he used to dictate quaint little poems even before he could write. One that he addressed to his mother when he was eight years old puts his love and admiration of her into most childishly simple terms, with here and there a touch that flashes into sudden beauty:
... She is full of love and grace,
A kind of flower in all the place....
Even the trees give her salutes,
They seem to know who 's near their roots....
She is something quite divine,
And joy, oh joy, this mother 's mine.
Two of the poems in his volume were written whilst he was at Winchester College, but the rest are dated from shell-shattered towns, whose names have become almost household words to us, and the war but rarely and intermittently intrudes into them. The longest, 'The Nightingale,' a glamorous love story adapted from Boccaccio, was written at Ypres and Poperinghe during June and July 1916. At Ypres, Poperinghe, Ecques, and Hullach Road he wrote the fanciful, bizarre old-world ballads of 'Worple Flit' and 'The
