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A child's desperate anguish over a broken doll is just as poignant while it lasts as a mother's grief for a dying child.
So he visualised an incident in overrun Belgium when the Germans strode across it smashing and killing everything in their path. A poor old woman, serene and happy, though there was nothing in her life to live for but her plot of flower garden, radiant just then with a glorious show of hyacinths and spring flowers of all descriptions. This garden by a corner cottage was in the path of a company of soldiers who could just as easily have passed round it. We showed only their heavy feet trampling all those lovely flowers into the dust. It tore at the heart-strings of all the people in the studio who had gardens and allotments of their own, but no one thought it really tragic on the screen.
We had better success however in a much more ambitious subject which required the building up of a corner of a Belgian town in a meadow which we had recently rented for another purpose. This was a very effective set comprising some cottages, two or three small shops and the west-end of one of those large churches which in Belgium seem so completely out of proportion to the little towns or villages which they dominate. It took the best endeavours of our designers and all our carpenters and stagehands to erect and paint it and it must, one way and another, have occupied much of my own time. Yet the story which it enshrined has utterly faded from my mind, while I remember the old lady's flower garden distinctly. Perhaps there was something in Thurston's idea of deep suffering in low-level tragedy.
He was a strangely lovable unlovely character: very kind, very clever, very selfish. He had a marvellously good and patient wife — patience in any woman in her position would have been a marvel, for he must have been dreadfully difficult to live with, though he had great charm. He would write all day — when he wasn't discussing films with me — and then in the evening he liked to collect his family and friends around him and read his morning's work over to them. This was by no means an ordeal for those who listened, for he read delightfully and well. He had a soft and pleasant voice and as we sat in silence round the fireside, the phrases he had nurtured and loved all day came easily and attractively over to us. I suppose his books are out of fashion now, for that is the fate of modern writers in an age when far too many books are written and the consequently small editions soon are out of print and crowded off the shelves and out of libraries. His
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