Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Letters copyright © 2020 Eileen Alexander

Compilation copyright © 2020 David McGowan

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Cover photographs: Couple kissing © Hulton Deutsch/Getty Images; St Paul’s © Popperfoto/Getty Images

David McGowan asserts the moral right to be identified as the editor of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008311209

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008311223

Version: 2020-03-24

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Contents

5  Foreword by Oswyn Murray

6 Historical Introduction by David Crane

7  1 Drumnadrochit, summer 1939

8  September 1939–April 1940

9  2 ‘No time to sit on brood’

10  May–September 1940

11  3 My Young Fellow

12  September–December 1940

13  4 Blitz

14  January–March 1941

15  5 Intentions

16  March–September 1941

17  6 A Rill Civil Servant

18  September–December 1941

19  7 Your Intended

20  January–May 1942

21  8 Separation

22  May–December 1942

23  9 Limbo

24  January 1943–March 1944

25  10 The Long Wait

26  April 1944–March 1946

27  11 Twin Compasses

28  Postscript

29  Dramatis Personae

30  Picture Section

31  About the Author

32  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Foreword by Oswyn Murray

In the autumn of 2017 I received an email from an unknown correspondent:

Dear Mr Murray,

I hope you will forgive the intrusion, but I recently purchased a large quantity of wartime correspondence, via eBay, written by Eileen Alexander (soon to be Ellenbogen) in which I have found many references to your father, as Eileen worked with him in S9 at the Air Ministry during World War Two. I attach details of a weekend she spent with your family in Summer 1943. I have considered long and hard whether this is the right thing to do, and am basing my decision on the fact that if there were written details of my own family from over 70 years ago I would very much like to read them. Eileen held your father in the very highest regard and her letters are bejewelled with words like kind, intellectual, understanding, humanist regarding him. Although it is only just over 70 years ago – the idyllic weekend she describes seems to certainly belong to a lost era …

With very best wishes,

David McGowan

I replied enthusiastically:

I have often blessed my parents for giving me a name (my grandfather’s) that is unique on the world wide web, but never more so than on receiving your email at the age of 80. Yes I still remember Corners vividly, our home from before my birth in 1937 to 1945, the doodlebugs, the air raid shelter, the 1945 election (when we were the HQ of the local Liberals), the garden and its wood. Your extracts are however the only written record I know of that period, and they are lovely. I do remember vaguely the name of Eileen Alexander, who sent Christmas cards every year, and I can locate most of the places and people she mentions.

It seems my father was still in the Air Ministry in 1943; but in that year he moved to be civil service head of SOE under General Gubbins, an experience he claimed had been expunged from his memory by concussion at the end of the war; but my first suitcase was one designed to hold a radio transmitter to be parachuted into France … Subsequently Patrick went on to the Ministry of Power, where he headed the electricity division, being responsible for the nationalisation of electricity and its denationalisation twenty years later, and for the creation of a nuclear power industry. He retired in 1965, and went to live in the south of France and Weybridge.

Thus began an unexpected friendship during which David and I researched his find. For thirteen years he had been the sole carer of his aged mother and confined to the house much of the time; to occupy himself he decided to buy letters on eBay and perhaps make a book out of them. By pure chance he bought a small bundle of letters from Eileen Alexander, and realised that these were truly remarkable; so he contacted the seller and offered to purchase the rest. A year passed, and he had given up hope, when finally the seller offered him the remaining letters for the original auction price.

Eileen Alexander graduated in 1939 with a brilliant first-class degree in English from Girton College, Cambridge; her subsequent accident in a car driven by her future husband, Gershon Ellenbogen, begins the correspondence and their love affair. There were approximately fourteen hundred of these letters, written almost daily, covering the years 1939 to 1947. David began transcribing them; he sent me a first volume and then three further ones, over sixteen hundred pages covering roughly half of the correspondence. I began to quail at the thought of a book as long as Proust, and suggested that he try to edit it down to a single volume with the idea of publication. Within ten days that volume arrived, covering the years of courtship up to Eileen’s reunion with Gershon and marriage. We christened it Love in the Blitz, and I introduced him to a family friend, the literary agent Felicity Bryan. She read it while confined with flu on her sick bed, and the next day phoned David and offered to be his agent. Together the three of us began to research the history of the correspondence.

The letters appear to have been first auctioned at Bridport Auction House in a bundle of miscellaneous papers shortly after Gershon’s death in 2003; presumably they had been part of his house clearance. The lot did not sell, and was taken away by an employee, who sorted the letters out from the rest of the papers and identified the writer, but found the task of transcription too difficult. A decade later, in January 2015, she put them back into the auction house as a separate lot:

Large quantity of correspondence (1939–1947) written by Eileen Ellenbogen (née Alexander) to Gershon Ellenbogen. Eileen Ellenbogen, a graduate of Girton College, was a noted teacher, writer and translator – especially of George Simenon’s Maigret books. In WWII Gershon Ellenbogen, who was in the RAF, worked for British Military Intelligence in Cairo.

The letters were bought for £250 by the dealer who subsequently began offering them on eBay until David’s intervention. Meanwhile David researched the family and friends of the couple, and Felicity tracked down Eileen’s grandchildren, who gave their assent for the letters to be published.

So these letters, surely some of the most beautiful and vivid love letters ever to be written during the Second World War, have survived through a series of chances, to be rescued from oblivion by David McGowan, their devoted transcriber and editor.

We plunge into the correspondence and follow the young writer’s experiences day by day with little knowledge of what lies ahead, as she lives through the war years. Slowly we learn to know her idiosyncrasies, her growing love, her relations with her rather ‘odd’ – as she describes them – family, her experience of the Blitz in London. We learn to trust her judgements on her circle of friends and acquaintances and we find them increasingly hilarious. Everything is seen through her eyes: even her beloved is only dimly reflected in her comments. We are amazed at her naivety and her ignorance of sex. We may admire her independent stance on Judaism and some of her progressive views on politics.

We begin, too, to appreciate that Eileen is involved in a new literary genre with a multiple purpose. The first is to enmesh her beloved in her life, to keep him engaged with herself and prevent him straying during their long separation – the sort of narrative letters that Ovid imagines Penelope writing to Ulysses. She wants to display all her talents, her knowledge, her first-class degree, her ability to find a quotation in Elizabethan literature for every eventuality. There is also much about her friends’ liaisons – perhaps in order to warn Gershon to keep faith with her.

The second is to create an intensely personal narrative, a type of Bildungsroman, so rich that it holds us as we follow the daily experience of a young woman setting out on life, with all its uncertainties, exploring her environment and learning from the mistakes of those around her.

The third is perhaps inadvertent; without knowing it, she is fashioning a feminist vision of war, a description of war as it is seen by women, not men – a time of absence and waiting, of hoping and doubting, of being caught between tradition and modernity, desire and faithfulness. That makes the narrative almost unique, the outside world impinges, disasters hit her, but she never acts, only reacts: and yet life goes on apparently normally. Elias Canetti’s famous description of contemporary London, Party in the Blitz, seems mean-spirited and randomly vicious beside Eileen’s instantaneous, daily, witty and loveable take on the undisturbed rhythms of Cambridge and London Jewish life in wartime Britain.

Did she ever think of publishing? She knew she had a talent for ‘the Art of letter-writing’, but publishing was never part of her plan. In September 1943 she wrote: ‘Pan has just come in to say: “Really, the care you take over your letters to Gershon – one would think that you were writing for future publication.” I looked at him Sternly, my dear love, & said: “Oh! no, I’m writing for a far more important reason than that.” But one day, he’ll learn, my love. Pan is the sort of person who will love a woman as I love you.’

Rather, her letters and her love for Gershon were her life: ‘I once thought that I had a genius for writing,’ she told him, ‘but I find instead I have a genius for love.’

As far as I’m concerned all my creative energies, all my critical & social faculties, all my moods and thoughts, and, above all, all the boundless sea of my love for you go into my letters to you … My letters are only a translation of my love, my darling. I can only give you my love itself when I’m with you, when I’m lying back in your arms – then, darling, I can give you my love with my voice & my eyes & my body. I am tired of being a translator, my darling. I want to be a creative genius again. If I have any creative genius, my dear love, it is in my love & not in my writing, which is insignificant & meaningless beside my love. What would the outside world know of my love for you, darling, if they were to read my letters? They would know what I know of the Odyssey when I read it in translation – but you are the only person, my darling, who has read the story of my love in the original and you are the only person who understands it fully & truly. That’s good, darling. It was a story which was written for you & only for you. I don’t want anyone else to understand it. It is not their story – it is only our story. I’m as arrogant & exclusive about our love as Ouspensky is about his Esoteric Knowledge.

This was ultimately the point: ‘I wonder what anyone would think if they suddenly came across my letters to you & started reading them in chronological order? I think they’d say “This girl never lived till she loved” – and it would be true, darling. Until I loved you, I was in the process of undergoing intellectual and emotional dry-rot. If I’d never known you – people, in later years, would have looked at me as though they’d taken a mouthful of vinegar – with the corners of their mouths screwed up, & said “Wormwood! Wormwood!” – but now they’ll say “While she lived she was a true lover & therefore she had a good end.”’

As she wrote these letters Eileen was surely thinking of the portrayal of courtly love in her favourite book by C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, published in 1936, which she described as ‘the finest piece of Medieval literary criticism of our time & perhaps of all time’. She seems to see herself half ‘in the precarious dream-world of medieval love poetry’, as the faithful damsel of troubadour tradition in her chastity belt, creating a romance as she writes to her beloved lord away on the Crusades about the strange deeds at home in their feudal castle. She moves between ‘the allegory of the Body and the Heart’. And she follows C. S. Lewis in believing in the continuity of courtly love into the English literary tradition of Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and John Donne. She is a supreme writer of modern literary prose, schooled by her love of English literature from Malory to Elizabethan and modern literature, yet with all the wickedness of a Stella Gibbons in her delight in ‘mollocking’. Compared to these, Eileen seems scarcely aware of Jewish antecedents, such as the Song of Songs or the books of Ruth and Esther, let alone the Jewish and Arabic love poetry of medieval Spain, still to be discovered. Yet she has written a masterpiece worthy to stand with these earlier writings in the Jewish tradition, alongside Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962); and perhaps her insistence on the virtues of chastity and faithfulness, so at odds with her contemporaries, owes much to her Jewish upbringing.

