Beschreibung:

WHITE, T.H. A 4pp. a.l.s., dated 3, Connaught Square, Alderney, C.I., dated 29. 3. 57, to John [Arlott], inviting him to: "bed and breakfast on your way to Guernsey -- but you had better have dinner with your friends at Tommy's, as I am still on the water waggon." He is prepared to lend Arlott his old fishing rods. "Of course you can have the wrecked fishing rods, but I advise you not to. If you are going to take up trout fishing, which is the most terrific sport in the world, far more difficult in timing than the most perfect on-drive at every cast, and far more breath-taking than breaking the sound barrier, and far more subtle than middle-eastern politics, you will not be content with less than the best tools brand new." Although White declares: "I have given it up for moral reasons, one of the great sacrifices of my life, and ought not in theory to encourage you," he warms to the task of explaining its fascination: "Whales are nothing, coelacanths are nothing, salmon are fools and governed by the laws of chance, coarse fish are mostly worms and bent pins, but the trout, the trout, the chalk-stream trout is the emperor of all. You fish for him all day with the cunning of a maniac -- and the skill of a Hobbs or Wooley -- glorious, graceful, classical strokes -- and the suffocating excitement of dicing with your own death, and at the end of the day you don't know that five minutes have passed." "I warn you," the letter ends good-humouredly, "that if you really take this up you will ruin yourself, as you will have to give up cricket and soccer." White moved to Alderney in 1946, and it remained his home for the last 16 years of his life. John Betjeman visited him there in 1950, and it was Betjeman who subsequently introduced White to John Arlott.