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Dear John, It was good to see you at the Hewitt's – it was altogether a very heart-warming evening, and I was very glad to have made the visit to Belfast at last. The only snag was that there was no opportunity to have a real talk with you, and this was one of the things I came for! All I could do was to ask you to think about the need for collecting material – letters, reminiscenses – of Bertie for the eventual biography. Now I really want to ask you how much I can count on your help with Bertie's papers. Although you are retired, it seems to me that you are as busy, if not more so, than you were before, and I am wondering if it is realistic to expect you to take an active part in sorting and collecting? I know I can't do it on my own, and that I will have to have help from Northern Ireland, but you, along with everyone else of Bertie's circle, probably still have to make money, and it is hardly fair to ask you to give up valuable free-lance time to work on something which, in the present situation, holds no guarantee of renumeration. As I said, I am not thinking of writing the actual biography myself, though, of course, I will contribute it. But we're none of us getting any younger, and I think it is important not to delay in getting the material together. Ideally, an author and publisher should be found at this point who would be willing to back the project and pay contributors. But as with the Irish Portraits, copyright fees can eventually be paid and also fees for helping with the editing. Not much of a carrot is it? I would be grateful if you can work out any business-like arrangement that would acceptable to you and make it possible for you to carry on the job as literary executor. If, however, it really us too heavy a burden, and you don't see any hope of devoting time to it within the foreseeable future, would it perhaps be better that you should say so now and that I should ask someone else to take over? Needless to say, I should be very sorry to lose your valuable help and support, but with so much work to be done, I feel I can't go on putting it off. I think I told you that I was going to take another 2-day-a-week job, but since coming home from Dublin I have decided to go completely free-lance, raking in as much translation and editing work as I can get. At the same time I will try to get started on sorting Bertie's papers into more accessible files – the first job being to find copies of the Ulster Journey scripts, so that the B.B.C. copies can be returned to Belfast (they asked me for them shortly after you