The experience of love is both unique and universal, but it changes almost imperceptibly in each generation. Too often it is reflected in recollection, when, for whatever reason it is lost, its intensity dispersed or transformed by memory, as in Proust or the late poems of Thomas Hardy. There are many accounts of love from the two world wars, beginning with Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) and Helen Thomas’s memoirs (1926 and 1931). Diana Athill – Eileen’s exact contemporary, who graduated from Oxford in the same year – may have experienced some of the same emotional highs and lows as Eileen as she corresponded with her fiancé, also in Egypt, but their relationship failed: he betrayed her (Instead of a Letter, 1963) and the letters themselves are lost. One of the nearest accounts in both time and place is Laurence Whistler’s numinous The Initials in the Heart (1964) about his love for the actress Jill Furse in the early years of the war, her death and his subsequent grieving for the rest of his life. But that too is about loss, and, like Athill’s account, is written twenty years after the event in an attempt to assuage his grief.

The one thing that such historical narratives lack, however personal they are, is ignorance of the future, and so they cannot capture the vividness of living in the present as this book does. This is what makes Eileen Alexander’s letters such an immense literary discovery. It is a description of love as it unfolds, ‘suspended between unborn tomorrow & dead yesterday’, as she wrote in the middle of war, an emotion as it is experienced by a young woman day by day, existing in a moment of history, unique to its time but universal in its meaning.

Historical Introduction by David Crane

On 19 July 1939, as Europe drifted towards war, a short report from the police courts under the mildly sardonic heading ‘DIFFERENT TYPE OF STUDENT HAD SIMILAR SORT OF ACCIDENT’ appeared in the inside pages of the Cambridge Daily News. ‘When a research student at Cambridge University,’ the piece began, ‘was summoned at the Maidenhead Borough Police Court on Monday for alleged dangerous driving and for failing to conform to a “Halt” sign at Braywick cross-roads on June 29th, he said to the magistrates, “I want to persuade you that I am not one of those reckless undergraduates about whom you have heard from time to time. I have already spent four years at Cambridge University, having gained a State Scholarship and two other scholarships and am now beginning my fifth year of study as a research student. During the four years I have been there, I have held various positions of responsibility in the life of the university, and have never come into contact with the Cambridge police or other authorities at all. I am not just a reckless undergraduate, but a research student of four years.”’

‘It was an accident that might happen to anyone,’ he told the court – the car roof was down, the sun was in his eyes, the road unfamiliar – but that was probably not a wise line to take. ‘It was alleged in evidence,’ the report went on, that he had driven over a major junction ‘at colossal speed’, smashed into a car coming from his right on the main Maidenhead to Windsor road, spinning his car over onto the far side of the road twenty-eight feet away and hurling his ‘lady passenger … herself a Cambridge student’ out of the passenger seat and onto the tarmac.

The ‘lady passenger … on her way to London to meet her parents who were coming home from Egypt the next day’ was Eileen Alexander, and the driver – banned from driving for a year, fined £3 and ordered to pay costs – was the Liverpool-born son of devoutly Jewish parents, with a double-first in classics and psychology, called Gershon Ellenbogen, the recipient of these letters. At the time the case came to court Eileen was in Maidenhead hospital, slowly and painfully recovering from her injuries, her nose and collarbone broken, her teeth and left eye-socket damaged, her face bruised and swollen.

If there was one event in her life, however, that Eileen would not have seen undone it was that car crash. She had first met Gershon Ellenbogen in the summer of 1938 but it was the accident that changed their lives, turning a friendship that might have naturally ended with their Cambridge days into the all-consuming love affair celebrated in these letters.

Eileen’s remarkably forgiving letter from her hospital bed, with which this volume opens, was just the first trickle in an unstoppable flood of words that passed between them over the long years of war. At some stage Gershon’s letters to her were either lost or destroyed, but he preserved hers to the end of his life, more than a thousand of them in all, written from air-raid shelters and office desks, on buses and station platforms, in hotel foyers and under hair-dryers, in that minuscule hand of hers that could have damaged stronger eyesights than Gershon’s.

Like the lovers in a poem of Donne’s – a God in her pantheon second only to Shakespeare – Eileen lived through Gershon, happy only when she was writing to him or when a letter from him arrived to obliterate the space between them. In many ways the letters are closer to a diary than love letters, and closer still to an uninhibited and unstoppable stream of consciousness than either – a ‘complete chronicle’ of her life, waking and sleeping, as she put it – with that ‘little room’ of Donne’s lovers that she inhabited, peopled with a wonderful array of characters and incident.

Even were these letters less brilliantly written they would still be of historical interest for the people Eileen knew, from wartime cabinet ministers, financiers, soldiers, philanthropists and art collectors to some of the major figures in the Zionist movement and the future State of Israel. She was lucky to have been part of a very bright Cambridge set, and yet it is just as much the London beyond her friends and family, the London of chance meetings in cinema queues and Lyons Corner Houses, of overheard snatches of conversations in restaurants and shelters – the London of the Blitz – that gives her letters their life and their colour.

These letters – vibrant, intimate, joyous, dark, angry, obsessive, neurotic, generous, scurrilous and very, very funny by turns – can speak for themselves, but something needs to be said of the remarkable woman who wrote them.

Eileen Helen Alexander was born in Cairo on 13 April 1917, the oldest of three children of Vicky Mosseri and Alec Alexander, a much-loved and highly successful South African-born and Cambridge-educated Cairo barrister of impoverished Polish Jewish parents. While it was from her father that Eileen inherited her intellectual rigour and fierce attachment to Cambridge, her Italian Jewish mother’s influence was equally marked. Each summer the Alexanders would escape the Cairo heat for the Highlands of Scotland and London’s Mayfair Hotel, but it was as ‘a poor little rich girl’, surrounded by the uncles, aunts and cousins of her mother’s sprawling, immensely wealthy, and interrelated Mosseri family that she spent her cosseted and unhappy childhood. ‘I think I should inform you that she is a very brilliant daughter of a very brilliant father,’ Eileen’s headmaster at the Cairo English School began a letter in support of her application to Girton in the summer of 1934 – a reference that tellingly says more about her parents than it does Eileen:

Mr Alexander is a Jew and Mrs Alexander is a member of the Mosseri family, one of the principal Jewish families in Central Europe and the Near East. She also is a woman of very great ability and the widest education … Mrs Alexander is extremely particular, not to say old-fashioned, in the upbringing of her daughter and until the time comes for her to go to Cambridge she would, I know, hesitate to send her to England alone or leave her there after her own departure … Eileen, herself … hopes to be called to the Bar and it is her ambition eventually to enter Parliament.

If ever one heard the voice and ambitions of the parent rather than the child it is in that last sentence, but if Alec Alexander had already mapped out the future for his daughter, Eileen had other ideas. When ‘I was about sixteen,’ she wrote later,

my father hauled me off to Cambridge to see the Mistress & the Director of Studies in Law (I knew I was going to read English but Dad refused to believe anything so revolutionary – so, in spite of my protests, he arranged that I should be interviewed as a prospective law-student). It was a grilling day in August, I remember. I dressed very carefully in my best clothes to give myself confidence. (I was very frightened) Dad took one look at me & said that he wasn’t going to be a party to the prejudicing of my chances – by letting me appear before women of High Living & Thinking, with short-sleeves (it was, as I have said before, a grilling day in August) and looking as though I were an associate of the doubtful revels of Brighter Mayfair. He ransacked my wardrobe, while I stood by, crying – and drew forth a knitted jersey which I kept for fishing in Scotland – a very old skirt and a pair of hearty shoes – and said ‘wear those’. I did – and cried all the way to Cambridge … We had an uneventful interview with the Mistress – but I recovered my self-respect with the D of S in Law. She and Dad were obviously twin souls. They discussed highly technical points of International Law for a long time – while I sat languidly staring out of the window. Then she turned to me & asked where my particular interest in the Law lay … I said – nowhere – I was going to read English. She drew herself up to her full height, turned a cold eye on my father & asked him why we were seeing her if that was the position. He had nothing to say in answer to that & we withdrew hastily.

It would be another two years before Eileen finally escaped parents, siblings and a Cairo she had grown to hate, but in the October of 1936 she finally had her wish and left to study English at Cambridge. The official college photograph of the Girton entrants for that year shows the young woman whom Gershon would have first met, uncomfortably perched second from the right in the third row from the back, a nineteen-year-old who looks little more than half that age, a schoolgirl ‘bent on celibacy’, as she put it, and still recognisably the same physically awkward, emotionally uncertain adolescent her father had dragged to the Girton interview two years before.

If this is nothing like the whole story – in a college full of ‘Amazonian clergyman’s daughters with bulging, scrawny legs’ she was happy enough to play the ‘Mosseri card’ when it suited – it is worth keeping in mind this Eileen because for all the brilliance and intellectual swagger of the letters this is the young woman who wrote them. She had come up to Cambridge, too, with every hope of emulating her father’s dazzling record, but if a ‘second’ in ‘Prelims’ was not disgrace enough for an Alexander, she had spent the summer of 1938 – ‘ill with anxiety’ from her father’s ‘intellectual demands’ – recovering in the Evelyn Nursing Home from a duodenal ulcer which had stopped her even sitting the Part I of her English Tripos.

It was a low period in her life, brightened only by her first meeting with Gershon, but a year later redemption had come. As she set off to meet her parents with Gershon driving her car, ‘Semiramis’, it was to give her father the news that she had gained one of only three firsts awarded that year to women in the English Tripos. She had also won a college prize, and with a place at Cambridge to begin research with the promise of some teaching, her academic future seemed assured. All she had ever wanted as she grew up, she said, was to be a Cambridge don, and now there seemed nothing to stop her.

