Miss Wardale. She startled me by promising to give me for next week a paper on all the phonetics and laws of mutation wh. she has been talking about and wh. I have not been listening to! . . .

I took out Hassal’s European Tables, came home and started, with the help of it and Saintsbury, making out a table of English literature from 1500. I worked hard on this for the rest of the day . . .

Wednesday 1 November: . . . It was a wet, windy morning. I decided to skip Simpson’s lecture and spent the morning hard at work on my table. After lunch I went to the library of the English Schools and read Wyld’s most elementary book (I forget the title) by way of preparing for Miss Wardale’s paper . . . I then walked to the Union and took out a volume of Gower, containing the Vox Clamantis . . . the Latin poem is pitiable muck so far as I could see. After supper I began my essay, and brought my table down to the end of the 18th Century before going to bed.

Thursday 2 November: . . . I . . . went to the Schools library. Here I puzzled for the best of two hours over phonetics, back voice stops, glides, glottal catches and open Lord-knows-whats. Very good stuff in its way, but why physiology should form part of the English School I really don’t know.

From there I went at four o’clock to the Union and took out a volume of Gower. Walked back. D and I were just sitting down to tea when the Doc turned up . . . After tea I came into the drawing room and went on with my essay: the Doc did not stay long. D is busy on her jumper for Miss Brody and again has a bit of a headache: we are afraid it may be her eyes. After supper and washing up I finished my essay.

Friday 3 November: . . . After lunch I went in to the library again and worried away at my phonetics, trying to master the laws of i-mutation. While I was there, a stout youth came in and began to talk to Simpson who was pasting in book plates at my table—the rule of silence apparently does not obtain in this library. He asked Simpson if [Walter] Raleigh had not been preparing a book on Chaucer before his death. Simpson said ‘No, he funked it, and he was quite right. He’d have been caught out on the scholarship. Now he once suggested to me that we might collaborate in a book on Chaucer. I would have done the scholarship and he would have done the appreciation.’

God above! Polonius and Ariel, Wagner and Euphorion would be well mated to this! Simpson droned on just beside me till he drove me nearly mad and I went out and bought pressed beef.

I then walked to Manor Place and had tea with Wilson. Perhaps he had a cold, or had been asleep over his fire: for whatever reason, I found him a little dull. I told him of my shock at finding that Miss Wardale expected me to know something of her phonetics. He said exactly the same thing had happened to him, but added that ‘Betsy Wardale had a fine mind.’

He had been lunching with Gordon, and Gordon had been talking about the difference between an Oxford and a Scotch audience at a lecture: here we sat looking as if we were bored, whether we were or not. There, they stamped with their feet when they were displeased and loudly applauded every good point. We agreed that the Scotch was the best practice. It would certainly do Simpson, Joachim and Joseph a lot of good.

Afterwards I read him my essay on Gower: he approved, I think, on the whole, but thought I should have read more. I like this man, tho’ he is a bit sleepy . . .

Saturday 4 November: . . . I . . . got out my bike and started for Forest Hill—a delightful ride, tho’ I have seen many an autumn with better colours. I met Aunt Lily coming down the hill to get milk and bread, in which duty I joined her after putting my bike in.

When we got back to the cottage she gave me some pages of her essay to read. I really had a great surprise. It is not in my line and I hope it is not true, but I must say I thought it great literature. It seemed to me—with all the obvious faults that some people will find in it—to have just ‘that’ about it. I really believe it’s going to last: not for its matter but for its enthusiasm.

You can see at any rate that she’s a real, convinced prophet and not a bit of a quack. Her absolute inability to take in anything that cannot be used as fuel for her own particular fire is also a prophet’s characteristic fault.

We talked on several subjects. Speaking of a wife who had left a bad husband she said ‘Her consolation is that she has stopped a bad heredity from perpetuating itself: her strain and her bringing up has made good the children, so that particular man is done with—biologically.’

She said the part of Hamlet could never be done properly on the stage because Hamlet wd. have to be fat: his particular trouble—inability to feel the emotions which the intellect clearly recognises as right—was dementia praecox which goes with obesity. She surprised me by liking The Taming of the Shrew: she said that Petruchio was the only one of all Shakespeare’s heroes whom she herself would have married. She also declared that Richardson was, next to Shakespeare, the greatest knower of characters and perhaps Shakespeare’s equal. She also put Jane Austen very high in that line. She said that Bergson’s chapter on ‘Rein’ was the worst in the book and in it he had relapsed into intellectualism: I thought it the most intuitive and wonderful of the lot.

She strongly disapproved of ‘Dymer’ which I had left with her last week. She called it brutal. She said ‘Where has all your old simplicity and rightness of language gone?’ She said I seemed to be deliberately slipshod and wrong in my words and ‘positively like Bill Patterson’. She also said I ‘must not describe’. When she came to a description of a wood in a poem—whether in Keats or me!!—she gave it up. She didn’t mind a man writing a poem just about a wood: but to have a wood flung in your way when you were reading about a man—!

She said what I needed was the sort of swing you get in Don Juan: I was surprised to find that she knew Don Juan. She said it was the only thing of Byron’s she could ever read. She ridiculed the view that it was immoral. What she particularly liked was the swing forward. She said I had utterly failed to get this: or, relenting, that I had only a trace of it here and there. I asked her if she disliked Dymer himself: she said, no, it was me: Dymer was just a young animal let loose.

She said that in reading Bacon she had often been struck by Shakespearian echoes: and when the Baconian theory first came out she had taken it up keenly. Later on she noticed that the Baconian bits of Shakespeare usually came in the speeches of Polonius and such characters: so that Shakespeare was not indebted to Bacon’s writings but to Bacon the man, much as he was indebted to the original of Dogberry.

I left—or started leaving—about 3.30. She kindly insisted on my taking away a bottle of cream and a volume of Emerson. This last she had intended to give me one day at Holywood: but I had said in the course of our talk ‘Damn Emerson!’ and so she refrained even till now . . .

Monday 6 November: In the morning to Wyld’s lecture. I was very much impressed by his abuse of the privilege of monologue. He said of a certain word ‘Some of you superfine young gentlemen may pronounce it so—if you ever deign to mention such a vulgar thing. I don’t care if you do. I pronounce it so.’ This is the only occasion on which I have ever noticed a similar hectoring strain: and all the women laughed obsequiously . . .

Coming home I found Jenkin here. He had called to ask me out for a ride, but this was of course impossible. I spoke of the personnel of the English school. I said that I had expected to find them more liberal and ‘humane’ than the Greats people: but, instead, they seemed pedantic and rather ill bred. He agreed with my feeling about Wyld. Wyld, he said, had been heard to boast that he enjoyed frightening people at vivas: and at some minor university where he had been, female candidates usually left him in floods of tears. He was in fact an ordinary bully: and, while professing a purely scientific attitude towards rival pronunciations, he was in fact morbidly class conscious. A snob, who liked to picture himself a country gentleman of the old school and piqued himself on saying ‘wescitt’ . . .

Tuesday 7 November: My cold still very heavy. I decided to skip the Cad Wyld’s lecture and worked hard translating the Wanderer till 11.30 when I bicycled to Miss Wardale’s. She seemed quite pleased with what I had done, and we had a useful hour.

On getting home I heard from D that Mrs Stevenson wanted me to tutor Sydney in Latin. This at first I refused point blank to do: but afterwards I found that it could be swopped against Mrs Stevenson’s tutoring of Maureen and thus save money. We are too poor to waste and I arranged to take her on Sundays.

After lunch I bicycled to Jenkin’s rooms . . . We started by the Botley Road and went through Ferry Hinksey . . . When we got to Thessaly we laid our bikes down in the bracken and walked into the wood. We went further than I have ever been, across three ridges. We were as pleased as two children revelling in the beauty, the secrecy, and the thrill of trespassing. Jenkin’s undisguised delight in the more elementary pleasures of a ramble always bucks me: one really would not be surprised if he suddenly said, ‘Let’s pretend to be Red Indians.’ I got the real joy in this wood. We spent a long time there and got back late to his rooms, where we had tea. He read me a new piece of his which I liked: he made me read aloud ‘Foster’ which I had lent him and which he liked very well . . .

Thursday 9 November: . . . I worked hard all morning finishing Piers Plowman: I read it all in the C text, except the last passages on Antichrist. It contains some bits which, all said and done, have more of the real thing than poor old Chaucer could ever have managed—and very little of the usual mediaeval cackle about Cato and Boethius. In the few minutes before lunch I started my essay.

