Letter from Walter de la Mare, South End House, to Siegfried Sassoon, 1951 October 22 : typescript signed with initials.

Commenting on gardening and solitude; saying "Have (a little less perceptibly perhaps) telepathicgrams been buzzing within your head as persistently during these last months as were the flies round it when you wrote your last letter, and you had been hacking down huge burdocks, and pulling ragwort and thistle, etc. etc. - such a day's work that must be pretty rare in these go-easy days! It was an enchanting visit to your tangled wilderness. I like spruce gardens, especially natty-neat little cottage gardens; and I couldn't bear my fraction of an acre at Hill House to get dried up or slovenly. A desire, not always aided by a some-days-a-week gardener, whose eye I can see as plain as plain at this moment, pretending that it was not one of the two owned by a friend about half-seas over. He used to haunt the little Inn at Taplow, the Oak and Saw, (and may have patronised others). For months and months after we arrived at Hill House I had heard of the Inn, and had passed it dozens of times, with my innocent belief undisturbed that it was only nicknamed the Open Sore. I can't remember any Sign. I've been simply longing to write to you for as long as I can see back. And what a host of things there were in your last letters on which we could spend hours of gossip, e.g., the Ants (and the fly), and the matronly hens with their 'muted soliloquies.' And, they, glancing and peering at, scrutinising and getting a [illegible] eye-full at a time of the human listener! After I was getting better last year at the Old Park, N. Julian and I used to circumnavigate the garden singing hymns, not only to the hens but to the de-sprouted stalks of the brussels! It was usually 'Once in Royal David's City' - though I always got it wrong, familiar though it has always been, by putting the Royal before City. What an enormous temptation the glades of your park and your garden must be to you to be alone. And why, why [on earth particularly] one would expect (what one often gets too) the complete opposite, e.g. did you know Arthur McDowall, a very dear friend of mine, now dead for many years. He was a first-leader writer on 'The Times', before, I think, he was 28, and no one could less suggest it. Apart from that he was a beautiful writer and I was very fond of him. His wife was a daughter of Mrs. and Bishop Creighton's. And her mother, whom I fancy I once met, was distinctly formidable. Well, Arthur and she(the daughter, who is still with us, I greatly hope & believe) went to live in an attractive old house in Amesbury - surrounded with its densely historied monoliths, and those lovely downs. One afternoon they were awaiting the vans with their furniture at the empty house, and passenger in one of them was their parlour-maid, who I think they had had for some little time. When everything had been disembarqued(?) the parlour-maid appears in hat and coat and they politely enquired where she was going. She said she was going back to London in the van as she knew she could never possibly endure the country quiet. And the house was in Amesbury. Well, that's enough about solitude, though I wish with all my heart you would write a little book about it. Did you ever see a book called 'The Lore of the Unicorn', written by an American friend of mine, concerning whom I must tell you a story some day; you won't have the energy for it now. He used to spend a fortnight every year camping absolutely alone some thousands of feet up in the foot-hills of the Rockies. A fortnight : - no more. By then the Presences had begun to draw too habitually near. And down he went again to human company and home. I haven't heard from him for years: but he, when we last met, told me that he was intending to do an exhaustive book on this subject. (It would have to be in a good many volumes). In strictest confidence, I very much doubt if you have anything little duties to fulfil except that of keeping the tit-bits polished up in your parlous, to be massakering burdocks in the park, and meditating on how nice it is to have nothing to do - especially when you are having meals in bed (as depicted in perhaps the best photograph of you I have ever seen) tea-pot in right hand, and milk-jug in left. Alas, I am in no such fortunate position. True, I am in bed; and it's round about half past eleven or twelve. But a very kind lady is (somehow patiently) seated a yard or so off, typing this here epistle, and apart from that, I have been slaving since break of day (all but) to keep pace with What I have To Do. How mournfully devastating a comment this must be to you, my poor derar Siegfried. Conscience is bad enough, but to have a friend, an old friend, [who can remember watching you saying your first goodbye to him in the Thornsett Road one summer evening, and your making a sort of semi-circular sweep over the grass in your progress toward the gate keeping still as busy as a Bee. I'll show you your signature some day, in my 'Hush' Visitors Book, which Sydney Cockerell having espied it when last he came to tea, offered to get bound for me. I hope in antique vellum or full-blooded morocco. There is bushels more to talk about, but for both our sakes I daren't go on. Do come again as soon as ever you can. I won't add that 20 years hence it may be too late. Have you ever written a ghost-story, or anything of that nebulous nature. Imagine me one - smiling at you like the Monster's Full moon!"