23rd July
In July 1929 he was thinking about diamonds. In a letter to his mother from Kimberley, South Africa, he wrote about a visit – a most vulgar and interesting day’ – to the diamond mines. He deemed it in some ways 'most impressive to see the whole countryside turned upside down for the sake of diamonds’, and conveyed vivid scenes of 'barbed wire everywhere, black convicts working, police, rubbish heaps like mountains, holes in the ground 3000 feet deep’. In the end the experience was a negative one ('It is the most imbecile industry in the world, I suppose’) and he concluded that 'I don’t think I shall now ever give you or any body a diamond bracelet’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 29 July 1929)