Smudge came to lunch and afterwards I did Latin with her till tea time. After tea I continued my essay, and so also after supper. D rather depressed and suffering from a headache. Extraordinarily tired tonight.

Friday 10 November: I had the devil of a night. I was twice sick and spent the rest of the time between sleeping and waking in a sort of feverish muddle of headache and dreams about Piers Plowman—the sort of dream which seems to go on for years and years and is so wearisome you’d be glad of a nightmare for a change. Some very heavy rain just as it was getting light . . .

Got home and changed (in preparation for the concert) . . . to which I was to go with Maureen. I read for a few minutes when D saw an advertisement of a house to let in the Oxford Times. I at once bussed to Ship St. to Galpin’s the house agent, but found it shut. Home again and supper: after which Maureen and I set out.

Tho’ not much better I did not greatly want to come and was therefore the more pleased at finding I could enjoy it. The best thing was the Beethoven Sonata—like a Titan’s laughter but with all the melancholy just underneath. I find it is no good for me to hear Chopin immediately after Beethoven—seems so luxuriously self pitying. Home in fairly good time and to bed.

Saturday 11 November: Into town to Galpin immediately after breakfast to find that there have been forty applicants and the house was already let. Then home and worked at O.E. Grammar as long as I could stand it. Then turned to the Wanderer. For a few minutes before lunch I walked round the circle of the roads taking The Return with me. I understand very little of the dialogue in this book: worth reading for the one sentence ‘We are all like children playing knuckle bones in a giant’s scullery.’ After lunch, having got held up in the Wanderer, I began Beowulf. Worked hard rather than well till tea time: a wet afternoon and very dark.

D was better than yesterday but depressed by the day. At tea time the Doc turned up. He seemed in good form and was very full of Dr Brown’s last lecture. I had meant to go out but stayed talking after tea. We discussed Tennyson: the Doc was enthusiastic about Ulysses: we also joined in the innocent amusement of raving our common praises of our favourite parts of Keats and Shelley . . . At about 6.30 he left and I walked back with him, talking of everything in and out of earth in such voices that the passers by may have taken us for politicians. We went beyond his lodgings to the end of Iffley village to look at the church and the trees in the starlight. I don’t know how, but we fell to talking of death—on the material side—and all the other horrors hanging over one. The Doc said that if you stopped to think, you couldn’t endure this world for an hour. I left him and walked home.

Flashes and bangs from Oxford where they were celebrating Armistice night . . .

Sunday 12 November: . . . After an early lunch Maureen and I cycled to the Sheldonian to hear the Bach Choir. We got seats on a window sill just under the painted roof. There was a great press of people. I noticed Curtis, Fasnacht, Emmett, Robson-Scott, Mort and Cyril Bailey: the latter was in the Choir and got apple red and wagged his head over the Dies Irae in a way to warm your heart—a good old boy. From the windows opposite I looked out on the roof of the Clarendon Building and other gables beyond, with a wintry sky, so that it was a good way to hear music.

The chief item was Verdi’s Requiem Mass, a very enjoyable work, tho’ not so fine as the composer meant it to be. The contralto was good. We also had Elgar’s Funeral March from Grania, Parry’s Jerusalem and Vaughan Williams’ setting of ‘For All the Saints’. The march I liked: the other two were spoiled by the bad, sentimental practice of making the audience join in. V. Williams’ tune seemed just as dull as any ordinary hymn. Maureen enjoyed the Mass enormously.

We bicycled home and had tea, after which I finished my O.E. for Miss Wardale. In the evening I started a new fair copy of ‘Foster’ and made some corrections which pleased me exceedingly. I then read Mrs Asquith’s instalment to D. Afterwards we fell into a gloomy conversation on death and chance and permanent danger . . .

Monday 13 November: . . . At breakfast D had an answer to her answer to an advertisement of a house she had seen in the Oxford Times. We decided that no time was to be lost, and I set off on my bike. Directed by the G.P.O., I rode down St Aldate’s and beyond the river, turning before the railway bridge to my left into a very squalid alleyway. I followed this, thinking I had come to a poor place: but after several cottages, it brought me over a number of wooden bridges and among fields and willow trees to the house itself beside the weir.

The squalor was quite out of sight: to the back of the house lay a complicated arrangement of pools, ratchets, waterfalls and bridges overhung with pollards: and in front of it level fields with two haystacks in view. Just by the railing of the garden was a man with a bicycle who turned out to be a rival tenant. We had both been told in our letters that ‘Mr Tombs’ would be there to show us over it before 10 or after four. No Mr Tombs however appeared: my rival told me that Mr T. lived at No. 7 and so departed.

The sun was coming out nicely now, and the whole place looked enchanted. I had some difficulty in climbing the railing. Once in, I surveyed everything as well as I could without a key. It is an odd cottage with big bow windows of later date put into it. The principal rooms were back to back and windows at opposite ends of the house: they were low but large rooms and very jolly. It appeared however to have outdoor sanitation and of course no gas or bathroom. The large garden was surrounded by a fence and a ditch and inhabited by hens. The sound of the weir was over everything. I went to No. 7 but no Mr Tombs was there . . .

I biked home through Iffley and reported to D. I felt like doing nothing but expiating on the beauty of the place, but pointed out all the practical drawbacks. I promised to try again at 4 and then went to my work.

After lunch I went to the English library, returned two books and read Ascham’s Schoolmaster, also referring to a Beowulf crib for some hard passages. I left the library and walked via Folly Bridge and the tow-path to the Weir House . . .

Reaching the house I found another man climbing out over the railings. I crossed the bridges and knocked at No. 7. No answer. I waited for a long time, watching many ducks in the lane, two rabbits scratching each other in a hutch and a fine red sunset over Bagley Woods. I tried to get into talk with my new rival but he would not. Presently Mr Tombs—appropriately a very dark man—turned up. The rival at once engaged him in a whispered conversation. When at last he was free, I asked to see over the house. ‘It’s all settled,’ replied Tombs and I walked home thro’ Iffley with this news.

D and I were very wise now and decided for excellent reasons that the place would never have done . . .

Tuesday 14 November: Many degrees of frost this morning and a thick fog, which, as D read in the paper, is all over England and Europe. I set off after breakfast to the Cad’s lecture: Southfield Road with its iced cobwebs was very jolly. I was already on top of the bus when Maureen joined me on her way to Dr Allchin.

I was late at the Schools, but this did not matter, as the Cad was late. He lectured for about half an hour, devoting most of his time to an attack on Bridges and to boasting of his victory in discussion over one unnamed who had lectured somewhere on the pronunciation of English. ‘I had him in the hollow of my hand,’ said the Cad. To do him justice, if his own account was fair, his adversary seemed to have been absolutely wrong, and even silly . . .

I bussed to Miss Wardale’s where I had an interesting hour. She tells me that the theory of an Asiastic origin for the Aryans has been abandoned and their cradle now placed on the shore of the Baltic . . .

Wednesday 15 November: The fog was still here in the morning but not so heavy. D had a letter from Moppie by the first post. In this she told us that she had written to the Bitch from Swansea for a skirt she wanted, which the Bitch had sent her. Since then the Bitch had written her several letters asking where she is etc., to which Moppie has not replied: and she has now got one asking her about the bicycle. Moppie ended by urging us not to come into contact with her ‘for fear of her terrible tongue’.

This letter worried us both. We were surprised that Moppie should have so little prudence and so little pride as to write any request to the woman: we also thought it unfair of her to do so without telling us, the more so that it had apparently happened long ago and we should never have heard of it but for the trouble about the bike.

It had also been arranged that Moppie should send D what money she cd. manage from week to week in payment of the considerable amount we had to pay for her escape etc. None of this has ever arrived, nor has Moppie ever mentioned the subject. D, who hates a lie of all things, was very disturbed: and indeed has never quite trusted Moppie since the Baker affair. Of course it is natural that the girl shd. be deceitful after such an upbringing, but the thing is a worry . . .

Friday 17 November: After breakfast I worked at Beowulf in the dining room until 11.30 when I walked to the Schools to hear a lecture by Gordon, Raleigh’s successor . . . Gordon was very good and I am sorry to have missed his earlier lectures.

I walked home and had lunch, at which Smudge turned up. She said she couldn’t go to Samson and Delilah and it was arranged that I should take Maureen.

Almost immediately after the meal Cranny turned up. I persuaded D to stay alone in the dining room while I went to the drawing room and sustained conversation, which I found very tedious. Cranny, apropos of a boy who had been brought up for the church and found himself thinking too far to believe, said that his own parents had taken it for granted that he wd. be a parson: he had got to the stage of reading Renan before he was confirmed but he hadn’t known what else to do—and there he is . . .

