Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame

by Kenneth Grahame

  ‘Well good-bye for the present. This is not a real letter. Perhaps later I shall have something solid to tell you about. Some wild village orgie — or “harvest home”.

  ‘Yours most sincerely,

  ‘KENNETH GRAHAME’

  ‘Boham’s,

  ‘Blewbury, Didcot,

  ‘Berkshire,

  ‘England, 20th Sept. 1911

  ‘DEAR PURVES, — The sad news of the deplorable tragedy at Fowey has no doubt reached you; but you will naturally be anxious for all particulars, so I am sending all that appeared in the Western Morning News, in case no one else has done so. We have not yet had any letters from Fowey about it. Please keep the cuttings if you want to.

  ‘I loved Atky — in perhaps a selfish way first of all because all his special “passions” appealed to me — boats, Bohemianism, Burgundy, tramps, travel, books, and pictures — but also, and I hope and believe chiefly, for his serene and gentle nature, his unfailing good humour and clear, cheerful spirits, and his big kind heart. But you know all these qualities of his as well as I do. And you are mourning him too.

  ‘Again and again, in imagination, I get my boat at White-house Steps and scull up the river by the grey old sea wall, under the screaming gulls, past the tall Russian and Norwegian ships at their moorings, and so into Mixtow Pill, and ship my oars at the little stone pier, and find Atky waiting on the steps, thin, in blue serge, with his Elizabethan head; and stroll up the pathway you know, to the little house above it, and be talking all the time and always some fresh whimsicality. I had a letter from him a very few weeks ago, telling of a Yachting Dinner they had just had — he, apparently, in the Chair — and his spirits seemed as buoyant as ever.

  ‘Well, I will not write more just now. I feel as if we had all suddenly grown much older. All, that is, except Atky. He couldn’t do it, he didn’t know how.

  ‘Yours, KENNETH GRAHAME’

  ‘Boham’s,

  ‘Blewbury, Didcot,

  ‘Berkshire,

  ‘8th Feb. 1912

  ‘DEAR PURVES, — Nothing that we had this Christmas delighted us more than the Dennison box of notions. Sending off parcels is no longer an agony and a running about all over the house — rather a delicate delight.

  ‘We are alone here once more, Mouse having departed school-ward, undaunted and in high spirits. We have excellent accounts of him and his progress. I had a line from Q. just the other day. The Boy had been elected to the “Leander” Boat-Club — the premier rowing club of England — which I suppose is a great compliment for so young an oarsman. He stroked one of the two trial eights this year, but he is not in the “Varsity” crew — at least up to the present. I fancy he may be a trifle light as yet — those boys run to such a size nowadays. On Latin and Greek and such trifles the father was silent.

  ‘We have been having some bitter weather lately, but it’s all gone now for the present, and Mud is King once more. We hang on for a bit, and go South when it is nearly sure to be fine.

  ‘We had rather an interesting time in Brittany in the late autumn and saw a lot of new country and new things, but, to me, that is not the South and therefore — nothing. You’ve got to have the Alps to the North of you before the air begins to have the right feel in it.

  ‘You see I’ve no news, — and indeed this is the dead time of the year here. Even the farmers have little to do.

  ‘I hope Mrs. Purves and the rest of you are well and lively, and having lots of opera and such good things, which your noble city provides so plentifully.

  ‘I will write you a better letter next time — perhaps something will have happened — just now we’re hardly thawed out after the recent frost.

  ‘Yours most sincerely,

  ‘KENNETH GRAHAME’

  ‘The Fowey Hotel,

  ‘Fowey,

  ‘Cornwall, 8th July 1912

  ‘DEAR PURVES, — First, let me formally acknowledge receipt of your two letters, 25th May and 8th June, and of the copy of the Century, with its charmingly written appreciation of Maxfield Parrish and of the treasures which decorate your new room. We have been away from home for some five weeks — first Dorsetshire, in a little old sea-town called “Lyme Regis”, chiefly known through being enshrined in one of the novels of Jane Austen, and then, for a fortnight, here. Fowey is prosperous, cheerful and full of smiling faces. More steamers up the river than I have ever seen and the jetties working all night as well as all day. Many inquiries after you all, from all classes, and a general feeling of having come home. Q. and miladi are going very strong, the Boy has been at home for a week, but is off again to camp as an Artillery man. Phelps walks down the road at precisely the same hour every day and Canon Purcell enters the Club at 6.45 p in as usual — and begins abusing the Government, and the Regatta is beginning to loom very large on the horizon. So you see that, whatever happens in outlying portions of the globe, Fowey holds on to its own old way and always will.