We first meet Eileen in July 1939, recovering in hospital, her hopes for the future still alive in spite of a worsening situation in Europe. When she is well enough to travel she goes for the summer to the family’s holiday house near Drumnadrochit, high above Loch Ness, and it is not until 23 August, the same day that the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact is signed, that the first half-fearful, half-comic references to the outside world break in on her letters. From this point, as it becomes clear that there is to be no second Munich, the fragile quiet that had held since Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in the spring unravels at frightening speed. On 24 August, Parliament passes an Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, giving the government control over virtually every aspect of national life. On the 25th, Britain and France reaffirm their commitment to Polish independence and territorial integrity and, six days later, in the early hours of 1 September, German troops cross the border into Poland. By 6 a.m. that same day Warsaw will be under air attack and Britain and France left facing the consequences of their Polish alliance.

1
Drumnadrochit, summer 1939

Monday 17 July Gershon – what everyone seems to have forgotten is that if I hadn’t asked you to drive me to London that Tuesday, you would never have had your arm broken & your life thoroughly disorganized for a considerable period of time – Furthermore if I had directed you rightly we’d never have got into that damned death trap of a side-road.

I have been brooding on this for a very long time Gershon, and at nights I have lain trying & trying to recall something about the accident but I simply can’t remember a word, so I shall not even be able to help you by corroborating your evidence.

Whichever way the verdict goes, please remember that I feel, absolutely certainly and sincerely, that the accident was not down to your carelessness but to pure chance, and that I owe you nothing but profound gratitude for the friendship and loyalty you have shown me during all these weeks of illness.

The very best of luck Gershon – I am looking forward to seeing you after this irksome business is all over, today.

Wednesday 19 July Talking of my appearance – assuming (rather dangerously – for I never can tell with you whether what you say is what you mean & vice versa – as I think I’ve said before) that you were serious when you asked me to give you a photograph of me – I asked my mother whether we had any copies of the Family Features still in our possession – but, no, it seems that all 24 are scattered among Alexander’s and Mosseri’s over an area stretching from Cape Town to Vancouver – so, alas, I cannot send you one of those, but must wait until my transitory (as opposed to permanent) blemishes have gone, & then have one done especially for you at one of those kind misty photographers who define one’s eyelash, a shoulder curve, & the tip of an ear, and have the rest enveloped in a kindly greyish haze. (I mean that you shall have a photograph of me if, though I can hardly credit it, you really want such a useless commodity.)

Friday 21 July My face is now fully exposed to the world & it looks like the rear elevation of a baboon. This is very disconcerting, as it gets no better & I am going to be driven very slowly to London on Monday for X-ray treatment. I’m so glad I didn’t show it to you on Monday – it is perfectly horrible & I don’t want anyone to see me while it’s like this. I do hope they’ll find something to cure it – it looks like bright pink – and – yellow leprosy to me but the Doctors will never listen to a lay-diagnosis.

Friday 28 July Yesterday my parents went to Cambridge to choose lodgings for me, and I had a lovely evening when they came back, listening to their accounts of all the people they met, (while calling on Miss Bradbrook in Girton) who told them how clever I was – D’you think I shall ever get used to the idea of being clever, Gershon, or believe that I really am? (The odd thing is that though I don’t feel in the least convinced of it myself, I love other people thinking it.) Apparently they have found magnificent rooms for me – and quite near the Evelyn too, just in case!

Aubrey sent me the Cambridge Daily News with its beastly little mean-spirited lead-line & account of the accident. I think it would be a good idea if you had a Medieval Shivering of Lances with the Editor while I hid beneath a bush – prodding him in the behind with a two-handed sword – but this is as you please, of course.

Yesterday afternoon Joan Aubertin and her fiancé came to see me – what with seeing Ian for the first time since the end of term & having someone at last to whom she could expand about her first (how well I knew that feeling before I. & May’s party!) Joan hopped about like an electric wire, & I was simply prickling with nerves – so we wore each other out – with poor Ian acting as a passive buffer state – you’d have laughed at us, I think, but he found us a little wearing – though he was the soul of good-nature. We talked about our Firsts first (of course) and then gossiped as nastily as could be about our friends at Girton – and we both felt young again – which was refreshing after all this time.

I am getting more & more active every day & Dad peers at me heartily every morning & says how much better I look – which is discouraging – because I don’t feel really robust yet, and I like a little tender sympathy – not a brisk satisfaction with my excellent progress. Ah! Parents!

Dicky is in our midst once more. At present he is concealing his fiendlike personality beneath a well-bred and charm-dripping exterior, for some reason known only to his Machiavellian self. My parents have swelled several inches with pride in his ‘reformed’ self. He has further won their hearts by being second in his form for the term – which is an improvement on a steady record of last place. Personally I feel he is brewing something perfectly awful & is waiting to get to Drumnadrochit to spring it on us all. However, perhaps I am wrong after all – I hope so. If an explosion occurs in Scotland I’ll send you an expurgated account of it. Dicky’s language, on the occasions when his brow is blackened with wrath, is not repeatable.

Wednesday 2 August The train journey from Edinburgh to Inverness (180 miles) took longer than the journey from London to Edinburgh (410 miles) & we arrived an hour late. And the jolting was phenomenal, even for a branch line Scottish train.

But all this was nothing to the 15-mile drive from Inverness to Drumnadrochit. We have an old Ford 8 here which Dad uses for fishing & which has no springs at all, to mention. The road from Inverness to the village of Drumnadrochit is very good, but no surface can soothe the vibrations of our old Ford – and as for the last three miles – from the village to our house – Christina Rossetti’s poem, ‘Does the Road wind uphill all the way?’ was inspired by this very stretch of squelching mud – to call it a road would be forever to debase the word.

So I arrived thinking my head was cracked in two & I looked around at the familiar drawing-room furniture with a jaundiced eye – & thought with loathing of five weeks here without electric light – the shrill voices of my family converging on me from every angle – and the eternal gurglings of drain-pipes in the bathroom next door. This is a squat, grey little house – & looks solid enough – but it must be built of twigs because every sound made anywhere in the house can be heard everywhere else. It reminds me of Chaucer’s House of Rumour.1

But, for all this, I feel better this morning – & I look better too.

Thursday 3 August Oh! dear, Gershon, (observe the comma – I am not being forward!) I wish you weren’t so much cleverer than I am. When I first knew you, I was always in a state of waiting breathlessly for you to find out that I wasn’t clever, & erase me from the tables of your brain for ever – then I thought oh: well you must have found out by this time & were kindly overlooking it – but the more I saw of you, the more things I discovered you could do that I couldn’t – you could understand music, and pass your driving test at the second attempt, and play games, & follow the Hebrew in the prayer book without using your finger, & be forward without being impertinent, & sing in the street without being foolish – & all kinds of other things too – but this last display of versatility is too much – you can type as well – and in two colours – and two different sizes! What can I do but say humbly that it’s been an honour to know you?

Are you going to be at Ismay’s wedding or will you be travelling home on that day? (Surely if you wait until the 13th you will be using a public conveyance on the New Year which would be horribly un-kosher of you and put you out of Beth Din2 spitting range for ever!) I shall have a new tooth for that day – (my dentist has promised me most solemnly to have it ready) & it will be my first public appearance since the accident. So if you aren’t there I shall probably cry – but no matter! I was very perturbed to hear that Ismay had chosen a Rabbi not labelled by Beth Din either – How awful! But I feel sure that she’ll give such an air of respectability to her life of sin, that we’ll all be shaking our heads and declaring, in about a year’s time, that we must have made a mistake, after all.

Saturday 5 August On Friday I had a beautiful surprise. The front-door bell rang – in itself an exciting event here – because our nearest neighbour lives three miles away – and few people will venture their lives or cars on the up-winding mud track which is the only means of getting at us. It was Hamish! The fact that Charlotte was with him daunted me for a moment, (he is not at his enchanting best with others, when Charlotte is there) but we got onto a Higher Plane at once, whither Charlotte could not follow us – so she just stood & gaped & put my conversational style down to concussion & Hamish’s to humouring the patient. He was very concerned for you & sent you his regards.

Tuesday 8 August It is charming of you to look forward to my letters with ‘unreasonable impatience’ – that is exactly how I look forward to yours – though I’d never have been able to express it so aptly myself – nor so prettily! There is nothing more to tell you about my collar bone. You knew it was dislocated, didn’t you? If not I can’t think how I forgot to tell you – you must have distracted my attention!

Your suggestion about our being seen together at Ismay’s wedding did not surprise me much, after your startling revelations about Mr Zeigler, D. Machonochie and the Prosecuting Solicitor – but I was mildly shocked to realize that things had gone so far, that we wouldn’t be able to go to a huge reception – and there nod to one another in friendly greeting & perhaps exchange a casual word, without giving rise to whisperings & head-waggings of the kind you suggest. I see that it is going to take us a long time to Live This Down! This is, in its way, a pity, but I think we’ll survive it, don’t you?

I was relieved to read your delicately worded confession that you would be in Cambridge next year – (this is an understatement – but I feel I must learn to be a little more formal and less forward with you, before we meet at Ismay’s wedding, in view of all the inquisitive eyes that will be upon us there).

Saturday 12 August On Monday the family circle will be widened by the inclusion of my cousin Jean & Aunt Teddy, & from then, onwards, we shall have visitors the whole time, which will break the monotony of purely rural occupations a little, I hope. We expect to be in London on September 6th – & on the 15th my parents are going to Paris. They are trying to persuade me to go with them – but I loathe the Channel – hateful, bulging, oily, green horror – and feel disinclined for the French, at present – so I hope to be able to persuade them to let me go & stay in the country with friends until the beginning of term. Pray for me. I am so tired of la vie de famille.

Please write and laugh at me for thinking you are cross with me, Gershon – (if you are angry you can laugh satirically, or sardonically if you prefer it – and if you are not, you can laugh comfortingly – but please laugh!).

Monday 14 August You know, it is a strange thing, but everyone has suddenly started to say kind things about my appearance since the accident. It is rather like the kind of thing which is raked up about the character of the deceased in an obituary notice. Joan Aubertin was in Girton the other day, & she met Maureen Stack & Jo Manton – (d’you know either of them? No? Neither do I – but we know one another by sight). They gossiped about this & that & apparently my injuries were mentioned – and they said they hoped my face wasn’t spoilt. It was such a lovely serene face & reminded them of the Monna Lisa!!! (No, Gershon, they were not mistaking me for someone else – they know me very well by sight.) Joan retailed this in a letter to my father with a sardonic chuckle behind every word – but he lapped it all up & was simply delighted, & came & waved the letter at me.