I . . . bussed with Maureen to the theatre. It was the Carl Rosa company, but at their worst with none of the best singers and—worst of all—a miserable orchestra: it sounded like two second hand violins and a penny whistle. They were all slack, especially the conductor, and did not even make the best of their wretched resources. Under these conditions we had a poor show: but I think the opera was rubbish, apart from the rendering. It has not simple melody like Sullivan nor pure musical development like Beethoven, nor (of course) passion and pictures like Wagner. It just drivels along, sentimental, bombastic, ‘operatic’ in the worst sense of the word. I was very disappointed as I had always thought St Saëns was a good man from the bits I knew. The audience in our immediate neighbourhood behaved abominably.

Came home with a headache and found D still pretty wretched. She had had some talk with Cranny after I left. He was in deep depression: ‘Life is one tragedy. I haven’t had any big troubles like you, but all my life has been a disappointment. And now my boy is—a policeman!’ He had said, poor man, that he hoped his son would be like me—a modest request. Then came the tragi-comic remark: ‘Violet (see 19 October) of course gets on with everybody!’

Lateish to bed. Today was Paddy’s birthday: D reminded me that this day five years ago I sailed from Southampton. (Dreamed the night before last that I was with my father and he complained of my letters. His complaint appears in waking memory as if he said ‘they are just one word after another’, but I understood it well enough in the dream.)

Sunday 19 November: I went out for a walk after breakfast, taking The Cenci with me. I went up Shotover—a misty morning and cool . . . I was reading The Cenci industriously and I find that one really sees more of the country with a book than without: for you are always forced to look up every now and then and the scene into which you have blundered without knowing it comes upon you like something in a dream. I went all through the thickest part of this valley with great enjoyment. The mist improved it: the autumn colours, tho’ not as splendid as some years, were very pleasant and there was a good smell . . .

Monday 20 November: After breakfast went to the Schools to the Cad’s lecture. He distinguished himself this morning by doing what I’ve never seen nor heard of a lecturer doing. He suddenly turned upon a man sitting in the front row and exclaimed ‘Do you understand that? Could you give an explanation of that?’ The man very naturally made no answer. ‘H’ngh!’ grunted the Cad, ‘You weren’t listening, were you? I should advise you to listen if I were you.’ It is really ridiculous how angry this little incident made me for the rest of the day . . . At 12 I returned to the Schools to hear Gordon on Shakespeare’s language—a capital lecture.

Walked home and had lunch and spent the afternoon on my Old English. At tea came Jenkin who worked with Maureen. I had to go to town again to return two books to the Union and walked both ways. Afterwards I walked a little of the way back with Jenkin. I told him of the Cad’s action this morning. He said this sort of thing was quite common. He had once turned upon a girl in the front row who was turning over the pages of her note book and bellowed ‘Haven’t you found the place yet, there? I am not going to lecture in this Sunday School way.’ I begin to understand why the Greats School was called Literae Humaniores.

After supper I finished my paper for Miss Wardale. I am becoming reconciled to this phonetic stuff which gives me new lights all the time—and her Grammar is very good: a great advance upon Sweet. D seemed very much better this evening: we talked about Moppie more cheerfully than before. Started Love’s Labour Lost just before going to bed.

Tuesday 21 November: Finished the first act of Love’s Labour Lost over my morning tea. It is deliciously musical. Maureen had been suffering from pains near the heart yesterday, and as they were still there this morning, D decided that she must see the Doc. D said she would be quite fit to go with her: and as I wanted to make up a lot of my tutorial with Miss Wardale I very foolishly believed that this would be so. They two accordingly set off and I worked at Beowulf till 11.30 when I bicycled to St Margaret’s Road. I had a good and interesting hour and came home.

Here I found the Doc and was met with the bad news that D, who had walked instead of bussing via the Plain, had had a collapse on the road and nearly fainted—luckily meeting the Doc, just at that moment. He had got her into a neighbouring house where she had been given whiskey and rested, after which he brought her back. I blamed myself very much for having let her go, and her for having walked. The whole thing was a sickening surprise and frightened me . . .

After lunch I biked to Jenkin’s rooms: I found him also in poor form, having been depressed and worried by a conversation held last night with a religious person. We discussed where we should go. As it was a gloomy and fogged day I suggested that we should seek out ‘fountain heads and pathless groves’ or any melancholy place which would underline the mood of the day to grandeur. He voted for Binsey and off we went. He led me onto the tow path between pollards which goes to the Trout Inn: then over bridges and a common, along a muddy lane and onto an avenue of trees with gates.

Finally we came to a sad church by a woodside. This is the church of St Fritheswide. The door way has a Norman arch so low that I almost touched it with my head and, inside, the church was very dark. We struck matches to try and read the names on the brasses. Coming out, we investigated the well which sprang up in answer to the prayers of St Frithswide. The water has miraculous powers and used to be sold at a guinea a quart. Here Jenkin found a silver plated pencil. We then shuffled through a lot of dead leaves among the graves to where the churchyard is divided from the wood by an almost quite black stream.

A felled tree, tho’ half rotten, made a bridge which took us safely across. It was a good but dreary wood: and very dark. When we had got into a thicket we were driven back by the smell of something dead and had a little difficulty in finding our original track among the marshy places.

I said I had lately been suffering from timor mortis conturbat me: Jenkin was in the same state—the suffocating feeling. He also said his great trouble was to know which is the real ideal. Was one to crush the physical desires altogether—to be pagan or puritan? He added however that he had a fear of knowing the real ideal for certain—it might be a startler. I was much interested in this. We crossed back into the graveyard and rode home.

He said this religious person had worried him by laying an exaggerated weight on things which Jenkin considered trivial—such as dancing at the Masonic and kissing grisettes. Jenkin hadn’t the least doubt really, he said, but such a conversation stuck in his mind. He confessed to a feeling that possibly even trivial things might be all the while preventing you from getting something else out of life, which, perhaps, people like his friend had.

We had tea in Jenkin’s room, consuming much bread and butter. He asked whether one ought to think about Death or put it out of one’s mind: since we could never find out what it meant. I said one wanted to go on thinking about it till one reached a point of view from which it didn’t matter whether you were immortal or not. One wanted to find a value wh. was quite full in one moment and independent of time. We agreed that there must be such a thing because, as a fact, human beings had found it. I remarked that this was obviously what Christ had been talking about: but either he or his reporters had utterly failed to explain what it was or how you got it. Jenkin said he did not think that there was any question of ‘Getting it’: it had to come ‘from without’ . . .

Thursday 23 November: . . . After lunch I went out for a walk up Shotover, thinking how to make a masque or play of Psyche and Caspian. I went to the end of the ridge and then by the footpath to the heath part overlooking the Horsepath lane. It was a very grey day with one bit of break high up in the sky. I went down by the side of the fence on my right, straight down where I have never been before and got into a thick woody part. Beyond the fence was a deep glen—just like the Irish ones—with very big trees and all rich brown. I got a very good touch of the right feeling. There was a great scurry of birds. Some pheasants flew out and gave me rather a start. I went as far down as I could, then to my left, and up again . . .

I don’t know if I was in a particularly receptive mood or whether it was the day, but this afternoon the trees and the sky and everything had quite an extraordinary effect on me.

I was struck by the idea that the feeling some chatterboxes get in solitude and wh. they would call ‘the pip’ may be exactly the same as what I had, only I like and they don’t.

Found D busy on work for Lady Gonner with the Varmint on her knee. As soon as I had been to Robertsons for some tobacco we had tea, after which I read Henry IV part I till supper time. I think this is one of the best things I have ever read—especially Hotspur . . .

Friday 24 November: Another very cold morning. After breakfast I worked in the dining room on my notes for Wilson until 11.30 when I walked to the Schools to hear Gordon’s lecture. There I met Robson-Scott who asked me if I would go to Cambridge with the Martlets next week, which of course I refused. He asked me if seven would be too many to send, to which I replied with a very strong affirmative. Jenkin came and sat by us. I asked R-S what was to be done about Wyld: he was not greatly interested and went on to say that Gordon’s lectures were ‘too chatty’, which I thought silly. Probably he said it for cleverness. Just then Gordon came in and gave a very charming lecture. Afterwards Jenkin walked with me as far as the bridge end. We talked about Hotspur.

