reckoned their effect on sales and so on the grocery bills. I still believed that it was possible to write poetry that was true poetry and yet could reach, say, a three or four thousand-copy sale. I expected some such success. I consorted with other poets and had a fellow-feeling for them. Beside Hardy, Siegfried, and the Boar’s Hill residents, I knew Delamare, W. H. Davies, T. S. Eliot, the Sitwells and many more. I liked W. H. Davies because he was from South Wales and afraid of the dark, and because once, I heard, he made out a list of poets and crossed them off one by one as he decided that they were not true poets—until only two names were left. I approved the final choice. Delamare I liked too. He was gentle and I could see how hard he worked at his poems—I was always interested in the writing-technique of my contemporaries. I once told him what hours of worry he must have had over the lines: Ah, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose; and how, in the end, he had been dissatisfied. He admitted that he had been forced to leave the assonance ‘Roves and rose,’ because no synonym for ‘roves’ was strong enough. I seldom saw Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell after the war-years. When I did I always felt uncomfortably rustic in their society. Once Osbert sent me a present of a brace of grouse. They came from his country residence in Derbyshire in a bag labelled: ‘With Captain Sitwell’s compliments to Captain Graves.’ Nancy and I could neither of us face the task of plucking and gutting and roasting the birds, so we gave them to a neighbour. I thanked Osbert: ‘Captain Graves acknowledges with thanks Captain Sitwell’s gift of Captain Grouse.’ Our total income, counting birthday and Christmas cheques from relatives, was about one hundred and thirty pounds a year. As Nancy reminded me, this was about fifty shillings a week and there were farm labourers at Islip, with more children than we had, who only got thirty shillings a week. They had a much harder time than we did earning it and had no one to fall back on, as we had, in case of sudden illness or other emergency. We used to get free holidays, too, at Harlech, when my mother would insist on paying the train-fare as well as giving us our board free. We really had nothing to complain about. Thinking how difficult life was for the labourers’ wives kept Nancy permanently depressed. I have omitted to mention a further source of income—the Rupert Brooke Fund, of which Edward Marsh was the administrator. Rupert Brooke had stated in his will that all royalties accruing from any published work of his should be divided among needy poets with families to support. When money was very short we would dip into this bag.