Letter 13, 8th March 1938
your regrets that you did not do so 10 years earlier. To me, the 12 years since I
retired have been the best and fullest in my life, and grow ever better.
- My best messages to Mrs Bailey.
- My best messages to Mrs Bailey.
- L. A. Bethell
- L. A. Bethell
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Letter 13, 8th March 1938
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37, Paternoster Row, E.C. 4
8 . III . 38
My dear Bailey,
Many thanks for yours of 15th of February from “somewhere in
the Terai”. Good hunting!
Yes, I gathered from a paragraph in the “Times” some weeks ago that you are
retiring in April, and Belham taking your place. I gather from an old Army List that
he's a man considerably younger then ourselves: ex-15th Sikhs, and a bit of a linguist
in the Punjabi and N.W.F. bats, though he doesn't seem to have touched anything
Mongolian. Wonder how he'll get on as your successor?
Need I tell you of the welcome awaiting you here, when eventually you pitch up in
July? I thoroughly agree with you, that it would have been wise if you had retired
earlier: not that I've the impertinence to suggest for a moment that your work in India,
for the last 10 years has
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been valueless, either to yourself or to the Empire. But I have a rooted conviction,
after a dozen years' experience of it, that a man's best, most fruitful, and certainly
most satisfying life only begins after he has retired, and when, fortified by a moderate
pension, he is then free at last to map out his life for himself. But he must do it on a
plan. Nothing more easy than to slide into a shapeless existence, in which a host of
trivialities tend to take charge. Whereupon the thing becomes undisciplined. The
man loses his mental (and too often his physical) shape, and the whole thing goes
gaga. I've been reading Arnold Wilson lately – a sound man, who has spent a lot of
time and energy in getting into close and personal touch with the English underdog,
whom you and I only know of by hearsay. With every appearance of obvious truth, A.
W. has narrowed the misery of the unemployed down to one basic factor: not
hunger, not dingy quarters and nagging wife, not physical depression, but, “the
overwhelming misery of
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one long compulsory holiday”. Physical troubles are bearable, but muddle-cum-boredom, when indefinitely prolonged, are insupportable.