I then came home and had lunch alone with D. Afterwards I finished my notes and read Henry IV till time for an early tea, after which I bussed to Carfax . . . and walked to Manor Place. Here I was just preparing to read my notes when I discovered that I had brought the wrong note book—an old one full of philosophical essays and bits of poems. Luckily I remembered what I had written pretty well and so had a profitable hour. My opinion of Wilson improves: but he needs to be pricked, he sleeps too much and sits by the fire . . .

Saturday 25 November: . . . I reached Aunt Lily’s cottage at about 2.38. She was still getting lunch ready and asked me to have a second meal, which I refused, and talked to her while she ate. We threshed out her mysterious letter. My first complex apparently is the common or garden wall complex which, she said, shows itself in the IVth Canto of ‘Dymer’.

My ‘other complex’ is the ‘Dymer’ myth itself. She told me that I had had at the age of six or seven a ‘little dog’ who hurt his paw and with whom I sat up all night: and that my father sent the dog away ‘because of Mr Patterson’. She must be referring to Nero who did hurt his paw. But he was a collie, not a ‘little dog’: I never sat up all night with it: he was sent away because he chased sheep: I do not remember feeling murderous about the subject—altho’ just as I write these words I remember a great deal more emotion than I thought I did: possibly this is paramnesia.

The coarseness of ‘Dymer’ depended apparently on the word ‘wenched’ in the first Canto. She took this very seriously: excused me on the ground of having no mother or sisters and because Oxford men were notoriously coarse—coarser than those of Cambridge. I reminded her that it was Cambridge undergraduates who had torn down the gates of women’s colleges and jeered at them. She replied without hesitation ‘The young men are quite right to defend themselves.’

She then told me a very disgusting story of two medical students here in Oxford, who she had seen dragging off a dog into the laboratories: and they were laughing together as they talked of the old man who had sold it making them promise to give it a good home and be kind to it. After that I no longer defended Oxford again nor ever shall.

Of ‘Dymer’ she took a more favourable view than before, especially of the first canto. She said Shakespeare’s Theseus was the most perfect gentleman in all literature, and As You Like It the best comedy. She agreed with me that Keats would have been greater than them all, even perhaps than Shakespeare, if he had lived: for he had a perfect medium, but died before he found much to say through it. She praised Tirrell (Conservative member for the county) very highly for his honesty. She also told me how Asquith had completely broken down under the Suffragette campaign of 1913—and had wept before two women in Edinburgh (armed with parasols) until they had to hold him up. She knew one of these women intimately . . .

Sunday 26 November: A heavy frost, a cold wind. We were rather late in getting up and after breakfast I walked out, taking Ben Jonson with me and began the Alchemist. I got far enough to enjoy the fine vigour of the first scene—like Corneille, tho’ so unlike, he gets something superhuman into his characters—tho’ mere comedy rogues—when it became too windy to read.

I crossed the river at Iffley lock where they are building a pretty, new bridge, roofed like a lych-gate. On the other side it was delightful: a sky like steel with a very pale yellow sun that you could look at as easily as the moon, and the river all whipped up by the wind. There was a good deal of ice among the weeds. I walked as far as the weir just before Sandford lock: stood on the bridge and watched the water for a long time till the bridge seemed to move backwards.

Walked home again and chatted till lunch. D was in very good form. Afterwards I read Henry V. Started by hating it because it is about a most inexcusable war lord, but was quite converted before I finished . . .

Monday 27 November: Worked at Anglo-Saxon grammar and The Battle of Maldon till lunch time and after lunch till 3 o’clock. The Battle of M. is ripping and I am glad to have found the original of a passage I have known for years . . .

On emerging at supper time I found that Mrs Taylor had called. D had wondered why and bided her time and presently out the cat came from its very miserable bag. Mrs Taylor is hoping to get Uncle Bunny’s (Kempshead of Magdalen) house. It is to be let and Mrs T. has seen over it. D had pooh-poohed the idea, telling her that we had been to see about it nearly a year ago: when the old man told us he wanted to sell, and if he did let he had already forty applicants.

‘Oh, are you looking for a house?’ asked Mrs Taylor, who knows well that we have been looking since 1919 and often talked to us of the matter in the days when we saw more of her. She is now greatly surprised to hear of our desire for a house: and after suggesting that we might go to Iffley and remarking, apropos of Lord knows what, that her sisters could not do without a servant ‘as they had never been brought up to that sort of thing’, she departed. It is an indignity to be angry with Mrs Taylor tho’ God knows she lied: she lied like a procuress.

What really worried me was Uncle Bunny. He was a man of our own class with no ground in the world to bear us a grudge: and I began to have a sinister feeling that there is something really queer in us that makes us permanently unfortunate in these matters. Uncle Bunny, by the way, is the Headington mystery. Some say he lives in an incestuous amour with his niece ‘Peter’ Grimbly and pity his wife: others, that his wife is mad, and pity the poor old man. The story however seems to come from Wendy and I doubt if it has any evidence. D said she was quite convinced that she wd. never again live in a house of her own.

All supper time we sat in judgement on Headington and its people (whom God reject) and perhaps felt the better for it. D had rather a bad headache. She had been disgusted to hear that Mary proposes to drag the unfortunate Doc to London next week to buy her a fur collared coat, tho’ he wears the cast offs of his friends and does not even buy himself a newspaper . . .

Later on D and I fell to talking of all the people who had failed us as mysteriously as those who had turned enemy. As we turned over the list I could not help exclaiming that with few exceptions I loathed the female sex . . .

Wednesday 29 November: D got an answer about a house in Woodstock Road and we decided to see about it at once. D said she was quite well enough to go. We all three set out after breakfast and bussed to Carfax, thence to 204 Woodstock Road. It was a beautiful frosty day with a blue sky: D was naturally delighted at being out again and we were all in good spirits.

The house stood on the right side of the road and opposite it were open fields looking across to Wytham Woods—a delightful view, not spoiled to my mind by two tall chimneys and a sheet of water. The house, except for the smallness of the garden, was everything that could be desired, but of course we hardly dare to have hopes of getting it: and as the rent is £100 I consider it a very dangerous experiment.

We had just come out from seeing it—we were shown over by a maid, the mistress being out—and were waiting for a bus, when a woman who had seen us came out and spoke to D. This turned out to be the owner, and D returned with her to the house, while Maureen and I walked up and down.

As we passed a house with very large bow windows I happened to look up: and in the window I saw an old lady whom I thought I recognised as Cousin Mary. I could not be sure and did not risk a second glance. I returned alone on the far side of the road and kept out of sight until D came out again. This little episode was quite enough to spoil the blue sky for me, and I was rather poor company (I’m afraid) for the rest of the morning. D had been nicely received by the owner (Mrs Waters I think) and we have been promised first chance if the house is let: but of course they are thinking of selling it . . .

This was my birthday and I am now twenty four: whether it was that, or the face at the window this morning, I don’t know, but I was depressed and remember this as rather a nasty day. On the other hand it was a great comfort that D was none the worse for being out and I think really the better. We had a horrible episode this evening (Tibbie being sick in the drawing room after a gorge of stolen fish wh. Dorothy had foolishly left within her reach). Late to bed.

Thursday 30 November: Poor D had a miserable night, first being kept awake by toothache and then woken again by an unusually bad nightmare. We were all late in getting up. I spent the morning starting my essay on Bacon and made very satisfactory progress . . .

I showed Jenkin the end of Canto II of ‘Dymer’ which he had never seen since I put in what Barfield used to call the ‘PASH’. He pronounced it ‘simply splendid’. I then walked back with him to his rooms: listening to a diatribe against women. He said no woman under forty was to be trusted. We became very merry later on . . .

Friday 1 December: . . . I . . . finished my work: thence to Gordon’s lecture at Schools where I met Jenkin. The lecture was excellent, tho’ the best part was a long quotation from Lessing on the question of historical truth in drama. He also told us that this would be his last lecture for the term and referred humorously to the usual practice of lecturers who pretend to be very annoyed if anything prevented their lecturing. I like everything about this man . . .

I walked in to Wilson and read him my essay on Bacon. He seemed pleased with it, and we had some good discussion: afterwards on Spenser, in whom he could find no foreshadowing of Milton tho’ afterwards he admitted some of my examples and even advanced others of his own . . .

Maureen gave us an amazing account of lunch with the Raymonds today. Mr R. was drinking sherry and his wife asked for some. ‘This sherry is nearly finished,’ replied he ‘why not have some port?’ ‘That’s just like you,’ retorted mother Raymond, ‘you’re always getting wine for yourself and you’ll never let anyone else have any.’ This quarrel continued throughout the meal, while by a species of domestic counterpoint, the children kept up a separate one between themselves . . .

