While all these personal dramas were going on, AW was still working away on his books. The Pennine Way Companion was published in 1968 and he then started working on a series of Lakeland Sketchbooks.
In 1968, he also agreed to do the illustrations for a children’s book which Molly Lebebure had written. He was still in contact with Molly, still without having met her, writing her amusing and sometimes flirtatious letters, despite the arrival of Betty, but he never mentions Betty by name or refers to his divorce.
Molly had written a story about an expedition of cats to a great mountain – on the lines of the Everest Expedition, only set on Scafell. She sent him the manuscript and he did her some sketches. Her agent had never heard of AW, but her publisher had, Livia Gollancz, who was a Lake District lover.
There then started a lengthy correspondence about the illustrations with AW being rather stroppy, trying to impose his views and knowledge. The book was originally going to be called ‘Red Rowan’s Paw of Friendship’, which AW hated. Miss Gollancz did not it like either, and the title was changed to Scratch and Co. It was published in the UK in 1968 with some success, and in France and the USA. (In those countries, the publishers had not heard of Wainwright and commissioned their own illustrations.)
THE DIAGRAM OF THE ROUTE OF THE EXPEDITION
You persist in calling this a map, which it isn’t. It is a diagram.
I have made the snowline occur at about 2000’, just about the level of Sprinkling Tarn. You were right about snow being easier to draw than fields of boulders; in fact, snow doesn’t have to be drawn at all. The result is that the higher mountains are left white except where smooth ground is interrupted by crags or heavy scree, and this permits a clearer definition of the route.
I had many doubts about the Cat Kingdom flag. Reading your letter of instructions it seemed that you had intended to let me have a rough design but omitted to do so; then, on a second reading, it seemed that you wanted me to have a shot at it, which I have done; but now I am wondering whether the narrative itself contains details of the design and I failed to notice the passage. If this is so, you must amend the story, or make it clear that a special expedition flag was used in addition to the national flag.
You may notice a small patch on the diagram near Stockley Bridge. This hides a burn mark caused by my pipe spilling onto the paper in a moment of tense excitement, but will not show on the printed picture.
The diagram has been drawn to bleed, but if Livia wants a margin half-an-inch can be sliced off the left-hand edge without loss of anything material except the name ‘Esk Hause’, which is not really important, being mentioned once only in the story.
THE BOOK JACKET
It’s the title that gives me the pip. It is clumsy, and too long. Worse, it must be spread over two lines, the first ending in a blessed apostropheess, which is shockingly bad. ‘Red Rowan’s Paw’ on the first line and ‘Of Friendship’ on the second is worse still. The book obviously should be titled RED ROWAN, quite simply; then it could appear in bold stark lettering. I, too, have conducted a consumer research in the matter, my sample for interrogation being a most attractive woman, and she agrees with me absolutely. I think your title is untidy, too long to endure into immortality, and ill conceived. RED ROWAN is good, pithy, rememberable.
You know I have doubts about the drawing appearing in colour. You have already told me that the bookshops insist on coloured jackets for children’s books. My own view is that you are more likely to sell well by being original and not conforming to pattern, certainly not a pattern dictated by booksellers. In this particular case, you are describing a bold adventure, an expedition into (for cats) uncharted territory, and the cover should suggest something of the old scrolls and maps used in Drake’s days, which were roughly hand-drawn with flourishes, and certainly not in three or four colours. As I have told you before, if you leave the colouring to a printer who has never seen anything higher than Box Hill he will paint Scafell Crag a violent green, which no part of it is: it is grey and brown and ochre, never green. He will colour Red Rowan in puce, not recognising him as a fox (can’t really blame him for that), and he will colour our lovely snow-covered ledges and terraces daffodil yellow … well, it’s your pigeon. You’ve decided on colour. So be it. I disagree.
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
2nd December 1968
Dear Molly,
Can you ever forgive me?
I take back all I said. I was ruthlessly unkind to you.
I have just seen your photograph in an Ambleside bookshop.
Such an open and frank and honest countenance.
