Swing of the censor
Sir: Could you be so kind as to allow me to use your columns to thank Mr I. E. Oxley for taking up the cudgels in my behoof? (Letters 26 July.) And also to point out that Mr Shaun Mandy's ingenious stuff (Letters, 19 July) about 'etiolated' photo- graphs with inscriptions about Virginia Woolf and the like is one hundred per cent fiction? This sort of tin-pot cleverness never was up my street. In a general way, if most people frequented taverns as fre- quently as I, all the pubs in England would have gone bankrupt without exception.
Nor did anyone ever chalk inscriptions on my cloak. I find it a trifle hard to believe that any really intelligent person could genuinely mistake anyone else for me, even my own cadet brother, although he imitated me by looking older than his elder brother, by wearing a cloak and robes, and by accepting homage as one who had written my works, which was particularly vexatious to me, inasmuch as this implied I had written his efforts. But his character and proceedings are not merely different
from but diametrically opposite to mine, and I esteem, that people who pretend to have met me when in fact it was my brother Cedric, know perfectly well in their hearts that it was not I they met.
Mr Shaun Mandy, who seems to have kissed the wrong side of the Blarney Stone (doubtless before he went to reside at El Respiro, Marbella, Andalusia, Spain) would give the public a much better idea of my typical occupations if he stated that in the days before the Abdication I was wont to attend daily Evensong at Westminster Abbey several days a week (for the purpose of hearing such composers as Byrd, Or- lando Gibbons. Purcell. Bach) and was even capable of jumping on a bus after the three o'clock Evensong at the Abbey to hear the four o'clock Evensong at Saint Paul's, and at times that at Southwark Cathedral at five. I was listening to good music quite infinitely more frequently than I was ever in a pub.
Before the war. Hugh Gordon Porteus once said to me that he knew three fellows who were waiting to write my life story 'when I was bumped off'. Whether he meant himself and two other persons. or himself and three other persons. I know not. But I have often said that nobody has ever taken the trouble to know enough about me, to be able honestly to write my life story. And who is going to he able to de- cipher my correspondence and other papers (diaries for instance), even if he does have access to them, in English, Polish, German, French, Italian. Hungarian and Latin? Yes, even Sanscrit at times, when it was par- ticularly interesting.
Porocki of Montalk Villa Vigoni, Chemin de St Martin, Drag- uignan, Provence, France
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