Saturday 2 December: By the first post came a letter from Harwood, couched in the kindest terms imaginable—tho’ the saying that both he and Barfield thought my mock epistle one of my best things was rather a shaky compliment. He included two new poems of his own, ‘The soldier’s coat’ and a poem about an empty room and pocket Horace. These both seemed to me extraordinarily original. He has got hold of a queer little haunting province of his own. I was more pleased with them than with anything that my friends (including myself) have written for a long time . . .

Ivy had called and presently D came in to tell me the shocking story of how Ivy had mentioned the death of her fiancé—sandwiched in between an account of some private theatricals and a description of hospital politics—apparently with no feeling. He died the day before yesterday. Ivy went still lower: she said it was hard luck, ‘I never even thought of any other man: I never flirted with anyone.’ She seemed to think she deserved the praise of a heroine because she had gone to see him at 4.30 a.m. when he was ill: I am very surprised and disappointed in Ivy: I had quite believed in her. Dorothy seems to have felt as D did.

After lunch I biked to Forest Hill at top speed. Aunt Lily had not got my letter saying I would not come to lunch: so I forced myself to have some soup . . . She propounded a theory that genius resulted from a process the opposite of that which produced identical twins—from the coalescing of two ova: and remarked that this was supported by the fact that genius seldom reproduced itself—having already exchanged differences in its own person . . .

We ended by discussing her philosophy. I said she urged us to co-operate with Life: I asked whether, remembering what Life might be really aiming at, there was any reason to help? Was the game worth the candle? She said there was the choice. It wasn’t her business to choose for anyone else. I showed her Harwood’s two pieces, which she pronounced with conviction to be real poetry . . .

Sunday 3 December: . . . After lunch Maureen and I biked to the Sheldonian where we again got window seats in the upper gallery. We had a very complicated bill of fare and unfortunately could not get programmes. Sir Hugh [Allen] conducted: the orchestra being rather smaller than before. They gave Bach’s ‘Sleeper awake’ which I didn’t make much of, Besley’s ‘Dominus Illuminatio’ which I liked, and Vaughan Williams’ ‘Fantasia on Christmas Carols’. This was interesting, especially his device of making the chorus hum in places which produces a very fine effect.

Best of all, they did some fragments of the Messiah, in which I got quite unexpected pleasure—for at one time it was quite staled to me on the gramophone and in my Wagner craze I despised Handel. The afternoon closed with some carols in which the audience lugubriously joined. In the whole, I enjoyed this show less than most—and what I really remember was the excellent view from the window we sat in—a kind of stage scene with Hertford Bridge for the backcloth and Clarendon Building and Old Schools for the wings . . .

Monday 4 December: Found to my relief that D had had an unexpectedly good night so far as the face was concerned, tho’ she was and continued all day very poorly with indigestion. I spent the morning doing a paper for Miss Wardale . . .

Jenkin came rather late to tea. He complained of the bad feeding in College. He said the kitchen committee was always composed of hearty people who dined out every night of their lives. Years ago it had been suggested that they might occasionally have baked potatoes. Since then they had had them baked for two years without a change! He then retired to work with Maureen. Afterwards I walked with him up the hill to the Asylum gate. He told me he was going to Italy this vac: oh the luck that men have!

I then returned, had supper, and washed up. After this I wrote to my father and then continued the Judith which despite its bombast is really admirable—especially the march of the Hebrews. D was very poorly and depressed in the evening and we were afraid the tooth was going to start again. Luckily it did not and we were in bed fairly early . . .

Tuesday 5 December: . . . I forgot to say that yesterday I met Fasnacht in town, when he again asked me to tea: I had to refuse, and as he looked rather vexed, I asked him to come here this afternoon . . . I thought little of Fasnacht: there is too much Oxford about him. I was not surprised to find that he admired Earp and Rowland Childe: I said pretty plainly that I did not. He said apropos of eugenics, that he would extend Pasley’s principle (i.e. ‘the same disgrace which now attaches to an illegitimate child shd. attach to a child too many’) to all children, on grounds taken from Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. Fasnacht is therefore a pessimist.

We discussed the ideal of extinction for the planet: he admitted that it was hopeless, as you couldn’t destroy all life before you retired yourself, and even if you did, nature might still have something up her sleeve. He then went on to expound what he called Idealistic Nihilism—the theory [that] nothing at all exists . . . I attempted to give a serious answer to Fasnacht’s theory and this led to an argument on Nothing. I used the same line as in my essay to prove that there were no alternatives to the actual whole.

He is a very close reasoner and I have seldom had the satisfaction of driving a sound adversary so consistently from position to position until he acknowledged that ‘there could be no pure nothing’. He took refuge in what he called an impure or imperfect nothing: I objected to this conception but he beat me by bringing in mathematics.

Fasnacht was once more proof how little purely intellectual powers avail to make a big man. I thought that he had not lived a single one of his theories: he had worked them with his brain but not with his blood. I think I rather surprised him by remarking that he was a remarkable guest, for he had made me talk more solemn nonsense than I had done for two years.

When he went I walked with him to the corner of the road. I said I believed the things I had said but he had been playing with counters. He admitted he could only clinch his view by committing suicide. He then left me. I forgot to mention that he referred to everything he liked—including Idealistic Nihilism—as ‘very sweet’. Faugh! He also professed to find my view of a Reality with no margins intolerable, expiating on the pressure: I said I loved it . . .

Wednesday 6 December: . . . I went . . . to College [for the Martlets Society meeting] . . . Here I met Jenkin who led me to King’s rooms where the meeting was to be held. Present were King, Dawson, Curtis, Robson-Scott, Currie, Fasnacht, Ziman, Simpson, some freshmen whose names I have not yet got on to, a new don called Keir, and Carritt.

Carlyle was speaking on the relation of history to literature. It is a beautiful, dark panelled room. Carlyle’s lecture was rather in the nature of a polemic against the English school. He was very convincing, humorous, and full of knowledge as usual: but drove his case too far . . .

The discussion afterwards was very lively. Ziman, Simpson and I led off by pleading in our several ways that Carlyle had gone too far, but we really made nothing of it till Carritt came in with the only good thing of the evening. He said that history, as such, was quite irrelevant to literature: but you had to know a writer’s language, and that had implications. For instance did ‘wine’ to that writer mean an occasional luxury to the rich or the daily drink of the people? Did breakfast mean a cup of tea at eight or a roast of beef at eleven? Carlyle never really answered this: indeed as the discussion went on he became very sophisticated, tho’ exceedingly entertaining . . .

Thursday 7 December: . . . At 6.30 I went to the Schools where Wilson had told me to go to the preparatory meeting of Gordon’s Discussion Class. Gordon saw twelve of us in the English Staff Room. Robson-Scott was there: so also was a perfectly enormous man whom I have often noticed—I saw him first in the Corn Exchange at the Ballet. He has a most striking face, and is, I should think, a man to reckon with: but he has a devilish supercilious look and I doubt if he is an aesthete. His name is Daroll or Darlow. I had settled that if asked to read a paper I should offer either Spenser or allegory but someone else said he hoped to hear on these very two subjects.

Everyone except Robson-Scott was marked down for a paper. I offered allegory but was deprecated by Darlow (rather aggressively I thought) before Gordon had time to reply. He said he was afraid ‘it would end in the Byzantine church’. Gordon said he thought symbols should be private. I hadn’t the least notion what they meant: but fixed on Spenser. I was very pleased to find an Indian in the class who was to read on Tagore . . .

Tuesday 12 December: This morning I decided that the job of seeing the Bursars of John’s, Hertford, and Merton about houses must be tackled at last. I was very nervous about tackling these great men, and set off after breakfast as cheerfully as if I were going to a dentist. It was a mild grey morning. I walked first to St John’s where the clerk of the Estates Bursar was able to tell me off hand that they had nothing. From there I went to Merton—beautiful place—where a clerk again saw me. He said they had nothing, and if they had, it would go to people connected with the College. He had no objection however to writing D’s name on a bit of paper: it looked a convenient size to make a spill of. If was the same tale at Hertford . . .

D was still stiff with lumbago and this was one of the worst days yet for her toothache, tho’ fortunately it is always cured by going into a cold room . . . Before going to bed I had a talk with D about ways and means: we are not on our beam ends at the moment, but too near to be comfortable. I also read aloud a good part of the last volume of my diary.

