10 Huntingdon Road Cambridge
May 4, 1924Care American Express 6 Haymarket
My dear Miss Turner
Various letters to you have had a brief start but as you are aware no end! I have been back in Cambridge ten days now and before next week Miss Flanigen will be here, and Lucy Wilson and her mother will be here over next Sunday I hope so it will be quite a Holyoke party. I cant realize that Miss Flanigan will be here so soon. She seems to think Spain will not be impossible on the [...] of heat so I think we will go. I am made excited at the prospect and have been reading Bardeker industriously for several hours. She also said she would like to do Africa (not all of it!) if it could be arranged so it looks as if I might really do the two things this summer I wanted most to do. Miss Flanigen is coming over with her neice [sic] and 3 other art students who are going to Italy & then to Paris to study. Miss Flanigen seems keen to do things.
The vacation I spent in a variety of places London 8 days, Brighton 5 hours (I went down [...] where I would stay as my letter of enquiry had not been answered, and decided that I preferred a place which was not so much of a city. This is one long esplanade and miles of city streets, miles from the country & 4 miles from the nearest cliff. So I saw the town and went on) Freshwater bay 8 days, Salisbury two days less the time spent on bus, boat & 3 trains to get there, 1 day train to Lynmouth 5 trains and a drive, 3 days at Lynmouth with the Wilsons. Boat to Bristow with stops at Barry & Cardiff, the light on the cliffs and islands & on the sea made a magic world of it. Night in a bum hotel at Gloucester, though the bed was clean & the feather bed a luxury after 3 weeks on a rocky surface varied by mountains & valleys. Train to Gloucester and a wonderful morning at the cathedral. The Wilsons took a train at 1.45 & expected to do Tewksbury which I was carzy [sic] to do Chittenham which I also wanted to do and on to Broadway where many literary lights live - a charming village which I went through last summer on a [...] trip. I took the train back to London & Cambridge.
I was quite thrilled at Freshwater to find that Peter had been there exactly ten years ago It was his pleasure in this [...] tonight which suggested to me that it would be a nice place to go. The family were pleasant, the grandmother of 76 who did all the cooking had the jolliest laugh and showed a wide almost toothless cavern. The daughter had been living in Ceylon with her son who was manager of a rubber plantation, her daughter was also out their [sic] married to another manager - she was back on a visit when I was their [sic] then there was a lady with a husband and married daughter in India, another married daughter who had just moved from Vancouver to Chicago & a son in China, an old gentleman with son & daughter in Vancouver. He also had lived in Ceylon. Two girls from Barbadoes [sic] who were part negro. I realized for the first time that this was a British Empire. It is an extraordinary thing how the English are scattered all over the earth & how they have to scatter because they cant all stay here. There was also a Baltimore Bryn Mawr girl who is studying in Oxford there with her mother who was very deaf whom I enjoyed very much.
The house filled up over Easter. At Salisbury I went out to Stonehenge. didn't [sic] you go their? [sic] I wanted very much to see the Cathedral for I had never seen any pictures of it which I liked. It is a little precise and the 4 black marble pillars which surround each, the main pillars do look like "drain pipes"! but it is harmonious, and the spire is [...]. 100 years later & just maybe more [...] to add a richness to the whole. And their [sic] were all gradations in windows from the simplest Early English to elaborate grouping [...] in the spire. Good Friday I went to Church 12-3. A beautiful service conducted by a young Oxford man. Did you go to Lynmouth? It is down in a three sided well so to speak, the sea side only being open & roads with a grade of 1 in 4 1/2 [...] leading up to the top of the cliff. We took a drive to the Lorna Doone country & Lucy and I walked an hour or so while her mother trailed in the auto. We also drove to Clovelly & Westward Ho. the weather was heavenly. We had to go out to the big boat in 2 small boats towed by a motorboat about 65 of us. It was an interesting end to our stay and most delightful.
The Gloucester Cathedral I loved. The perpendicular work there was the first ever done & seems to me the loveliest of the style I have ever seen. All in all it was a nice vacation. I have omitted to say that I was working in Freshwater, and the charms of the place was that in 10 minutes one could reach the downs on the sea, and the downs put a spell over one so that one never wants to come down. I went with the two Americans round the island in a Ford 75 miles. [...] is a lovely place to stay.
Lectures are interesting this term, but the term is exceedingly short - less than 5 weeks before examinations begin. I have been trying to get my clothes started towards repair. I wish I had Miss Davnie! [?] I am hoping to have Miss Flanigen & Lucy tell me what to buy. that of course will largely depend on what we do.
Thank you so much for sending the copy of the play. It was certainly clever. Is the moral of it all to give youth a "clean bill of health" whatsoever it may take a notion to do? Some times the captains spirit of the him [sic] gets rather tiring. It does not sound as if the song "I know a nice place for young girls to go" were [sic] in the undergraduate repertory - certainly some of the rules here would make the girls explode with wrath. Some way the news does not sound as if it were written by ladies or by people with any desire ever to learn anything or to train their minds. Of course I am exasperating but I dont think the him [sic] leaves a pleasant taste.
I am glad you are having the year off but I shall miss you but you wont be so far away but what you will be coming back some times. I am sorry you have to spend the summer with moving. It will be an undertaking.
I think I was unfair to the students in general in what I said about the news. But some way the news does not fill me with pride. I certainly do not see in print here any such spirit. And it all sounds so half baked. I am sorry it was my luck to miss the play. I missed Jennie Junior also - Lucy Wilson enjoyed reading the play and I know Miss Flanigen will enjoy it. I would like to keep it but I will lend it to Helen Searles after Miss Flanigen has seen it.
Well I seem to be getting sleepy & it is just ten so I had better quit & go to bed.
I heard Bisham Henson of Durham preach this morning. He lectured here in the [...] House on Byron yesterday. I liked him. His text was "What in Him my life," at the end he made a plea to undergraduates to enter the church. The English strike me as very religious. I saw quoted in a paper this remark of some foreigner, that England was the only country where the youth of the governing class were receiving a Christian education.
Well I must go to bed. I hope your arch is all right again. Wish I were not made of sawdust inside my head tonight & speaking generally!
Love to you
M. A. Chase