Here we are in 148 Waverley Place though Lulu may decide to move as we get no sun, but he has a roof for nights...(Oct.11, 1921)
BOHEMIA IN GREENWICH VILLAGE
I am well and fairly comfortably fixed at this address. The room has certain advantages. I can sleep on the roof on fine nights, and the sitting-room has two large and airy windows. (Llewelyn to his sister Gertrude, 1st November 1920, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys)
But it isn't a bad room and it is absolutely bare and Lulu and I can be as untidy as we like...
I am prostrate with exhaustion at this particular moment from buying things at the ten cent store... We keep knives and spoons and just two plates and two cups and saucers... on the chest of drawers. But the room has been prepared and the floor varnished... and it is an airy room... and very near Washington Square... (11 October 1921, John and Frances, the Love Letters of J.C.Powys to Frances Gregg)
John and Llewelyn rented that room in October 1920. They were relatively poor and, as Llewelyn relates: " my mind reverted to a magnificent overcoat I possessed, and already I began to experience a premonition of the misery I would suffer if it was taken from me. So it came to pass that my brother found himself the inhabitant of a room bare as a barn, and yet protected like a prison with the most ingenious contrivance ever invented by man's brain. For, whenever he went out of the room, even so much as to wash his hands in the bathroom, an iron rod that was craftily inserted into the floor would, with an ugly clang, slip automatically into its place in the lock, rendering by this means our disagreeable garret, with its coal-bag and heap of splintered kindling, absolutely impregnable until I, from the inside, had executed certain delicate manipulations." (The Verdict of Bridlegoose) They stayed in Waverly Place on and off until mid 1922.
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