My Dear Elizabeth,

            Well ! Many Happy Returns of the Day. Now you have a Vote (and may you use it rightly), you are no longer a minor, you have managed to keep alive for one and twenty years, and congratulations.  The offering with which this is enclosed is accompanied by lashings of good wishes and greetings. Hope it is pleasing, but if you get seven similar offerings, Whitlocks will change it. Don’t be afraid to say so.

            You will have numerous tokens of esteem and whatnot, I hope. We’ll celebrate somehow sometime specially. The enclosed is but half the offering.

            I’ll be there at eight of the clock tomorrow evening, with no car. So I’ll risk the invitation and bring sleeping things, I believe I was invited. It’ll save having to dash off at eleven which would be silly.

            Then we have the week-end. I’m having the motor vetted thoroughly. Giving them ample time. Its noble of you to wait until the Saturday to drive down with me. And its better for two, and nicer for your mother to go by the saloon car. If you are all alone on Friday night I’ll come and keep wolves from the door. Lone or otherwise. But if it is better to let them think I’m staying here, we’ll say nothing and only get the idea on Friday night. Fender just said on the wireless “as a matter of fact no catch is easy in this game of cricket”.

            A certain aloofness this week-end must not be interpreted by you wrongly. It’s so easy to indulge in cosy cuddling when one is tete-a-tete with a nice and attractive female, and one is naturally suspicious of the justness of easy things. One is always nervous of spoiling something rather sterling by mere obviousness.

            Yes we’ll do something about holidays. You will be twenty one then, and perhaps It would be all right to gad off on our own. We’ll see, – what we’ll see.

But for now, surface gaities and enjoy this your day. You have now “bade fare-well to youth and childhood, finally

and irrevocably.  Its forward now, poise and self establishment; adult sanity and rich balance.  You deserve happiness galore, and may you get it.  I take games seriously, you take Life

seriously. My method is a useful safety valve, hence some virtue in the much maligned Publfci School System, and also the reason for the sanity and irritating (to foreigners) sang froid of the English.

You will have much to read and to think about.  Its selfish of me to take so much of your time. But at eight I’ll be there, earless, and happy to see you, happier if I see you happy. Your party shall be a success, for I’ll step into the breach if it flags, I’m famed for making parties go, a grim hearty-fool sort of a reputation. But you’ll have a grand time, and do not flinch from the lime-light of this your Pay.

The rest of your present shall be a dinner dance and a drive back from London, I promise you.  Consider it look-forward-to-able.

My love to your mother, and has she a corkscrew ?

Again congratulations on a well played twenty one not out, a firm promising opening to your innings.