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Francesca dear,
… We duly saw Oxford sink on the television and I hoped you weren't there. Even a launch would have been an uncomfortable experience on such a day, not to mention the disappointment of ‘no race’. It is astonishing how clear the television pictures are, even expressions are visible.
It is a marvellous moonlit night with the wind sighing gently in the pine trees. There is a line of Flecker's which goes:
For pines are gossip pines the wide world through.1
It has always stuck in my mind since I first came across it when I was at Oxford. Arthur Bryant2 and I used to learn quite a lot of verse when we were up. But I think I learnt most during the first world war. My biggest feat was in 1918 I think when our battalion had no tanks left and I and a dozen of my men had to fill a gap in the line with our machine guns. Our last night before relief I was with a colonel of the Royal Scots and it became clear as we were talking that a German night attack was starting. As everything that could be done had been done he said, Let's talk about something decent. Have you read the de Coverley essays? I told him I had, so we talked about Sir Roger de Coverley and Will Wimple and the rest while the Boche in his little way shelled our waterlogged line of shell-holes and earthworks to bits. The colonel got killed a little later, and I, still having nothing to do, learned off ‘L'Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ from a Golden Treasury I had with me. As it turned out we were only on the flank of the attack and were relieved a little before dawn. I don't think I remember much of either now though funnily enough I can still repeat a good deal of Virgil that I learnt at, though not ‘in’, school. I hated Latin lessons but used to like the sound of Virgil so I used to learn bits. We never ‘did’ the Georgics which I think the best of the lot.
Easter Sunday. I want to add more to this before I go to catch the Sunday post which goes at tea-time. It is still a lovely afternoon and has all the