The Wycliffe Companion

Letters from the Eighties

10th April 1984

WJB to Dr Grothusen, Kiel

Dear Dr Grothusen,

I feel very guilty in that I have received two letters from you since writing myself; the first gave a fascinating account of the family and, in particular, of the impact of the war on your lives. When I read it I could not but recall how fortunate we were as a family to survive that war without having suffered the separations, deprivations and bereavements which affected so many millions of people whose only wish was to live a decent and useful life. But more of that later.

First I must explain my seeming discourtesy in not writing earlier. It is unfortunately true that people of our age have to expect to become reluctant patrons of the medical profession We were both deeply sorry to hear that Eva (forgive that informality but I feel we have known you long enough) was taken ill on the Normandy trip and we hope from our hearts that she is now recovered and that you will enjoy many many more expeditions together. Our case is somewhat similar: in the past two and a half years we seem to have spent far too much time in hospitals and consulting rooms. Muriel arid I have both had what is menacingly called 'major surgery' and in addition Muriel has recently undergone a less serious operation It looks now as though the outlook is brighter and we are getting back to normal.

One of the immediate practical effects of these intimations of mortality was to delay by several months the next Wycliffe book. The need to produce a successor to The Beales and a certain amount of pressure from Gollancz gave us some hectic months but the typescript has now gone to the publishers and D.V. the book should be out late this year. Muriel is almost as much involved as I am in all this and we have been 'living' Wycliffe from morning till night!

While still on the subject of books let me say how much I appreciated your more than kind remarks about The Beales. I hope you will like the new one when it comes - we are back at the sea-side, at St Mawes. Have you ever been there? It is in the Roseland Peninsula.

Now to the immediate future: we are delighted to know that you are coming to England at the end of the month. Of course we are greatly looking forward to seeing you here. Any of the three days you are at Boscastle would suit us but I will suggest Thursday May 17th and you can let me know if that does not fit in readily with your plans. We hope you will come to lunch and stay as long as you can for I am sure that we have much to talk about. It will be a Red Letter day for the Burleys.

I think you have a too rosy picture of Holywell and of St Patrick's. Ours is a small bungalow, built in 1938 - very prosaic, and surrounded by a garden in which we have fought a battle against sand, salt, wind and drought for twenty-eight years (incidentally, we came nearest to complete rout in this last unspeakable winter). In those years a rash of seaside bungalows has grown up around us, several caravan sites, and an army camp which, at this moment, is busy defacing a headland which has remained unspoiled until now. Every winter since we came here we have decided that we will 'shift' but as we have made the interior of the house more and more as we want it so we have become reluctant to do so. Holywell has one point in its favour: there is a local joke to the effect that the place is so healthy, the residents never die. It is said that they are secretly shot when they become too old and troublesome. Our turn hasn't come yet, but who knows?

Because, when we came here, Holywell had only 27 permanent residents we do not have any system of road naming - indeed, we do not have a proper road. To help friends who want to visit us and to save them giving up in despair, Muriel has contrived a little map and I enclose a copy. One final point - St Patrick's, Holywell sounds ecclesiastical and when I sent my first book to Livia Gollancz she wanted to know if I was a monk! In fact, we inherited the house name from an Irish family who had the place before us.

When I read the brief autobiographical sketch you were kind enough to give me I was struck by two things - first, as I have said, by our own relative good fortune in the war years, and second, by the fact that you and I have very disparate backgrounds. You obviously come from the upper echelons of the professional class in Germany while I am very much a product of the so-called 'working class' here. My father and his immediate ancestors were masons and I am the youngest of six children. I mention this because understanding people from another country is sometimes made difficult if the context of their lives is undefined. For this reason you may have some interest in my history.

At eleven I was due to take the examination for a free place at the local grammar school but I had the measles - so no place. At twelve I was sent to a technical school in a nearby town where we studied only craft and engineering subjects - no languages and no history. At sixteen I was given a scholarship which enabled me to become an indentured pupil in gas engineering - the manufacture and distribution of 'tuon’ gas.

This led, at twenty-five to the management of a small works and a little, later, in the early years of the war, I was transferred to a works which supplied gas to a 'hush-hush' factory which, I discovered afterwards, was producing valves for the early radar sets. The story of my years there seems quite bizarre as I look back - the spectacle of bureaucrats trying to cut through their own red tape and become men of action. All this under the stimulus of former journalists turned civil servants by Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill's Minister of Aircraft Production and owner of the Express Newspaper. Enough of that:

Anyway, that constituted my war.

In 1948/9 the gas industry was nationalised and that did not suit me at all. I had become interested in zoology as a hobby and I was lucky enough to get what is called a 'Mature State Scholarship' to Oxford to study zoology there.

[The two-page draft of this letter ends there, at the foot of the second page]