Beverley Nichols dined with Fred and went into raptures about [Fred's] house, saying in his usual whimsical way that the furniture seemed to have been put in its place by the gentle hands of Time; the pictures had almost grown into the walls; and the carpets had sprung naturally from the floors like some gracious form of grass. According to Nichols, Fred's face glowed with happiness as he showed his guest round the house. He was described as ‘a smallish (Fred was five feet ten), pinkish, twinkling, urbane, grey-flannel-trousered man’ who had finally come to rest in a quiet London square, having retained the sparkle of his eyes, his taste for Italian wine and, above all, his love of a sheet of white paper in the stillness of the night. Fred, who had not ‘come to rest’ at all, noted with amusement the slight cattiness behind Nichols's gush. [Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd, E. F. Benson: As He Was]

Beverley Nichols was a lunch guest and on one occasion he came with his nephew. This must have been the time he was contemplating his piece “E. F. Benson, or Very Much at Home” (from Are they the same at home? 1927), because Mr Benson asked him if he was going to show it to him before he published and he said yes. But apparently he didn't, as Mr Benson was pretty peeved at a reference in the article to his novels "growing more and more dusty on the shelves of the subscription libraries. He doesn't care, I'm sure." In fact he did. "Mr Benson didn't like that at all," said Charlie [Tomlin]. Mr Benson had a mild dig at him in retaliation in some review of a publication where Beverley Nichols is in Italy or somewhere abroad and suddenly at the end realises it is April and the daffodils are blooming in England. So he has to rush home, of which Mr Benson wrote "I hope to God he got back in time." (Beverley Nichols was to retain a certain animosity towards Mr Benson until his own death in 1983.) [Cynthia and Tony Reavell, E. F. Benson: Remembered, and the World of Tilling]

In the space of two minutes my war — my very special war — seemed much less unpleasant, because my new friend was none other than the Master of Magdalene, A. C. Benson, whose father had been one of Queen Victoria's favourite Archbishops. There were three Benson brothers, all distinguished in their separate ways, though the only one who is nowadays remembered is E. F. Benson, who is currently enjoying a belated revival as a writer of Edwardian comedy. A. C. Benson, whom I came to know very well indeed, was a true scholar and an admirable administrator, with a knack of coaxing large sums out of American philanthropists for the benefit of Magdalene, which was his chief love. A beautiful little college it was, with a library of exceptional distinction, founded on the original bequest from Samuel Pepys. Benson was a mixed-up man, who had a habit of developing sentimental attachments at a moment's notice, and no doubt this was what had occurred when he met me in the porch, though I did not at first realise the full implications of the encounter.

[…] Ever since my departure [A. C. Benson] had kept in touch through a constant stream of correspondence. No young man ever had a kindlier mentor; he wrote as an equal, drawing me out, seeking my opinions. He was not only kindly but practical. Realising that I had no means apart from my meagre Second Lieutenant's pay, he took some of my letters and sent them to an American magazine called The Outlook with the suggestion that they should be published anonymously. They were accepted, and the editors asked for more. Altogether I made five hundred dollars from The Outlook, which was a small fortune in those days. For the first time I knew the excitement of writing words on paper and selling them, of twisting my pen into symbols that could be exchanged for gold. Which is all that authorship has ever been about, or ever will be. I do not know whether The Outlook still survives and Benson's letters to me have long since disappeared, with the exception of one, which I kept and cherished because I had a feeling that it was a landmark in my life.

