254 To the Rev. Denis Tyndall

[Tyndall, an old boy of King Edward's, Birmingham, had written to Tolkien recalling their schooldays together.]

9 January 1964

76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

My dear Tyndall,

How delightful to get a card from you, and how kind of you to think of me. ....

I do remember very clearly the old IVth class room and Dickie; indeed I even remember that we read with him a non-classical Greek text furbished up by a German (Willamowitz Möllendorf?) in usum scholarum which bored me extremely. I behaved very badly, together with that later model of rectitude and headmasterly seriousness Christopher Wiseman, as did many of those released from the strict regime of the class below under Heath. Dickie was not an inspiring form-master and made Greek and Roman history as boring as I suspect he felt them to be; but he was immensely interesting as a person. I kept up with him and the Beak (R. C. Gilson) until they died.

My memory is mainly pictorial and vague on dates, but I have a notion that you were a little senior to me and left school first, so that the friends of my later year or two were junior, and mostly younger than myself -1 stayed on till I was nearly 20! I was brought up to Oxford by car (then a novelty), together with L. K. Sands, by Dickie: in the October of that astonishing hot year 1911, and we found every one in flannels boating on the river. Punts were then as strange to me as camels; but I later learned to manage them. ....

I was 72 on Jan 3, and my eldest grandchild (now at St Andrews) comes of age on Saturday next, but as you say I tick over. ....

Yours ever,
[signature not on carbon copy]