Because I feel full of the milk of human kindness, I’ll concur in your judgement of Nachman. He bores me & always will – but that, as I think I told you, is because he never laughs at me – it casts no slur upon his character or intelligence. Lois is another matter altogether.

Thursday 17 August I had a letter from Sir Robert Waley Cohen, asking me to spend a week with him at Honeymead, from Sept 15th–21st. He says, graciously, that if I am not well enough to ride I can follow the hunt in the car. (what? what?) (Note the delicate manner in which he assumes that I can ride (as a matter of fact I can – but he has no reason to know that). Obviously all the Best People do ride, & if he didn’t think I was one of the Best People, he wouldn’t have asked me to stay – which makes me laugh a lot – but I think I shall go – it will spare me the threatened visit to Paris – and I shall love writing and telling you all about it. It will be a new experience. I have known Sir Robert and his two sons for many years (they have filled the ground floor of the Great Portland Street Synagogue on Yom Kippur while Mummy & Sophie Tucker & I have been filling the gallery, ever since I can remember) but I never suspected him of this pukkah strain. I shall never be quite the same again.

Saturday 19 August It was nice of you not to be sceptical about the Monna Lisa comparison. (Monna was a 13thC. Florentine abbreviation for Madonna – in fact an exact translation of m’lady – and so although I know all about how the vulgar herd spell this (conjectural) name for Leonardo’s Gioconda, I stick to Monna which is pedantic but Right.)

Tuesday 22 August Hamish came to see me on Sunday – (Charlotte is back in Edinburgh). I told him politely, but with a subtle inflection of enquiry in my voice, that Charlotte had written to me. He gave me a long and involved explanation of this phenomenon – (his story is that she got so tired of the sound of my name (!) that she got quite nasty about me. Hamish explained to her, with dignity, that he and I were on a Higher Plane – and finally brought her to see me – whereupon she was immediately reassured – one look at me was enough to convince her that here was no rival for her charms – and her letter was a subtle (?) tribute to her restored faith in Hamish – and her Absolute Confidence in me). It was a good story, told in Hamish’s inimitable voice & enlivened by Hamish’s inimitable mannerisms but I doubt if we’ve got to the core of the matter, even now.

Wednesday 23 August I wish I were a Cabinet Minister, Gershon – I’d have been so clever – nothing like this could ever have happened.3 When Italy attacked Abyssinia, I’d have put two nasty, bristling battle cruisers across the Suez Canal (strictly illegal, of course – but oh! what a gesture) and then I’d have cocked a snook at Mussolini (I never liked his face anyway) and I’d have written a rude note to Hitler saying that I knew all about why he was holding Mussolini’s hand – so as to keep his mind off Austria.

And now look what a nasty mess we’re in – all because no-one thought of including me in the Cabinet. It gives rise to ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’.4 Ah! well, let’s eat, drink & be merry for tomorrow we die – tis a maxim tremendous but trite.

As a matter of fact, I’m frightened. I just wanted to tell someone I was. Let’s not mention it again. You’re not thinking of sprouting into a handsome territorial, or anything, are you? don’t – darling – (not that I really think you would – but I’m being Forward and, (I hope) appealing, just in case you had considered it).

My aunt is clucking helplessly. Jean keeps on expecting a wire announcing her instant mobilization. My father prophecies a cataclysmic collapse in Germany, after which everything will be All Right. (He believes the Russo-German pact to be a wild clutch at a swirling-away straw by a drowning Fuhrer.) I go out & stir up rabbits – I prefer rabbits to political arguments. What’s done is done. She wept because she had no more to say.

Dear me, this is a very unsatisfactory letter. The truth is that I want to be comforted.

Friday 25 August In case of war I think my mother and the children will stay here. Dad will go to London to see in what way he can be of use, and I have written to Leslie HB’s5 secretary asking her advice as to what kind of job I’m fitted for. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to offend the aesthetic sensibilities of my friends or the nation by blossoming forth as a WAT Or a WREN Or a WAAF or even a land-worker.

My father doesn’t think there’ll be a war. He bases his belief on that old saw about right triumphing in the end – and also on a conviction that the Führer is played out.

Dicky is getting more and more insufferably insolent. I’d like to beat him hard. I wish you were here to do it for me – as a matter of fact I wish you were here – (but that is a forward admission, & quite by the way). There’s a sort of heat-vapour of suppressed hysteria in the house – which makes me feel I want to scream & scream. It is no-body’s fault – but it’s Hellish. Your letters are the only things that happen, to make me smile.

I blush, Gershon, I really do, to think of the number of letters from me which will await you on your return from Liverpool. (Though I am forward, I am not brazen – yet.)

Saturday 26 August Old Sir Robert, my-host-that-was-to-have-been, thinks that his house party on Exmoor will probably have to be cancelled – so it looks as though I shall not follow the hunt in a car – with the dowagers – after all. I shall, by then, probably be immured in some ‘destination unknown’ with the War Office.

And what of Ismay’s wedding? I fancy that in the event of War, she will be gathered to her Charles’ manly bosom sooner than either of them expected. But I’m not going to talk about war any longer – I’m tired of it – and you must be too, by now.

I’ve just been downstairs listening to the news. I think the suppression of Neville Henderson’s6 message from Hitler is very sinister. I hope we’re not going to have another Munich – but I don’t think so. Chamberlain (silly old cockerel) wouldn’t dare do it again – but you know the old saw: ‘If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly, fly again.’ (This is not original. I shouldn’t like you to think I am cleverer than I am.)

A heartening sight met me in the drawing room. Lionel – plunged deep in knitting. He offers no explanation of this phenomenon. He just sits, all wrapped up in yarn – knitting frenziedly – only coming out of his reverie occasionally to make trenchant comments on the news. Dicky is now not on speaking terms with anyone in the house except Lionel. He refuses to wash or brush his hair or change his clothes – or wear the requisite amount of undergarments. He goes about in a navy polo-jersey & navy shorts and Wellingtons – in & out of the house – his hair standing on end in wiry tangles. Occasionally he tramps about intoning a tuneless trill of sound – or murmuring ‘What the bloody Hell’ to himself in an aggressive manner. Otherwise he holds no communication with man or beast. Yes, Gershon, we are an odd household.

Dad is certain that there will be peace with honour. Well! if he’s right, we shall meet again at Ismay’s wedding in just over a fortnight, sha’n’t we? If he’s wrong – ‘Quoth the raven “Nevermore” –’7 or quite possibly, at any rate – but this is vapouring. Take no notice of it.

Monday 28 August I had an agitated letter from Joyce by the same post as your two. If there is a rent in the clouds – she is coming up here at once – otherwise she will be evacuating school-children for her Country.

I liked the fatherly touch about ‘one oughtn’t really to worry about individual skins’. Of course one oughtn’t, mon cher, but one does – and the more shocked one is by the unethicalness of worrying, the more one worries, because in addition to worrying, one worries about one’s own shortcomings which make one worry – if you see what I mean – and I shouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. Anyway, (and I say this defiantly, though firmly) I’m glad you’re not a Territorial – though I don’t suppose that will prevent the War Office (damn it lustily) from sending you off to prod Germans in the rear from the Maginot Line, while they are busy trying to squeeze into the corridor, if & when war breaks out.

Of course, I was saddened to hear that you had had my blood cleaned off your suit – but I do see the position. It would have been a fine gesture to arrive at Ismay’s wedding all spattered with it – but it might have caused Comment or even Gossip – and then – Reputation, Reputation, we’d have lost our Reputation – which would have been a pity – but it was uncommonly civil of you to say you wouldn’t let anyone else bleed on it. If anyone tries, just push her onto the ground, and let her bleed on that!

I haven’t had an answer to my letter to Miss Sloane (Leslie’s Secretary) yet – but I pressed obligingly but firmly for a job either with the War Office or the Censorship, on the outbreak of War – (if such there be). I could not possibly spend the illimitable duration of a modern war in the family bosom – we would worry one another around in circles all the time, until one, or all of us, dropped down dead, from nervous exhaustion. If I have a paid job in the government, I shall have to go where I’m told, and no-one will be able to do anything about it, which sounds incredibly selfish – but actually will be better for all of us.

(By the way, I hope our Aubrey is safely back from Geneva.8 Joyce has had two post-cards from him since he left England. I have had one letter – which of us is better off? It is hard to day. I wrote him a very silly letter, to which I have not, as yet, had any answer – but I hate to think of him perishing in a mined Swiss Mountain Pass – or being drowned by conquering Nazis in Le Lac Léman. Oh! dear, what a woeful thought.)

Wednesday 29 August If there is no war, we leave here next Tuesday evening and hope to arrive in London on Wednesday morning – (bless we the Lord. Let’s praise & magnify him for ever, if we are able to proceed according to plan). Excavations on my tooth are scheduled to begin on Thursday 7th – but I don’t think my chin will be quite itself again in time for Ismay’s wedding. It is getting paler – but slowly. Eventually I think it will disappear altogether (I mean the redness – not (I hope) the chin!) but not for some time, yet.

Friday 31 August Your letter has just arrived, Gershon. Your reprimand was more than justified and, in the circumstances most kindly expressed. From now onward, the expression ‘I shall never be the same again’ will be wiped from my epistolary slate for ever, though it is only fair to warn you that, after taking this drastic step, I shall never be quite the same again! And there is a condition attached. ‘Sweet-darling’ must be immediately erased from your vocabulary. It does not suit you – or me – and it is not funny.

I thought, like you, that we had the Führer in a corner – but now I don’t know. I don’t understand anything, & I want to say – I’m glad you only feel a healthy glow. My inside is now minced as well as mashed. Thank you for your solicitous advice about what I should do in the event of war – (in this, you and my parents are at one – we have established an armed neutrality on the subject – there’s no point in arguing with them until I hear from Miss Sloane). I could not possibly stay here more than a week or two if there was a war. I am perfectly healthy now – but in a very dangerous state of restlessness because I have nothing to do. When I say dangerous, I mean that I haven’t forgotten that nine weeks ago I was sure I was going mad, (this state of mind was only indirectly due to the accident – ever since I was eleven or twelve, at all times when my mind was not fully occupied with work which was tough & impersonal, I have watched myself fearfully for signs of a lack of mental equilibrium – I don’t know why – I just did) and unless I have some very definite and absorbing work to do, soon – I shall get worse.

