Читать книгу The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien - Christopher Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien - Страница 53

[Lewis kept very few letters, and only two that Tolkien actually sent to him have survived. (For the second, see no. 113.) ‘The U.Q.’ is an abbreviation for ‘Useless Quack’, the nickname given by his fellow Inklings to R. E. Havard, Tolkien and Lewis’s doctor. ‘Ridley’ was M. R. Ridley of Balliol College, who, with Tolkien and Lewis, was involved in teaching forces cadets at the university, on the wartime ‘short courses’. Lewis was, meanwhile, also travelling around England giving talks on the Christian religion to RAF stations.]

20 April 1943

[20 Northmoor Road, Oxford]

My dear Jack,

V: sorry to hear you are laid low – and with no U.Q. to suggest that it may be your last illness! You must be v: disconsolate. I begin to think that for us to meet on Wednesdays is a duty: there seem to be so many obstacles and fiendish devices to prevent it.

I hope to have a good report of you soon. But do not trouble yourself. Ridley was so astounded at the ignorance of all 22 cadets, revealed in his first class, that he has leaped at the chance of another hour, esp. since otherwise there was no ‘Use of E[nglish]’ class next week at all. You can (if you wish) shove in ‘Arthur’¹ on some other date, when you are recovered fully. The tutorials do not matter.

I fear you are attempting too much. For even if you have merely got ‘flu’, you are prob. tiring yourself into an easy victim. As a mere ‘director’, I shall hope v. much to persuade you to ease off in travel (if poss.), and put some weight into this cadet stuff. I am a bit alarmed by it. My lone machine-gun since it started seems to me to have missed the target, and it needs at least one more gun – to depend on – other than the valuable Ridley.

I lunched at the Air Squadron to-day & got a brief whiff of an atmosphere now all too familiar to you, I expect.

Yours affectionately

T²

PS. Ridley’s first question in the test-paper was a group of words to define – apposite, reverend, venal, choric, secular and a few others. Not one cadet got any of the words right.