Letter from Walter de la Mare, South End House, to Siegfried Sassoon, 1952 March 25 : typescript signed with initials.

Commenting on the advent of Spring and the value of Aunts; commenting on the first 24 hours of Spring saying "I have been looking up these particular days, and some time hope to discover why as the year proceeds they don't fall each quarter exactly on the same date. No doubt this was in my private encyclopedia (kept on my top floor) of its third edition say 50 years ago. But it has gone now, and all I can guess is that it may be the length of the months that is the difficulty. It is quite proper to pay heed to Emperor Sol, and I praise him without ceasing; but I don't think that even Harrison's clock is by any means the finest tribute to him. And can you imagine any human mind referring to him as her, or still less to his companion piece - Old Luna - as him. (Here the parenthesis ceases). How I do love your letters - and everything about your Aunt Rachel. And why are Aunts so valuable (considering they may also be mothers, grandmothers, cousins, daughters and in-laws, ad lib.). I have no portrait of my Aunt Augusta, but a telling photograph which next time you radiate my apartments by visiting them, I'll produce. She was a most remakable woman, and therefore had her own little ways. She preferred, for example, especially when visitors were present, to merely dally with her lunch or dinner, and would then partake of a chop in her bedroom. My Uncle was the Rector of Dinder and a Prebendary of Wells. In self-compassionating tones she once plaintively asked me, 'How can one pay full reverence - something to that effect - to a husband when one sees him in a surplice on Sunday evening, and a few hours afterwards in a nightshirt'. Are there any real 'Aunts' about now? My three-cornered hat! What indeed have we not, you and me, escaped by not being public men! I'd far rather be a public-an. Listen to these unseemly, less than child-like, partially dishonest squabblings between a certain A.B. and a certain C.A. - neither of them completely oblivious to the main chance. Why, I should even have to put it in 'inverts' if I borrowed a single line from you for a little poetical enterprise of my own; as if its quality alone, by comparison with its neighbours, wouldn't stand out like the Peak of Teneriffe;" adding, in a postscript, "Later Dry & sunny - and a N.E. wind."