this was something more to him than a profession, a thing to be laid aside in leisure hours'—and in his leisure he wrote those plays and songs for his boys' amusement. His humour and love of nature and of children and of all life overflows his poems, and only once or twice does any hint of the war get into them. In August 1915 he recalls two friends who used to walk the heather with him, and now:
One is far away where the heroes stand
For the right of God and the motherland.
Another waits where the spire looks down
On the level plains round the Saxon town.
They have the gleam of the light divine,
The loss and the loneliness are mine.
In a different vein, just after he had joined the Queen's Westminsters as a private, he wrote a rhyming epistle from Hazely Down Camp, Winchester, on Easter Eve, 1916:
Dear Meg, now I 'm a simple Tommy
I thought you would like a letter from me,
Living a silent celibut
With twenty others in a hut,
My bed of wooden boards and tressels