Wednesday 13 December: . . . I set out taking Lyly in my pocket. I walked first to Cowley village, then past the barracks to Horsepath, up the bridle path and so home over Shotover. The loathsome depression which we have all been living in these last few days now first thoroughly lifted and I had a most enjoyable afternoon. During the duller parts of my walk I read the greater part of Endymion, with which I was agreeably surprised. It’s got an air about it, I don’t know what, that seems to make the absurd style rather brave . . .

While D and I were having tea a letter arrived from Warnie. This brought the good news that he is having a week’s leave and that I am to meet him at Euston on the 23rd. He very decently offers to put up the difference between the fare via London and the fare via Birkenhead . . .

Thursday 14 December: . . . The three of us proceeded to the House to see the ceremony. I don’t know why I found it very uncomfortable—gave me a sort of suffocating feeling and nervous. The Bishop in his address spoke like a man: tho’ of course he couldn’t help bringing in the absurd statement that this day would be the one of all their school days which they would remember most vividly. However it was over at last, and someone played a fine fugue on the organ.

Immediately after the service we met Mary and the Doc. The Doc agreed with me that the thing was a pretty arrant farce. I said I felt as if I’d been forced to come and see a pig killed. There’s some good glass in this cathedral. D asked the others home to tea and they all went back by taxi, including Smudge, whom we found under Tom Tower. I walked home.

After tea I had a good deal of talk alone with the Doc, chiefly on philosophy. He explained to me (from the scientist’s point of view) the difference between epiphenomenalism and parallelism which I hadn’t quite clear before. We argued about the source of things: I said his ‘awareness’ was too qualified, there must be a bare ‘is’ beyond it. We drifted into psychology and I mentioned my trouble of becoming ‘self conscious in solitude’. After premising that I must not be alarmed he said it was a mild form of dissociation and certainly ought to be avoided . . .

Friday 15 December: . . . After breakfast I bussed to the Union where I finished and noted The Broken Heart and read nearly all of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, a very jolly romantic play—the only Elizabethan one I have yet found which avoids rant and has a sense of restraint. B & F could certainly have taught Shakespeare a lesson in this line . . .

I finished Philaster and after writing a note on it, began The Maid’s Tragedy. This was an absolute revelation to me. It is a great pity that Shakespeare’s plays both good and bad have been made into such an institution that a man might never open Beaumont and Fletcher if he didn’t happen to read the English School . . .

Saturday 16 December: A raw, wet day. I spent the morning doing Vergil with Maureen. She was extraordinarily stupid and seemed to be making no effort—which I suppose is always the teacher’s fault in some way, tho’ I can’t quite see where I fail.

At 12 o’clock I set out for Forest Hill . . . Aunt Lily combined cooking and philosophy and we did not lunch till 3.30—off chops and a capital plum pudding wh. she had bought at Buols. I found her very tedious today: tho’ I like enthusiasm one gets desperately tired of a fixed circle of ideas. She pays for her depth by narrowness. It was all the old business today: Shakespeare (praised, not as a great poet, but as a kind of monstrosity of intuition), the inevitable Emerson, the élan vital, the ‘exchange of differences’, heroism and the forward plunge.

There was one inexplicable anecdote. She had been held up by a crush of prams at Carfax and had asked one obstructive woman to take her pram off the pavement. The woman replied that she had a right to be there. Aunt Lily retorted that she had no right to bring these children into the world for other people to look after and still less to block up the pavement. The woman said she was shopping. Aunt Lily said it was bad for the child to be taken shopping and the only good thing was that it killed some of them off.

I asked her why on earth she said such a thing. ‘I was angry,’ she answered. I replied, quoting Plato, that anger was an aggravation, not an excuse. She added that she had a lot of leaflets issued by the C.B.C. (Constructive Birth Control): and she was going to drop one into every pram the next time she went into Oxford, wh. would indeed be a good joke: but I don’t think she saw it that way.

Lunch was a slow business and after-lunch tea a slower, so that it was after five before I knew. I then left her and walked home. It was almost quite dark, with wind in the trees and a little grey light over Shotover Hill: it was like plunging into a cool bath after all this afternoon’s jargon. What I can’t stand about her is that she knows everything: the Holy Ghost discusses all his plans with her and she was on the committee that arranged creation . . .

Reached home shortly before seven to find the Doc, Mary and the Brat here and D rather worried as she had expected me earlier. The Doc is to vaccinate us all tomorrow.

Maureen came in with the news that Mr Raymond—who is leaving for a job at Watford—is proposing to let his house (Hillsboro) unless he gets a good offer of purchase, and was surprised that we hadn’t made an offer. I am to go and see him about it in the morning: I suppose it is a wild goose chase like all the rest . . .

Sunday 17 December: I dreamed in the night that the Doc was ‘vaccinating’ Baker. I came into a room and found the patient lying nude on a hearthrug: the Doc was using an instrument like a spanner—which was not screwed together but sprang together at the pressure of a trigger. The operation in my mind was understood to be vaccination, tho’ at the same time castration. I fled from the room and woke.

It was a miraculously bright morning. After breakfast I walked up to Hillsboro where I found father Raymond engaged in ‘dogging’. I stood by the kennel and listened to him for a few minutes, until Mrs Raymond appeared and we retired to the drawing room. I then broached the subject of the house. The answer was a series of uncertainties. Mr Raymond does not know when he will leave nor where his new job will be. If his new place offers a good house they will move thither, if not, they will keep Hillsboro and he will live in rooms. Or again, they may let it furnished—and so on. The only fact that I could get was that he would sell for £1200 and let for £75 and that he would rather sell than let. After a little talk on politics I came away.

Having reached home again and given my report, I wrote a little until stopped by Maureen’s practising in the next room. After lunch time the Doc arrived and we all prepared for execution—Maureen keeping up a torrent of comic relief. The Doc used a sterilised nail file and the scullery for a theatre: we were all done, including Dorothy. Maureen apparently has the thickest skin and the Doc was a long time scraping her, which she bore with admirable stoicism. When my turn came I found it less painful than it looked . . .

Monday 18 December: Very tired again this morning. I dreamed in the night that my father had taken one of the paper shops at the bottom of Divinity Road, and Baker had taken the other. The dream turned mainly on my efforts to avoid being seen by my father when I went into Baker’s shop for a chat across the counter.

After breakfast I went in to the Union and started Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois: of which I couldn’t make head or tail, partly because it is such execrable drivel, partly because I was feeling so poorly. In the end I gave it up and came home with a volume of Middleton and a headache. D and Maureen had gone into town independently and were still out. After lunch I read the Changeling in the drawing room—next to Bussy D’Ambois the worst Elizabethan play I have read, but it has one good scene. I am wondering if any Elizabethan except Shakespeare ever thought of writing except on adultery. Afterwards I began Women Beware Women which is very good and made ample amends. Every now and then it actually has a line that scans.

At tea D told me that Dorothy’s family are all furious with her for having been vaccinated. After tea I was just going to go out when D remembered that Smudge was coming for a lesson. I continued reading until she came and then did Tacitus with her till 8 o’clock when we had supper. D pretty well today.

Thursday 21 December: . . . I then came to the Union and wrote to Baker and to my father. This done, I went round to the bookshops to choose a present for the latter, and after some difficulty, fixed on What the Judge Thought—a rather bad book for a present as it cost a guinea and looks worth twelve shillings. But it is the sort of thing I think he might read. My arm worried me rather more this morning.

I then came home: after lunch I went into the drawing room and started my table for the nineteenth century. D worked very hard in the dining room putting up parcels for all her poor pensioners: we had tea at 5.45, alone, Maureen having gone to play progressive bridge at the Taylors. We were both in as good form as could be expected, with this wretched Irish visit hanging over us. In the evening came Smudge: all very merry at supper. Afterwards I did Latin with her. Not in bed till nearly one.

Friday 22 December: My arm has thoroughly taken by now and is pretty sore—tho’ nothing to Maureen’s. After breakfast (which was very late) I went on with my table for a little while: then, finding that Saintsbury ceased to give dates as he got near the present day, I bussed in to the Union and did some research on the eighty-ish crowd.

The Doc was here for lunch . . . He gave us an account of the awful clothes his father had made him wear as a boy: he had had a fad for ‘government flannel’ and fitted all his sons out with thick grey shirts of that prickly material. D said their father had been a very good man really, and disagreeable nowhere except at home. The Doc agreed.

I got him to talk travellers talk: he described a sail in the iceberg regions, bergs, one after the other like tents in a camp, stretching as far as you could see, and tremendous sunshine. He said one of the best places he’d ever seen was the straits of Magellan: he said it really gave you the feeling of the world’s end.

