Mr. Eric Edward Watkins —

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I often used visited Kathleen and Eric when they lived at Petts Wood in suburban Kent.

Opinions on Checkov or the Brontes 'Howarth' would be aired in their garden, or one of their book filled rooms, A radio tuned to a cricket commentary, with the sound of a bat hitting a ball and then, subdued applause, would be the muted background to the discussion.

They spoke in the patrician tones of their generation. Kathleen with the echoes of Wendy Hiller and Celia Hammond in her voice, and Eric with the charm of Rex Harrison and Trevor Howard in his. Their company was civilisation as we knew it.

It may well be that language is no longer a determinant of class, and that it has been decreed that Northern consonants and vowels have been accorded equal status to their Southern counterparts, but Kathleen recalls a time when any deviation from the norm was eradicated with some vigour in her charming essay on Edwardian childhood ‘The Elocution Lesson’ But it must also be recorded that Kathleen and Eric were considered with some awe by our Dutch relations in that every single word they said could be clearly understood.

One feels that Kathleen and Eric's true habitat was an earlier, pre-war residence in Alma Square, St John’s Wood - very near the ‘Lord’s’ Cricket ground. Eric wrote his own tribute to Lord's and cricket in his poem to Neville Cardus - and the approaching apocalypse too!

Eric confessed that one reason for their choice of the 'Petts Wood' location had been the frequency of late night trains to London - very useful when sub-editing late at night in Fleet Street. This led to the origin of the phrase ‘Petts Wood Widows’ (A particular role enacted by Kathleen when Eric ‘retired’ to the ‘Times’ on the collapse of ‘The News Chronicle’)

Kathleen’s neighbour, Betty Sell, once told me of Kathleen’s reaction to the first visit from a friend of Eric’s, Henry Williamson, who sat down, in a chair, swept back, white hairs from his forehead with his hand and, enquired , “Do you think women still find me attractive.”

Eric edited a few of Henry Williamson’s books from the ‘Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight’ and one of the series is dedicated to Kathleen and Eric.

Eric wrote few poems, unsurprising, perhaps, for such a stern critic - see 'Set It Down' ; but one of them ‘To Stevie’ indicates what sort of poem a practised sub-editor would write. If TS Elliot ‘measured his life in coffee spoons’ then Eric measured his in pica points.

Eric and Kathleen believed in the ‘New Jerusalem’ instigated by the Labour Party after the second world war and both were fervent supporters of the emerging welfare state. Their beliefs were always liberal. Eric had been to the left in his stance over the Vietnam War and records of Peter Paul an Mary and Bob Dylan were mixed up with recordings of Kathleen Ferrier and poetry recitals of Keats. (In common, it would seem, with others of his generation, Winnie-the-Pooh was held in great esteem, second only to Hamlet for his sagacity and philosophical introspection.) But, in one respect, Eric was more extreme than many, and expressed his stance in a poem called ‘A Prayer’ - a stance that is being increasingly adopted today.