Some few 'weeks ago, in a street leading off Tottenham
Court Road, I noticed a venerable and massive figure standing stock-still in the middle of the pavement. As I passed him I observed that it was Dr.` Vaughan Williams. Looking back once or twice I saw him still motionless and began to fear he was ill. But at last a lady came out of a shop, took his arm and the pair moved sedately on. It was obviously his secretary, who since Saturday has been Mrs. Ralph Vaughan Williams. They will no doubt live in the unpretentious house in a Dorking side-road which the composer has occupied for years. He might, if he chose, have been established very differently, for soon after the end of the war his brother Harvey Vaughan Williams died and left him a fine and spacious Elizabethan house on the southern slopes of Leith Hill, with magnificent views over the Sussex Weald, and a range of woods crowded with rhododendrons and azaleas whose splendour in the spring is equalled only at Kew. But Vaughan Williams' first wife, who was an invalid, could never have coped with such a mansion, and he presented the whole property to the National Trust. The woods are now open to the public and the house and gardens are let to Sir Ralph Wedgwood. a distant cousin.
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