2110-7-9-2

[V. Markham]

GOVERNMENT HOUSE. OTTAWA.

9th March, 1936.

Mrs. James Carruthers, C.H., 8, Gower Street, Bloomsbury, London, W. C., England.

My dear Violet,

Your long, delightful letter gave Susie and me enormous pleasure. I am afraid you have had a difficult and heavy winter, but I hope your trip will do you all the good in the world. Your account of the King's funeral is most impressive. I never realised before the influence that simple goodness and dutifulness could have in the world. There is much that I dislike about modern inventions, but there is no doubt that things like the Wireless get a personality across to millions who would otherwise never have realised it. The last message he sent me (which arrived the day of his death) was to beg me to remember that ski-ing was not a sport for a middle-aged man!

I have just begun my correspondence with the new King, and I have to feel my way pretty carefully.

John's health seems to be enormously improved, and we hope he will be out here pretty soon to recuperate.

We have just come back from a tour in French Canada, where I have had to make endless speeches in tolerable English and indifferent French. I am sending you a copy of a little private note I wrote on it.

Our friend, my Prime Minister, is wonderfully well again.

2.

GOVERNMENT HOUSE. OTTAWA.

Like you, I was anxious about him at Christmas, for he had got really tired - and I know too well what fatigue means in Prime Ministers! But he seems to have picked up wonderfully and is at present in excellent health and spirits. I am very happy with him, and indeed with all my Ministers.

This mourning moratorium, when we have no functions and little entertaining, gives me a wonderful chance of seeing people. I hold a reception three days a week for Members of Parliament at my office in Parliament Buildings, and every evening between tea and dinner I see young men of every type. There is uncommon good stuff in Canada among the youth.

I am trying to get the difficulties about my going to the States arranged. I think the King will be perfectly agreeable, but I must induce America to give up her passion for ceremonial. The President wants to come and visit us here early in June, and then take us down with him to his country house on the Hudson .

Susie is, on the whole, wonderfully well, and doing quite brilliantly. The thaw has begun, and in a month we shall be able to look at brown earth again.

Our warmest love to you.

Yours ever, John