Good-Bye to All That quotes

The rhyme might have been taken further to show how closely, nevertheless, these things are linked.

For while maps are the biographical treatment of geography, biography is the geographical treatment of chaps.

Chaps who are made the subjects of biography have by effort, or by accident, put themselves on the contemporary map as geographical features; but seldom have reality by themselves as proper chaps. So that Who’s Who?

I have given those. Profession. In my passport I am down as ‘university professor.’ That was a convenience for 1926, when I first took it out. I thought of putting ‘writer,’ but people who are concerned with passports have complicated reactions to the word.

‘University professor’ wins a simple reaction—dull respect.

No questions asked. So also with ‘army captain (pensioned list).’

Not bad talk as talk goes; usually informative, often witty, but it goes on and on and on and on and on. The von Ranke’s have, I think, little mechanical aptitude either.

It is most inconvenient to have been born into the age of the internal-combustion engine and the electric dynamo and to have no sympathy with them; a push bicycle, a primus stove, and an army rifle mark the bounds of my mechanical capacity.

My grandfather, on this side, was Protestant Bishop of Limerick. He had eight, or was it ten, children. He was a little man and a remarkable mathematician; he first formulated some theory or other of spherical conics.

He has never been bitter about all this, but he has more than once impressed on me almost religiously never to sell for a sum down the complete rights of any work of mine whatsoever.

I am glad in a way that my father was a poet. This at least saved me from any false reverence of poets, and his work was never an oppression to me.

I am even very pleased when I meet people who know his work and not mine. Some of his songs I sing without prejudice; when washing up after meals or shelling peas or on similar occasions.

His wardrobe is almost too carefully a gentleman’s, and he does not allow himself the pseudo-ducal privilege of having disreputable acquaintances and saying on all occasions what he really means.

About this being a gentleman business: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled occasionally to get some sort of return.

The gap of two generations between my parents and me was easier in a way to bridge than a single generation gap. Children seldom quarrel with their grandparents, and I have been able to think of my mother and father as grandparents.

Also, a family of ten means a dilution of parental affection; the members tend to become indistinct.

I have often been called: ‘Philip, Richard, Charles, I mean Robert.’

Here I began playing games seriously, was quarrelsome, boastful, and talkative, won prizes, and collected things. The only difference between me and the other boys was that I collected coins instead of stamps.

The value of coins seemed less fictitious to me than stamp values.

My first training as a gentleman was here. I was only once caned, for forgetting to bring my gymnastic shoes to school, and then I was only given two strokes on the hand with the cane.

Yet even now the memory makes me hot with fury. The principal outrage was that it was on the hand. My hands have a great importance for me and are unusually sensitive.

I live a lot in them; my visual imagery is defective and so I memorize largely by sense of touch.

I seem to have left out a school. It was in North Wales, right away in the hills behind Llanbedr. It was the first time I had been away from home. I went there just for a term, for my health.

A preparatory-school boy, when off his guard, will often call his mother, ‘Please, matron,’ and will always address any man relation or friend of the family as ‘Sir,’ as though he were a master. I used to do it.

School life becomes the reality and home life the illusion.

In England parents of the governing classes virtually finish all intimate life with their children from about the age of eight, and any attempt on their part to insinuate home feeling into school life is resented.

when we were up walking there we made our own. We decided who was buried under the Standing Stone and who had lived in the ruined round-hut encampment and in the caves of the valley where the big rowans were.

On our visits to Germany I had felt a sense of home in my blood in a natural human way, but on the hills behind Harlech I found a personal harmony independent of history or geography.

The first poem I wrote as myself concerned that hill-country. (The first poem I wrote as a Graves was a free translation of a satire by Catullus).

so we never got hurt. I had a bad head for heights and trained myself deliberately and painfully to overcome it. We used to go climbing in the turrets and towers of Harlech Castle.

I have worked hard on myself in defining and dispersing terrors.

The simple fear of heights was the most obvious to overcome. There was a quarry-face in the garden of our Harlech house. It provided one or two easy climbs, but gradually I invented more and more difficult ones for myself.

I lived outside the University three-mile radius. For my last two undergraduate years I did not even have a tutor. I have a warm feeling for Oxford. Its rules and statutes, though apparently cast-iron, are ready for emergencies.

