I continue to seem to have little to say.!!! (12 pages further on)When last I wrote I was at Cambridge, & I think I put in Thursday night & Friday morning writing. It seems hidden in an undiscoverable sunken past now, but I must see if I can’t disinter some memory of what happened. Now I think of it I couldn’t have written to you on Thursday night, because that was the night McGrath knocked my goggles off in the quadrangle of Clare & busted frame of same — luckily I was able to stick it together with seccotine, which is the beauty of horn rims — after which we went to the Festival Theatre to see The Devil’s Disciple. There is a bird called Terence Gray who has started a repertory theatre at Cambridge under that title — an ex- archaeologist he is who got a bug for stagecraft, & believes in having noisy entrances through the audience & so forth. It is a nice little theatre though — 3/6 is the highest price you can pay, & the young gentlemen aren’t allowed to go up in the gods & pay a bob. At least they can do so & res but may be progged. The programme has one or two commendable features — I send it out — but suffers from an appalling high-browness. Mac is meditating a devastating rag on it at present. He has invented a wonderful modern theatre at Mabuse in Sweden (I believe) with which he & a cobber hoaxed a society at Cambridge — with detailed architectural drawings & all, quite the Terence Gray style, or a bit beyond, & he is thinking on working it off on Terence Gray now. The main diffi- cultydifficulty is to let everybody else know it’s a rag. One of these subtle things UnivUniversity of N.ZNew Zealand might well emulate. Anyhow this theatre does a different play every week in term, & does good stuff. Some of the acting is very good e.g.for example General Burgoyne in this was perfect. Funny to think that Shaw ever wrote romantic stuff like most of this, except with his tongue in his cheek — It was only in the third act that he seemed to me really to get going. I remain very sorrowful that you can’t see some of these things. I think it must have been Friday afternoon that I did my architectural tour of Cambridge — or no, I think that was the glorious afternoon we walked into Cambridge via Grantchester — or perhaps we did both. I know we finished up at an old 2ndsecond hand shop full of curious & interesting & dirty things. I bought a little old Chinese god for a birthday present for one of my cobbers & nearly bought a pair of old Burmese brass lions (?) for 80/- but managed to restrain myself — there are a lot of things a bloke wants to buy in this world. I’m glad I got my Hobbes & James I though — nothing like a few old folios to give tone & dignity to a gent’s library; although if I stay in London a couple more years I’ll certainly need a flat. I finished up by buying a wash drawing from McGMcGrath, one of the best things he has done, which he was getting ready for the Cambridge Art Society’s Exhibition. At least I told him I would buy it if he couldn’t get more for it at the exhibition. It is called Breaking up Old London, & will fit my library pretty well some day. I hope to invest in one of Uncle George’s new water colours before I leave, too; he has turned out some good stuff.

On Saturdays they still have their market in Cambridge; so I strolled in & had a look round after going to the Record Office, just to salve my conscience, & hearing that they had nothing there any good to me; & resisted again the temptation to buy — this time a charming pair of early Victorian candlesticks with hexagonal bases — brass. Also I did not buy once before in this market place a Gibbon’s Rome, half 1stfirst-edition, half 2ndsecond. I though it would do for you, being nice big hefty quarto volumes. Also I bought two collars, but as the bookshops closed for lunch, had to leave 1½ of them unvisited, a great nuisance — I shall have to go back to Cambridge in the autumn. In the afternoon Mac hiredgot out his bike, & I hired one for 1/3 (I found when I got on it that it didn’t have a bell, or a lamp or a rear-light & that the brakes were wonky — but that didn’t matter, as the road was nice & flat all the way; but incidentally I got my trousers mixed up with the chain something horrible & have had to buy a new pair, very flash, grey flannel, bang goes 16/6) — anyhow we got these here bikes, & rode to Ely, for to inspect the Cathedral. A very mixed sort of Cathedral, but a fine Norman nave; & a Lady Chapel that would be very fine if ardent 16thsixteenth century reformers hadn’t gone round & knocked every head of in the place off the statues & carvings — & there were about 5000five thousand of them. So it was with a peculiar sense of the divine justice that I recalled that the cove who was the cause of this had his own head chopped off, in a different connection, on Tower Hill. I send you a little book about the place, sold at the incredible price of 3d — it has some very nice woodcuts in it, so Mac & I plunked down 1/- each & walked off with the whole pile — much to the agitation of the aged sacristan (or some such-like) who thought we were pinching them. The outside of the place didn’t look as good as it does in the woodcut, except from one position, where you got all those towers piled up one on top offof the other very impressively. Then we had tea & cycled back in the cool of the evening. A very holy place, Ely — even the barrel organs play hymns. One of them was the Churche’s One Foundation Is Jesus Christ Our Lord alias O Star of Truth down shining, which took me back a long way. They must have been great places in their palmy days, those old country cathedrals & abbeys, before they got it in the neck from Henry eighth8 & their latterday surroundings & Sir Gilbert Scott & the modern parson. Ely is very well kept however. I am wondering which cathedral to add next to my collection & perhaps I may go down to Winchester & drop a pious tear over the tomb of JaneJane Austen. I am getting more & more to like Norman building — you can’t beat it. Tewkesbury, Peterborough, Ely — what a collection! You would think that once a nation had built those things, they wouldn’t start to worry about an empire. But yet here’s our Stanley Baldwin yesterday saying that we can still beat the world. It will be very interesting & gratifying to see us make a start. I hope we will start before I leave England.

Sunday was another glorious day — actually hot; & I started to uncurl for the first time since last summer. I took a book & went & lay down in the Grantchester meadows by the river & dreamed of the perfect university. What a place we could have in N.Z.New Zealand if we loosened the purse strings & only tried! Cambridge wouldn’t be in it. Well, well, it may happen about the year 3000three thousand. The meadows were all covered with buttercups & daisies, so that in places you couldn’t see the grass; & I lay & read & looked at the punts going by, & was assaulted by innumerable gramophones each one worse than the last, & everything was very idyllic. Except for the buttercups & the punts, & the fact that I wasn’t in pyjamas, it was almost like being at home again down the back garden of a good hot Sunday morning. I came up for lunch, & then I went back again for a further spell, thinking it was well worth while to give the Fitzwilliam the go by for the sun. Then back ag to tea with McGMcGrath & a cobber of his, after which we canoed on the river for a bit, after which a meal, after which I said good-bye to Cam- bridgeCambridge. I can well imagine a cove getting fond of such a place in two or three years — though of course Jack Yeates didn’t & I was lucky with the weather the 2ndsecond half of the week. Abolish the footling rules, & a man would be all right. The greatest joy of all the rules is that by which the library closes at 4four & you can’t borrow a book after ¼ to 4four — What a place it would be for Horace Ward! Well, I must go back to see it in the autumn, when it is supposed to be at its best; & there areis the Fitzwilliam stuff &that those 1½ bookshops. Pity I haven’t a cobber like McGMcGrath at Oxford.

Back to London in a carriage full of Cockneys, each one a joy, & all of them discussing life with a Wellsian seriousness & intensity except one, who merely grinned at intervals. The others ranged from the death penalty to pubs & incest with equal interest & moral ideals. So back at last to Brunswick Square, having done not a stroke of work but enjoyed myself hugely. I would have stayed longer if it hadn’t been for the urgent necessity of attacking the constitutional & land history of Australia & N.Z.New Zealand — a grisly business after Grantchester. And now it has started to rain again. Here our white flowering trees & lilac have gone, but everything is very freshly green still; nor does it look as if the grass will be burnt up yet awhile. I am getting back into the collar again; though after finishing a big chapter of about 70seventy pages (70x350 : 24-5000