I had a letter from Jean this morning. She has been mobilized – at which she is not amused – nor am I, for that matter. As a member of the auxiliary air force, she will spend the entire duration of any war training recruits at humming aerodromes all over the country. She is the only one of my 52 first cousins (except Victor, whose face I slapped, but with whom I am very friendly for all that – which, on the whole is magnanimous of him) of whom I am really fond. Victor is in Corsica – no-one quite knows why – but he’s like that. I fancy, if there’s a war he’ll have to stay there. As he has literary aspirations, he will probably write a book – after all Boswell did.

Now that Ismay’s wedding is post-poned, (sorry – wrong word – I mean now that it is a ‘fait accompli’) I presume that we shall not leave Clunemore on the 5th, unless something absolutely definite happens one way or another before then – but I don’t know. If the status quo is maintained, during the next few days, perhaps you would very graciously go on writing to this address – also, if war breaks out. If anything unexpected happens in the way of a Peace conference or the like – then I expect my address as from Tuesday, 5th will be ‘The Mayfair Hotel, Berkeley Square, London W1’ (Note the forward manner in which I now just take it for granted that you are going to write to me! Oh! Indubitably, I am not what I was! Hubris again, Eileen – oh! Nemesis is close at hand – beware).

Oh! by the way, to revert to this photograph question. When we last met, you asked me for a photograph of my countenance, if and when it returned to its old ‘chubby’ symmetry. (Ill as I was, I was touched at your choosing the word ‘chubby’ in preference to ‘fat’. These are actions that a king might show.) On the strength of this request, I bullied you into having your photograph taken for me. Now I feel in duty bound to ‘fulfil my obligations’ if you wish to hold me to them. (It most certainly is not too late to withdraw – negotiations have hardly started. I can’t even have proofs taken, until my broken tooth is restored – but let me know, and I shall, in all my best, obey you, sir.)

1 A reference to ‘The House of Fame’, a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400).

2 Beth Din or ‘house of judgement’ is a rabbinical court of Judaism.

3 In 1935 Mussolini had brutally invaded Abyssinia in defiance of the League of Nations, driven the Emperor Haile Selassie into exile and proclaimed a new Roman Empire. Fearful of war with Italy at a time of the growing German threat, Britain, like France, had shied away from effective sanctions and allowed Italian warships unhindered access to the Suez Canal.

4 From ‘Intimations of Immortality’ by William Wordsworth (1770–1850).

5 Leslie Hore-Belisha, Secretary of State for War. An old friend of the Alexanders, he had holidayed with them at Drumnadrochit.

6 Neville Henderson, British ambassador to Germany 1937–39 and a supporter of appeasement. The telegrams reported Hitler’s determination to invade Poland and blame England for any consequences.

7 From The Raven, a narrative poem by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49).

8 On the outbreak of war, Aubrey Eban was at the 21st Zionist Congress in Geneva.

September 1939–April 1940

With the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, war had become all but inevitable. On the same day that German planes bombed Warsaw, Britain’s army was mobilised, and as the evacuation of mothers and children from major cities began, and London sank into the darkness of the first blackout, the country waited every hour for the declaration of war that still did not come.

At 9 a.m. on Sunday 3 September, after another two days prevaricating, Chamberlain finally bowed to Cabinet and parliamentary pressure, and an ultimatum was delivered to the German government. At 11 a.m. it expired unanswered, and the country finally, and unheroically, stumbled into war. Six hours later, an even tardier France followed suit. The long ‘half-time’ of peace was over.

This would be the last summer the whole Alexander family would spend together at Drumnadrochit. That Sunday morning they sat around the wireless and listened to the prime minister’s broadcast to the nation, and as their holiday neighbour, Mrs Ironmonger – an aspiring Lady Novelist who had tormented Eileen with her unpublished manuscript – hurried back to Liverpool and ambulance duties, and her son to his Territorial unit, a frustrated Eileen was left in her Highlands limbo, with her parents, brothers, family nurse and the Alexanders’ customary gaggle of hangers-on, wondering what she was going to do.

In these first weeks of the ‘Phoney War’, when no German bombers came, and the RAF dropped leaflets on Germany, and city evacuees drifted back to their homes, a curious sense of anti-climax settled over Britain. On 4 September the first advance units of the British Expeditionary Force had sailed for France, but the only real fighting was taking place a thousand miles to the east, where a doomed Poland fought on alone.

When more than a month later Eileen finally returned with her mother to London, before going on to Cambridge to begin her research on Arthurian Romance, it was certainly the normality of home-front life rather than its strangeness, that would have struck her. The Emergency Powers Act (Defence) had given the government dictatorial powers over the whole gamut of national life, and yet while barrage balloons floated above London, air-raid wardens patrolled the blacked-out streets and everyone now carried ration books, identity cards and gas masks, the cinemas were again open, rationing – except for petrol – had not yet begun, the gas and bomb attacks had not materialised, and ‘everything that was supposed to collapse’, as Eileen’s great friend Aubrey Eban recalled, ‘went on exactly as before’.

It was the same when Eileen moved into her rooms at ‘Girton Corner’ in the middle of October, with Cambridge very much the Cambridge she knew and many of her old friends still up. On the outbreak of war, Parliament had brought in conscription for all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one, but Gershon’s age group had not yet been called up and he was back at King’s, studying law, starring in union debates alongside Aubrey, and exchanging notes and letters with Eileen, just three miles down the road, as if the war did not exist.

War, however, was closing in. On the day that Eileen and her mother had left Drumnadrochit for the Mayfair Hotel in Berkeley Square, Poland finally succumbed, and German armies began their move from east to west. In December the Battle of the River Plate gave the British public a rare victory but the New Year brought little else to cheer. Abortive plans to help Finland and simultaneously deny Germany Sweden’s iron ore would lead to the chaos and humiliation of the Norway campaign. Merchant losses at sea prefigured the long and desperate fight against the U-boat that lay ahead and by January the first food rationing – sugar, butter, bacon – was introduced. Before the New Year was a week old, too, the Alexanders’ much-loved old friend, Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Secretary of State for War, bitterly at odds with his own generals, had been sacked.

As Eileen prepared to return to Cambridge after the Christmas vacation, across the Channel the BEF dug in along the Belgian border next to their French allies, and waited for an attack they were ill-equipped to resist.

2
‘No time to sit on brood’

Friday 1 September 1939 On hearing Hitler’s ‘peace’ proposals over the wireless last night, I begin to feel a warm glow at the idea of punishing the insolent brute, as well! The beautiful impertinence of the suggestion that – (given twelve months for the dissemination of Nazi propaganda & terrorism in the Corridor) he would like another of those now-notorious cooked plebiscites – is really almost inspired! I don’t think even our simple-minded Neville would fall for that one again, somehow. Do you?

I have now heard from Miss Sloane. There is nothing but clerical work at the War Office for the present – but she advises the Censorship. I should apply immediately, she says & I shall probably have to take an exam, soon. Thank God for that. Can’t you see, Gershon, how I come to life again, at the very prospect of something to do?

I had a pathetic card from Ismay this morning. She is staying in Sussex with Charles. He can’t be far away from London, as he expects to be called up any day.

I have written to the Censorship office, telling them how clever & useful I am, and how silly they’d be not to have me. I intended to write the letter myself, but I turned all bashful at the last minute & couldn’t take the responsibility for such a lot of lies, on my own shoulder – so Dad dictated a gem of a document. If you only knew what a mine of precious ore you’d held, bleeding down the front of your suit, ten weeks ago – you’d never have sent the suit to the cleaners.

I presume that owing to the outbreak of hostilities between Germany & Poland this morning – the declaration that we are at war, will be put before the House this evening.

You are likely to have a great deal to do, and worry about during the next few weeks. Please darling, if you are bothered or busy, don’t attempt to write me long letters. I’d be glad of post-cards – to know how you are, and letters if and when you have time – but I’m no longer an invalid who has to be humoured – and all men who are likely to be conscripted will have to think primarily of themselves now, and not of spoilt & idle women to whom they have already been over-indulgent.

Saturday 2 September We shall not be leaving here on the fifth, and I shall stay here until I have definite work to do – which I hope to God will be soon.

Sunday 3 September We have just been listening to Chamberlain’s announcement that we are at war. There is nothing more to be said except God bless you and keep you, and everyone else who is going to help in blotting out slavery & brutality, from too much sorrow and pain. I’m afraid this sounds banal – but I mean it, Gershon.

Let me have news when you can – because I shall be worrying and wondering, at all times, about the whereabouts and safety of all my friends in vulnerable areas – but once again let me reiterate that a post-card will be enough if you haven’t the time or the inclination for letter-writing.

You must be worrying a great deal about your parents. Has your younger brother been sent away to a place of safety?

Under the new Conscription Act1 – I suppose you will soon have to start training for a commission.

This declaration of war has had an astonishingly Cathartic effect upon me. ‘I have not youth nor age – but, as it were, an after dinner sleep, dreaming of both.’ The rain is coming down in a thin drizzle and there are wisps of fog crossing the tops of the hills. It is very dark.

We are as safe here as we could hope to be anywhere. Don’t worry about me, please. I am getting better astonishingly quickly, and soon, I hope – I shall be perfectly fit to do useful work wherever I can be of help.

I hope you are less thin & tired than when I saw you last. Forgive my clucking (nature will out) but do take a tonic if you’re not – an army marches on its stomach, after all – & people with concave tummies have to crawl along on their ribs – which is uncomfortable.

Good luck, Gershon darling, and (as Miss Sloane said) may we soon meet again in Peace.

Don’t be alarmed at the solemn, not to say sententious, tone of the last part of this letter. I can & shall smile still, but I did want to say just once, quite seriously, what I was thinking. It won’t happen again.

Monday 4 September I hope you weren’t disturbed by the Air Raid Sirens last night. I hope you never will be.

I hear the Government urgently wants Graduate University students (men) urgently for all kinds of work. Mum says they broadcast a request for volunteers, while I was having my walk.