In my case, at any rate, a poet was an emergency.

Whenever I come to the word ‘Charterhouse’ in this story I find myself escaping into digressions, but I suppose that I must get through with it.

I found the juniors were on the whole a decent lot of fellows. Towards the end of this year, in the annual boxing and gymnastic display, I fought three rounds with Raymond.

There is a lot of sex feeling in boxing—the dual play, the reciprocity, the pain not felt as pain.

This exhibition match to me had something of the quality that Dr. Marie Stopes would call sacramental. We were out neither to hurt nor win though we hit each other hard.

I thought that it would mean garrison service at home while the regular forces were away. In the second place, I entirely believed that France and England had been drawn into a war which they had never contemplated and for which they were entirely unprepared.

It never occurred to me that newspapers and statesmen could lie.

I forgot my pacifism—I was ready to believe the worst of the Germans. I was outraged to read of the cynical violation of Belgian neutrality. I wrote a poem promising vengeance for Louvain.

Recruit officers spent a good deal of their time at Company and Battalion Orderly Room, learning how to deal with crime.

Crime, of course, meant any breach of army regulations; and there was plenty of it.

In these days Battalion Orderly Room would last four or five hours every day, at the rate of one crime dealt with every three or four minutes.; This was apart from the scores of less serious offences tried by company commanders.

I have an accurate record of the trial but my publishers advise me not to give it here.

Orderly Room always embarrassed and dispirited me. I never got used to it even after sentencing thousands of men myself.

There was something shameful about it.

The men of the draft had none of them been out before, except the sergeant in charge. They began singing. Instead of the usual music-hall songs they sang Welsh hymns, each man taking a part.

The Welsh always sang when they were a bit frightened and pretending that they were not; it kept them steady.

They never sang out of tune.

Even when an observation officer in an aeroplane or captive balloon or on a church spire was directing the gun-fire it seemed unaimed, somehow.

But a rifle bullet even when fired blindly always had the effect of seeming aimed.

And we could hear a shell coming and take some sort of cover, but the rifle bullet gave no warning.

I jumped up on the fire-step beside the sentry and cautiously raising my head stared over the parapet. I could see nothing except the wooden pickets supporting our protecting barbed-wire entanglement and a dark patch or two of bushes beyond.

The darkness seemed to move and shake about as I looked at it; the bushes started travelling, singly at first, then both together.

The pickets were doing the same. I was glad of the sentry beside me; his name, he told me, was Beaumont. ‘They’re quiet to-night, sir,’ he said, ‘a relief going on; I think so, surely.’ I said: ‘It’s funny how those bushes seem to move.’

But the faint plop! of the mortar that sends off the sausage or the muffled rifle noise when a grenade is fired, we pick out at once.

The men are much afraid, yet always joking.

The company sergeant-major stands behind Number Eleven brick-stack and shoots at the sausages with a rifle as they come over; trying to explode them in the air. He says that it’s better than pigeon-shooting. He hasn’t hit one yet.

Beaumont had been telling me how he had won about five pounds in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show. It was a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it.

Before a show the platoon pools all its available cash and the winners, who are the survivors, divide it up afterwards.

Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.

It was a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show the platoon pools all its available cash and the winners, who are the survivors, divide it up afterwards.

Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.

24th June. —We are billeted in the cellars of Vermelles, which was taken and re-taken eight times last October. There is not a single house undamaged in the place. I suppose it once had two or three thousand inhabitants.

—We are billeted in the cellars of Vermelles, which was taken and re-taken eight times last October. There is not a single house undamaged in the place. I suppose it once had two or three thousand inhabitants. It is beautiful now in a fantastic way.

We came up two nights ago; there was a moon shining behind the houses and the shells had broken up all the hard lines.

Next morning we found the deserted gardens of the town very pleasant to walk about in; they are quite overgrown and flowers have seeded themselves about wildly. Red cabbages and roses and madonna lilies are the chief ornaments.

At the end of the gallery I found a Welsh miner, one of our own men who had transferred to the Royal Engineers, on listening duty. He cautioned me to silence. I could distinctly hear the Germans working somewhere underneath. He whispered:

‘So long as they work, I don’t mind; it’s when they stop.’

