ART, WRITING AND MYOPIA with. At the same time, she was able to draw touching realistic sketches of mundane objects such as her daughter’s baby shoes and her neighbour in the maternity hospital. The diminutive drawings, made when she was a student, raise some issues relating to her acute myopia, which may be tentatively linked to and have inspired some aspects of the nature writing that characterised her wartime life in Potacre, Llangarron1 (Herefordshire) in her seminal work Autobiography (1943), and also in her hitherto unpublished letters to her brother when he was a prisoner of war (PoW 1940–45). Her detailed observations and vivid perception of the natural world are detailed in the second part of this extended essay. The earliest record of her myopia is in a letter written to her brother Roger (Whistler) in September 1924 when she was fifteen years old and he eight. She refers to her altered appearance with the new spectacles she is forced to wear: ‘How would you like me in big goggeldy glasses […] they make me look very stern.’ As one very short-sighted person when faced with a tiny detailed drawing related to me, ‘We took off our glasses to look closely, having a small amount of perfect vision very close to the eye.’ It may or may not be relevant that myopia has been found to occur more frequently in youths with heightened IQ . Here I offer examples of her work, grouped not by age but by medium and subject, using examples of her art held by the author and friends. Thanks are given to Cassie Davis for permission to publish her mother’s drawings, for which she holds copyright, to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, for making some of the later drawings available and to Tom Nightingale. Diminutive drawings, pen and watercolour Margiad enrolled into the Hereford School of Art in 1926, aged seventeen, studying etching and drawing. A remarkable series of diminutive drawings exist which are signed by her (PW = Peggy Whistler) and appear to be costume designs for a restoration comedy. 7