My work, then, is a joy to me. But it is the hours of leisure which make life in Kendal a delirious delight. At 5.30 I promptly forget about the office (my aggregate hours of overtime since I started here are precisely nil) and continue from the night before my plans, fantastic, exhilarating, wildly exciting, for a future which has bounded much nearer and is now within my grasp. These dreams are no longer transient and far away, but real;
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LETTER 30: TO LAWRENCE WOLSTENHOLME, 25 NOVEMBER 1942
Wednesday evening
19 Castle Grove
November 25 1942
Kendal
My dear Lawrence,
Sorry to butt in on wages, but I must insist that the ‘privilege (sic) of having the last word’ be mine. So get ’em balanced, in a fashion, and stuck up, and then lend me a cavernous ear.
First let me thank you very sincerely for your condolences and those of the unnamed others in the office.
Then let me say that your letter afforded me acute delight. Listen. When I first knew you, back in the days of silent films, you were a romantic: you had a flashing eye, a fiery tongue, a ready temper. Sadly I have watched the years change the baleful glare into a bovine stare; calm the tempestuous flow of your invective, damp almost to extinction the flame that once burned so brightly within you. You are not as you were, by a long chalk. The Wolst of recent years has been characterized by meekness, timidity, submission – and I exhort you to save these qualities, such as they are, for your old age. When you were a youth you had dreams; now these are gone too. You are growing old too fast, Lawrence, much too fast. I don’t like to see you straddled with cobwebs. I preferred you as a man of passion, of action. And now, at last, I have roused you from your torpor. Every word of my harangue was designed with this end in view. Far from being a ‘hysterical outburst’ it was written, as you should have guessed, with a placid smirk on my venerable visage. It worked. For the first time you are inspired to send me a letter which is not a doleful diatribe of distress, and not only that but you reply within 48 hours. Furthermore, your reply is couched in the violent language I hoped for. I rejoice. The red blood is flowing again.
Now actually it doesn’t matter whether you write me letters or not. A letter received is a letter to be answered (it is with me, anyhow!), and when I tell you that in the past twelve months I have received over 200 (TWO HUNDRED) personal letters from folk who still think a lot of me, you will appreciate that this drain on my leisure time is hindering the fruition of my Major Plans. So you can please your damn self.
No it wasn’t your tardy letter-writing that I had a grouse about. What disappointed me was that you failed even to acknowledge my sensational free gift. Then you yap about friendship! If, in your analysis of friendship, thanks are never called for, then, sir, you are a pig. In my friendships, courtesy has prominent place. It is your sense of friendship, not mine, that is pathetic. And I repeat (to further revive your drooping ire) that you are a pig. Margery will agree with me; if, that is, she sees this letter, which I doubt.
Your cheap gibe about CEASERS shows that you quite misread my letter. I mentioned little Ceasers. By the way, are we spelling this word right?
The only passage in your letter to which I bow my head and agree is that all have not my ability to wield a facile pen. How I wish they had! Oh, how I wish they had!
I had better mention that I shall be sending you a card at Christmas. I would not like to place you at a further advantage.
Your old pal
AlfW
LETTER 31: TO ERIC WALTER MAUDSLEY, 27 JANUARY 1943
Wednesday evening
19 Castle Grove
January 27 1943
Kendal
Dear Walt
I received your letter with acclamation, but my face grew grave as I learnt of your somber news. Truly, the swing of fortune has brought low the once-exalted bastion and bulwark of Congregationalism, the man Maudsley.
You still do not hint at the nature of your operations in hospital, and in view of this reticence on your part to uncover all I am driven to the surmise that it was on your hind quarters, on that fleshy globule called your bottom, that the knives of your tormentors descended so relentlessly. I admire your phlegm in the matter of the bedpan, but I am of course reminded that ten years ago chasteness would not allow you to regard humbler vessel, a chamber, without searing your soul. You have become worldly since then.
