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

1 Albert Lewis, like so many others, had for some months previously feared that England would be invaded by the Germans, and this explains why his son was not allowed to return to Great Bookham until 16 January 1915.

2 Mark 3:26: ‘If Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.’

3 Homer, Iliad, Books I-XII, with an introduction, a brief Homeric grammar, and notes by D.B. Monro (1884).

4 Homer, Odyssey, Books I-XII, with an introduction, notes, etc. by W.W. Merry (1870).

5 Cornelius Tacitus (c. AD 55-117), the greatest historian of ancient Rome, in AD 98 published Agricola, a biography of his father-in-law, Julius Agricola.

6 Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

7 Henry Seton Merriman, The Grey Lady (1895); With Edged Tools (1894).

8 Paul Emanuel and Mme Beck are characters in Villette.

9 There were, in fact, a good many German submarines operating in the Irish Sea at this time. Lewis’s father was particularly upset over the raid near Fleetwood on 30 January 1915 when the Germans sank the Kilcoan, a collier designed by his brother Joseph.

10 William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Esmond (1852).

11 George Henty (1832-1902), while serving with the army in the Crimea, became a war correspondent. Following this career in many countries, he became successful as the author of stories for boys mainly based on military history Out in the Pampas (1868) was followed by some 35 other titles.

12 A family of Belgian refugees were evacuated to Great Bookham in the autumn of 1914. Lewis began visiting them with Mrs Kirkpatrick, and became infatuated with one of the young girls in the family He doubtless discussed his feelings for her with Arthur Greeves during the Christmas holidays. As to how much truth there was in what he wrote and said about the Belgian girl, see Lewis’s letter of 1 October 1931.

13 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901), The Jungle Book (1894); The Second Jungle Book (1895); Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906).

14 Albert Lewis had just acquired Kipling’s The Seven Seas (1896), which contains ‘The Story of Ung’.

15 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Book IV, Canto xii, 1.

16 Helena, a play by the Greek poet Euripides, was produced in 412 BC.

17 Lewis is mocking his cousin Robert Heard Ewart.

18 Mr Kirkpatrick and Lord Balfour (1848-1930), were born in 1848, making them 67.

19 Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (1880).

20 1 Samuel 16:23: ‘The evil spirit from God was upon Saul.’

21 Warren had only just returned from France, and having a week’s leave, he and Jack spent part of it together at home. Jack returned to Great Bookham on 9 February.

22 Presumably the Belgian girl he had written about in his previous letter.

23 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821), XLV, 397.

24 Lord Kitchener (1850-1916) was Secretary of State for War.

25 Walter Savage Landor, Pericles and Aspasia (1836-7).

26 Sir Walter Scott, Kenilworth (1821).

27 David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Minister of Munitions, gave a speech on 28 February in which he appealed for an end to labour disputes. ‘We laugh at things in Germany,’ he said, ‘that ought to terrify us. We say, “Look at the way they are making their bread–out of potatoes, ha, ha.” Aye, that potato bread spirit is something which is more to dread than to mock at. I fear that more than I do even von Hindenburg’s strategy, efficient as it may be. That is the spirit in which a country should meet a great emergency, and instead of mocking at it we ought to emulate it.’ The Times (1 March 1915), p. 10.

28 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878). The poem entitled ‘A Forsaken Garden’ begins ‘In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland’.

29 Publius Vergili Maronis Aeneidos: Liber VII, edited by Arthur Sidgwick (1879); The Aeneid of Vergil: Book VIII, edited with notes and vocabulary by Arthur Sidgwick (1879).

30 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822).

31 i.e. the Belgian girl.

32 Lewis has borrowed the name from Malory. In Le Morte d’Arthur Galahad is the son of Launcelot and Elaine, and destined because of his immaculate purity to achieve the Holy Grail.

33 John Rutherford, The Bread of the Treshams (1903).

34 William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (1623).

35 Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin was first performed in 1850.

36 The title Richard Warner had chosen for his opera was The Venusberg, but he changed it to