Such grace, such charm. No trace of the ravages of alcohol.
Such a well-proportioned figure (upper half only visible).
Indeed, such beauty. An Anglo-Franco rose, no less.
I have been a blind fool. What do scraggy thighs matter, after all?
I think you are super.
Incidentally, there is a Scottish terrier in the picture with you. Hamish, no doubt. But the caption to the picture says ‘Molly Lefebure and Scratch’.
Enclosed is a review of ‘Scratch & Co’ from the Westmorland Gazette of a few weeks ago, which you may not have seen. I hope the book is selling well.
I had a wonderful holiday in Scotland, the best ever. Partly and primarily due to the attractiveness of my companion, who has all your good looks and thighs as well. We went in a car, she driving, me tickling her ears and enjoying the scenery. Which, even as late as the end of October, was superb. After the mild summer, the leaves were still on the trees, making a most gorgeous riot of yellows and reds and bronzes. I withdraw what I have said before, that Lakeland is lovelier than the Highlands of Scotland. It isn’t. In fact, after seeing the Scottish glens in autumn, it beats me why people rave about the Lake District.
Tell me I am forgiven, even after saying that.
Tell me we are good friends again.
Tell me anything, except that you have gone off me.
I think you are super.
AW
The photo AW had seen of Molly shows her with her dog Hamish.
AW and Molly then made plans to do further children’s books set in the Lake District, though only one more was ever published: The Hunting of Wilberforce Pike, which came out in 1970.
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
2nd April 1969
Dear Molly,
No, I’m not dead.
I’ve been frenetically busy, that’s why.
But really I should have replied to your last letter much earlier than this, and thanked you for the gorgeous photograph. It’s super. Such an appealing pose, such grooming, such charm, such wistfulness and yearning in those soft eyes! Yes, I could fall for Hamish. You’re not half bad yourself, either. Thank you for this picture.
I’ve been frenetically busy because a deadline has been set for the two books I am doing, and, as usual, I am pressed for time. I have undertaken to finish A LAKELAND SKETCHBOOK (which, incidentally, is now planned to be the first of a series of five companion volumes – if enough people buy it) by June 30th for publication on September 30th, and WALKS IN LIMESTONE COUNTRY by the end of the year for publication next Easter. In addition I have resumed my assault on the garden, and, in an attempt to make the desert blossom as the rose, I have turned over much virgin ground and planted 600 bulbs and plants, not a single one of which is as yet showing any signs of life. Waiting to be done is the laying of a parquet floor, and the writing up of an acquisition book for Abbot Hall Art Gallery.
So I received your commission for the illustrating of two new Scratch books with some consternation. You know jolly well I can’t refuse you anything, and I’ll have a shot at them, utterly regardless of my own convenience, but I do hope you’ll proceed tardily with the writing of them. Yes, Dove Crag would be a fine place for the wilful murder of the cat-thieves by Scratch and Co., and there are some mammoth boulders crowned with lush vegetation just below the rocks that would serve as hiding places and vantage points for the ambush. I should need to go there again for pictures, not having any photographs of the crag (it’s almost always in deep shadow). Or there is Deer Bield Crag in Easedale – another good spot for a dark deed, with Easedale Tarn handy to throw the bodies in. Or what about a chase up Jack’s Rake on Pavey Ark, which everybody knows and would recognise from your description, with a watery bier in Stickle Tarn? Let’s make it a really gruesome murder – eyes scratched out, ears torn off, guts hanging out, etc., I think that cat-thieves should suffer horrific deaths. And folk who send dogs for vivisection. So I am all for a bit or moralising.
For the third book I am not so sure about the Coniston mines. Remember that these are mainly straight shafts and therefore could not be used by cats. (You might get into trouble, too, for giving publicity to these death traps, as happened to me; there’s talk of filling up the holes, anyway). Better for feline adventures would be the Tilberthwaite or Little Langdale slate quarries, where access is gained by horizontal tunnels – there are some beauties on the fellside above Slaters Bridge, and here too is Lanty Slee’s Cave, in which you could have an hilarious interlude as Scratch and Co. try their hand (paw) at whisky distilling.