"My Dear Beverley, We do not know each other as we might have done, but if you have come to know me at all you will have realised that one of my ‘complexes’ — I believe that is the fashionable expression — is a hatred of waste. Perhaps that is why I can claim some success as the Master of Magdalene. I keep a very strict watch on the outgoings of the Bursary! But it is not only a matter of accountancy. It goes deeper than that. I am bewildered and alarmed by the profligacy of Nature, and even more bewildered and alarmed by the wastage of this hideous war. I think that you are being wasted. You have many talents and none of them is being used. With your precarious state of health your sphere of activities must be limited, but that does not mean that you can be of no use at all. As soon as I see an opportunity I propose to do something about this. Once you suggested to me — with that never-failing impertinence which I find so engaging — that I was an ‘intri- guant.’ (I had been telling you the story of the ingenious manner in which I had persuaded a Chicago millionaire to give us ten thousand dollars for our beloved Library.) You could not have paid me a higher compliment. Intrigue, to me, is the spice of life. I am an ancient spider, sitting in the centre of an ancient web, weaving ancient spells. And some of them will shortly be speeding in your direction. My affectionate greetings, A.C.B."

The ink of the letter has dimmed to a sickly sepia, and the address on the envelope, with its faded penny stamp, is almost illegible. But I still feel a glow of warmth as I read it, with half a century of disillusionment behind me. [Beverley Nichols, The Unforgiving Minute: Some Confessions from Childhood to the Outbreak of the Second World War]

"Oh, how I hate the cold! It makes me feel so old; It makes me cough and wheeze; It makes me sniff and sneeze."

For this hitherto unpublished poem of Mr. E. F. Benson, I feel faintly guilty, as though I had stolen to Hall Caine's blotting-pad and extracted from it his latest interpretations of the Deity's desires. Yet, when one has heard a poem fourteen times, recited in a cheerful falsetto by the author, the hearer of it obtains almost a proprietary right in it. Which, here and now, I assume.

It happened like this. We had been lunching in his house in Brompton Square, the one house in London that I feel should have been mine by rights. Outside, April was ‘laughing her girlish laughter’ in the shape of a grey fog which refused to be dispelled even by the keenest of English winds. And, to show my contempt of the weather, I had gone to the piano to play him my latest song, which, not unnaturally, appeared to bore him considerably.

He then pushed me rudely from the piano, and played a Bach fugue to which, in the irresponsible gaiety of his spirit, he had affixed those words:

"Oh, how I hate the cold! It makes me feel so old; It makes me cough and wheeze; It makes me sniff and sneeze…"

But why bother about the cold in such a house? Why worry about fogs when you have brown rooms filled with silence, and red rooms plastered with ridiculously attractive posters — of the Underground Railway, and a hall which you have painted a Giotto blue with your own hands? And when, outside your window every morning, the trees are sighing and the branches beckoning with a benediction? I cannot think of Benson apart from his house — perhaps because I never see him anywhere else. But he is a house-proud man, so much that I believe that is one of the most important things about him.

In spite of my enviable reputation as an impertinent young man, I often find it exceedingly difficult to ask people exactly the sort of questions one wants to ask them. I could never, for instance, ask Lady Oxford what she really thought about Lloyd George. (As a matter of fact, she told me without being asked, but that is neither here nor there.) And I could never ask Benson if Dodo really was (as everybody so constantly asserts) a mere picture of Margot herself. But a few vague hints produced something of what I wanted to know.

‘Oh, that!’ he said. ‘I was only just twenty when I wrote the first half of it, and I had never seen her, as far as I know. It came out of my own inside. Then I shoved it away in a drawer and forgot about it. And then one day I remembered it, and did the rest.'

‘But the talk!’ I said. ‘Can you really talk like Dodo?’

‘Of course I can. Only it would be terribly boring in real life. It would drive you crazy, and would make you run howling down the stairs. Imagine anybody actually talking like Miss Bates in Emma.’

I frowned at him. ‘I should have thought,’ I said, ‘that conversation like that was extraordinarily difficult to write. I should have thought that you kept notebooks filled with epigrams' — and here I cast a suspicious eye at his desk, which used to belong to some ancient Irish bishop — 'which you consulted from time to time, taking out six epigrams per page. It seems that I was mistaken.’

‘You were.’ It was his turn to frown at me. ‘Anybody can write that sort of piffle straight off, if they'll only take the trouble to feel silly. Not stupid: silly. As a matter of fact, the best Dodo talk I ever wrote was Lady Charlie Beresford's in Mother. She didn't say any of the things I actually made her say, but she said exactly that sort of thing in exactly that sort of way.’

