LXXXIX
Clemency Power to Patricia Power
Pat, my Angel,—I am comfortable enough here but I wish I could hail an aeroplane and drop in on you all for a few hours. Some day we shall be able to do impulsive and impossible things like that. Miss Raby is certainly getting stronger, and could very well do her own reading, but she seems to like me. I am saving money too—because there’s nothing to do with it—and when my time is finished you must come to London to meet me and I’ll stand you some nice dinners and theatres before we go back.
I hope I’ve done the school children a little good, but it’s heartbreaking to be a teacher, because one is fighting nature most of the time. “Be thoughtful, be good, be considerate,” we say, by which we mean “Behave so that the comfort of older people, who own the world, may be as little disturbed as possible.” But oh the little poets and rebels we are suppressing and perhaps destroying!
We’re all women here, except the Doctor and the Rector, who are both old and oh so polite. The Doctor’s wife, Mrs. Ferguson, is the affable arch type who tells anecdotes and is “quite sure God has a sense of humour”—you know the kind I mean. The Rector’s wife is soft and clinging and full of superlative praise. But I mustn’t be critical, because every one here is kind and nice, and as for Miss Raby I’d do anything for her.
Give Herself my love and say I’ll write very soon. Adela ought to write to me, tell her.—Your devoted
Clem.
XC
Horace Mun-Brown to Verena Raby
Dear Aunt,—As you know, there is great need of a revival in all kinds of home industries if we are to regain, or rather to hold, our place among the nations, and I am far too keen a political economist not to be giving much thought to the matter. What I am at the moment most interested in is the carpet manufacture. I have heard of a firm in the West of England which merely needs a little more capital to do the most astonishing things, and I wonder if you would advance me a thousand or so to invest in it. I ask as a loan—no speculation at all.
One of the reasons why I have a leaning towards this industry—apart from the fact that carpets must always be needed—is that the other day when I was in the South Kensington Museum, looking about for inspiration, I noticed an ancient rug, hanging on the wall, which represented a map. It at once struck me that it would be a first-class notion to make map carpets for sale in this country. Think of the enormous success that a carpet-map of the Western Front would have been during the late War. Conversation need never have faltered, and if you had a real soldier to tea or dinner he could have made his story extraordinarily vivid by walking about the room and illustrating the various positions. Or take a carpet-map of Ireland—how that would help in our understanding of the Irish question! In nurseries too, the carpet could teach geography. Children crawling over it from one country to another could get a most astonishing notion of boundaries and so forth.