Glad to get yours, (as Father Johnson invariably starts his letters) which came on Saturday, late as usual. Or perhaps I should look on the bright side of things & say no later than usual. Likewise I received a rude, not to say vulgar, note from Keithles, which I am thinking of sending on to Frannie, to open the girl's eyes if possible ere it is too late. I don't like the way he refers to my letters, but no doubt he doesn't know any better & such masterpieces of the literary art one can hardly be anything else but wasted on so stunted a sensibility. So I will say no more on the point, but let it go at that. But I may perhaps add that even if you don't like your Christmas present, it's hardly considered good form to remark on the same to the donor; for confirmation on this point he might apply to the Johnson family, experts on what is & is not done. Nor can I consider it in the best of taste to continue to make pointed remarks on one's wedding & consequent wedding presents. Of course some coves will stoop to anything; but I think I remember dis- posing of the matter in question to the satisfaction of all concerned in my last letter. Nuff sed. To come back to your more important & amiable communications, I'm glad you & your husband liked your books so much. Thank you very much for your proposed 10/- postage note — that is the literal way in which I like my goals to be taken. I notice that Keithles said nothing about refunding postage, but no (or Ern) but no doubt every little helps to feather the little grey home in the nest, so to speak. With reference to what Daddy says of Pollard & my work, I gather from bits I have picked up here & there in the course of conversation that it is Pollard's profession to be a swine to everybody not excepting his wife; but he doesn't worry me now. I got one or two encouraging words from my boss this afternoon & work is looking up a bit & spring ought to be here in about three months so altogether the world is not entirely unpleasant. Daddy says “I shd like you to get on to something which will enable you to make the best use of yr opportunity as well as to do justice to the gifts you undoubtedly possess”. As far as I can see my job is to go through an intensive training in dry as dust, which will result in a book, if printed, (Newton talks gaily about what we'll print) which specialists will approach, & specialists alone — excepting perhaps the students I may some day have, who will find it prescribed as an indispensable element in their historical training, like Barney Murphy & his Economics. Not much scope for my voluptuous style in an historical source book with critical prolegomena & voluminous notes. However it will go hard but I manage to squeeze some blood & amusement out of the stone. Anyhow I am getting into the work now, which is a great improvement on just messing about. Thanks very much for Inspector Superintendant McIlveney's noble effort; I thought he was a shrewd sort of hard-headed cove; but all these cops high up seem to run to excessive eloquence. Wasn't it that old fool Cullen who made the wonderful peroration about "Your dead comrade lying there with his sightless eyes staring at the sky" when the young cop got pipped in the dark a few years ago? Looking up to after the community seems to go the brain. Alan's pictures on same weren't bad, but too crowded with script to my thinking, & not as good as some of his others I have seen in Jimmy Parr's lately. Mrs. Bryant seems a very entertaining woman, & a soul full of harmony, which is a good thing in this discordant & materialistic civilisation. Of course if you combine Hymns Ancient & Modern & Hawaian love-songs you can't go wrong; for any tendency to libertinage in the one, even so far as they might affect a deaf female, would be infallibly corrected by the soulful charm of the other. However I gather from Keithles' letter that I am verging on a discussion which might shock his pure soul, so you had better keep this letter from the boy. Before I change the subject however I might recount a joke which a kind correspondent sent to the yesterday's Sunday Times. A small boy who had to do a composition on King David for his scripture exam, finished up a laudatory description of his personality by saying "If he had any fault, it was a slight tendency towards adultery." Thank you also for old Thornhill's calendar, which I ripped up & threw in our W.P.B. after reading same; cripes, he ought to be in an asylum that cove. Taling about parsons reminds me of something old P. Phillips told me which I have forgotten to pass on up to now; he told me that Wellington's name was mud with the B & F; that the B & F was as slow as a wet week in making up its mind; that just before the W'gton conked out the American association offered to provide a parson & subsidise his screw pretty generously; P.P. wrote to the B & F putting in the boot and urging them to get a move on; and they said they'd think it over; & by the time they'd started to begin to think that it was time that they might possibly give a thought to the matter the game was up. I wandered into the Essex Hall book room one day and the young females & parsons I saw drifting round there didn't inspire me with any rush of admir- ation. Reminded me greatly of the N.Z. Bible & Book Society & Willis St. I have been in Essex Hall too; quite a small place & very bare except for a painting of Martineau & a lot more pious looking coves. I haven't heard or seen anything of Unitarian activities in London outside this to date; although to be sure I haven't looked.