He did his two-hour spell by candle-light. It was very stuffy. He was reading a book. The mining officer had told me that they were allowed to read; it didn’t interfere with their listening. It was a paper-backed novelette called From Mill Girl to Duchess.

Besides, I had worked it out like this.

The best way of lasting the war out was to get wounded.

The best time to get wounded was at night and in the open, because a wound in a vital spot was less likely. Fire was more or less unaimed at night and the whole body was exposed.

The battalion cared no more about the successes or reverses of our Allies than it did about the origins of the war. It never allowed itself to have any political feelings about the Germans.

A professional soldier’s job was to fight whomsoever the King ordered him to fight; it was as simple as that.

With the King as colonel-in-chief of the regiment it was even simpler. The Christmas 1914 fraternization, in which the battalion was among the first to participate, was of the same professional simplicity;

There was about half a mile of communication trench between us and the trenches proper, known as Maison Rouge Alley. It was an hour or so past midnight. At half-past five the gas was to be discharged.

We were cold, tired and sick, not at all in the mood for a battle.

We tried to snatch an hour or two of sleep squatting in the trench. It had been raining for some time. Grey, watery dawn broke at last behind the German lines; the bombardment, which had been surprisingly slack all night, brisked up a little.

I broke the news to the men about three o’clock. They took it very well. The relations of officers and men, and of senior and junior officers, had been very different in the excitement of the attack.

There had been no insubordination, but a greater freedom, as if everyone was drunk together.

I found myself calling the adjutant Charley on one occasion; he appeared not to mind it in the least. For the next ten days my relations with my men were like those I had with the Welsh Regiment;

At Bouchavesnes on the Somme in the winter of 1916–17 a battalion of dismounted cavalry lost half its strength in two days from trench feet; our Second Battalion had just had ten days in the same trenches with no cases at all.

Autumn was melancholy in the La Bassée sector; in the big poplar forests the leaves were French yellow and the dykes were overflowing and the ground utterly sodden.

Béthune was not the place it had been; the Canadians billeted there drew two or three times as much pay as our own troops and had sent the prices up.

That night the whole battalion went up to work at a new defence scheme at Festubert.

Festubert was nightmare, and had been so since the first fighting there in 1914, when the inmates of its lunatic asylum had been caught between two fires and broken out and run all over the countryside.

The British trench line went across a stretch of ground marked on the map as ‘Marsh, sometimes dry in the summer.’ It consisted of islands of high-command trench, with no communication between them except at night, and was a murderous place for patrols.

How far this reputation for atrocities was deserved, and how far it was due to the overseas habit of bragging and leg-pulling, we could not decide.

We only knew that to have committed atrocities against prisoners was, among the overseas men, and even among some British troops, a boast, not a confession.

I heard two first-hand accounts later in the war.

His cynicism, in fact, was not confined to his own country. But he never underrated the German as a soldier.

Newspaper libels on Fritz’s courage and efficiency were resented by all trench-soldiers of experience.

Religion. It was said that not one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches though one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.

Patriotism.

There was no patriotism in the trenches.

It was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.

Every night not only the companies in the front line but both support companies were hard at work all the time. It was even worse than Cuinchy for rats; they used to run about A Company mess while we were at meals.

We used to eat with revolvers beside our plates and punctuate our conversation with sudden volleys at a rat rummaging at somebody’s valise or crawling along the timber support of the roof above our heads.

A Company officers were gay. We had all been in our school choirs except Edmund Dadd, who sang like a crow, and we used to chant church anthems and bits of cantatas whenever things were going well. Edmund insisted on joining in.

Our greatest trial was the canister.

It was a two-gallon drum with a cylinder inside containing about two pounds of an explosive called ammonal that looked like salmon paste, smelt like marzipan, and when it went off sounded like the day of judgment.

The hollow around the cylinder was filled with scrap metal apparently collected by the French villagers behind the German line—rusty nails, fragments of British and French shells, spent bullets, and the screws, nuts, and bolts that heavy lorries leave behind on the road.

