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Dec 19th 1916
8, GOWER STREET, BLOOMSBURY.
My dear John
Xmas has memories I hardly dare think about this year but I must send you a line of affectionate good wishes for the season. For us older people the world has become a very desolate place but it's good to think of Alice & Jones [Johnnie] & William for whom laughter & joy & sunshine will all come back. It's up to us to make them if possible a decent world to live in purged from some of the evils which have brought such catastrophes about our heads.
I hope you are happy in France & enjoying your work but all your friends here miss you very much. The crisis has been a very poignant one for me - I can never remember great political changes which I did not share with Arthur [Sir Arthur Markham, her brother]. I was
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much touched by a most kind note I had from L.G. this morning speaking of him as the most true loyal & generous man he had ever known.
Well thank God Squiff & Co have gone. Manchester School Liberals soaked with the Laissez Faire point of view cannot conduct a war reinforced by Tory octogenarians. I have no illusions about L.G. but at least he has the will to win & to will the means to that end. McKenna & Runciman could only recollect the fact of war by a mental effort. At least we are out for the big adventure & if we go down now it will be with a crash & not through dilatory drifting. I hope A.J.B. [A.J. Balfour] will do better at the F.O. [Foreign Office] than at the Admiralty. As First Lord he was a disaster & the record of the Admiralty during the last year has been one of the worst of any Department for drift & ineptitude. Margot has taken her fall
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very hard & with a sad lack of dignity. As for the people who babble about the "future of the Liberal Party" & loyalty to Squiff as the first condition of a right minded patriotism - well I want to call on them with a horse whip!
I want to send you my whole hearted thanks for "Greenmantle": It's been the one thing which has cheered me up through the war. I read the book in Land & Water as it came out - Thursday noon became the one bright spot in the week - Sally [ST: her secretary] & I used to resort to any manner of mean shift to get hold of the paper first! I think it is too wonderful of you to write such a book in the midst of all you have to do. Had you been a little less pressed, had you been able
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to develop some of the characters in greater detail - well you would have been in the Treasure Island class. Some day you must write such a book - Greenmantle shows you can do it. Meanwhile you have made thousands & thousands of people your debtor.
Bless you dear John. The affection & friendship of Susie & yourself is one of the very precious things in life to me & it's an affection Jim shares more & more. There is no one for whose gifts & character I have more admiration than your own & at Xmas time I feel I must tell you so & say how proud I am to be your friend!
Ever yours affectionately
Violet C. [Violet Markham married James Carruthers in 1915]
