28/07/1915

My Dearest Mother

Thank you so much for your last letters which have been extremely interesting, especially the one of the 18^th which I fear must have cost your poor thumb many twinges. How tiresome it is to have so much rain: it is just the same story here.  I do hope you have roped in a cook by now, especially with Granny coming today. It will be very nice for her to get a little country air. Is old Mrs Baron still at Merton Lodge? If so they will I’m sure have many pleasant meetings. Please give my best love to Granny.

I expect Curry and Paxton have got my monocle some time ago now, as I sent it off ages ago, but as you say things take a long time to come across, and go too.

I expect someone must have taken a fancy to the AW roses enroute as they didn’t roll up.

I’m glad to hear the new maid is a possible person. If she is intelligent and amenable she ought to make a decent servant under your vigilant eye.What a pity you couldn’t have caught Mrs Sandall’s cook, but perhaps she’d have been no use to you.

I envy you sitting in the garden: that is a thing we can never do unless one happens to go out to tea somewhere where there is a garden. The wild flowers are again lovely: especially those wild knapweeds (centaurea) with the frilled edges (not the ordinary tight-headed one) and the scabious and wild mignonettes, with hosts of small flowers. The garden sounds too heavenly: I long to be grubbing in it. Tim got a book of photos from her home the other day: she is a great gardener and does nearly all of the garden herself, actual work, besides arranging: of course she has a man to do the hard work, but she had some photos of her own border and they were absolutely a sight. Her home is a lovely place on the river Dovey. Her brother has just gone out to the Dardanelles he is a Captain in one of the Welsh Fusilier battalions: he and George Walcott were at Wellington together in the same house and same form and knew each other quite well.

I’m glad the sweet Williams in my garden are pretty, and the baby gypsophila all right. I love monkshood: you ought to get Fuller to put in some of the plants in the long border this next”back-end”. I can’t think what the new yellow flower you speak of on my rock garden can be? Can you throw any light on the subject? The “sort of lavender” near the black boards is Nepeta Mussinii or cat-mint. I gather that the Rev d’Or by the pig-sty has repaid all that tucking in of the long shoots. Ernest Metz was very execrably pruned, so that may account for his defection, besides he sounds like an enemy rose-tree to me. I should make Fuller apply liq: man: to the big rose bed, a canful to each tree.

I have seen George several times again, but he is now in the officer’s hospital with internal troubles; a sort of indigestion or catarrh I think.

I wish you wouldn’t refer to me as an emancipated female: firstly it sounds like suffragettes and secondly, you know that I really I would much rather be at home with you and father or “emancipated” and on my own, if it weren’t for the desire to “do my bit”.

I wish I’d been with you in church: they ought to be smacked for having the Austrian National Anthem.

I went out with George again the other night: we dined and went to the Cinema where I saw Mr McEntire’s wedding , on at the cinema! Wasn’t it funny. He was the little Scot I met at the bazaar in town, a friend of B and May’s. He is now in the London Scottish! George is now in hospital with troubles in his inside.

I have no news haven’t been doing anything particular. I am very fit and awfully busy.

I will write to Father next.

With best love to you both

From your loving Dorothy