It often happened when both sides were busy putting up proper defences that they turned a blind eye to each other’s work. Sometimes, it was said, the rival wiring-parties ‘as good as borrowed each other’s mallets’ for hammering in the pickets.

The Germans were much more ready to live and let live than we were.

(The only time, so far as I know, besides Christmas 1914, that both sides showed themselves in daylight without firing at each other was once at Ypres when the trenches got so flooded that there was nothing for it but for both sides to crawl …

A German occupied sap was only forty or fifty yards away. We were left standing on the parapet piling up the sandbags, with the moon behind us, but the German sentries ignored us—probably because they had work on hand themselves.

It often happened when both sides were busy putting up proper defences that they turned a blind eye to each other’s work.

Sometimes, it was said, the rival wiring-parties ‘as good as borrowed each other’s mallets’ for hammering in the pickets. The Germans were much more ready to live and let live than we were.

This was on the afternoon of 14th July. At 4 a.m. on the 15th July we moved up the Méaulte-Fricourt-Bazentin road which wound through ‘Happy Valley’ and found ourselves in the more recent battle area. Wounded men and prisoners came streaming past us.

What struck me most was the number of dead horses and mules lying about; human corpses I was accustomed to, but it seemed wrong for animals to be dragged into the war like this.

We marched by platoons, at fifty yards distance. Just beyond Fricourt we found a German shell-barrage across the road.

I went into the wood to find German overcoats to use as blankets. Mametz Wood was full of dead of the Prussian Guards Reserve, big men, and of Royal Welch and South Wales Borderers of the new-army battalions, little men.

There was not a single tree in the wood unbroken.

I got my greatcoats and came away as quickly as I could, climbing over the wreckage of green branches. Going and coming, by the only possible route, I had to pass by the corpse of a German with his back propped against a tree.

The men swore that it spoke something in German as it came in, but I did not hear it. I was feeling tired and was off duty, so without waiting for the bombardment to stop I went to sleep in the trench.

I decided that I would just as soon be killed asleep as awake.

There were no dug-outs, of course. I always found it easy now to sleep through bombardments. I was conscious of the noise in my sleep, but I let it go by. Yet if anybody came to wake me for my watch or shouted ‘Stand-to!’

I always found it easy now to sleep through bombardments. I was conscious of the noise in my sleep, but I let it go by. Yet if anybody came to wake me for my watch or shouted ‘Stand-to!’ I was alert in a second.

I had learned to go to sleep sitting down, standing up, marching, lying on a stone floor, or in any other position, at a moment’s notice at any time of day or night.

But now I had a dreadful nightmare; it was as though somebody was handling me secretly, choosing the place to drive a knife into me. Finally, he gripped me in the small of the back.

I was on the way to Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Highgate. This was Sir Alfred Mond’s big house, lent for the duration of the war, and a really good place to be in; having a private room to myself was the most unexpected luxury.

What I most disliked in the army was never being alone, forced to live and sleep with men whose company in many cases I would have run miles to avoid.

I was not long at Highgate; the lung healed up easily and my finger was saved for me. I heard here for the first time that I was supposed to be dead; the joke contributed greatly to my recovery.

Siegfried said bitterly: ‘Well, I expect the colonel got his c.b. at any rate.’ England was strange to the returned soldier. He could not understand the war-madness that ran about everywhere looking for a pseudo-military outlet.

Every one talked a foreign language; it was newspaper language.

I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible. A single typical memorial of this time will be enough:

We both thought that the terms should have been accepted, though Siegfried was more vehement than I was on the subject. The view we had of the war was now non-political.

We no longer saw it as a war between trade-rivals; its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.

I made a facetious marginal note on a poem I wrote about this time, called Goliath and David (in which the biblical legend was reversed and David was killed by Goliath):

In November Siegfried and I rejoined the battalion at Litherland and shared a hut together. We decided that it was no use making a protest against the war.

Every one was mad; we were hardly sane ourselves.

Siegfried said that we had to ‘keep up the good reputation of the poets,’ as men of courage, he meant. The best place for us was back in France away from the more shameful madness of home service.

They did not want to die virginal. So venereal hospitals at the base were always crowded. (The troops took a lewd delight in exaggerating the proportion of army chaplains to combatant officers treated there.)