We talked of the wreck of the Titanic. He said when the Captain saw the berg ahead, he should have kept straight on: in that case he would have smashed his bows, but as the impact lessened he would have come up against the first watertight bulkhead and the rest of the ship would have been safe. As it was, he put his helm hard down in a hopeless effort to get round the berg, and so got his whole side ripped up . . .

D and I were alone for tea: afterward I walked down Cowley Road and bought a razor blade. Sat up pretty late in the evening talking over this last year and what bad times we had had—especially its beginning and the cursed visit of the Askins and their patient efforts to ruin my Schools and, what was more important, D’s health.

Saturday 23 December: Up betimes, having packed the night before and left home immediately after breakfast. I caught the 10.5—a beautiful sunny morning. I was met at Paddington by Baker, who seemed well and cheerful. For some reason we found that we had very little to say to each other, tho’ not for lack of will on each side.

He told me that Barfield was engaged to be married to a Miss Dewey who was at least thirty seven. We both agreed that the possibilities of success in such unequal marriage depended entirely on the individuals, and that it might turn out very well. He said the pity was that there could be no children and Barfield was obviously made to be a father. I saw no reason why a woman under forty shd. not have a child.

He took me to the flat which he shares with Beckett, a very tiny place in a large block of similar ones, which are mostly inhabited by the mistresses of great men. Baker is getting on excellently at the Old Vic and has had encouraging messages from ‘in front’. He is now doing Herod’s chancellor in their Nativity play.

I tried to get his views of Moppie. He said his aunt had seen at once that truthfulness was not one of Moppie’s virtues and was afraid we might be deceived over the main issue. He could give no explanation how she had spent so much money in London, as he had paid everything.

At 12.30 we went out and lunched at the Good Intent: we then tubed to Charing Cross where he had to leave me, after a most disappointing meeting . . . I then wrote a card to D, got my ticket and strolled about Endsleigh Square, where I had been in Hospital in 1918.

Shortly before 4 I returned to the Central Hall at Euston and there was met by W, when we immediately went and had tea in the refreshment room. He gave a most favourable account of Colchester which, he said, was a very old world town in an Arthur Rackham country. We caught the 5.30 for Liverpool: what between dinner, drinks, and conversation the journey passed very quickly: we succeeded in sitting in the dining car the whole way. We had two single berth rooms in the boat, with a communicating door. I was greatly worried all day by the pain in my armpit. A rough night, but we both slept well.

Sunday 24 December: We got out to Leeborough in the grey of the morning, not in the best of spirits. My father was not up yet. When he finally appeared, he was in poor form and rather shaky—for whatever reason. He approved of my new suit. Then followed breakfast and the usual artificial conversation. We vetoed churchgoing and went out for a walk at twelve o’clock.

My father chose his favourite route ‘round the river bank’: that is, crossing the railway at Sydenham, we walked in the black and leafless park which lies between the slums and the shipyards, separated from the latter by an impure channel in which they are at work building an island of garbage. The path was so narrow that the other two walked ahead and I was left, not to my own thoughts, for in Ireland I have none, but to the undisturbed possession of my own lethargy.

We came back and had some sherry: W and I have often remarked on the extraordinary effect of this sherry. Last night I drank four whiskies without any undue result: today, in the study, my one glass of sherry led to a dull and cheerless shadow of intoxication. We had a heavy midday dinner at 2.45. The rest of the day was spent entirely in the study: our three chairs in a row, all the windows shut. I remember little of it. I read a certain amount of Inge’s 1st Series of Outspoken Essays. I talked with W for some time after we were in bed.

Monday 25 December: We were awakened early by my father to go to the Communion Service. It was a dark morning with a gale blowing and some very cold rain. We tumbled out and got under weigh. As we walked down to church we started discussing the time of sunrise; my father saying rather absurdly that it must have risen already, or else it wouldn’t be light.

In church it was intensely cold. W offered to keep his coat on. My father expostulated and said ‘Well at least you won’t keep it on when you go up to the Table.’ W asked why not and was told it was ‘most disrespectful’. I couldn’t help wondering why. But W took it off to save trouble. I then remembered that D was probably turning out this morning for Maureen’s first communion, and this somehow emphasised the dreariness of this most UNcomfortable sacrament. We saw Gundrede, Kelsie and Lily. W also says he saw our cousin Joey. . . .

We got back and had breakfast. Another day set in exactly similar to yesterday. My father amused us by saying in a tone, almost of alarm, ‘Hello, it’s stopped raining. We ought to go out,’ and then adding with undisguised relief ‘Ah, no. It’s still raining: we needn’t.’ Christmas dinner, a rather deplorable ceremony, at quarter to four.

Afterwards it had definitely cleared up: my father said he was too tired to go out, not having slept the night before, but encouraged W and me to do so—which we did with great eagerness and set out to reach Holywood by the high road and there have a drink. It was delightful to be in the open air after so many hours confinement in one room.

Fate however denied our drink: for we were met just outside Holywood by the Hamilton’s car and of course had to travel back with them. Uncle Gussie drove back along the narrow winding road in a reckless and bullying way that alarmed W and me. We soon arrived back at Leeborough and listened to Uncle Gussie smoking my father in his usual crude but effective way, telling him that he should get legal advice on some point. The Hamiltons did not stay very long.

Afterwards I read Empedocles on Etna wh. I read long ago and did not understand. I now recognised Empedocles’ first lyric speech to Pausanias as a very full expression of what I almost begin to call my own philosophy. In the evening W played the gramophone. Early to bed, dead tired with talk and lack of ventilation. I found my mind was cumbling into the state which this place always produces: I have gone back six years to be flabby, sensual and unambitious. Headache again.

Tuesday 26 December: The same sort of morning in the study. W is reading Dill’s Roman Society and he started discussing it with me. We wondered whether the pay for the legions was carried in gold from Rome or whether they possibly had some credit system. At this moment my father suddenly cut in, observing derisively ‘No, it was taken in specie.’ Not even an ‘I think’ or a ‘Probably’: and he has never to my knowledge read a word about the Roman Empire!

We were invited by telephone to lunch at Glenmachan and while we were changing Kelsie called and we walked up with her. Gundred was out hunting: we met Bob and Cousin Mary. The latter, despite my real respect for her, made me indignant by supporting the Ulster government’s prohibition of Midnight Mass and describing Cardinal Logue’s very moderate letter as an incitement to rebellion. But one can’t argue with old ladies and I said ‘Yea, yea and nay, nay’.

Kelsie bored me to death: and made one horribly revealing remark. She said it was a pity that the Rolls Royce people had started making small cars: for in the old days ‘to have a Rolls Royce meant that you were Someone, but now anyone would ask, which sort?’ After this we left.

A rather grey afternoon. We walked down to Tillysburn and went to town by rail motor: at the station we had drinks and I sent off a post card to D. One of the bright spots of a holiday like this is the schoolboyish sense of escape and delight wh. W. and I feel in our otherwise prosaic little jaunts. We then rail motored back to Sydenham and arrived at Leeborough to find our father out: after tea—at wh. we now get plum cake alone—I began Jude the Obscure and read this most of the evening: having read and hated Burke’s Present Discontent in the morning. Jude is splendid. I heard today or yesterday that Arthur is away in Surrey—a piece of news which for more than one reason did not increase my cheerfulness. Early to bed.

Wednesday 27 December: Up late again. W spent most of the morning in the little end room making out a ‘programme’ of gramophone records for the evening. I sat in the study and read Jude. My father took short strolls in the garden, fidgeted, and read a little before lunch. W and I played croquet after lunch (which my father ordered for ‘2.30 sharp’). W and I went into town. Back lateish and gramophone in the evening.

Thursday 28 December: My father went back to town today. He came into our room to say good morning fully dressed and we were not up till he was out of the house. After breakfast we repaired at once to the little end room where we have had no chance to be yet. It is the only part of the house where we have any sense of possession or of being at our ease. I spent a busy and laborious morning making up my diary from the time when I left home. During the morning Janie McNeill rang up and invited us to lunch.

W suggested a walk and in the afternoon we set out. We went up to the hills by the usual route and along to the turn before Craigagantlet. Thence down by the waterworks into Holywood. It was most enjoyable: there was white frost on the road and a cold sky, grey with yellow patches deepening into mauve near the horizon. The country with its bare trees, tumble down cottages and glimpses of the Mournes was very fine: but sad. In the hotel at Holywood we drank and sat for a long time by a fine fire in the smoking room, talking pleasantly on indifferent subjects.

