Enclosure – Letter to RG from Sam Graves
PublicPage from Robert Graves diary manuscript. The diary includes 1,546 pages with 117 enclosures: letters, clippings, photographs post cards, notes, games.
- In Collection:
- 1 page : 12 x 19.5 cm or smaller
- The diary is written on quarto sheets, folded horizontally to form octavo booklets, one recto page devoted to each day.
- Robert Graves Diary, 1935-1939
- Accession Number: 1969-003, Item: Gr-1-869
- Robert Graves Diary project URL: http://graves.uvic.ca/diary_1937-07-05_01_enc.html
- Special Collection finding aid: https://uvic2.coppul.archivematica.org/robert-graves-collection
- July 19, 2002
- Enclosure – Letter to RG from Sam Graves Arundale, St. Christopher Letchworth, Herts. July 2 nd , 1937 Dear Robert, Thank you so much for your coins, they were very interesting indeed. I am so sorry for not writing to you before, but circumstances keep occurring which hindered me, and I am going to make this letter as long as possible, especially when you are in bed. Your letter was very welcoming and I have still got it in my locker I think. I am in bed too, for the second time, but I am afraid that you are much worse off than I am. There is an examination for me at the end of this term and I hope I will go through it. Nancy, Geoffrey, David, Catherine and I are going to camp in the holidays for a fortnight immediately after school. [figure: drawing of a horse] There is some work to do even in bed, because I want to get them done before next week. It is very sad about your throat operation and I hope you will get better soon and I should very much like to stay with you at Ewhurst, especially with Jenny, David and Catherine. I have only a bad cough and I was going to play in the 2 nd eleven tomorrow in an away match. Once I had to retire as a batsman in a game of cricket and once I made the most runs in another. My two faults at my lessons are that I cannot catch up finishing my essays easily and that I giggle with my friend Merril Hart. Anyway, I am said to be the only perfect pupil at French Grammar in my group of 11, and some are some years older than I am! However, I have to keep looking up the vocabulary when I read a French book, as I don't know all the words yet. I like geometry very much but I am not good at sums, well, I mean that I am quite ignorant of some and forget their methods of calculating. Catherine could have helped me simply. The mathematics teacher told one of her pupils to teach me a sum about interest and %, but I could not understand him because he just dashed away muttering the numbers, and practically never told me how and why and what to do and so on. Geograph Geography is all very well but the group learned last term something which I did not know about Australiasia Australasia and the table at which I sit is usaully usually far away from the teacher (we just bag our tables, by putting our books on them and also on those for our friends[)]. At craft I am quite keen on it but I was very bad at my toast rack and delayed myself on making it until it got lost. Then yesterday I began again with fresh hope and zeal and I got much further in time, about some minutes compared with some days. I am hoping to make a kite, but there is no one who is keen enough (a boy, I want) to help and share in it. Just now another letter came in from you by Merril and I was ever so pleased when I recognised your writing on the envelope. It must have been awful not to have eaten all that week but I am glad that you have passed it. It is certainly good news about your friend Gelat being free from prison again. I wonder what its like in a prison. I expect that everything would be boring, and little of nature, horrid food, and hard-working. Still, he's out, and that's what matters. I am helping to build a pavillion for the sportsground. We are making the framework for the present. We are going to have a cinema for our school (perhaps because of the school film-education method campaign) and also a swimming bath, (perhaps you have already heard of it). I hope you will all [be] very happy in your new “home” (is your Majorcan home a permanent one?) which you call Ewhurst (nice name, I think). Robert and Laura and Karl, if possible, do come and see me, as I really feel rather lonely and I am longing to show you around this really big school and so on. If you will come, please come on a Saturday, because I find Sundays rather dull and very little people about but tell me first won't you? – because I may be away at camp or things like that. Nancy cannot come because she is too busy. I wish I could have seen the Royal Air Display at Hendon, as I am so very keen on aero- planes, you know. I want to be an air pilot and get some money for Nancy so that she can cover our family costs and so on. I want to fly all kinds of air-craft, right from a small biplane to the “Ensign” monoplanes, if ever I do get a chance. My handicap is my deafness, so I could not hear very well through wireless. If I want to be trained I must be- [figure: two planes sketched in top margin] gin my training at about over 15 or at 17 years of age. All the same, I'll write some books, I hope, after your proffesion profession . I am good at chemistry, I find, and enjoy myself very much writing about the interesting experiments as much as seeing them. Please give my love to Laura and Karl and be happy and cheerful!!!! [figure: wiggly exclamation point] I shall see you again, with much love from XXX SAM XXX
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