Letter from Edward Thomas to the poet Gordon Bottomley. Sent from Rogate, Worple Rd, Wimbledon, London. Archival ref: 424/1/1/1/10/112
Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments in Wales and Monmouthshire, 36, Great George Street, Westminster, SW
Thursday 24.ix.08
My dear Gordon,
Thanks, thanks. I was rather alarmed by what you say of my not giving a more organic account of the progress of affairs in Jefferies family etc. I know nothing about them, except that the farm was sold and his father became a gardener in Bath where he and the mother lived until they dies. It was not even possible to say that RJ was a good husband and father with any certainty. But the exact extent of my insufficiency you will not see just yet. I had hoped that
I had done away - pretty well - with the need or expectation of much more by suggesting that he was just a poorish, isolated writing man living and content to love with his family and occasionally meeting old friends. What do you think? But there the thing is done now: nor in any case could it have been much bettered except by more discretion or cunning.
About the owls, there is no sort of doubt that they do no harm worth speaking of in comparison with the good in disliking rats, mice and voles. But of course they are known to kill young pheasants or partridges, though rarely. A landowner like Sir Herbert Maxwell,
x Referring to a perpetual conflict of mine with a neighbouring keeper.
also a Christian and Darwinist and a real naturalist, makes the point clear in one of his books. Hudson's Experience tells the same thing.
Well, I don't like London, I am sick of waking in bad air and until after midnight, and getting no exercise and therefore getting moody and doing work badly. So I shall leave this place in a week or so. It was as well to have learnt what such work means. I am elated at the prospect of getting back especially in the spring a friend who has bought 20 or 30 acres at the top of the hill (and built himself a house and a [illegible] - he is an old Bedales boy and makes furniture) is going to build us a house up there according to our needs, including
a study for me right away from the house at the edge of a wood. We shall be nearly 800 feet up and have a mighty view. Up there you can come and see us I do hope. Goodbye. Yours ever, Edward Thomas