Sorry you won’t let me do a drawing of L.H.S. but I will, someday, just the same. I’ll come heavily disguised, with an unshaven chin, limping and wearing a tattered raincoat (perhaps not such a heavy disguise, now I come to think of it). I may knock at the door and ask the way up Robinson. Merely to get a peep at dear old Hamish, of course. Such a sweet little fellow. Such grooming, such charm …
AW
38 Kendal Green
KENDAL
30th May 1969
Dear Molly,
Correspondence between us would be more facile if I knew where the hell you were living at any given time. You send me a letter from Surbiton and I naturally reply to Surbiton and then you write from L.H.S. to ask why haven’t I written and then I write to L.H.S. to say I have and then comes a letter from Surbiton to see if I’m ill. THIS letter I shall address to Surbiton. I expect your next to come from L.H.S…. No, I am not ill. Judging by recent performances of one sort of another I am in the prime of life.
The letter I am now replying to came from Surbiton and was written in your very best vein, full of choice turns of phrase (‘swirling cloud which occasionally lifted sufficiently to show the magnificent Mrs Shepperd perched like a sentinel on the ridge’) with scant regard for grammar (‘which’ should be ‘that’ in the quote); of graphic description (‘off into the sluicing downpour we sloshed’); of juicy anecdotes in the dialect (‘it were t’muck smoking, like’) of word inventiveness (‘edentulous’; ‘yoiked’). A richly humorous letter describing hilarious situations: the sort you do better than anyone else. I don’t reckon much of your children’s books even though they go mad about them in Chicago (it’s the illustrations that sell them, I always think), and in your serious delvings into history and tradition you are merely following others, less worthy no doubt, but your true forte is humorous story-telling and I am surprised you do not launch forth as a female Jerome K. Jerome and beat him hollow at his own game. ‘Three Women In A Tent’, set in flooded Borrowdale, is simply crying out for your attention. I have kept all your correspondence. I wish you’d be quick and die and then I could pick up a fortune by publishing posthumously ‘The Letters Of Molly Lefebure’, They’d go mad about this in Sarawak.
Incidentally, I don’t want to charge you with double-crossing me, but didn’t we agree that the Cumbrian Literary Society was a collection of undersexed morons, or something of the sort? You only have to write a four-line ‘Ode to a Pansy’ to get into that mob, and it needn’t even rhyme. Yet I find that, according to their syllabus, they are to be addressed this summer by Mollie (yes Mollie) Lefebure, the author (sic.). Shame on you, turncoat! If you see in your audience a man not wearing a white carnation in his buttonhole it won’t be me. I stick to my principles. Anyway, since you have committed yourself, don’t forget to remind them that Wainwright’s Guides are obtainable in all good bookshops in the district. I don’t know what’s come over you. Even Griffin has addressed the Cumbrian Literary Society, and you can’t get any lower than that.
Yes, as I promised before (I don’t change my mind) I will do you the honour of illustrating your second cat book, but not until the end of July. I will do a jacket showing the cat-thief hanging on to an imaginary precipice on Striding Edge with a bunch of cats hissing and spitting at him and clawing his clutching fingertips (they’ll howl in Lyons when they see this). I will draw a map of their wandering for a frontispiece. I will do up to a dozen tailpieces. Livia’s generous fee should be sent to the Bleakholt Animal Sanctuary, Ramsbottom, Lancs, the patron of which, by the way, is the Duchess of Argyll, Margaret, the third existing of that ilk, of whose exploits you will doubtless have heard. I have met her by invitation at a remote rendezvous on a desolate Lancashire hillside (what better place for it?) and returned unsullied from the encounter. Livia’s fee will buy food for her poor unwanted animals, for which she has a quite genuine compassion … So, you see, I can now number the nobility amongst my acquaintances as well as lesser fry like authors of cat books.
