Postcards, 1908-1945

-2Santillana, San Vincente de la Barquera (find that if you can), Oviedo Avila, Zamora, Salamanca, Segovia, Madrid, Toledo, Escorial [?], Valladolid, Burgos, Vitoria, and San Sebastian again. These are charmed names which all the later bloodshed has not changed for us. But the countryside and its people are even more worth thinking of. We lived very close to them as one went when traversing great distances where one sees only them. One stretch of a hundred miles there was without sign of help had the Ford broken down, and another of fifty miles in which [illegible] [illegible] but three cars. Yes everywhere we were tranquil for the people smiled and were kind. I like to think of our luncheons [?] on the thick turf of hill-side, with the peasants, donkey borne, black umbrellas afterward the sun, coming fast in single file, each saluting as unaffectedly. Wine from the black skins of country shops has a smokey touch [taste?] through. This rebellion is essentially a [strikethrough] [illegible] [/end strikethrough] crime against nature. (Aren’t all real crimes such?) The agricultural poverty of Spain is extreme; some of the crops of wheat suggested those scant hairs which you and I have(?) tended(?) Meaning you, Alf, meaning you! so carefully on the life of our homes. Yes live the folk manage to, even with the maggoty clerics (most of whom will never pupate [?]) all [illegible] and about them. They have come to realize this unequal lot. And everywhere rise from the fields.

[[photograph]] [Entombment of Christ]

-6The children had been left home with Phyllis, save little Marion who was and is still in in [sic] Lahevy [?] with some cousins. So from Cambridge we journeyed into East Anglia to see about Roui [?] forebears, as mother has often implored me to do. The baptismal registers there seethe with the name in all spellings, one can almost hear the wails of the babies, but none had sufficient identification to be our great grandfather and all we acquired was knowlegde the ways of vicars, good and bad, of modern grocers signs and words of earl's [illegible] + [and] ancient forts and [illegible], all labelled with the word we sought for. Yet it was good fun, especially when the earl's agent who was helping me, said over the telephone to a friend "the darling duchess was most affable." He really did.

Now at last we are still - as much or least as Phyills let us be. For she is most admirably and artlessly [?] social. Day before yesterday we lunched in a great country house with Lord Methuen - an unhappy man, brooding and ill-at-ease amongst his [illegible], commencing indeed with his own family [illegible] who are also some of them unhappy, as he told me--and yesterday we motored fifty miles to have high tea and it was, at the Shipp Inn at Mere with some who had ridden there cross country.

[preprinted text] [Spanish] 425. Toledo - Detalle del Patio de la Casa del Greco [/Spanish] [/preprinted text]

Phyllis' house is just out of sight up the road marked x from Avebury (see card) [?]. It's called Manor Farm House and sits amidst garden and wire [?]. Now one smells roses and now something else. I like it but you, Ruth, would not. You'd be selling things to rights and trying to exchange the barnyard and neither can be done. Both have existed several hundred years and are [?] content[?]. What's the word, corresponding [strikethrough] with [/strikethrough] to amphibious which means existing now in the vegetable, now in the animal world? That's the sort of existance we lead. The greenery surges up [?] about us [?].

In the evening off state, as the Royal See, with "decorative worm?", who should come up and greet me but Sir Thor. Lewis [?]. We had much talk, after some skirmishings, on how one gets a research idea and we parted undually [?] pleased, I think, since we found ourselves in agreement. He has no longer a grating surface. Poor man! He's had 3 coronary shocks lately, so McKee says, and remarked often the last "Death still has many arrows in his quiver." But he continues to push [?] vigorously the idea of clinical investigation as such. Many here deem him a doctrinaire, many more than would do so in the U.S. conditioned by the demand [?] whom we supplant. We want to come to you for one of those week ends but cannot now say which because of the move from the apartment, its time being uncertain. We [leave] on the 16th. Don't tie up those week-ends because of me but let me come if you have a - [strikethrough] [/strikethrough] free one. We do want to. - Our love. P.