ONE day at the beginning of October 1918 Walpole arrived at the office 'to find that Bennett wants me to do the report on the work of the Ministry for the War Cabinet. A particularly hair-raising job and one for which I feel quite unfitted.' But he did it, and a week later dispatched it to Bennett with a letter:
This has been a beastly job — the worst I've ever attempted. When I began I hoped to make it an individual personal affair as you had suggested. But when I looked at the other chapters in the Blue Book I saw that such a method would be at once ruled out by the War Cabinet. . . Were one writing a complete Blue Book, all by its little self, about the Ministry, one could, I think, make it both poetic and entertaining. Such an account however in this case would look like Titania sleeping with numberless Bottoms.
Rupert Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole: A Biography (1952), p. 176.
I CAN'T remember if I ever told you about meeting Hugh Walpole when I was at Oxford getting my D.Litt. I was staying with the Vice-Chancellor at Magdalen and he blew in and spent the day. It was just after Hilaire Belloc had said that I was the best living English writer. It was just a gag, of course, but it worried Hugh terribly. He said to me, 'Did you see what Belloc said about you?' I said I had. — 'I wonder why he said that.' 'I wonder,' I said. Long silence. 'I can't imagine why he said that,' said Hugh. I said I couldn't, either. Another long silence. 'It seems such an extraordinary thing to say!'—'Most extraordinary.' Long silence again. 'Ah,well,' said Hugh, having apparently found the solution, 'the old man's getting very old.'
P. G. Wodehouse, Performing Flea. A Self-Portrait in Letters, ed. W. Townend (Copyright 1953), p. 128.