Love and so forth, as you so naively put it. Old Gerrish won’t last for ever. Hand in hand we may still climb Dale Head together, just you and me and the magnificent Mrs Shepperd.
AW
AW could be rather cruel about Molly’s children’s books, but she said she was not upset. It was just his way. AW really did meet the Duchess of Argyll, through the animal charity Bleakholt Animal Sanctuary, of which she was the Patron. He and Betty helped them a lot, after he had finally fallen out with the RSPCA and the collapse of his suggested animal refuge.
The reference to Mrs Shepperd concerns a rumour about a well known member of the local hunt. According to local gossip she and her husband slept with a badger in their bed, which led to various confusions in the night.
38 Kendal Green, KENDAL
2nd August 1969
Dear Molly,
Please confirm that you are not dead.
If you are, there is not much point in reading further, and I would just like to say how deeply sorry I am. Right in the prime of life, too, and at the peak of performance. I am sadly distressed.
If you are not, then I am writing to say that I am ready to draw cats, having just completed my book of drawings and before I resume my shelved epic on the limestone country.
I feel very alone. I haven’t heard from you for ages. I know you can’t write to me if you’re dead, but damn, after all we’ve been to each other, you might at least try to appear before me as a spirit.
Farewell, if necessary,
AW
Dear Moll,
They say exchange is no robbery, and here is my swap for the copy of your classic CUMBRIAN HERITAGE, which is very good indeed, obviously the result of much painstaking research and unrecognizable as the product of the same brain that gave birth to the much less distinguished legends of Scratch and Co. I enjoyed it immensely, and my apprehension that you may have courted notoriety by denouncing me as a fake who describes as coachroads rough tracks where coaches have never passed was, happily, without foundation. You are very kind to me. You could have exposed me as counterfeit, but you generously refrained. I am still sceptical about the gutter on Sty Head Pass, which I prefer to regard as a pristine part of the original roadway. However, a very fine book, the result of much hard work and an entertaining and instructive account of Cumberland as it used to be. Now say something nice about WALKS IN LIMESTONE COUNTRY, out this week.
Also enclosed, in a separate envelope; couldn’t squash everything in one, to make you furious with rage, is the newly-issued Directory of Northern Writers, which includes your friend Dudley Hoys but excludes yourself. But you are in good company. Griffin, too, is omitted.
Your extremely kind and cordial invitation to L.H.S. at Easter touched me deeply and my callous disregard of it may well mean that it will never be repeated. But in fact the opportunity never arose; the bitter weather kept me indoors, drawing and rugging, and although I am now almost back to normal (i.e., back to smoking) I have only once ventured out into the country, this to walk the Whinfell ridge between Shap and the Tebay roads for a couple of miles or so to give me a start on WALKS ON THE HOWGILL FELLS. I felt none the worse, but my powers are disgustingly diminished, what with bronchial pneumonia and wedlock.
Incidentally, while honeymooning at York, I paid a first visit to the North Yorks Moors area. Not bad, not bad. I might yet do a COAST TO COAST WALK, St. Bees Head to Robin Hood’s Bay, crossing Lakeland, using the newly-created Dales Way into Yorkshire and ending with parts of both the Lyke Wake Walk and the Cleveland Way.
You will be dying to learn of my progress with the rug, and I am pleased to report that, as a result of diligent application, over 20,000 knots have now been completed and the whole should be finished within a fortnight. Then I hope to have it displayed on exhibition at many of the provincial galleries. It is by far the greatest of my accomplishments. If I am remembered, it will be because of the rug.
I assume you have now fled the bitter Northern weather are now back in suburbia.
AW
AW and Betty got married at Kendal Town Hall on 10 March 1970 – so at last AW started writing about Betty by name. Molly invited him and Betty to her home – but so far AW had not managed to get there.
The references to the Cumbrian writers Dudley Hoyes and Harry Griffin are all scurrilous – AW amusing himself by suggesting Molly was having affairs with them. She hadn’t even met them.