I have a premonition that you were born to be the Brains behind this war – be guided by it, Gershon.

Wednesday 6 September I had another letter from Joyce this morning. She is definitely going back to Girton next term. I think she’s wise. I would do the same, were it not that I feel compelled to try & be as useful as possible – and I shan’t do that by digging myself deeper & deeper into the middle-ages. I simply cannot go on living on my parents any longer – though they would, not only willingly, but gladly, go on supporting me in luxury forever. I have, however, written to the Mistress of Girton,2 asking her if there’s any work I can usefully do in Cambridge – and to Miss Bradbrook. I’d be happier there, than in a strange sea-port, prying into other people’s private letters. But if neither the Censorship nor Girton can make use of me, then I think I’ll write to Dr Weizmann & see if he can include me in his scheme for organizing Jewish brain power!! The old boy is about as fond of me as the Chief Rabbi is (I have found it necessary at times to use the same methods of intimidation upon him – when he comes over the heavy leader and martinet) but surely he won’t allow personal prejudice to interfere with the Public Weal – what d’you think?

I shall only apply to Leslie in the very last resort – if no one else will have me at all – but I’m determined to get some work to do, somewhere – soon.

Now about your air-raid adventure. How damnable! But I really don’t see why you, and millions of other people (many of them a lot more uncontrolled than I am), should be submitted to this kind of experience, while I sit snugly in the North feeling safe. It simply isn’t good enough, Gershon. I’m a physical coward of the first magnitude – but so are thousands of others – it is not customary to pander to fear. No doubt I, like everyone else, would soon get used to the sound of Air Raid Sirens, and the dazzle of incendiary bombs. If being a nice girl entails being regarded by one’s friends as on a mental level with an evacuated schoolchild of tender years & snivelling habits – I wish I weren’t a nice girl. I know I’m not ‘self-composed in crises’ – but it’s about time I learnt to be, & this seems to me a good opportunity to begin.

Sir Robert has now definitely cancelled Exmoor. I am relieved. I don’t think it would have been quite my milieu. Where Joyce would shed grace on the county – I would spread disgrace. She has poise & charm & savoir-faire. Pertness, clucking and tactlessness are very poor substitutes for these – and anyway Old Bob never bothered much about me until I got a first. (As a matter of fact, that’s very unkind, not to say unjust. I withdraw it all.)

Friday 8 September It’s funny that you should refer in your letter to the myriads of first cousins who have a claim on the Alexander hospitality – because only yesterday we had a wire from Jean’s mother to say that we may expect her, (Aunt Teddy), Jean’s sister & Jean’s niece (aged two – Ye Gods!) on Sunday morning. So the family circle is due for expansion soon.

My future was the subject of much discussion yesterday between my parents and myself. They lean towards the suggestion that I should stay here until term begins & then go back to Cambridge for Research as long as they can afford to keep me there. The cultural work of the Nation, says my father with a wide arm-swing, must go on. How I wish my conscience would allow me to believe that they’re right. Other suggestions were that we should all go back to Egypt together as soon as it’s practicable – but I’d see myself dead before submitting to that.

I was very startled at your talking about conscription as though you thought a few months was the maximum length of time, you could hope to be left at liberty. I think it would be fantastic of the government to make a soldier of you – you’d be invaluable in all sorts of other ways – but unless you bring yourself to their notice – they’ll never find out. O mon dieu, quelle vie.

I had a long letter from Ismay yesterday. She had five days of honeymoon – then Charles wrested from her. He’s back again now, with ten days’ leave – then he’s due to go away again – she doesn’t know where or for how long. Poor Ismay – her sang-froid has completely deserted her. She almost clucked (but not quite, because, like Joyce, she’s too dignified ever to sink as low as that, even though she has just cause. I wish I were a little more like my friends).

Thursday 14 September The war has brought solace to one person of our acquaintance, anyway. Joan Friedman. Raphael Loewe has written to tell her that his country calls, but that he’s probably too short-sighted to be of much use. This, after a silence of several months (I suppose he had to work off his patriotic zeal on someone). Dear Joan – though she doesn’t know it, she’s got a Jocasta complex about Raphael (is there such a thing?) You see, she loves him like a mother – but unfortunately she doesn’t realize it – which, in its way, is a pity.

(By the way, darling, are you too short-sighted to be of much use to the British Army? It’s a beautiful thought anyway.)

Friday 15 September Did you ever meet Mrs Crews? She was famous for a number of things. She’s an authority on Judeo-Spanish and is adored by the Loewes, though she has a pretty poor opinion of them. Sidney Berkowitz says she has the nicest legs in Girton. (I’ve never noticed them myself – but I feel that in matters of this kind, Sidney would probably be competent to judge.) She has the worst sherry in Cambridge (3/6d a bottle, and proud of it) and she’s wireless-crazy, & gives as a reason for her separation from her husband that ‘he was a National & Regional man y’know’. She is in the Censorship now. (She was on the reserve staff last September.) So if I did become a censor, I shouldn’t be completely alone. I’m very fond of Mrs Crews.

Saturday 16 September I have just heard, from the mother of a friend of mine, who is a Cameron Highlander (one of the few regiments still to wear kilts, even in battle), that he has been issued with a pair of gas-proof pants to wear under his kilt. (The official army name is ‘proofed nether garments’.) The legs unroll to make protective gaiters which are buttoned under the instep! Let it not be said that England doesn’t look after her warrior sons.

Monday 18 September My future seems to be taking shape – but (as I may have said once or twice before) no man should be declared happy until he is dead. The censorship doesn’t want me at present – but if I’ll fill in a form all about the colour of my hair & my mother’s nationality and take their exam at my own convenience – they’ll put me on their waiting list. The Mistress of Girton says – come to our arms my beamish girl3 – there are, at present, no specialized war jobs for girls under 25 – so stick to Research. I’ve written back and said that if she’d arrange for me to live in college, I might consider it. My father expands & talks about the cultural work of the nation – a theme he’s expatiated on before. (Spare a prayer, in these Holy Days, Gershon, that the college will have a room for me. Your influence above, is more pronounced than mine, I feel sure. You don’t hare off to Prunier’s to eat curried crab as soon as you set foot in London – nor do you go hatless to synagogue – nor are you saucy to the Chief Rabbi. Any request from you would doubtless be listened to with courteous attention.)

Later I had a long and wholly delightful letter from Aubrey, and one from Miss Bradbrook saying – Come back. Aubrey, like the rest of us, has offered his services to the Government and is finding uncertainty wearing and discouraging. He asks nicely whether I know anything of you.

Offering my services as a sandbag is a very good idea. I felt sure that your fertile invention would produce some really helpful suggestions about my future – and it did! I shall set about it at once.

Aunt Teddy, her daughter and granddaughter are now in our midst. The child is surrounded all the time by hordes of clucking women, asking her if she loves them (poor little devil), but she likes me best, because I take no notice of her & she keeps asking me to go for walks with her!

Oh! Gershon, I want to Research in Cambridge – but there are grave difficulties. The college can’t house me – and my mother sends feathers flying with her clucking at the thought of my living in lodgings with bombs banging about. (The beautiful rooms she’d chosen for me are now out of the question on financial grounds – and I’d have to live where the College sent me – and like it.) My parents and I are going to have a session to consider the problem, this afternoon. I’ll let you know the results.

My parents and I have now sat down to this question of Cambridge or not Cambridge. It is damned difficult. My father says, ‘We cannot commit ourselves,’ (with term 2 weeks away!) My mother says, ‘If they’d have you in College, you could leave tomorrow if you liked,’ – and points out that I’d be as miserable as sin in strange lodgings – not being able to go out at night, and having to sit alone in a probably hideous room – going mad. Then she cries at having to oppose my dearest wish – at this point I cry too – at having to oppose her – and my father relents and says, ‘Well, write to the college and ask them what sort of lodgings are available – and where – and then we’ll see’, – and then the wireless announces the sinking of the air-craft carrier Courageous4 – and Dad says, ‘Look at those poor people,’ – and I do – and feel a cad, & cry a bit more.

Yesterday, I cured all my humours by cleaning my vinaigrettes.5 I haven’t had the heart to look at them since the war started. They are looking lovelier than ever – bless them. May they never be subjected to the ordeal of fire.

Thursday 21 September Today or tomorrow I expect to hear from Girton whether they will allow me to live in the gardener’s cottage in the grounds, until something more satisfactory can be arranged. I don’t expect, for a moment, that this will seem to them a practicable suggestion. A month ago, I was their blue-eyed darling, & the trouble they took over me, one way or another, was phenomenal. Now their sense of proportion has undergone a violent readjustment. They think I ought to go back (for my own sake) but they don’t care a damn if they never see me again – and the twitterings of me & my parents are a matter of superlative indifference to them (and I can’t say I blame them).

I’ve cried so much during the last week that I really begin to feel, as Shelley would say, like a cloud that has outwept its rain!6

Actually, of course, I am fussing disquietingly about very little – what on earth does it really matter whether I go back to Cambridge or not? At this moment I see it as a life or death question – but once a decision is made, I’ll get used to it. Oh! I shall get used to it shan’t I, Gershon? Instead of being secure & pampered, I might have been a Central European or German Jewess, mightn’t I?? – and then I’d have had something to cluck about. This happy thought, instead of restoring my sense of balance, only adds humiliating self-disgust to my other discomforts. I wish you were here – and you could shake me until my toothless gums rattled together – it’s the only fitting treatment for me.

I had a letter from Miss Bradbrook. All the double sets of rooms are being converted into single bed sitting rooms (poor Joyce!) – and Miss Bradbrook says they’re living like pigs. It must be pretty bad, for her to notice anything because, in the ordinary way, she has a Soul above Space – but there you are – the war has changed a lot of people.

I may say that this photograph business has caused a terrific stir in our ménage. ‘Why do you want to have your photograph taken?’ asks Aunt Teddy, rudely & inquisitively. ‘What on earth do you want a photograph of yourself for?’ says nurse – adding more kindly, ‘It’s not like you to want to be photographed.’ ‘Is this quite the moment to be photographed my dear?’ says Pa. ‘Of course you’re looking more like yourself, and we haven’t had one of you for some time – but …’

My mother, who is the only one who knows why I had it taken, smiles kindly, although she thinks it forward, if not improper of me to give a photograph of myself to a MAN (other than Pa, of course). She might be less kindly if she knew the shocking spirit of barter in which the whole transaction has been carried out – but she doesn’t. I tell my mother more than you tell yours, – but not everything.

