Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931. Walter Hooper

is what I have made up.

Mouse-land had a very long stone-age during which time no great things tooke place it lasted from 55 BC to 1212 and then king Bublich I began to reign, he was not a good king but he fought gainest yellow land. Bub II his son fought indai about the lantern act, died 1377 king Bunny came next.¹²

      your loving

      brother Jacks

       TO HIS FATHER (LP III: 82):

      [Pension Petit-Vallon,

Berneval, Près Dieppe] 4th Sept. ’07.¹³

      My dear Papy,

      excuse this post-card being so dirty, but in our rooms everything is so dusty. It is still lovely weather still. I was sick and had to go to bed but am quite beter now. I hope you are all right. Are Tommy and Peter all right?

      your loving

      son, Jacks.

       TO HIS BROTHER (LP III: 105):

      Tigh-na-mara,

      Larne Harbour, Co. Antrim.

[May 1908]¹⁴

      My dear Warnie

how are you geting on. Mamy is doing very well indeed. I am sending you a picture of the ‘Lord Big’,¹⁵ I forgot until it was too late that she was screw not paddle, but of course there might be 2 boats in the same line that have one name. Did I tell you about going to chains memorial?¹⁶ It is a funny old place, one thing that struck me was the thickness of the walls. The light (as I suppose you know) is worked by gas, while I was there the man broct two mantles. Did you get my letters? one of them had a home drawn post card on it, I got yours and now I had beter stop, as there is nothing to say.

      your loving brother,

      Jacks

       Flora Lewis had been ill for months and an operation on 15 February revealed she had cancer. The following month she seemed better, but during this period of uncertainty Albert Lewis’s father died on 24 March. The last letter from Flora Lewis in the Lewis Papers was written to Warnie on 15 June 1908. ‘I am sorry not to have been able to write to you regularly this term,’ she said, ‘but I find I am really not well enough to do so. I have been feeling very poorly lately and writing tires me very much. But I must write today to wish you a happy birthday’ (LP III: 106). Flora was very ill, and the impending tragedy at Little Lea resulted in Warnie being brought home at the end of June. Following another operation, she died at home on Albert’s forty-fifth birthday, 23 August 1908. The following month Jack accompanied his brother to Wynyard School in Watford, and the next letter is the first Jack wrote to his father after his arrival there.

       TO HIS FATHER (LP III: 140):

      [Wynyard School,

      Watford, Hertfordshire 19? September 1908]

      My dear Papy,

      I suppose you got our telgy-graph to say that we were all right.

      It was rather rough crossing, poor Warnie was very sea sick, I was sick once. Unfortunately Warnie was sick again in the train, also the breakfast car was so full that we could not get anything to eat till a long way after Crewe, we were both very hungry but when at last it came Warnie could not eat any worth talking about. When we arrived at Euston we saw both our trunks and plaboxs, the side of mine was dinged in. When we got to Watford the play-boxs were missing, evedently (though Warnie gave him 3d.) the porter had omitted to put them in at Euston. The railways officials think they can find them.

I cannot of course tell you yet but I think I shall like this place. Misis Capron and the Miss Caprons are very nice and I think I will be able to get on with Mr. Capron though to tell the truth he is rather eccentric.¹⁷

      Anything we want Warnie is telling you about in his letter.

      your loving son,

      Jacksie

       TO HIS FATHER (LP III: 147):

      [Wynyard School]

      Postmark: 29 September 1908

      My dear Papy

      Mr. Capron said some-thing I am not likely to forget ‘curse the boy’ (behind Warnie’s back) because Warnie did not bring his jam in to tea, no one ever heard such a rule before.

      Please may we not leave on Saturday? We simply cannot wait in this hole till the end of term.

      your loving

      son Jack

       TO HIS FATHER (LP III: 149):

      [Wynyard School]

      Postmark: 3 October 1908

      My dear Papy

We are getting on much better since Aunt Any’s visit.¹⁸ We went up to the Franco-British exhibition and enjoyed it very much, but I suppose Aunt Any has told you all about it.

      Warnie was just a little sick last night and had to go to bed early and take 2 pills, he is quite well today but did not go to church. I do not like church here at all because it is so frightfully high church that it might as well be Roman Catholic.

      You must excuse me writing a long letter as I have a lot of people to write.

      your loving

      son Jacks

      The contrast between what was said of the church the boys of Wynyard attended–St John’s Church, Watford–and what it meant in retrospect is very great. In a little diary kept at Wynyard and dated November 1909, Jack said:

      We…marched to church in a dismal column. We were obliged to go to St Johns, a church which wanted to be Roman Catholic, but was afraid to say so. A kind of church abhorred by respectful Irish Protestants. Here Wyn Capron, the son of our Head Master, preached a sermon better than his usual ones. In this abominable place of Romish hypocrites and English liars, the people cross themselves, bow to the Lord’s Table (which they have the vanity to call an altar), and pray to the Virgin. (LP III: 194)

       Recalling it some years later in SBJ II, he said:

       I have not yet mentioned the most important thing that befell me at [Wynyard]. There first I became an effective believer. As far as I know, the instrument was the church to which we were taken twice every Sunday. This was high Anglo-Catholic.’ On the conscious level I reacted strongly against its peculiarities–was I not an Ulster Protestant, and were not these unfamiliar rituals an essential part of the hated English atmosphere? Unconsciously, I suspect, the candles and incense, the vestments and the hymns sung on our knees, may have had a considerable, and opposite, effect on me…What really mattered was that here I heard the doctrines of Christianity (as distinct from general ‘uplift’) taught by men who obviously believed them.

       TO HIS FATHER (LP III: 151):

      [Wynyard School]

      Postmark: 25 October 1908

      My dear Papy,

      Did you get my letter? Is Maud still with you, I hope so. How is your back?

I am very sorry you are so much annoyed at Mr. Capron’s letter, but it is quite untrue, Warnie is not lazy.