THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

MRS. R. VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
10 HANOVER TERRACE
LONDON, N.W.1.

Wednesday [28 August 1957]

How splendid that both our invalids are on the up & up!¹  I expect Eslyn has been a great restorative to her mother – I wish you could see R. working in his big chair, with a tip-up table, surrounded by roses from his girls, & pretty nurses dashing in & out with pills, or any other excuse, to enquire after his ‘inspiration’ – much deflated when R says its ‘only copying’.
I’ve just come in with a cargo of cochineal & china dishes. – ie Wedgwood plates, for his final choice of a dinner service to be a present from the firm.² We agree on white with a gold feather pattern.
Love from both to both

U.

1. The invalids were VW and Eslyn Kennedy’s mother.
2. ‘Cargo of cochineal & china dishes’: a quotation from ‘The Andalusian Merchant’, the second part of ‘Thule, the Period of Cosmography’ from Thomas Weelkes’s Madrigals of 6 Parts, 1600. The china was to be an 85th birthday present to the composer from Wedgwoods, the china manufacturers (VW’s mother had been a member of the Wedgwood family). Michael Kennedy thinks that the service they chose was the only one made in that pattern.