  ‘We have been up to Rosebank — a sad sight rather, with its empty rooms and bare walls. Miss Marston is still there, alone, but has taken a flat in London, whither she will move in the autumn. The place is for sale, not to be let, and I don’t think it will sell in a hurry — it’s not everybody’s house. The pictures sold badly — the water-colours were much faded by the sun and spotted by damp, and the dealers in a body stood aloof. But the books did well. The enormous stock of clocks, barometers and binoculars (I believe he had 45 telescopes alone) fetched very little. We have been having consistently beastly weather throughout, and have to-day rather suddenly determined to get home to-morrow, starting by an early train. So this letter will be a bit truncated, from pressure. I will try and do better next time; and in Berkshire I may remember some more “Fowey bits” to tell you. Meantime, we want to hear all about the Hospital Fair, and the dresses, with nothing left out. And I don’t see why we shouldn’t meet near Paris, next year — and here too, with luck. Fowey and Paris have both their good points.

  ‘Yours ever sincerely,

  ‘KENNETH GRAHAME’

  ‘Boham’s,

  ‘Blewbury, Didcot,

  ‘Berkshire,

  ‘England, 8th Aug. 1912

  ‘DEAR PURVES, — Your letter of the eighteenth of July has been before us for some days, and all its talk of next year seems to bring your migration to these shores once more very near indeed. After all, in the month of August, when lamps are once more lighted for dinner, “next year” is a pretty near thing, isn’t it? Certainly we ought to be able to come together in Paris or elsewhere, wherever you settle upon eventually, and as for Fowey, that ought to be a sure thing. We don’t want much tempting to skip off down there. You won’t find any change to speak of, a shop or two has moved or blossomed out, the cloak shop has shifted further into town, but Varco will still greet you from his shop door at the comer. Miss White will smile at you through the fruiterer’s window a little lower down, the hotel bus, crashing down the hill, will shave your toes as you skip for safety into the little bar-door of the Ship, and when you reach Town Quay, and sit on the same old garden-seat out side the “Institute”, with the same old men on either side of you, it will be as if you had just closed your eyes there for an afternoon nap and opened them again.

  ‘We met Climo one day in the street, as usual hawking a basketful of delightful, blue-black squiggly lobsters. We had some lobster talk and made a sort of a rendezvous later, on the other side, to renew the subject, but we quitted prematurely and it never came off.

  ‘Q. is more full of work than ever at present. A book of original verse coming out, another anthology, and a novel. You really mustn’t take it to heart, by the way, if they don’t write to you. They never write letters to anybody. For myself, I don’t think I have ever seen so much as a pothook or a hanger of her Ladyship’s; as for Q. I sometimes have to bother him, for introductions, or information of some sort, and when he replies, which he always does promptly, he gives me a half-sheet summary of the latest gossip — in shorthan
d. I fancy that professional writers nearly all hate letter writing. The style is different and that makes it difficult for them. The amateur finds it easier. Lamb was good at it, to be sure, and Edward Fitzgerald — but in a sense they were amateurs.

  ‘Well, I am getting prosy, and had better stop. All good wishes to all of you.

