Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/93

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.


Nicholas Todd
65

tion, but stood, as you shall see, for the same human ideals that made fighting-men of all these soldier poets, and of the many thousands like then, in heart and mind who have had no gift of song.

Nicholas Todd was another lover of children. Born at Occold, Suffolk, in 1878, he was educated at Felsted and Keble College, then became in succession assistant master at Balham, and from 1906 to 1916, at Sedbergh School. He wrote charmingly whimsical plays, with the liveliest songs scattered through them, for his boys to act, and two of these, 'The Sacred Lobster' and 'The Bridge of Rainbows,' are printed at the end of a memorial volume. One who knew him says he seemed to bear 'a mysterious passport to the intimacy of children'; and that 'it was scarcely conceivable that he could ever have done other than teach boys to call the wild flowers by their names, to write painful Latin elegies, to love the becks and the fells, bird and beast, the satire of Gilbert and Sullivan, the human sympathy of Dickens. For all