Then, make darker the sky, is your calling-up for military service, which appears to be imminent. Indeed, since it is now some weeks since your letter was penned, it is by no means improbable that you are already engaged in feats of derring-do as a regular soldier, that the Hertfordshire belles are now shaking sad heads over your departure.
But your gravest item of news was the brief mention that relations with Bess have lost their early rapture. Surely not! ‘Long, luscious, sweet as nectar’ … these are your own words. Having regard to the fact that [word blacked out] it was who, more than anyone before [three lines blacked out] will later bring in full measure – having regard to these, I cannot help but feel sad. Then, to crown your woe, you lament bitterly on the dung-coloured, uninspiring countryside in which you have chosen to live. Your happiest days were spent within sight of the hills. After the War you must come back north, for the man who goes to live amongst the pine-trees and cascades and purple heights gains the whole world by so doing. How well I recall your valiant cry, echoing amid the peaks: ‘En Avant!’
At the moment I am at rather a low ebb myself. I am typing this letter with the machine half-way up the chimney and a pair or brace of bony knees thrust forward into the smouldering embers of a dying fire. I have, I fear, developed a cold, due primarily to artistic zeal which kept me sat on a boulder up at Sweden Bridge for an hour last Sunday until I was tolerably content with the rough sketch I had made. You may gather from that that I have at long last, after months of dreaming and planning, rolled up my sleeves and gone to work in earnest. I am engaged in preparing fifty drawings of Lakeland scenes (after the style of Blea Tarn): these I intend to publish on completion in book form under the title of LAKELAND SKETCHBOOK at 12/6 a copy. This will be a venture entirely new, and should bring me fame. And money, for if I sell 5,000 copies, which is my target, I shall profit on the enterprise to the extent of two thousand pounds. My only other piece of Lakeland news since I wrote last is that on Boxing Day morning I was tempted by a blue sky and warm sun to follow the Coniston Foxhounds from Ambleside ‘ower top o Kirkstone’. It was a bonny morning, springtime at Christmas; the colouring of the fells was exquisite, with wisps of white mist trailing across the hillsides and adding a peculiar charm to the views.
I was not in Blackburn at Christmas, hence your suggestion as to the reason for the unrelieved gloom of the populace was well-founded. I went over for the New Year, and wallowed in an atmosphere of fish and chip shops, black puddings, tripe, clogs, hen-pens, cloth caps. There is little joy in returning now; I have advanced and matured since those humdrum days of pre-1941. By arrangement, I met Willie Ashton on this trip, and by accident Norman Hamm.
I am not enclosing my Lakeland photographs this time, chiefly because I am using some of them to supply the details for my sketches until I can get out into the district more. And again because you may already have slung your hook from Herts. Later on I’ll let you have them, augmented by my 1943 collection.
You must let me know what happens to you in the near future, for I shall always retain a mighty interest in the welfare of one who, though misguided in some respects, always struck me as a being a very likeable cove. Good luck!
Your old pal
Alf
LETTER 32: TO ERIC WALTER MAUDSLEY, 10 APRIL 1943
Saturday evening
19 Castle Grove
April 10 1943
Kendal
Dear Mr Maudsley,
14566772!
What have they done at you, boy? If ever in the past I have thought of you
as having a number as a handle to your name it has been when criminal tendencies have oozed through the smooth veneer of your sophistication and the prospect of an ultimate Dartmoor has passed, like a vague shadow, through my mind. Such occasions have been, I admit, infrequent. You were never the type to rob a bank, but sometimes you expressed anti-social views which might have landed you behind bars.
Yet you’ve got your number, all the same. You are now no longer Maudsley the peerless, nor even Maudsley the elegant. You are no longer Maudsley the one and only but 14566772, one of fourteen million odd.
It isn’t good enough, damn me if it is. All these years you’ve spend in acquiring and fostering distinctive touches so that your personality might be a rare and beautiful thing, and now, overnight, the lot goes to hell, and you with them. Out of the grey dawn emerges 14566772, a miserable and bedraggled creature shorn of his trimmings.