We then caught the rail motor and, getting out at Sydenham, reaching Leeborough just at the same time as my father whom we met at the gate. He was depressed and fidgety. He talked of the possible invasion of Ulster by the southerners in a cowardly strain that annoyed us.

When we had sat down to dinner news was brought that a lady was outside with a message for me. Going out, I found Mrs Greeves who greeted me with surprising affection, pressing my hand between hers. She then handed me a letter from D. She said I was not to worry about it at all and not to protest, and would I come over and see her. I was a little worried at finding her as my confidante, for I had never thought her very discreet, but I was very pleased and grateful on the whole. Her husband (the notorious Thistle Bird) is in hospital in London for anaemia and she is alone with John. When I returned to the table I was surprised to find that no pressing enquiries were made.

Afterwards I finished Jude which is certainly a great tragedy. I looked into Yeats’ later poems: they are too obscure. In Two Kings he interested me by using a story I had wanted to write on myself. I then took up De la Mare’s Veil: unwisely, for I was already lonely and depressed and they made a very vivid impression on me. W and I were late to bed. In D’s letter I read that the tooth had begun bothering again. Hardly any headache tonight.

Friday 29 December: After breakfast we repaired to the little end room where I wrote to D, giving an account of Mrs Greeves’ visit and directing that letters should be sent to Bernagh, but not too frequently. I then wrote up my diary: and we had got up so late that this, together with some reading of an old MS from the playbox (‘The Sailor’) and some chat over our morning beer, took us till 12.30 when it was time to change to go to lunch at the McNeills.

Here we had the usual lively and outrageous conversation and some very excellent coffee after lunch. Janie told us a scandalous story about Bob [Ewart]: his mother had been considering the purchase of a new car, but said that she was so old now that it would be hardly worth while. Bob replied ‘Oh well a Ford lasts about four years,’ and had suggested that they should use the doctor’s advice in buying it. W and I both disbelieved the tale. We had a great deal more of chaff and scandal and some mildly literary conversation.

Janie told us that Cousin Mary thinks I am ‘greatly improved’—whatever that means: perhaps it is her way of saying (what everyone else has said) that I have got fatter. Janie pulled my leg and said I was ‘getting to look fearfully adequate’ . . . As W and I walked back we laughed at Janie for pretending to have read Rabelais. W said it was a pity she was so proud of her little bit of literature and her little bit of emancipation.

On the way back we met Mrs Calwell and her sister, fat Miss Robertson, whom I should not have known. They delayed us for a long time but told us one good bit of news, that Miss Harper is now living with Hanie Hewson and her husband near the Curragh and looking after the children: so we may hope the poor old thing is in an atmosphere of comfort and cheerfulness.

Having got back to Leeborough we changed and had some tea: after which we walked down to Tillysburn and there took the rail motor for Holywood. When we came out from Holywood station on the ‘front’ there was a faint mist of level blue grey with a few lights here and there and a break in the clouds out to sea. It was beginning to rain. W remarked on the insensibility of nearly everyone to beauty: ‘How many would notice that?’ he asked. I said nobody (almost) looked at the sky.

We then went to our usual hotel where we found the smoking room inhabited by a very old man and two fine dogs. We had our drink. He talked of immortality: he said all he wanted was this world improved. I argued that whatever else happened, that part of you couldn’t be immortal. He complained that reality never came up to our dreams. I propounded my condemnation of dreams, and he understood me better than most—for I have never been able to explain this decently, except to Baker and to him only because he had thought it himself. I don’t think W agreed with me at all. We then came back by rail motor, getting out at Sydenham.

After dinner I began to read grandfather Hamilton’s diary of his voyage to Calcutta in 1852. My recent interest in eugenics and some vague smatterings of the Mendelian Law etc, made me feel a new interest in community of blood. It was strange to feel that I had really been there on the old East Indiaman. An interesting book, this diary, despite the awful picture of my grandfather as a pompous and conceited evangelical boy.

After I had read for some time, John Greeves came in. He said almost nothing: but my father became very interesting and agreeable and we had some fairly good talk. I felt I could get on with him splendidly if he would always be as he was that evening. This showed me that it is a change in him and not the mere process of my growing older which makes things so increasingly difficult—for I seem to remember him once being usually as he was, exceptionally, tonight. Fairly early to bed, much less depressed than last night.

Saturday 30 December: A fine morning: after breakfast to the little end room. Yesterday Mollie Boyd had rung up on the telephone and invited us both to play bridge for some evening a fair way ahead. W had answered that he was going to England tonight and that I was going on the 7th. At first I was delighted at this escape, but soon realised that they would be almost sure to see me here later than the 7th. After some hesitation I wrote this morning a letter to Molly Boyd explaining that W had made a mistake: adding, however, that they must not change their tables again on that account and deprecating my powers as a bridge player. After this I wrote up my diary and was preparing to write a letter to D when W pressed me to come out. As it was late and his last day, I wrote a card to D and came.

We walked to Tillysburn by the High Holywood road and the ‘sandy loaning’, thence by rail motor to Holywood. Here we sat a good while in the smoking room: I forget what we talked of. We came back by rail motor to Sydenham and arrived at Leeborough to find my father already there. During the afternoon I went on with my grandfather’s diary.

By afternoon post there came a letter to me addressed in Arthur’s hand and containing one from D. Arthur had included a small note of his own—so ridiculously small in comparison with the whole that I could not read it in the presence and had to leave the study abruptly. Arthur writes that the people with whom he was staying in Sussex have got ill and he is now back at 4, Cleveland Terrace, Hyde Park, London, W.2. I was of course unable to read D’s letter and for some absurd reason I felt a conviction that it wd. contain bad news: this kept me very anxious all evening.

Just before dinner an unpleasant episode occurred. W was complaining of the expense of a small mess such as they have in Colchester and my father began, as usual, to make fun of the army and of army troubles. W, who is morbidly sensitive on this score, was stung into retorting ‘It’s all very well for you, living in the study and spending £1400 a year on yourself.’

Tho’ just, this was really rather rude after W has been drinking his whiskey for a week and especially since my father told him yesterday that he need not repay the £20 lent him at the time of McGrigors failure. My father took it very well, all things considered.

After an excellent cold supper (the only meal I like in this house) my father and I went in to the Liverpool boat to see W. off and returned in the same taxi. I felt thoroughly miserable. My father remarked that it ‘made him sick’ to think of a man of W’s ability wasting his time in the army.

After he had gone to bed I opened D’s letter and found to my great relief a most cheerful, homely and comforting letter wh. bucked me up a good deal. One more example of the vainness of premonitions. I then read Boswell till fairly late and, after I was in bed, a little of Morris’s Jason wh. is an old friend. My eye was caught by his poem ‘In Prison’ in the same volume, which exactly expressed my own feelings at present. I was a long time getting to sleep.

Sunday 31 December: Up late as usual. A desperately long day. After breakfast we went to church which, on these occasions, is a refuge to me: for at all other times, shut up alone with my father, I am on the qui vive for something or other to turn up, and the end of the day finds me quite demoralised as if I had been walking over a precipice or smelled the wrong end of a machine gun. Lily walked back with us from church.

I decided that this would be a good opportunity of tackling Meredith and accordingly began Beauchamp’s Career in which I made considerable progress before nightfall. I got little pleasure from it: it is obviously written for a person of quicker, subtler and maturer mind than I—perhaps for a person of finer technical breeding too.

‘Dinner’ at 2.30. I also read The Faerie Queene in my big edition by Dent, beginning at the VIth Book. After that I announced that I would go out: my father, tho’ I know he didn’t want to, accompanied me. We met the McNeills on the road and I was asked to lunch again on Tuesday. I didn’t want to go, but I had no excuse ready and so accepted.

We then walked nearly to Holywood along the high road and back the same way. It was frosty, with a thick white mist and a moon over the hills and a continual sound of boats horning from the Lough. If I had been alone it would have been sheer ecstasy: as it was, it was a relief from all day confinement in the study.

After he had gone to bed I sat up for a long time reading Spenser, till it almost carried me away from Leeborough. I find I am fit for phantasy these days, but hardly for real imagination. After I was in bed I heard the horns and sirens at the docks blowing and the bells ringing for the old year. Found it very hard to sleep, being all uneasy in my mind and feeling isolated: I was also threatened with toothache but when I lay on my back so as to keep my cheek cool, it went away. A frosty, moonlight night and I left my curtains open.

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