Walter Hooper

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


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and theological reading needed to make the Bible more than a superstition. 4. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’72 Have they the marks of peace, love, wisdom and humility73 on their faces or in their conversation? Really, you need not bother about that kind of Puritanism. It is simply the form which the memory of Christianity takes just before it finally dies away altogether, in a commercial community: just as extreme emotional ritualism is the form it takes on just before it dies in a fashionable community.

      You can imagine how I enjoy them both. Indeed this is the best part of my job. In every given year the pupils I really like are in a minority; but there is hardly a year in which I do not make some real friend. I am glad to find that people become more and more one of the sources of pleasure as I grow older.

      Not that I agree for a moment about books & music being ‘vanity and vexation’. Really imaginative (or intellectual) pleasure is neither the one or the other: the bad element is the miserly pleasure of possession, the delight in this book because it is mine.

      Of course it was entirely my own fault about the pyjamas—I only hope that your mother was not worried when you asked about them. Give her my love and if her mind needs setting at rest on the subject—why Sir, set it.

      Try to write soon again.

      Yours

      Jack

       TO HIS BROTHER (W):

      [The Kilns]

      Christmas Day 1931

      My dear W–

      I believe that for the first time I shall be really gravelled for matter in this letter to you, simply because what with examining and lecture writing I have done, read, and heard nothing for a long time that could possibly interest you. Minto has had a letter from you dated from your ‘improved’ hotel in Shanghai, and we were surprised that you found none of ours awaiting you. No doubt you have had several by this [time].

      The afforestation programme 1931 has been carried out, successfully, but not according to plan. What I am more pleased to record is that in the wood four new trees have replaced (instead of being added to) four elder stumps. I think I told you before that the uprooting of these is practicable, and I shall make it a rule never to plant a new tree without getting rid of a stump. I hope also, if I am energetic enough, to be able to do a little buckshee uprooting during the rest of the year. What interfered with the design of my afforestation was water. I dug one hole far on the Eastern frontier (‘in the parts over against Phillips-land’) and found it half full of water next day. This I attributed to rain and set to with gum boots and bucket to bail it out. Next morning, although 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.

       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.