The Drapeau Blanc saved the life of scores of them by incapacitating them for future trench service.

The instructors at the Bull Ring were full of bullet-and-bayonet enthusiasm which they tried to pass on to the drafts.

Troops were taught instead that their duty was to hate the Germans and kill as many of them as possible. In bayonet-practice the men were ordered to make horrible grimaces and utter blood-curdling yells as they charged.

The bayonet-fighting instructors’ faces were permanently set in a ghastly grin.

‘Hurt him, now! In at his belly! Tear his guts out!’ they would scream as the men charged the dummies. ‘Now that upper swing at his privates with the butt. Ruin his chances for life. No more little Fritzes! ... Naaaoh!

Ruin his chances for life. No more little Fritzes! ... Naaaoh! Anyone would think that you loved the bloody swine, patting and stroking ’em like that. Bite him, I say! Stick your teeth in him and worry him! Eat his heart out!’

Once more I was glad to be sent up to the trenches.

The highest part of it now standing was a short course of brick wall about three feet high; the rest was enormous overlapping shell-craters. A broken-down steam-roller by the roadside had the name of the village chalked on it as a guide to travellers.

We often lost a horse or two at Cléry, which the Germans continued to shell from habit.

Our reserve billets for these Bouchavesnes trenches were at Suzanne. They were not really billets, but dug-outs and shelters. Suzanne was also in ruins. The winter was the hardest since 1894–5.

Suzanne was also in ruins. The winter was the hardest since 1894–5. The men played inter-company football matches on the river, which was now frozen two feet thick. I remember a meal here in a shelter-billet; stew and tinned tomato on metal plates.

Though the food came in hot from the kitchen next door, before we had finished it there was ice on the edge of the plate.

In all this area there were no French civilians, no unshelled houses, no signs of cultivation. The only living creatures that I saw except soldiers and horses and mules were a few moorhen and duck in the narrow unfrozen part of the river.

The fumes tarnished all buttons and made our eyes smart. I considered going back to France but I knew this was absurd as yet.

Since 1916 the fear of gas had been an obsession; in any unusual smell that I met I smelt gas—even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden was enough to set me trembling.

And I knew that the noise of heavy shelling would be too much for me now. The noise of a motor-tyre exploding behind me would send me flat on my face or running for cover.

packed benches on either side of the church, full of relatives; aunts using handkerchiefs; the choir boys out of tune; Nancy savagely muttering the responses, myself shouting them out in a parade-ground voice. Then the reception.

At this stage of the war, sugar was practically unobtainable; the wedding cake was in three tiers, but all the sugar icing was plaster.

The Nicholsons had had to save up their sugar and butter cards for a month to make the cake taste anything like a cake at all. When the plaster case was lifted off there was a sigh of disappointment from the guests.

I was told by an old man at an antique shop that no new houses were now built in Limerick, that when one house fell down the survivors moved into another.

He said too that everyone died of drink in Limerick except the Plymouth Brethren, who died of religious melancholia.

Life did not start in the city before about a quarter past nine in the morning. At nearly nine o’clock once I walked down O’Connell Street and found it deserted.

They might find overcrowding in their homes, but this could be nothing to what they had been accustomed to; in France a derelict four-roomed cottage would provide billets for sixty men.

They had won the war and they were satisfied. They left the rest to Lloyd George.

The only serious outbreak was at Rhyl, where there was a two days’ mutiny of Canadians with much destruction and several deaths. The signal for the outbreak was the cry: ‘Come on, the Bolsheviks.’

I have forgotten what I said, but it was in commendation of the Welshman as a fighting man and was loudly cheered.

I was still mentally and nervously organized for war; shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight even when Nancy was sharing it with me; strangers in day-time would assume the faces of friends who had been killed.

When I was strong enough to climb the hill behind Harlech and revisit my favourite country I found that I could only see it as a prospective battlefield.

He gave me books to review for it. In these days the Daily Herald was not respectable. It was violent. It was anti-militarist. It was the only daily paper that protested against the Versailles Treaty and the blockade of Russia by the British Fleet.

The Versailles Treaty shocked me; it seemed to lead certainly to another war and yet nobody cared.