Saturday 23 September I lay in bed alternately musing and reading the book of Job. (I do not like the Day of Atonement service. I always read the Bible instead.) The only diversion which occurred during the morning was a letter from the Mistress (in reply to my letter to the College Secretary). She has investigated the matter of lodgings herself. I am to live at 130 Huntingdon Road, in a smallish single room (but who cares?) and she personally guarantees my comfort and safety – and Dad, purified by starvation, and intimidated by her august and brisk intervention, says, ‘Yes’.

Oh! Gershon, I am so happy (always bearing in mind that no man should be declared happy until he is dead) that I’m even prepared to admit that (in a non-erotic way, of course) I love you better than my country. (Does it matter which country?)

I am sorry to have to tell you that Aubrey also seems to have noticed that I love you better than my country. (It pains me that my most intimate feelings, however non-erotic, should be so patent to you both – but, no matter, I shall learn resignation in time.) I am led to this conclusion by the fact that in an eleven-page letter, yesterday, he devotes four lines of verse to the war and five pages to you.

He did not owe me a letter, Gershon, – he just caught sight of a reproduction of the Monna Lisa on his wall, (he spells his ‘Mona’) detected a facial resemblance between us – and so wrote me eleven pages of profuse strains of carefully pre-meditated art. (In a post-script he says delightedly: ‘Something really wonderful has happened – Gershon came in while I was out, saw my Mona (sic) Lisa and stuck a label on saying “Eileen” I swear that we have never discussed it before. So you see how I am proved right by the highest authority available. Who better could distinguish a genuine Eileen from a fraudulent reproduction?’)

SUNDAY 24 September Pa is leaving us today with the children. Mum & I still don’t know what day we’ll be leaving for London – but I’m writing to the Mistress to say that (war-work permitting) I’ll be in Cambridge on Oct 7th.

Monday 25 September My mother looked at the enclosed photograph, shuddered, and said, ‘My dear’, in a voice charged with meaning, and then handed it back to me in the manner of one lifting an earwig out of the soup. This was not encouraging, so I showed it to Gerta. She smiled and said, ‘you do look a hap’. Aunt Teddy glanced at it and said, ‘It’s a good likeness – but not flattering’, and if ever a voice implied that a good likeness of me was a painful sight, it was hers.

I think that, insofar as it doesn’t show my scars, my pink chin, or the bump on the bridge of my nose, it’s not too bad, considering the material upon which the unfortunate photographer had to work.

Tuesday 26 September There is now a further hitch in regard to my proposed return to Cambridge. The rooms which the Mistress so kindly offered me, have been let to somebody else – so chaos is come again. I’ve wired to Girton for advice, and I’m waiting to see what happens. Pa is seeing everyone in London, and has suddenly woken up to the fact that Drumnadrochit is a backwater. I think he will send for us soon.

Wednesday 27 September Nurse has come back from London – oh! dear, our peace is shattered again. Of course the first thing she did was to demand to see my photograph and, when I showed it to her, she giggled noisily – slapped me heartily on my sore shoulder and said, ‘I think you’d better have another one taken – he photographed the uglier side of your face by mistake.’ Nurse has taken the place of Lois as Hate No. 1 on my (at present) narrow horizon.

My father phones my mother twice a day – and writes to her twice a day – and, when the telephone rings, or the postman comes, she goes all pink & kittenish! They really ought to know better at their age – and after 24 years of married life, too. Anyway, I’m hoping to cash in on all this love, by getting away from here, very soon – so love on, my girls & boys, love on – and don’t, on any account, mind me.

Thursday 28 September No letter from you by the first post, Gershon! Only nine pages from Aubrey, who is now an Intelligence Officer in embryo. I quote a vital passage from his letter below, to show how interviews with the recruiting board should be managed. Please learn it by heart & say it over to yourself every day before breakfast. Here it is: ‘… then there was the moment when a decrepit doctor with creaking joints asked me to take off my spectacles and read the letters on the board. “What board?” I asked innocently staring straight at it. This disability disqualified me from a Commission in the Observer’s Corps. Some capacity to distinguish an ally from an enemy is apparently regarded as an indispensable asset in war.’ Be as blind as you possibly can, Gershon, when your time comes. Aubrey’s account of his interview with the Recruiting Board has made me realize, (tardily perhaps) that there’s a war on, and that you may be called upon to go forth and get yourself killed in a dirty dug-out in France. I don’t mind telling you, that this is a possibility which I find singularly unpleasant to contemplate. It may be eccentric of me – but there it is.

Pa has just telephoned from London to say that he’s been appointed to a job in the Treasury as an expert in International Law. I gather that he starts work at once – so he probably won’t be coming back to fetch us after all. This means that he may be able to afford the rooms he and my mother originally chose for me in Cambridge – but everything is still very uncertain – he could give us no details over the phone as the appointment is still a secret – and I’ve no business to be telling you about it.

The three o’clock post has just come – with a letter from the Mistress saying that she’s cycled all round Cambridge trying to find me a home! She hasn’t succeeded yet – everyone is housing Bedford women & evacuees from the London School of Economics. She is writing to me again tomorrow. She is, with sympathy, mine sincerely … and I had the temerity to say that Girton wasn’t bothering about me any more. Bless her lily-white head. I hope all her cycling expeditions aren’t in vain!

Friday 29 September This morning I had a letter from Girton. They’ve taken rooms for me at Girton Corner. The main disadvantages are six children and high tea instead of dinner – but oh! if I could get back to Cambridge, I wouldn’t care if it were six boa-constrictors and no food at all! (You’re not the only one who’s willing to go without your meals in a Higher Cause!) Owing to sundry obstacles like clinging parents, and dentists who must be seen, I shall not return to my Alma Mater (if I ever get there at all – and I’m afraid to believe I shall) until Thursday, October 12th.

We leave here, inshallah, on Sunday 8th, and if you are moved to write to me in the intervening four days, my address (unless you hear to the contrary) will be ‘The Mayfair Hotel’, Berkeley Square, London W1.

Dad has started work at the Treasury. (It is therefore no longer a secret – when an Alexander is anywhere, it is difficult to look as though he’s not, and although all Government departments adore secrecy, and would have liked Pa to disguise himself as a puff of wind, they were reasonable, and saw his difficulty.) He is not coming back here, so Mum & I have arranged everything between us, (bless her!)

Sunday 1 October Your lyric outburst over my photograph was prettily written – but did you really like it? More and more people here seem to like it less & less – but, if it meets with your approval, I don’t give a damn. (I’m getting very independent in my declining years.)

Now let me sketch the evolution of my attitude to ‘darling’ for you. I think it will cause you to smile – but if perchance introspective anecdotes of this kind (and I am much given to them, I know) bore you – you have only to say so, and I shan’t tell you any more.

Go back a little in time to almost the eve of my Tripos, when I came out of retirement to go with Joyce and you & Aubrey to the Irish Plays. On the way home, as you may or may not remember, we had an altercation about the relative merits of the words ‘ostentatiously’ and ‘ostensibly’ in a given context. The altercation extended itself onto paper – and the last document in the case was a treatise by you on the subject, written on scribbling paper and handed to Joyce in Synagogue for delivering to me. Joyce gave me this erudite work, when I went to call upon her, the next morning – and, as she was interested in the controversy, I read her what you had to say. All went well, until I got to about the third page – and then I faltered and stopped – and then went on reading – omitting the word which had given me a shock. Joyce was quick to notice the pause, and wanted to know the cause. ‘How dare he,’ I answered obscurely, d’une voix mourante. It took her between 30 & 45 minutes to extract the reason of my distress from me – and when she did, her explanation of the phenomenon was not encouraging. ‘I expect it was just a slip of the pen,’ she said!! I must hasten to explain that at this time, I was living in a state of perpetual terror that my immoderate regard for you must be apparent to everybody – particularly you – and my interpretation of your use of ‘darling’, was that you had said to yourself, ‘Oh! well if it amuses her to be treated like a poppet, I don’t really mind one way or another,’ and had forthwith written it down. I couldn’t explain all this to Joyce – with whom I had spent hours, in the still watches of the night, protesting that I hadn’t any out-of-the-common preference for you at all – so I just sat at the bottom of her bed, crying piteously – and, of course, she was now more firmly convinced than ever, that I was quite mad.

Ye Gods! Was there ever such a transformation. Now, I don’t mind telling you, I not only tolerate ‘darling’ – I like it! Of course, the first time I used it myself, I was shocked to the core. My pen hovered over the page for an eternity, and when I did write it down, I blamed it all onto the war-suspense, and assured myself that, of course, it wouldn’t happen again!

At this point you will doubtless look very wise, and say that what has happened to me is that I am becoming almost normal. I don’t know. Anyway, that’s the story, for what it’s worth!

Y’know, Gershon, sometimes I get into a wild panic at the thought about how much you know about me. Your photographic picture of my defences, must be almost as complete as the Allies’ picture of the troop concentrations on The Siegfried Line. T’aint ’ardly decent – and think of all the damage you could do, if you felt so inclined.

Tuesday 3 October Horace has a lot of very pungent things to say about the political situation. I know they are pungent because I am able to detect a thickening and quickening of the pen-strokes whenever the words ‘Russia’ – ‘Germany’ – or ‘Chamberlain’ occur. Unfortunately, his writing, like Lois’, is quite illegible – so I can’t tell you what they are. This is a Great Sorrow to me because Horace is un genie manqué (I mean this absolutely seriously) and anything he says is worth pondering over. It was he, you know, who got me my first. He told me a story about himself and Henry James which I reproduced in my essay on Henry James in the Tripos. Unless you know Horace, it is impossible to believe the story – so the examiners said (with some truth) ‘This girl has imagination’, and gave me a First at once. (But don’t tell anybody, please, Gershon. I like the outside world to think I’m clever. There’s no point, though, in trying to deceive you – everything there is to be known about me – you know already.)