The correct title of Molly’s latest book was Cumberland Heritage published by Gollancz in 1970. ‘Mr A Wainwright’ is listed in the Acknowledgements.
38 Kendal Green, KENDAL
24th May 1970
Dear Molly,
Thank you for two entertaining letters and a well-deserved congratulatory telegram. I would have written earlier but found that a further period of convalescence was necessary after my rug affliction. Following such a sustained effort with a latchet hook I was quite unable to manipulate either pen or typewriter. I was making knots in my sleep and seriously disrupting normal marital relations. My fingers still sometimes go through the motions.
The really bitter pill was that the damned thing, when finally completed, couldn’t be used as intended because it slipped all over the parquet floor and was in fact positively dangerous. It is doomed to spend its days ignominiously under a table firmly pinned down by the table legs and four chairs. Never again. I keep seeing better rugs in the shops at half the price. Ready made, too. 220 hours of my life have been wasted.
Otherwise I am just about back to normal (i.e. smoking like a chimney) and getting around again. Latterbarrow (803’) and Hallin Fell (1291’) have both been conquered in recent weeks without undue distress. I have remained modest about these achievements and kept the news out of the press. And last week I paid a first visit to Black Force near Sedbergh in furtherance of my super new book (not yet started): WALKS ON THE HOWGILL FELLS. The going was arduous without the encouragement and help of a faithful, devoted and admiring new wife this expedition might well have failed. I must say I am enjoying having a faithful, devoted and admiring new wife (with a car). Not without good reason, she thinks I’m wonderful.
Betty is more than ever determined to get me up to L.H.S. after learning of your extremely kind invitation to me to meet Livia there. But I’m afraid Livia must be denied the pleasure of meeting the man who has come to mean so much to her. Because on Tuesday the 26th we are off to Scotland for ten days, touring the west and north in general and Wester Ross and Sutherland in particular. In the car, of course, with my f, d, and admiring new wife driving and me rubbernecking. Not for me any longer the bourgeoise discomforts of bus and train travel. So I’m sorry, but Livia must suffer a wretched frustration. I feel a bit sorry for her, not seeing me. Of course there’s always Dudley Hoys, who would do anything for you, or even, as a last resort, Griffin.
I await with impatience he appearance and world preview of THE HUNTING OF WILBERFORCE PIKE, but meanwhile am applying myself diligently to A SECOND LAKELAND SKETCHBOOK, which is well up to schedule and will be out in the autumn. In one drawing in this book L.H.S. appears unobtrusively in the background (‘Robinson and Hindscarth from Catbells’) No, let’s get it right: ‘Hindscarth and Robinson from Catbells’. Sometime this summer I shall be taking a long look at Newlands Church with the same purpose in mind.
With much of the tourist traffic drained off into limestone country the Lake District is strangely quiet this year, and this has undoubtedly contributed to the nesting of a pair of eagles with two eggs that are due to hatch this weekend. The area is being patrolled by wardens, but the actual site is being kept a dark secret. I know where it is, but all I can tell you is that it is amongst the eastern fells.
Talking about cats, part of the nuptial package deal was that I should take over a feline named Krishna, who has quickly established himself in the household and become the terror of all living creatures in the garden. He is no ordinary cat, but a four-legged monster with an extraordinary penchant for climbing. You don’t look for Krishna curled up on the floor somewhere; you look for him on the tops of wardrobes and cupboards and on high windowsills and on any projections from the vertical conveniently near the ceilings. It is somewhat disconcerting to suddenly notice him surveying your steadfastly from some lofty vantage point far above your head. You can’t help cowering a little with Krishna. The point is that I now have a model to pose for the illustrations in your next cat book. I have nothing to learn about baleful feline glares and snarls and expressions of utter indifference to entreaties. In repose he sleeps with a big fat smile on his face. No wonder. He’s the boss in this establishment and right well he knows it.
I hope you have better weather than you had on the occasion of your last visit. Don’t get too involved with Dudley.