Tuesday Feb 8th McGrath & de Kievriel (q.v. later on) turned up last night so the preceding was all, with considerable difficulty, I was able to write. So I am denying myself the pleasure of seeing H.M. Geo V in procession on his way to open Parliament not to mention his Queen & H.R.H. & Yeomen of the Guard & Life Guards in full dress & Lord knows what else; & here I sit with uncombed fingers thinking how nice & warm it would be down at the Record Office. McG. had found a flat out at Maida Vale which he was eager for us to take, but which after pro- longed discussion we finally turned down. £ 3 a week - McG's ideas are rather flasher than ours, & I can't afford to spend any more than I do now. Also Maida Vale is a good way out, & de K said he had tried living out so far & it was no good. We have been talking about taking a flat together for some time, but I don't know whether anything will come of it; and I'm personally not keen on leaving this place, as its very handy to everything, even if our land- lady could hardly be described as generous. I don't know whether I've even said anything about her — she is a retired Indian army nurse & superficially quite decent, but with an immense contempt for the subject races, & a brute to Mrs Mackenzie, the old cleaner up & woman of all work. Mrs Mac however had an accident & her successor a strong hefty self-confident young damsel sticks up for herself with spirit & independence (in- cidentally she pinches our gas regularly to maker her afternoon tea & scrubbing water hot. I shouldn't be surprised if she takes an occasional bath out of it too, to judge by the amount of gas that we miss. The other member's of the landlady's family (Miss Hawkins by name) are two pampered cats & a pampered dog, which she calls her children. The cats sits on the stairs & and won't move out of your way, & the dog has a disgusting yap & she cleans its teeth for it & asks me to take it out for a hem when I go out late to post a letter; so some night when a handy taxi passes there will be a sudden treacherous kick & the statistics of canine mortality will go up one. Miss H. doesn't give us any trouble however & she thinks we're both very good boys, so taking things all in all, with the exception of the impossibility of a decent hot bath, we're not badly off. I thought I should be sure to get a good hot bath at the Johnsons, but did they offer me one? Not on your life. And yet when I remarked to Father Johnson, not apropos of that, but of climatic & other conditions generally, that I thought the Eng- lish must have considerable difficulty in keeping clean, he was quite indignant. The people in this joint certain- ly don't go in for cold baths in the morning — Australia & NZ have the only representatives who, spite of snow piled up in the bathroom & water that freezes as soon as it comes out of the tap, plunge boldly in.

De Kievrel, whom I mentioned sometime back, is a S. African over here with a scholarship, a pretty good sort of a cove, with whom I have lately struck up a friendship. He is one of Newton's students at the I.H.R.; born in Holland but has spent most of his life in S.A. — Univ of Johannesberg. So we have a good deal of information to swap, & what with one cobber or another, we seem to talk the heavenly bodies in & out of the sky more than nights than not. I have buzzed up to his place once or twice, & he drops in here, last night e.g. with lamentable results to filial corresp- ondence. He has enlightened views on diet, so I gather, & politics & quite a number of things. Apparently S.A. is a good place for teachers — you only have to land in the country to get a job, & they are paid far more than in NZ — about £400 to start on apparently, with rapid rises Of course the cost of living is a bit more than in NZ. Capetown University wouldn't be a bad place for a job either; they have a good library & a good staff there; & a good orchestra in the town, & according to de K have a good deal of intellectual & a pretty vigorous native culture; while the lucky blighters are only 17 days from England, with fares correspondingly cheap, so that some of their profs come over here every year! Still when they get broadcasting so developed as to be able to hear the Queen's Hall orchestra in W'gton & television is so good that that you can see Pygmalion or Macbeth in the front room at home NZ will be quite worth living in.

We went to Pygmalion on Saturday, & it was jolly good, though the characterisation was not so good in my opinion as in The Doctor's Dilemma; Esmé Percy the leading man being perfect as Dubedat but a trifle Dubedatish as Higgins; nor do I think that Gwen Frangçon Davies got the full-blooded Cockney accent, but I may be wrong there. She is a great actress, however. All the other parts were pretty good. This crowd, the Macdona Players, are doing Man & Superman next, so we aren't doing badly so far as Shaw is concerned. That's the only play I've been to lately, but we're going Juno & the Paycock on Thursday; & Rose Marie on Saturday to see something of the girls. The chorus in this is supposed to be something out of the ordinary for drill & massed effects; but we shall see. I have half a mind to buzz along to a girl & leg show at the Adelphi, too, next door to Jimmy Parr's, round the pictures outside which male London buzzes with fervour perpetually. One pair of legs proclaimed as the finest in the States — it is a Yank show called Broad- way, & really they are quite good. Did I tell you the Farmer's Wife had just stopped running after more than three years? They are putting on another play by author of same, whose name is for the moment hidden in some corner of my brain and refuses to come forward; I must write a play like this some day myself. I think I mentioned that the Lenen Quartet were giving a series of recitals & doing all Beethoven's quartets to celebrate the centen- ary of the hero's death, in honour of which also Ernest Newman of W.J. Turner and all the other critics are getting busy, so that every week a new, or at least a dif- ferent book is another on the man & works. Like- wise all the concerts