  ‘Yours very truly,

  ‘KENNETH GRAHAME’

  ‘Boham’s,

  ‘Blewbury, Didcot,

  ‘Berkshire,

  ‘ll th July 1913

  ‘Mv DEAR PURVES, — Many thanks for your letter of the 3rd. Of course we are immensely disappointed to hear of the very small probability that exists of your being able to get to England; and we are deeply sorry to hear that you are so pulled down and all the rest of it. But I want to say at once and right away, that what you are doing is absolutely the right thing, and the only thing, and the thing to make you fit and well again in the shortest possible time. You have got to “slack” as if you were in for a prize for it. Not only must you not think to-day of what you will do to-morrow, but you must not think in the morning of what you will do in the afternoon. In fact, you mustn’t think at all, but sit in the sunshine and let things just happen before your eyes and don’t ask yourself why they happen, or any other conundrum. Nature will do her work all right, if she’s given the chance and a free hand.

  ‘We shall probably start for Fowey on the 16th or 17th as we have got to be back here about the 26th, to get ready for our journey to the Highlands in the following week. We continue to have excellent accounts of Mouse in every way. I wish we could bring him to Fowey with us, but that may not be.

  ‘Yours most sincerely,

  ‘KENNETH GRAHAME’

  ‘Boham’s,

  ‘Blewbury, Didcot,

  ‘Berkshire,

  ‘12th December 1913

  ‘DEAR PURVES, — Ever since our return from Scotland I have been reminding myself almost every day that a letter was due from me to you; and lo, here is Christmas almost on us, and the letter still unwritten. Fortunately I have other letters still more overdue, and that reflection somehow seems to cheer me amazingly. I wanted particularly, first of all, to thank you most warmly for your very kind, thoughtful invitation to Mouse to come and see something of Holland under your auspices. Had he been kicking his heels here, at a loose end, I would have jumped at the opportunity; but the fact is, it would have abruptly cut his Highland holiday off suddenly, and the boy was so enjoying every hour of it, and so eager to be allowed to stay there till the last possible day — which indeed was what we did — that I hadn’t the heart. I wish you could have been with us; we were in places which were almost fantastically beautiful, even for the Highlands, and some of it only recently opened up to travellers.

  ‘I was greatly pleased when I heard about Q. and the new Book. It is just one of those graceful and delicate compliments which it is such a pleasure to receive and such a privilege to be able to pay; and it will bind you to Fowey by yet one more golden link. The book has been exceedingly well noticed over here, I am glad to see. I sometimes think he is at his best in that sort of work.

  ‘I wish you had been with us the day before yesterday, when we were returning from London after a day’s Christmas shopping. It was “Cattle Show Week”, the annual orgie of the country farmer in London, and our carriage was crammed with a jovial crew of Berkshire farmers, their wives and children, laden with toys for the children left at home. They all came from two primitive little villages about five miles from here, and when we parted at Didcot we had invitations to visit them all and see their houses — no one apparently lives in anything later than Elizabeth, and they feed their pigs out of Staffordshire slipware dishes and chop wood in the woodshed on Jacobean stools with carved legs — at least that is what I gathered, in the course of the journey. This country really gets older and more primitive the longer one lives in it, and the Berkshire farmers are, in a sense, a race apart — prosperous, well-to-do, living a jolly life, but among themselves, and intermarrying among themselves and keeping up their old habits and customs.

  ‘I wonder if you ever read The Scouring of the White Horse by T. Hughes, the Tom Brown man? It was written, I suppose, about fifty years ago, and gives, in a small way, a rather faithful picture of life in these parts — as it is now, because of course here fifty years amounts to just nothing at all.

  ‘I was calling lately on a farmer in a neighbouring village, and I asked him about a certain house supposed to be haunted — we have lots of haunted houses about here. He said he wanted to investigate the legend himself, so he went to the oldest inhabitant, but found him scornfully contemptuous. “Ghostesses?” said he, “I don’t hold with no ghostesses. Cos why? Lookee here. If so be as they’ve gone to the right place, they don’t want to come back; and if so be as they’ve gone to the wrong place, whoy, damme, they won’t lat un.” Probably a chestnut, but he said that was what the old fellow said.

