July 28th 1917 Havelock Barracks, Lucknow, India
… we are having some terrible weather out hear, its never stop raining for five days, I don’t think I have ever witnessed it in England to rain, how it does out hear, it comes down heavy to, I hope you like the Indian Rose I am sending you, we don’t often see Roses growing out here, morest we see, is Ants, the land is fairly alive with them, and after it has been raining, and the sun comes out we often have a plague of flying Ants, especialy at night, they always make for the lamps we have hung in the Bugalow, the light seems to attract all the insects there is, what with Grass Hoppers and Moss Keaters, you don’t get much rest…
…you ask me what I mean to do, after I have done out here, well if I have the pleasure of learning Engineering, I think it would suit me up to the Mark, I am saying this as highly interested in anything of that line, so if I am spared to come home, and work till I get a few shillings, and then I can pay to learn. I have wrote to London, to the International Schools for a Book of Engineering hoping I succeed in getting it, I can see I have been a fool to myself in the past, but I’m only young (“prime of life”), but I have learned more this last three years than ever I new, it will be three year’s on the 5th of August, since I listed, of which I am pleased in one way and not in another, as I don’t think I should ever had of joined the colours if the War hadn’t of broke out…
For more about the writer of this letter go here. On the envelope containing ‘Letters from men at the front in the last war’ one of Kittie’s executors, Louise Rosales, wrote: ‘Quinn seems a rare character.’
I particularly like how the rose looks like a figure with a head and two arms, one raised. I thought I’d seen a drawing or painting exactly like it, but the closest I could find is the Pokémon Roselia.
Thank you. Roselia is delightful, the last of a long line of female roses with and without faces stretching back through Le Petit Prince, Lewis Carroll, Le Roman de la Rose, to the ‘beloved’ of The Song of Solomon, and probably earlier.
You’re undoubtedly right about the anthropomorphic look of Quinn’s rose for Kittie. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but now I think he perhaps pressed it so that the left hand leaf as we look at it (the rose’s right hand) is saluting..? (It was certainly pressed separately before he put it in with the letter.)
What might one feel as a twenty-one-year-old miner from Sheffield, corresponding with a fifty-year-old upper-class lady from Hampstead who sent one whatever one asked for?