are beginning to specialise in Beethoven. I have been to the first two Lenen quartets concerts & am going again tonight — hence my having to take the morning off; but the music is so highbrow that it is pretty hard-going when you haven't heard any of it before, especially after a series of late nights & a few hundred West Indian dispatches. However the brain must be trained in the way that it should go, & at 2/4 a time it isn't so bad. Berlioz is another cove who is being paid a lot of attention nowadays — I told you about his Requiem, I think; I heard one of his symphonies last week, & tomorrow night some choir is doing his Damnation of Faust, thus emulating the achievements of the distinguished Mr H. Temple White & the Royal Wellington Choral Union. In fact there doesn't seem to be anything done in the colonies which they don't imitate here. I heard Bach's B minor Mass a couple of Saturday's ago in the Albert Hall; a big choir & orchestra & organ going at top — it is the stuff alright. This was by the Royal Choral Society; they are doing the Dream of Gerontius next, so my luck's in all right. Also there is a big Elgar orchestral concert coming off soon, conducted by the great man himself. But no doubt you get a bit fed up reading all these fortnightly details. I heard the Eroica symphony, however, which you know, the other night with de K at a B.B.C. Concert; at which they also played a jolly Liszt piano concerto (Poussinoff) & Verklarte Nachte, a thing by that modern cove Schoenberg: it sounded all right to me, I must say. At the concert where I heard the Berlioz Symphony, they also played a symphonic poem of old Cesar Franck's Psyche, which Bernard Pope used to deliver on the organ occasionally, & which (being heard here for the first time) the critics tore up with remarkable unanimity; & a new "Hymn to Apollo" by the enfant terrible Arthur Bliss, who however G.N. reckons is settling down to bourgeois respectability now. On this last thing an an- tique Victorian looking gentleman behind me, with flowing whiskers, loud and prolonged applause in my ear for anything he liked, & extensive comments for everything, made the following remarks which I took down for your benefit: (with pity) "And he really thinks he's done something!" (A.B. comes out & bows. With amusement not with alarm). "I'm afraid he'll do it again now!" (with indignation) "They shouldn't encourage that sort of thing!". At this concert also a first-rate singer, Elizabeth Schumann, sang that Mozart Hallelujah, which Ingrid Onegin sings on our gramophone — it is part of a much bigger thing. She also sang some stunner Strauss songs. By the way, Ingrid is coming over for the Covent Garden opera season later on.

That about finishes the concert news, I think. The only other place I have been to is out to Newton's last Friday to an evening affair, where all the lads & lasses were invited in their glad rags, so that my boiled shirt came in handy once again. There was a first- rate pianist there by the name of Mrs Thompson who plays professionally as Jessie Hall, & we got some decent stuff from her. Nothing much else notable, though the coffee was good, & a Yank girl told us a good joke which I will now proceed to recount. Of course you have to imagine the accent. Three American presidents came to the pearly gates, & St. Peter came out to interview them in turn. The first was George Washington. “Who are you?” “I'm the Father of my Country” “That's all right. Come right in” Next was Abraham Lincoln. “Who are you?” “I'm the Saviour of my Country” “That's all right. Come right in.” The next was Roosevelt. “Who are you?” “That's none of your business! Where's God?” Old Newton is a pretty amiable cove, if you strike him in a good humour. I may be going down to Bristol at the end of the term, where the National Union of Students are holding a conference on something or other at the University for a week, to be addressed by Bertrand Rus- sell & Margaret Bondfield among others. I shall have to figure out whether I can afford this as well as a week in the Lake District with old P.P. No doubt it would be pretty stimulating & perhaps provide an article for the Spike. By the way I got the Old Clay Patch alright, thanks. I think the only other place I have been to one other place — McG took us out to see a cobber of his, name by name Gilbert, an architectural sculptor, who has done some pretty good stuff to judge by photos of same & has a son & a daughter sculping & painting students & an amiable wife amiable enough to mend Mac's socks. A comfortable visit, with a good supper & smokes thrown in; but it in- volved missing Ramsey MacDonald at a protest meeting at the Albert Hall re the matter of China. No doubt I shall hear him & others before I leave. Lloyd George keeps on making pointed & humorous remarks about everybody & Grey has smashed the remnant of the liberals because he won't have anything to do with the man of sin & one by one the Liberals pair off to the Conservatives & to Labour & L.G. exhorts his followers not to be down-hearted. Grey & his followers preserve a frosty silence; except when they hurl another thunderbolt at L.G. Winston pokes borax at the lot of them. The greatest sensation lately of course has been the Wright & Gladstone case, which has filled up pages of the Times & issues of the other papers, and has been mildly funny in places — they T.P. in the box, who could not resist describing himself as the Father of the House of Commons & telling the world all about it in the Sunday Times. He does an article every week in same; generally some old friend has died on whom he can descant amiably till further notice. Then of course there are the revolution- ary, not to say Bolshevistic changes in the prayer-book (but of course, permissive only) which take up two full pages of the leading article in the Times this morning, & which are causing the Bishop of Norwich to wring his hands desolately in the bitterness of his spirit — it's a great country! I enclose a few varied clippings to suit all tastes & subscribe myself with love to all, not forgetting Auntie & Mrs Kilfoy.