In a way, this experience will do you good, yes. Discipline builds character, physical training builds a fine body. But the main thing is that these attributes are being enforced upon you. You have lost your freedom. You can’t do as you please any more. You are a slave. You must be content with lesser joys now for a while. You must learn to find pleasure in grosser company than that to which you have been accustomed, to be ready to guffaw at lewd and unfunny remarks, to appreciate the appeal of cheap and frowsy women, to enjoy raw food served in a dollop on a tin plate, and, above all to squirt in a chamber if need be.
Compare your lot with mine! Inwardly I cannot help but gloat. When am I going to join the Army indeed! Never. In fact, your letter was a jolt; I had well-nigh forgotten there was a war still raging somewhere far from this peaceful Utopia of mine. I am sitting at the foot of the rainbow with my pot of gold, lady, and I am here to stay.
Take last Saturday, for instance, when you were marching and sweating in the barrack-square. I, for my part, was comfortably laid on a fragrant couch in Dora’s Field at Rydal, idly watching the blue smoke from my pipe curling upwards into the sunny sky. I was a man at peace with the world and with himself, a man inexpressibly happy and utterly content. The tree in whose shade I lay was in blossom: I could see the delicate tracery of the petals against the brightness of the sky. Around me were daffodils in profusion, a golden carpet of bloom. Life was very very sweet …
In due course I sauntered along to the Glen Rothay Hotel for tea, and subsequently made my way beneath the dark pines and the vivid-green larches by the edge of the quiet lake, and so, at length through the bracken on to Loughrigg. And there was the vast pageant of hills, sleepy in the sunshine: Bowfell the beloved, Gable, the Langdales, Fairfield. Oh, how grand to be in Lakeland, to be rid of things earthy, to dwell amidst eternal beauty!
The following day I spend in the Lyth Valley, amongst the lambs and the nesting birds, following winding paths beneath trees loaded with sweet blossom. Pastoral tranquility where’er I turned my steps. Again, life was very sweet.
You could have been a happy man, too. But there was the stink of money in your nostrils, and you chose, like a he-dog, to follow its trail. Thou fool!
Future generations, when they think of Wordsworth and Southey and Coleridge and de Quincey, will think of Wainwright also. All my energies are now devoted to this aim. I am engaged on a work which will bring me fame, and enthusiasm for it is running white-hot; life is deliriously exciting. I haven’t left myself time to tell you of my plan in detail, but believe me, this is Wainwright attaining a new best. And backing me up are friends with the stuff that counts in an enterprise of this sort. Today my researches took me on a first visit to Shap, where, by the side of the infant Lowther, in a sleepy hollow of the fells, I spent an enjoyable hour amongst the primroses gazing at the ruins of the old Abbey. I wore flannels, not khaki. I listened to the myriad voices of nature, perfectly attuned, not to the raucous call of the sergeant-major.
So leave me here with my dreams and my plans, in the Lakeland I love so passionately. Write to me whenever you wish. And fight my battles for me, that’s a good chap.
Tell me when the war’s over!
Your old pal,
14566773
Maudsley, in early 1943, having served in the Home Guard for two years, after he had recovered from his minor operation, was called up – but not into the Navy as he had hoped. He found himself in the Royal Signals, en route to Burma. He was in the army till the end of the war in 1945. His relationship with Bessy had finished before he went into the army.
AW remained in Kendal for the rest of the war, still planning the brilliant books with which he was going to astound the world.
Part 4
Letters to Family and Friends, 1942–54
AW’s mother Emily died in Blackburn on 13 November 1942, aged sixty-nine. The mention of thanking for condolences in his letter to Lawrence Wolstenholme of 25 November 1942 (Letter 30) refers to her death.
She left furniture – which AW was involved in trying to sell off – and also a bequest which led to many complications. Her father had left her a house – which is presumably the one in which she had lived and brought up her children – but in order that it did not fall into the hands of her drunken husband Albert, he had set up a trust to benefit her children, namely AW and his brother and two sisters.