‘Please,’ I begged him, ‘talk like Dodo for a moment.’

Mr. E. F. Benson declined.

It was the first time he had ever mentioned Dodo to me. And as I thought of the writing of that vivacious book at the age of twenty, the thought of all that had happened to him, and to the world, and to everybody since that happy period, set me off on a train of imagination which I could pursue almost indefinitely. I looked at the smallish, pinkish, twinkling, urbane, grey-flannel-trousered man opposite me, and I said to myself: ‘Here is somebody who has lived a life extraordinarily like the life I should have liked to lead. Here is somebody who has been to the great parties of the ‘nineties, who has sat round a table while Oscar Wilde crooned his crooked, polished stories; has watched in amazement the double eyebrows of Lady Charlie Beresford; has, as a young man, listened to Melba and De Reszke in a glittering Covent Garden; has plunged his body into the clear blue of Capri waters; has been acclaimed as a literary lion — nauseating phrase! — by half London before he was out of the twenties; and has finally come to rest in a quiet London square, having retained the sparkle of his eyes, his taste for Italian wine, and, above all, his love of a sheet of white paper in the stillness of the night, when the very inkpot seems a magic pool, capable of producing a million secrets.’

But always I come back to his house. The furniture in it seems to have been placed there by the gentle hands of Time. The pictures have almost grown into the walls; and surely from the floors of it the carpets have sprung naturally, like some gracious form of grass. I once asked him to lunch with me. He refused, politely but firmly. He said: ‘I like my own house best.’

And I replied, ‘So do I.’

I do. I wish I could capture on paper the love which its owner feels for it. In the hall he points to the chequered floor and says, ‘I want to play chess on that some day.’ Every night I can imagine him saying that to himself, moving, in dreams, a gigantic knight to check a gigantic queen — or whatever does check queens in chess, for I do not play the game. And then he turns to a Stuart pulpit, stuck against the wall, and tells how his father, the lovable but fearsome Archbishop, was once on a tour in Devonshire and saw it being moved out of an old church, and bought it on the spot.

‘And in the summer,’ he said, ‘the sun sets as one is dining over there — through the trees.’

He leant forward and pointed to the desolate sky that glowered at us through the old windows. I looked, too. And, by some trick of imagination, it seemed that the sky was glowing, that it was evening, and summer, in Brompton Square. I looked back at Benson. His face was glowing with reflected happiness — the happiness of anticipation. That is, I believe, his secret — the reason why he never grows old, even though Dodo today is a little antiquated, and many of his other novels are growing more and more dusty on the shelves of the subscription libraries. He doesn't care, I'm sure. Nor would you, if you had a house like his.

I have just been reading David Blaize and think it lovely — the best school story yet written bar none. Here we have a continual stream of young officers to train as scouts and snipers and there has been a great run on David, as many as three copies of him on one course. Many of the lads who have come have few if any memories of anything but home and school as this is a young man's job. I think you would perhaps like to know the pleasure your book has given to these very fine and gallant lads who come to first army training school from the trenches.

When Fred Benson published The Challoners in 1904, Arthur, like all the children, quick to enter into a competitive possessiveness over their parents’ stories, commented in his diary, “Mr Challoner—though drawn too superficially from Papa— is an interesting character. But Fred fails purely from lack of sympathy with and knowledge of what really could be inside a man like that.” […] So another way to write “I hate my father” is to publish a novel in which an evangelical father recognizes, and recognizes truly, that his son— named for the author’s father’s idolized perfect and dead child— “almost hated him.”

Never had a character taken him over so completely, never had he written with such lack of inhibition about himself. True, it was himself as a boy, but it was a true, clear picture of adolescent passions. He thought he could do it by depicting himself under the name of David Blaize as he really had been, or had wanted to be, all those years ago: yellow-haired, sunny-natured and of an unbelievable goodness.