Letter from V.S. Pritchett, Great Shefford, Newbury, to Thomas Balston, 1940 September : autograph manuscript signed with initials.

Commiserating with Balston over his recent illness and observing that "There is nothing so disheartening or demoralizing as a gnaw in the stomache", attributing the problem to anxiety over the war, and noting that "going to London, strangely enough, eases my anxiety about the war", as "one is so much more in it that one doesn't spend one's time (as one does in the country) building up a defence against it all.", remarking that "It's very hard to make a character which fits in with the new conditions of the modern world, but we'll have to do it for the bombs will be a fact even when peace comes."; mentioning that his parents are visiting him and discussing their reactions to the war, noting that his mother has recovered from her former ill health ("The war has been for her an interest outside herself!"), and his father "just adds another inch or two to the thick hide of complacency he always wears"; writing that finds the Home Guard "very entertaining", as they "pass the hours talking to soldiers who were at Dunkirk", and relating a recent incident in which a drunken veteran was treated with great generosity as an example of the touching reverence with which the soldiers regard "the men who were in the last war."