Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 47

You have not written to me for a very long time. I am awfully uneasy. Tell me if anything is wrong and don’t conceal it. I have been to the Master for a letter every day for a fortnight. I hope you will write soon.

I am getting on famously, am in the extraordinary and I don’t know what all. Those boys who do the ordinary lessons very well are called ‘the extraordinary’.

Old Father Christmas is again come in sight and is rapidly approaching with his escort of Plum Pudding, Roast Goose, etc, etc.

My love to Papa, Lottie, Cony and Jeannie. I am writing a long piece of Poetry on the subject of the war.

Agreat deal of war-related poetry lay in Conan Doyle’s future, ranging from ‘The Song of the Bow’, an idealistic tribute to the English long-bowmen of the fourteenth century, to the ascerbic ‘H.M.S. Foudroyant: Being a humble address to Her Majesty’s Naval advisers, who sold Nelson’s old flagship to the Germans for a thousand pounds.’ First published in the London Daily Chronicle in September 1892, it began:

Who says the Nation’s purse is lean,

Who fears for claim or bond or debt,

When all the glories that have been

Are scheduled as a cash asset?

If times are bleak and trade is slack,

If coal and cotton fail at last,

We’ve something left to barter yet—

Our glorious past.

Conan Doyle also turned his imaginative gifts to his aunt Catherine’s recent travels, wistfully conjuring up a domestic scene at home in Edinburgh—and the contents of his next Christmas food package at school.