[HEMING, Joyce (dates unknown)]. A Knight there Was. London, 1946, 8vo, original cream boards gilt. Provenance: Anthony Eden (old armorial bookplate). INSCRIBED BY EDEN in pencil, "Sent me by the mother who wrote it. The boy was in 60th. A. E." RARE.

[HEMING, Joyce (dates unknown)].  A Knight there Was. By Mary England [i.e. a pseudonym]. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1946. 8vo (185 x 125mm). Half title, title within woodcut typographical border. Original cream silk paper boards lettered in gilt (corners bumped, spine a little darkened, without a dust-jacket [?as issued]). "Copyright. First Edition, December 1944. Reprinted December 1944, 1946" (from the verso of the title). Provenance: Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon (old armorial bookplate). The book is a deeply moving account of a mother's loss of her son in the Second World War. INSCRIBED BY ANTHONY EDEN in pencil on the front free endpaper, "Sent me by the mother who wrote it. The boy was in 60th. A. E." The boy in question was Michael Savage Heming (1920-42) who, serving with the 60th Regiment of Foot, was killed in action at El Alamein in 1942 at the age of 22. He was a promising conductor and composer and a former student at The Royal Academy of Music. His "Threnody for a Soldier Killed in Action" was re-constructed from musical sketches which were found among his effects and returned to England after his death. The finished piece was shown by Michael's father Percy Heming, a professional operatic baritone, to his friend John Barbirolli, who premiered it at Sheffield Town Hall with the Hallé Orchestra on 14 January 1944, on what would have been Michael's 24th birthday. The meaning of the gift of the book, which bears no explanatory presentation inscription from the author, would have been clear to Eden since he had lost his own son, Simon, in Burma in June 1945, at the age of 20. The book's epigraph, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, is particularly poignant: "A Knyght there was, and that a worthy man, / That fro the tyme that he firste began / To riden out, he loved chivalrie / Trouthe and honour, fredom and curtesie ... And evermore he hadde a sovereyn prys; / And though that he were worthy, he was wys, / And of his port, as meeke as is a mayde. / He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In al his lyf unto no manner wight. / He was a verray, parfit, gentil Knyght." RARE.