Tuesday 22 June 1943
London
Dearest,
This will be a very short note indeed I’m afraid as your letter had not arrived when I left the office at 10.45 and there is so little to report since I wrote you yesterday evening. After posting your letter I did go along to Kew with the intention of dropping Mother a note, but I fell asleep on the grass near the river – remember? – and when I woke it was nearly 7 o’clock and I was late for tea! I had a look at our prunus trees but they don’t look anything like their photograph. Almost they look like any other two trees – as if they ever could be! Do you remember walking down the side of one of the L-shaped glasshouses where a herbaceous border had been laid out? There was very little in bloom when we were there, but it is just a mass of flowers now and the red-hot pokers, now finished, must have made a wonderful riot of colour. You’d have loved one big bed, about 15 feet by 10, of mauve daisies. And old Thompson would have committed murder for some of the new types of double pinks. Lovely variegated colours they are. A place like Kew, despite the rose beds and herbaceous, never makes the same appeal to me at this time of the year as it does in early spring. I’ll never forget the sense of comfort and the belief that good things do outlast the stupidities of man which I got when, at the end of February, I saw the early flowering prunus, the rhododendrons, camelia and the magnolia. I don’t hope to see anything lovelier – growing in a garden I mean, sweet!
Tom Oliver decided that he wanted to go to the Derby so he went sick three or four days before the race with a pain in his back. He reported for duty and had to go to sick bay, of course, to report there. The vet asked him what he’d been suffering from and he gave the medical name for it. Our own vet, of course, is bound to give him an examination and every time he came to one spot Tom flinched and the vet murmured very learnedly about there still being lumps under the muscles! He gathered the sick-bay attendants round, lectured them on the subject, gave Tom medicine and pills and told him to go there for massage every day. Can you beat it? Tom, swinging the lead, gets all the consideration in the world while Jack Gray, in constant pain, is more or less accused of malingering. No wonder Cronin wrote ‘The Citadel’!
Well, angel girl, that’s all the news except to say I’m missing you a lot. I did wish you were walking round Kew with me again yesterday. The weather was glorious and again today is a real scorcher. It’s going to be too hot to move this afternoon. Have the children been having any bathing costume weather this week? I’d like them to get really brown this year because I always feel they store the sunshine up to help them through the winter.
Now I must be off for lunch. Take good care of yourself, sweetheart. I’m looking forward to a nice letter when I go back. All my love.
Ever your own
Arthur X
Jun 221943