I used to bicycle down from Boar’s Hill every morning to my lectures. On the way down I would collect Edmund Blunden, who was attending the same course. He too had permission to live on the hill, on account of gassed lungs. I had been in correspondence with Edmund some time before he came to Oxford. Siegfried, when literary editor of the _Herald_, had been among the first to recognize him as a poet, and now I was helping him get his _Waggoner_ through the press. Edmund had war-shock as badly as myself, and we would talk each other into an almost hysterical state about the trenches. We agreed that we would not be right until we got all that talk on to paper. He was first with _Undertones of War_, published in 1928. Edmund and Mary his wife rented two rooms of a cottage belonging to Mrs. Delilah Becker, locally known as the Jubilee Murderess. She was a fine-looking old lady and used to read her prayer-book and Bible aloud to herself every night, sitting at the open window. The prayer-book was out of date: she used to pray for the Prince Consort and Adelaide, the Queen Dowager. She was said to have murdered her husband. In Jubilee year she had gone away for a holiday, leaving her husband in the cottage with a half-witted servant-girl. News came to her that he had got the servant-girl into trouble. She wrote to him: ‘Dear husband, if I find you in my cottage when I come back you shall be no more.’ He did not believe her and she found him in the cottage, and sure enough he was no more. She told the police that he had gone away when he saw how angry with him she was; but no one had seen him go. He had even left his silver watch behind, ticking on a nail on the bedroom wall. The neighbours swore that she had buried him in the garden. Mary Blunden said that it was more probable that he was buried somewhere in their part of the cottage, which was semi-detached. ‘There’s an awfully funny smell about here sometimes,’ she said. Old Delilah said to Mary once: ‘I have often wondered what has happened to the old pepper-and-salt suit he had on when he was—when he went away.’ Whenever she went out she took the carving-knife out of the drawer and laid it on the kitchen-table, where it could be seen by them when they went past her window. I liked Delilah very much and sent her a pound of tea every year until her death. Her comment on life in general was: ‘Fair play’s good sport, and we’re all mortal worms.’ She also used to say: ‘While there’s wind and water a man’s all right.’