Item 127b - Carbon copy of a letter from Lord Pethick-Lawrence to Gwen Raverat

3 single sheets

Fourways, Gomshall, Surrey.—Praises her memoir Period Piece, and its description of middle-class life during the eighteen-eighties and nineties. Recalls his own experiences of the period at Trinity College and Eton, and his dancing lessons.

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Transcript

Fourways, | Gomshall, | Surrey.
October 6th, 1953.

Dear Mrs. Raverat,

As I have just read with immense enjoyment your book “Period Piece”, I feel I must write to you to tell you how delightful I found it.

Your personal and frank description of the life of the middle classes in the eighties and nineties of last century rings a bell in the brains of your fellow Victorians and your drawings are revealing and delicious.

Many of my acquaintances have also read it with great pleasure but the fact that I was myself a Trinity undergraduate in the early nineties has added greatly to my personal enjoyment.

I attended a course of lectures by one of your uncles (? your father) but the only thing that I positively remember is his description of line density which he compared to a cab fare paid by a silver thread run out along the line of route from the start to the finish of the journey.

In the same way my one recollection of the lectures of Gabriel Stokes on Light is that when he wanted to darken the lecture room he used to butt his head against part of the apparatus while he wound with his hands the shutters into position.

Like you I do not look back on my childhood with nostalgia. I objected strongly to the frustrations imposed on me be grown ups. I did not fit in easily with my schoolmates at Eton, though I got some fun out of my contacts with my Maths masters to whom I set conundrums which sometimes they discussed with one another. There was one Maths master “Piggy” Dalton who quarrelled with the solution of a problem in a text book because having made two mistakes himself (which cancelled out) he subsequently discovered one of them and took a lot of persuading that he had still got one undetected. He was always late in coming to early morning school; and when he arrived 8 minutes late and I was one minute after him we had arguments as to whether I was one minute or 9 minutes late! But I was very happy at Cambridge in my early twenties (1891–1897), because for the first time I was “Mr. Lawrence” and had the right to choose my own way of living and working.

Your experience of dancing lessons was in some ways the reverse of mine. I was sent while a very little boy to a class taught by a very stately and old fashioned lady who gave herself a French name. Nearly all my class mates were little girls whose flaxen looks caught my fancy. I remember that as we were all told to copy those in front of us I learnt to make a most graceful and elaborate curtsey. But my tragedy was the opposite of yours. My dancing mistress did die. Between the dates of two lessons she had an apoplectic fit, to which she succumbed. They told me that if they could have got a bladder and a block of ice to put on her head she might have recovered. I was heartbroken, and I am sure that if I had thought of it I would have prayed God to restore her to life so that I might resume my contact with the little fairies at the class. As it was I dreamt that I procured the bladder and the block of ice and saved her life. In after days I always felt that my failure to dance gracefully or rhythmically owed its origin to the abrupt termination of my dancing lessons and the gaucherie of my approach to women to the blighting of my infant sex attraction.

Sincerely yours,
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Mrs. Gwen Raverat,
Author of Period Piece,
c/o Faber & Faber Ltd.,
24, Russell Square,
London.

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2020.