AW
AW had taken up rug making after a serious bout of pneumonia and had been told to stay indoors and not do any strenuous exercise for a while. AW hated doing it. When he had eventually finished his rug, he laid it out on the living room floor which was made of highly polished wood. He slipped when walking on it the first time – and injured his leg. So much for recuperative therapy.
38 Kendal Green, KENDAL
Sunday afternoon, 9th August
Dear Molly, or Molly dear, whichever you prefer
So I finally completed my convalescence the other day with an intrepid ascent of Great Gable from a car parked on Honister Pass and accompanied only by my faithful and adoring new wife, realizing full well that I might drop dead or be smitten by a stroke or develop a palsy or yellow fever or something as a result of the unaccustomed exercise following my long lay-off. I kept glancing at Haystacks where my charred embers will some day be decently scattered, and thinking not yet, buggar; and in fact I not only didn’t pass away from lack of breath but completed the ascent in fine style and had enough puff to visit Green Gable, Brandreth and Grey Knotts before returning to the car. I was mightily pleased with my performance. I am a fellwalker again.
Mind you, the summit of Great Gable was no place to be that day. All the decent walkers are doing the limestone country this year, of course, unfortunately leaving in possession of Lakeland an untidy and noisy rabble of school parties and dropouts. You would have thought there was a Pop Festival going on top of Gable. There were hundreds of near-humans draped all over the summit, an noisy, uncouth, illiterate mob with transistors going full blast, and after a brief visit to Westmorland Cairn we fled the place. Green Gable was little better, but Brandreth and Grey Knotts were havens of peace. It was heavenly to recline again in a bed of heather and be damned to the passage of time.
Yesterday I sent off to the printer the last few pages of a super new book entitled A SECOND LAKELAND SKETCHBOOK, and when I have finished this overdue letter to you I shall get cracking on WALKS ON THE HOWGILL FELLS, which, although you have never heard of the Howgill Fells, is likely to become the standard book of reference to that area.
After looking through A CUMBERLAND HERITAGE only cursorily when I first received a copy (due to other pressures at the time) I have recently spent my evenings, apart from watching Coronation Street of course, in a detailed study of the book. The amount of time you must have spend in digging out all that forgotten information is truly amazing, and you have produced a classic here greater even than Scratch & Co. I could have wished you hadn’t been so confoundedly dogmatic about the old so-called coach road over to Dockray, or that original unspoilt bit of the Sty Head track, or about the so-called memorial stone to John Bankes, but I suppose you must be right and I should be grateful that you preferred not to name the cheapjacks who spread their spurious fictions around and call them truth. Congratulations on a splendid book. I hope it sells well, but the price of books in general is becoming frightening to those of us who live by the pen, don’t you think? And will get worse. From July 1st printing costs jump by 30%, mainly due to big wage increases and paper prices. Books like this last one of yours are gong to cost the public around three guineas in future and even your best friends will sneak off to the Public Library to borrow a copy. Anyway, Jennie Lee said that authors are soon to get royalties on books borrowed from public libraries, so perhaps you will be able to continue to live in the manner to which you are accustomed, booze and all.
You can’t tell me anything about the eagles in the Lake District. I know all about them. They have built three eyries for use in alternate season and I know exactly where they are, but I am not going to tell you because you would want to go rubbernecking. This year the hatching was half successful, one baby being reared successfully and it has already taken to the air. I don’t think the secret will keep much longer. A Cumberland newspaper has already published a photograph of the nest, or a least of the crag where the nest is.
