A Presumption of Death Read Free

hope the Christmas cards will do. I had a terrible time with the sacred ones; there seems to be nothing this year between things from the British Museum and those sentimental modern ones with the Virgin and angels very thin and willowy and ten feet tall. Such a mistake, too, to imagine that children approve of baby cherubs and little darling boys and girls swarming over everything. At least, I know my children always wanted stories and pictures about proper-sized people, whether it was knights or cavaliers or pirates, and just the same with their dolls and things – I suppose it gave them a grown-up feeling and counteracted their inferiority complexes.
    It’s only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people – do remember that, dear, won’t you? But I’m sure you will because you’re always most tactful with them, even with your own Bredon; more a friend than a parent, so to speak. All this cult of keeping young as long as possible is a lot of unnatural nonsense; no wonder the world seems to get sillier and sillier. Dear me! when I think of some of the Elizabethan Wimseys: the third Lord Christian, for instance, who could write four languages at eleven, left Oxford at fifteen, married at sixteen and had two wives and twelve children by the time he was thirty (two lots of twins, certainly, but it’s all experience), besides producing a book of elegies and a learned disquisition on Leviathans, and he would have done a great deal more, I dare say, if he hadn’t unfortunately been killed by savages on Drake’s first voyage to the Indies. I sometimes feel that our young people don’t get enough out of life these days. However, I hear young Jerry shot down a German bomber last week, and that’s something, though I don’t think he’s likely to do very much with the languages or the Leviathans.
    Talking of books, I had a heartfelt outburst from the young woman at the library, who said she really didn’t know what to do with some of the subscribers. If there isn’t a brand-new book published for them every day they go in, they grumble frightfully, and they won’t condescend to take anything that’s a couple of months old, even if they haven’t read it, which seems quite demented. They seem to spend their time running to catch up with the day after tomorrow – is it the influence of Einstein? The girl asked when there was going to be a new Harriet Vane murder story. I said you thought the dictators were doing quite enough in that way, but she said her readers wanted their minds taken off dictators, though why murders should do that I don’t know – you’d think it would remind them. I suppose people like to persuade themselves that death is a thing that only happens in books, and if you come to think of it, that’s probably the way they feel about religion, too, hence the pretty-pretty Christmas cards. All the same, I’m sending a few assorted murders to the poor dear men who are being so bored on the balloon barrage and jobs like that. So dull for them, poor things, and nobody seems to take much interest in them. More romantic, of course, to send to the men overseas, but it can’t be so solitary out there as sitting up all night with a blimp in darkest England.
    Talking of darkest England, what one wants on the shops at night is not just a sign saying ‘Open’, but something to show what they’ve got inside. They’re allowed a little light on the goods, but if one’s driving along one can’t possibly see whether a pile of vague little shapes is cigarettes or chocolates or bath buns or something to do with wireless sets; and it doesn’t help much to see just ‘J. Blogg’ or ‘Pumpkin and Co.’ unless you know what Blogg or Pumpkin is supposed to be selling.
    My dear, this letter is full of shopping and nonsense, but I’ve made up my mind that we just mustn’t worry about Peter because he disappeared so many times in the last war and always turned up