  ‘When we went to Newbury Fair a month or two ago — and a very jolly fair it was — I went to see a very beautiful old house which is now after many vicissitudes in the hands of a furniture dealer. (It is right on the “Bath Road”, so they get a lot of motor-car custom.) He showed me an old room they had recently reopened; it had become unpopular and been bricked up because a certain highwayman had hanged himself there in the eighteenth century and seemed unwilling to quit the scene altogether. The staple he hanged himself from is still there all right. The house had a secret chamber, or “Priest’s” Room, as well, but I preferred the Highwayman’s room, it was practically untouched since the incident, and much more “grooly ‘We have a house near here where, on one night in the year, an old woman knocks at the front door, and on being admitted walks quietly upstairs and disappears. They always let her in all right. They don’t mind. When a thing has been going on for a thousand years or so you begin to get used to it. I wish we had something of the sort at Boham’s, but though we’re old, I’m afraid we’re not “classy” enough, the house being a simple one of the farmer type.

  ‘I hope you continue to have good accounts of Jack. At any rate he is in “Christmas Country”, as one always regards Germany somehow, and that is a sort of consolation for his absence.

  ‘Well — I must bring this rambling screed to a close. You know all our good wishes and best thoughts are with you, you fellow citizens of Fowey, which is “no mean city”, and perhaps some future Christmas we will have a private joint-stock lobster-pot of our very own, and haul it up and eat the proceeds thereof on Christmas Day.

  ‘Yours most truly,

  ‘KENNETH GRAHAME’

  ‘Boham’s,

  ‘Blewbury, Didcot,

  ‘Berkshire,

  ‘24th January 1914

  ‘DEAR PURVES, — That was a truly noble volume that you were so very kind as to send me this Christmas, and thank you ever so much for it. It is a remarkable book — I never possessed a copy of it before — I read it, I suppose, before I was twenty and never since — when it arrived I began turning the pages over and found myself insensibly immersed in it for the rest of the evening. That’s just it, I suppose — it’s pre-eminently readable — and that’s a spell many writers would give a thousand pounds to discover. Perhaps it’s the only thing that really matters.

  ‘The holidays are just over, and we are in a state of unnatural peace and calm. The day before yesterday I took Mouse up to town, had him “vetted” by the dentist, filled him up with a solid British Luncheon at Simpson’s in the Strand, and fired him off by train along with two carriage-fulls of comrades in misfortune all adorned with a somewhat forced gaiety. Boys don’t like going back this term, because it’s the dullest of the three, and there is nothing particular to look forward to, and Christmas holidays mean many domestic joys and much home comfort, after which school looks a little bare and blank.

  ‘The portrait of P.M. that you sent with the book was much admired by everyone here. He is a credit to the lot of us.

  �
��We are rejoiced to hear that you are really so very much better in health. This must make your whole outlook upon things very different. But you must take life a bit easy.

  “Rundownedness” is quite a specific complaint, and a bad one; and it’s apt to be the patient’s own fault too.

  ‘This is only a brief and very belated note to thank you warmly, which I do once more, for your kind and much-appreciated present.

  ‘With all regards, and every good wish for the year now fairly launched.

  ‘Yours very sincerely,

  ‘KENNETH GRAHAME’

  ‘Boham’s,

  ‘Blewbury, Didcot,

  ‘Berkshire, England,

  ‘18th Feb. 1915

  ‘DEAR PURVES, — We have been genuinely distressed at learning from your recent letters of the very poor time you have been having in the matter of health, and can only hope that the slightly more cheerful note in Mrs. Purves’s postscript is still justified. And then on the top of it you had business troubles and worries — it all seems very hard. Well, one can only remember that troubles mostly pass, sooner or later, and that, when one has sailed into smooth water again, perhaps the pleasant harbour and its sunny shores look more smiling and peaceful on account of the breakers left behind.

  ‘We very deeply appreciate all the kind and sympathetic things you say about our position in this appalling war. I was pretty sure how you both would feel about it, but your kind words made pleasant reading. Your people may feel sure, that their many manifestations of sympathy — and by this I mean both instinctive sympathy and reasoned sympathy, for there have been many evidences of both — sink deep here, and will not be forgotten. The English are taciturn and ungushing — also their papers often say foolish and tactless things — but they remember all right.