He writes to his Aunt Nellie – his mother’s sister – about her son Oswald, AW’s cousin, now going in the services. Peter, AW’s son, now aged nine, had been in hospital to have his appendix removed.
He also writes about the problems of the will and the disposal of the grandfather’s trust. Uncle Tom is the husband of Emily’s sister Annie and AW was not best pleased with his handling of the will as a Trustee, or the behaviour of the solicitors – but was obviously quite pleased with his phrase ‘recrudescing in a more violent form’ which he uses in both his letter to Uncle Tom and his Aunt Nellie. Alice is AW’s sister.
Emily’s personal estate came to £182–16-2, which included furniture sold for £17–15-0. The money in trust, from the property, came to £572, shared between the four children. AW’s total share came in all to £174. He planned to use it as a deposit on a bungalow and leave his rented council house in Castle Grove, but this was not done for some time.
LETTER 33: TO HELEN (NELLIE) SMITH, 24 NOVEMBER 1942
19 Castle Grove
Kendal
November 24 1942
Dear Auntie Nellie,
Your letter was a very pleasant surprise for me this morning.
So Oswald is to be a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm. Is he? Well, well! Somehow I can only remember Oswald as a small boy with a colourful smile and with hair which, although obviously the subject of much attention, never would just stay as it was put. I did once, I think, see him in long trousers. And now, quite suddenly, he has reached man’s estate. A pilot in the Fleet Air Arm! My word, I’ll bet he’s delighted.
You needn’t worry much about him, he’ll have a grand time, and take to the strange new life like a duck to water, see if he doesn’t. The house will seem strange without him when he goes, and for a long time afterwards; you’ll regret the parting naturally, but I rather fancy you’ll be a proud mother all the same.
Peter is very much better, thank you; so much better, in fact, that we are to ring up the hospital tomorrow to see if he is ready to come home. He has not worried unduly over his long confinement away from home. Indeed, on the contrary, he has taken very great interest, almost a morbid interest, in the operation and in the treatment to which he has been subjected, and he must certainly now be regarded as a complete authority on matters appertaining to the routine and administration of a hospital. Better still, he’s got something to swank about for the rest of his life!
I am glad to have your explanation regarding the price fixed for the bedroom suite, etc. Of course I do not think you are interfering! Alice was correct when she told you she was paying 12 pounds for the suite and 4 pounds for the bed, this being the price agreed with mother. It does seem, therefore, that you were misunderstood. Nevert
heless, although I shall now offer to reduce the price to 10 pounds, it seemed to me that both Alice and John were perfectly satisfied, and in my opinion they had a good bargain. The only fair price is, of course, the market price ruling at the time they acquired the furniture, and this, of course, is much higher than in normal times. However, I’ll see how they feel about it, and in the meantime must thank you for drawing my attention to this matter.
I must thank you, too, for your further invitation to stay with you if I find it necessary to come over to Sheffield. I should be delighted to, so much so that I do hope the necessity will arise, but I hardly think it will. To tell you the truth, Smith Smith and Fielding (now Wake Smith and Co.) are contriving very adroitly to snatch the whole business out of my hands.
When uncle Tom showed me my grandfather’s will last week, it seemed to me both then and afterwards on further reflection, that my mother had in fact no power to provide for the disposal of the money bequeathed to her, as grandfather himself had expressly provided that the Trust Fund should be divided equally between her surviving children at the time of her death. Fortunately the terms of my mother’s Will were similar, but there is this difference, that it remains the duty of Uncle Tom and Uncle Armitage to convert the investment into cash and themselves distribute the proceeds amongst the children. Smith Wake and Co. have pointed this out to me, and I am compelled to agree with them. The position is further complicated by the fact that payment of the mortgage cannot be enforced, and in any case, there are no funds in the hands of Mr Mellor’s Trustees to repay the money. It will be necessary, therefore, for the mortgage to be transferred to a new lender, if possible.
The Wainwright Letters Page 8