Your account of the guided mission to Scafell with a distinguished professor from California was a delectable piece of writing. Molly the Sherpa certainly did her stuff all right all right, and Professor Omygosh must have had an adventure he will never forget. No, I can’t honestly say that any foreign researchers have ever asked me to guide them. Nor has anybody else, come to think of it. But you are hardly fair to dear old Dudley in saying he doesn’t know one end of Cam Spout from t’other. He does, you know, he knows Eskdale better than anyone. Anyway, why so spiteful with old Dudley all at once. Not long ago you were as thick as thieves. He could do no wrong in your eyes. You turned to him when I jilted you in favour of Betty and for months you rammed his virtues down my throat, not that I cared. Now clearly it is all over between you, and posterity will be left not knowing what your true association ever was. There will be speculation, of course. Sometime in the 21st century an avid woman researcher, probably living in a remote farmhouse in a Lakeland valley, will start digging into the dusty logbooks and visitors journals at L.H.S. and the Woolpack and interviewing the oldest inhabitants to discover what their grandfathers ever told them about the shriveled little man and the big bosomed florid woman who for a fleeting period of history were thrown together in a mad romance that ended abruptly in mutual abuse and recrimination (I did hear tell as how the woman was half-French).
Each morning I await my free copy of THE HUNTING OF WILBERFORCE PIKE from Livia. It never comes.
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
16th December 1970
Dear Molly,
I received your letter, smelling vilely of gin, which no doubt accounted for its general incoherence. The message it purported to convey, if message there was, suffered from a welter of crossings out and misspellings and although I was generous enough to accept your apology for the haste in which it was written, I am left unhappy that your mind could have been in such turmoil and am still confused as to the role I am supposed to play with regard to the third Scratch classic, (sic) which I received safely a few days later. Hitherto your instructions have been reasonably explicit; they must have been penned in lucid intervals when you were off the bottle, but on this occasion you have thrown the thing at me and left me to work out for myself what I’m supposed to do with it.
Nor can I understand your mention of Mr G’s desire for the Siamese cat drawing from Wilberforce Pike. I said yes to this request almost a year ago, and in any case never got those drawings back from Livia, not that I wanted such reminders of a shameful episode in my artistic career.
It is good to know, however, that the book has been so well reviewed (can’t think why) and my sympathies are with the Halifax reviewer who thought Wilberforce Pike was 2634’. The trouble is that these flattering eulogies only spur you on to do more. I wish you would stick to your Cumberland Heritages and so do something worthwhile for posterity. Scratch and Co are amongst the banalities of life.
Meanwhile I am ranging far and wide over the magnificent Howgills, treading where no man has trod before but where multitudes will tread from Easter 1972 onwards. Now I see that a 168-mile footpath, Offa’s Dike, is to be opened next year. This will surely call for a super guidebook, but piling up for early attention are Walking the Border, The Pennine Watershed and a Coast-to-Coast Walk (St. Bees Head to Robin Hoods Bay). I am also committed to one Sketchbook per annum. These, coming on top of the marital duties I am now expected to perform, would exhaust a lesser man. Even so, time presses hard and you can imagine my rage and fury when you blithely command me to illustrate yet another cat book. You have me under your thumb, and well you know it.
All right, then, tell me what you want me to do, and say whether a deferment until 1985 is possible. If Scratch is as immortal as you seem to think, time is of little consequence. But Offa’s Dike is urgent and soon there will be a clamour for a Companion to it such as has not been heard since guidance was provided for the Pennine Way.
Okay, okay, what do you want me to do with Loona Balloona apart from the obvious?
Thank you for a lovely Christmas card. You said you weren’t going to send any more, you rotten thing. A shilling, this one’s cost me.
AW
Molly eventually did meet AW – she thinks probably around 1971. They then planned to do a book about the old packhorse roads of Lakeland and did some research together on various routes – along with Betty, driving them.
While investigating an old road over Shap, Molly said it was one way, AW said another. They shouted and argued, each insisting they were correct. Finally in exasperation, Molly yelled at him ‘That’s the fucking road down there!’
AW was silent before replying ‘I thought you were a lady.’
Molly says AW didn’t speak to her for two years, but they did become friends again, though the joint book never happened. (In 1985 AW did a slim book on his own called Old Roads of Eastern Lakeland.)
AW and Betty visited Molly’s house in the Newlands valley house and Molly and her husband visited AW and Betty at home in Kendal.
‘When we arrived at Kendal Green for the first time, AW opened the door and said “Did you have to bring him?” John didn’t mind. He took our Great Romance in his stride.’