Coningsby is perhaps my closest friend: he is the Tony of Marlton: he chafes at the routine and rules and finds an avenue of escape in literature: he is also a born poet. He has a true sense of beauty and is learning to discipline himself by imitating the metres of all the older poets. I am trying to teach him the necessity of discipline, reticence and restraint in writing as in life, but I find it very hard owing to my own inability to conform in one or the other. I take him with me to the University Extension Lectures on the modern poets and to the frequent concerts given in the town by Plunket Greene, Gervase Elwes, the London String Quartette, the Westminster Glee Singers and other celebrities that come down here. One thing which has brought out the latent talent and interesting side of a number of boys has been a performance of _Twelfth Night_, which one of the House-masters got up in aid of charity. Boys love acting and to meet them day after day at rehearsals brought us all into much closer contact than we were before. Boys think far more deeply than they used to. They grow much more quickly to maturity than they were wont. In one way one misses the careless irresponsibility: it kept one eternally young to be always with youth, but now, partly owing to the fact that all the senior boys work in the holidays in munition factories or on farms, the whole school is much more "grown up" in spite of the fact that the average age is much lower. _January 17, 1916_ Elspeth and I spent Christmas in Bath and I tried to write without much success, so we decided to go to Bournemouth, where we stayed for three weeks and enjoyed every minute of it. By a strange chance we met at least half a dozen people who were with us in Scotland in the summer. We walked about the cliffs trying to get strong and went to many entertainments and read a great many novels. We joined in at nights with the hotel people in their amusements, which did us both good and went a long way to remove the depression of the times. I still go up to London every week to see my specialist. I am gradually getting quieter, though there are moments when my restlessness drives me to do crazy things. There are hardly any old Radcastrians of my time left. Two masters are back maimed for life, one armless, and the other without a right leg. The other young ones are all killed. Stapleton has given up his living and is working on a farm: Montague and Jimmy Haye keep on coming and going from and to France. Both have been wounded once, but they seem to bear charmed lives. They always spent some part of their leave with us at Marlton. They live for getting somewhere where it is really quiet and there is no reminder of the war. _April 3, 1916_