Aunt Matilda needed him desperately, but when he arrived she did not want him and neither did anyone else in his home town.
THE
GALLERY
By ROG PHILLIPS
ILLUSTRATOR LLEWELLYN
I was in the midst of the fourth draft of my doctorate thesis when Aunt Matilda's telegram came. It could not have come at a worse time. The deadline for my thesis was four days away and there was a minimum of five days of hard work to do on it yet. I was working around the clock.
If it had been a telegram informing me of her death I could not have taken time out to attend the funeral. If it had been a telegram saying she was at death's door I'm very much afraid I would have had to call the hospital and order them to keep her alive a few days longer.
Instead, it was a tersely worded appeal. ARTHUR STOP COME AT ONCE STOP AM IN TERRIBLE TROUBLE STOP DO NOT PHONE STOP AUNT MATILDA.
So there was nothing else for me to do. I laid the telegram aside and kept on working on my thesis. That is not as heartless as it might seem. I simply could not imagine Aunt Matilda in terrible trouble. The end of the world I could imagine, but not Aunt Matilda in trouble.
Wherever he went Arthur felt the power behind the lens.