Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ there had been no rain it was fuller than before, so I concluded I had struck a spring. I shifted my ground and dug another a little to the West. This time was even worse. It was not a question of water ‘collecting’—water leaped round my spade as if I had struck a pipe. I hastily filled in what I had dug and tried again. This time my excavation remained dry for a day or so and then began to fill with water. The upshot of it all is that the afforestation this year has been entirely lop sided. I have only managed to plant two at the east end, and the West is overweighted. Next autumn, if we have had a drier summer, the eastern frontier may be practicable again and I shall then restore the balance. If, on the other hand, these springs are permanent, we shall just be unable to plant that side (‘there won’t be any wood there’). After all, regularity is not our aim, and an irregularity, not devised for ornament, but dictated by the nature of the ground, is an honest sort of beauty.

      Except for the afforestation there have naturally been no public works so far this Vac. An examiner can hardly be expected to occupy his scanty hours off in such a vigorous way. I hope to do a little now that I am free and shall begin this afternoon by finishing off with the sickle the evacuated (at least I hope it is evacuated) strongpoint of the wasps and the piece of nettle and briar which we left—I can’t think why-along the Philipian boundary.

The only social diversion I have had lately was the binge of the English ‘Cave’—the anti-junto which, as I said in an earlier letter, is in danger of becoming simply the regular junto.⁷⁹ I mention this because I heard recited there a bawdy ballad which was quite new to me, and which seems to me in its conclusion so ludicrous that I can’t resist handing it on. Perhaps you know it already. (The rimes seem to have degenerated during the process of oral tradition and now are mere assonances—if that). The early stanzas don’t matter: we will begin with the one that ends–

       Never a word the damsel said But roared with laughter when the fun was over. (Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)

      Then comes the good part:

      Hark! I hear a step on the stair! Sounds to me like an angry father, With a pistol in either hand, Looking for the man who screwed his daughter (Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)

      I have seized him by the hair of his head And shoved it into a bucket of water, And I screwed his pistol up his arse A dam sight harder than I screwed his daughter (Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)

      With the rôle of the heavy father properly cast—stumping up the stairs with a desperate expression and his two pistols—this anticlimax, this adding of injury to insult, seems to me irresistible.

I also heard at the same binge a very interesting piece of literary history from an unexceptionable source—that the hackneyed ‘A German officer crossed the Rhine’ was being sung at undergraduate blinds⁸⁰ in 1912. What do you make of that? Can it date from the Franco Prussian war? Or is it a German student song made in anticipation of Der Tag about 1910? The latter would be an interesting fact for the historian. I never heard the ballad as a whole, but think it is poor—in tact, nasty. Bawdy ought to be outrageous and extravagant like the piece quoted. It can, of course, be funny through sheer indefensible insolence, like the following (to the tune of ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May’)

      The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men Sleeps with men, sleeps with men. The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men Till three o’clock in the morning.

      But any parts I have ever heard of the ‘German Officer’ relate quite possible happenings that have really nothing funny about them. Again, bawdy must have nothing cruel about it, like ‘Old Mother Riley’: it must not approach anywhere near the pornographic like the poem in which every line begins ‘A little’. Within these limits I think it is a good and wholesome genre: though I can’t help feeling sorry that it should be the only living folk-art left to us. If our English binge had been held in a mediaeval university we should have had, mixed with the bawdy songs, tragical and even devotional pieces, equally authorless and handed on from mouth to mouth in the same way, with the same individual variations.

I go to Cambridge on New Years Eve for a couple of day’s awarding, not this time to be lodged in Queen’s but in the University Arms: with—would you believe it—the same carte blanche. So, at least, I gather from Hugh-Jones of Keble,⁸¹ who stayed there on the same job some years ago and wondered till the last night, when he discovered (almost but not quite too late) the explanation—wondered at the lavish orders of his colleagues and concluded them all to be rich men.

      This same Hugh-Jones has been one of my disappointments. I met him in Cambridge at the Award last year: we discovered a common enthusiasm for Shaw and Chesterton and just an interesting amount of disagreement on the subjects they led on to: sat till after midnight: and parted with a strong desire to continue the acquaintance. A few weeks ago he asked me to dine, not in Keble but at his house. That was the first shock—married! I arrived and got the second shock—not only a wife present, but a sister in law—an Anglo-Indian sister in law. Still I consoled myself with the expectation that he would carry me off to his study after dinner for some talk. Not a bit of it. Not even a temporary separation from the ladies over our wine. He had asked me, apparently, to sit solidly with his wife and sister in law till ten o’clock when I could endure it no longer and went.

The sister in law was the sort of woman who, when the talk drifted towards education, remarked that it was astonishing how badly children were taught now a days: she had met a boy of fourteen who didn’t know the principal export of Burma. ‘He thought it was fruit’ she said, and laid down her needles and gazed at me. In fact I was like Lamb, left alone with his sensible, well-informed man. (I could have told her the chief export of Anglo-India all right). The wife was not so bad, and I had seen her a few days before acting the part of the maid in Tartuffe (in English)⁸² given by the Magdalen dramatic society. She had ‘done very well’ wh. is surprising, for my pupil Lings (I think you met him) who was producer, as well as playing Organ, had given me an amusing account of her behaviour at rehearsals. In his scene with her he had a speech ending ‘His only care is religion,’⁸³ which he inadvertently altered to ‘Religion is his only care.’ After a long pause she said dreamily ‘Are you waiting for me? I haven’t got to say my speech until you get to “is religion”, you know.’

      Tartuffe was really excellently done. I had neither read nor seen it before and enjoyed it thoroughly. To a reader I daresay the savagery is the most striking thing, but on the stage it made me laugh ‘consumedly’. The final scene between Organ and his wife is as funny as anything I know (‘But I tell you, Mother, I saw him with my own eyes. I saw the rascal embracing my wife’—‘Ah, my son, beware of tale-bearers. Without doubt the worthy man has been slandered’—‘I shall go mad! I saw it myself’—‘Ah tongues will wag, to be sure’ etc.) A most maddening type of female P’dayta. By the way doesn’t Tartuffe, specially in the opening scenes, bring out very strongly that Latin dominance of the familia which you have often spoken of?—except that in Tartuffe’s household it is not so much patria potestas as materna potestas: which possibly is very French too.

It is now after tea and I have put in a very tolerable afternoon’s walk on the nettles and brambles. A civil gamekeepery kind of man walked up on the Philips side of the boundary—I think he lives in the other house on Philips land—and had a chat about trees.⁸⁴ He knows the place very well having originally СКАЧАТЬ