When the most critical decisions were being taken at Paris, public interest was concentrated entirely on three home-news items:

I liked Delilah very much and sent her a pound of tea every year until her death.

Her comment on life in general was: ‘Fair play’s good sport, and we’re all mortal worms.’

She also used to say: ‘While there’s wind and water a man’s all right.’

I found them as nearly as possible in equal proportions; which nobody could call pessimism.’ In his opinion vers libre could come to nothing in England.

‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us.’

About his own poems he said that once they were written he cared very little what happened to them.

Somehow I thought that the power of writing poetry, which was more important to me than anything else I did, would disappear if I allowed myself to get cured; my Pier-Glass haunting would end and I would become merely a dull easy writer.

It seemed to me less important to be well than to be a good poet.

I also had a strong repugnance against allowing anyone to have the power over me that psychiatrists always seemed to win over their patients. I had always refused to allow myself to be hypnotized by anyone in any way.

she looked round and said: ‘Yes, this is the cottage all right, but I shall have to cut down those cypress trees and change those window-panes. We’ll move in on quarter-day.’ I said: ‘But the money! We haven’t the money.’ Nancy answered:

‘If we could find the exact house, surely to goodness we can find a mere lump sum of money.’

She was right, for my mother was good enough to buy the cottage and rent it to us at the rate of ten shillings a week.

The village policeman led an easy life. During the whole time we were living there we never had a thing stolen or ever had a complaint to make against a native Islip cottager.

Once by mistake I left my bicycle at the station for two days, and, when I recovered it, not only were both lamps, the pump and the repair outfit still in place, but an anonymous friend had even cleaned it.

Every Saturday in the winter months, as long as I was at Islip, I played football for the village team. There had been no football in Islip for some eighty years; the ex-soldiers had reintroduced it.

We kept the cottage cleaned and polished in a routine that left us little time for anything else.

We had accumulated a number of brass ornaments and utensils and allowed them to become a tyranny, and our children wore five times as many clean dresses as our neighbours’ children did.

I found that I had the faculty of working through constant interruptions. I could recognize the principal varieties of babies’ screams—hunger, indigestion, wetness, pins, boredom, wanting to be played with—and learned to disregard all but the more important ones.

But most of the books that I wrote in these years betray the conditions under which I worked; they are scrappy, not properly considered and obviously written out of reach of a proper reference-library. Only poetry did not suffer.

When I was working at a poem nothing else mattered; I went on doing my mechanical tasks in a trance until I had time to sit down to write it out.

At one period I only allowed myself half an hour’s writing a day, but once I did write I always had too much to put down; I never sat chewing my pen.

The church-party, with the exception of the rector, an intelligent man, was scandalized. But the ex-service men had not been too well treated on their return and it pleased them to be reminded that they were on equal terms with the glorious dead.

They were modest men: I noticed that though obeying the King’s desire to wear their campaigning medals, they kept them buttoned up inside their coats.

The leading Labour man of the village was William Beckley, senior. He had an inherited title dating from the time of Cromwell: he was known as ‘Fisher’ Beckley.

I did not even flatter myself that I was conferring benefits on posterity; there was no reason to suppose that posterity would be more appreciative than my contemporaries.

I only wrote when and because there was a poem pressing to be written.

Though I assumed a reader of intelligence and sensibility and considered his possible reactions to what I wrote, I no longer identified him with contemporary readers or critics of poetry.

I also worked on a study of the English ballad.

The best thing that I saw in Egypt was the noble face of old King Seti the Good unwrapped of its mummy-cloths in the Cairo Museum. Nearly all the best things in Egypt were dead.

The funniest thing was a French bedroom farce played in Arabic by Syrian actors in a native theatre. The men and women of the cast had, for religious reasons, to keep on opposite sides of the stage.

The men and women of the cast had, for religious reasons, to keep on opposite sides of the stage. They sang French songs (in translation), varying the tunes with the quarter-tones and shrieks and trills of their own music.

The audience talked all the time and ate peanuts, oranges, sunflower-seeds and heads of lettuces.

I went to call on Lord Lloyd just before the close of the academic year, which was at the end of May. Soon after I was invited to dine at the Residency.