Wednesday 4 October This is my last night in my solitary Clunemore double-bed. (I use the word ‘solitary’ graphically – not regretfully.) We’ve been here two months – and a more unpleasant two months I’ve never spent in all my life. Thank God for the accident:

a.) because it gave me an excuse for retiring to bed when I was tired of family life, which was often.

b.) because it kept the children quieter.

c.) (and by far the most important of all.) It amused you to write to me often. I have often wondered whether, if there hadn’t been an accident, you’d ever have written to me at all. I have never made up my mind on this point.

I really am too tired to write any more, Gershon. My next letter will be from London. The first thing I shall do when I get there will be to write to you (G. No?) The next will be to go to the pictures – and the rest to have my tooth mended. What a busy girl I’m going to be!

Friday 6 October We had a loathly journey. I’ve never travelled at night on English trains before – and to think that once I used to grumble at Wagon Lits! I just didn’t know when I was lucky.

In a moment I am going to see my dentist. I’m frightened out of my wits.

Evening: The dentist was foul. He gave me a cocaine injection, and drilled for two hours – long after the numbness had worn off – and now all I have the energy to do is to lie in bed and cry weakly.

Joyce and I pranced round the shops in a girlish way after lunch. I haven’t been inside a shop since the accident, and I bought myself a beautiful gas-mask case as a gesture.

Monday 9 October It is very strange to be back in London again. I have shopped – braved the black-out with my father to see I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany7 – which I thought lacked co-ordination, and was far too documentary – besides, Miss Steele is very plain, I think, which, aesthetically, makes a difference – besides which, I don’t like her voice – and I have met Prince Axel of Denmark at a lunch party. No! he was not Prince Hamlet, nor anything like his illustrious forbear – the only thing he has in common with Hamlet is the potentiality to say with truth: ‘I’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.’ If example is a satisfactory method of instruction – he would. Never have I seen a man shovel down so large & miscellaneous an assortment of alcoholic liquors. It was all very instructive. Today, I am seeing Mr Back (the surgeon) and the eye specialist. If they give a satisfactory verdict – then it’s Cambridge for me on Thursday afternoon.

It was unsubtle of you, dear, not to see that, if I have never been serious about anything else in all my life, I am serious about not wanting to be married. Mr Kean, who hardly knows me at all, realized that I was frightened of erotic love (of which, everyone tells me, there is a certain amount in every marriage) and you, who know more about me than is good for either of us, don’t seem to realize that that is the most serious obstacle to marriage which could possibly exist – and it’s not that I don’t know anything about it either. Practically speaking, of course, I don’t know anything about it – but otherwise I do. From the ages of 11–20 (inclusive) I brooded over a morbid and depressing infatuation for Gerta’s cousin/young man. I did not like him – nor was I amused by him – but he was very attractive and exciting. It was not until I met him by accident in the theatre, at a performance of the Three Sisters,8 after which he took Jean & me out to coffee, that I realized that he’d bored me excruciatingly for years. (His comments on ‘The Three Sisters’ were as banal as they were insensitive. Silly ass.)

I shall not write to you again before we meet – (unless I owe you a letter before then). I don’t like my mother’s caustic comments – though she doesn’t mean to offend me – besides, there’s a lot in what she says (by implication). You think so too, don’t you.

Monday 16 October [Girton Corner, Cambridge] You’ll be gratified to hear, darling, that Miss Bradbrook has told the Board of Research Studies (by letter) that my Literary Judgement is penetrating & accurate.

I’m feeling quite clever today – so if Mr Bennett gives me half a chance when I see him this afternoon, I’ll ask him what he thinks about supervision. I dare do all that may become a girl, who dares do more is none.

Sunday 22 October I’m very sorry I was so querulous this afternoon, darling. So sorry, in fact, that I’d probably have cried if Aubrey hadn’t been here. (Poor Aubrey!) I was fantastically tired & I had a headache – but that was no excuse. It was an impossible way of returning your kindliness & hospitality – (pause for a semi-tearful brood on the whole thing).

You can come & see me any evening you like, if you like, provided you telephone and/or write and say you’re coming. I now have no sherry, coffee, squashed-fly biscuits, nor any other form of sustenance to offer you, (except Sanatogen, of course, you can have lots of that) – only me, trying hard not to look like Lois – and probably not being able to think of anything to say – so if you’d rather stay at home or prowl about on your Quest for Her – you may. I shall understand.

Monday 6 November I skipped out of bed this morning just as though I’d never had a headache in my life. The red streaks of dawn (is dawn red? I’ve never seen it, so I wouldn’t know – but popular fiction has a tradition to that effect) were just appearing in the sky. Clutching my dressing gown about me and pushing wisps of hair out of my eyes, I tottered downstairs and found your letter (in a carefully disguised hand – which I recognized at once) side by side with a very fat one from Sheila. I opened yours first – and, darling, the photograph is the concrete embodiment of the Platonic idea of a photograph of you. It is not flattering – it is ideally and triumphantly Right. This morning (because nobody is coming to see me today), it is sitting on my dressing table. I don’t think I’m going to be able to do any work – so perhaps there are advantages in les convenances, which dictate that I should keep it out of sight when I have visitors! Thank you for taking so much trouble over it – it was worth waiting for.

Sheila’s letter was Beautiful, too. She lives in a welter of Air Raids and domesticity. She ascribes her engagement to Allan’s whirlwind courtship, when he spent a week in Edinburgh prior to being called up. There was nothing to do but court, she says, social life in Edinburgh being practically at a standstill. Not, mind you, but what they’ve often courted before – but, (in case you’d forgotten) there’s a war on now – so everything is different. She is a little worried about Hamish & Charlotte who are now practically indistinguishable in looks, voice and ideas. They remind her of Paolo & Francesca,9 she says. Their spirits have mingled and they are One. (Don’t misunderstand me, Charlotte is, in every sense of the word, a nice girl and Hamish’s intentions, though undefined, have been strictly honourable from the first.) This is the old Sheila – and I’m very happy at having re-established contact with her.

Tuesday 5 December My dear love, I have News for you. I am going to have a job at the War Office, in the vac, as assistant to Public Adorer No. 1, and so I shall be in direct contact with Leslie for a whole month. I shall come to London by train from Middleton every day. Isn’t that Beautiful? Ma told me, all casual-like, on the telephone this morning. I was strook-aback.

And, darling, now that I’m such a Personage, you will come to tea at four on Thursday, won’t you? After all, an hour one way or another won’t affect your work much, will it? – but oh! the difference to me!

Thursday 14 December I’ve had a most fantastic day, darling, which is a Good Thing, because there’s been no time for my imagination to sit on brood (a lovely expression, I’ve always felt – and from one of my best-known plays too).

Miss Sloane introduced me to her underling – a Miss Fox, whose underling I am to be (and damn me if she isn’t a fully fledged Public Adorer as well! This thing is becoming a cult – but I’m pledged to it now and there is no escape10).

Then Miss Sloane said, ‘I think Mr Hore-Belisha wants to see you,’ and she flung open the double doors – and there I was in his room. That was at three – at three-five he’d already found out why I love Malory – at 3.10 he was asking me what position the Jews held in Mediaeval Society (if any) and at 3.15 – I was giving him a lecture on Chivalric Love Poetry, and religious mania as exemplified in the ‘Book of Margery Kempe’.11 He just sat and nodded all the while – and then he sighed and said, ‘My dear, you must come in and read me some of these things. I feel like the child in Robert Louis Stevenson’s fable – everyone laughed at him for playing with toys – and so he put them away in a cupboard, saying that he’d play with them again when he was grown up and no-one would dare laugh at him, then – and then he forgot all about them. You have opened the cupboard for me, and I have caught a glimpse of the things I had forgotten. Please come and read to me sometimes.’

It was very beautiful, darling – and then the crash came. PA No. 1, who had been standing by chafing all this while, now bustled busily forward. ‘Certainly, certainly,’ she said briskly, more in anger than in sorrow, ‘Eileen will be glad to read to you when we’ve got rid of this war – but you’ve got to see the Prime Minister in five minutes – and you put off Lady Dawson of Penn,’ (Leslie here interjected irritably, ‘Damn the woman’ and PA No. 1 looked as shocked as a PA can permit herself to look) ‘so as we could go through the points of your interview together’ – (glowering at me) ‘and we haven’t.’ Whereat she seized me by the shoulder and pushed me out – shutting the door with a determined click. Not So Beautiful.

However, my work is to consist of filing his letters from constituents (y’know – Mr X has rheumatism – and Mr Hore-Belisha did say at the last election that he’d be pleased to help and advise his constituents – and someone said horse-embrocation was a good thing – what did Mr H. B. think – and so on) and also to help Public Adorer to compile a War-File – of all his successes & failures and speeches, and all the nice comforting things we’ve done for the troops – bein’ an uncle to them and all that – you know.

I ought to be doing this now – but as this is my first afternoon, Miss Fox is being kind to me and letting me have an hour off to write a Very Important letter which must catch the evening mail.

Nor marble nor the gilded monuments of War Chiefs shall outshine this powerful claim, Darling.12

Saturday 16 December Leslie said good-morning with a sardonic chuckle, and said he hoped I was finding my work under Miss Sloane as inspiring as Mediaeval Literature – and turning to Miss Fox, he asked her, whether she had noticed that the office had definitely acquired Tone since they’d got a future University Don to do their odd jobs. He then grumbled at Miss Sloane for telling him he was dining at the Admiralty when he wasn’t, and then wandered back into his own room, calling vociferously for his mid-morning pills, and some hot whisky and milk to wash them down with!

Sunday 24 December It occurred to me on Friday, Gershon, that there was One Person in my life of whom you know nothing – namely Duncan. Now all my friends except you know about me and Duncan – and it is not Right that you should be kept in ignorance any longer. (Hamish knows, Victor knows – and of course Joyce & Jean & Sheila know – even the Outer Circle, like Ismay & Joan Pearce know – true Aubrey does not – but that is difficult, as you will readily understand when I tell you All.)

You see, when I say to any of my friends suddenly in the middle of a conversation, ‘Excuse me, I must see Duncan’, they know that in another idiom this would read ‘Please teacher, may I be excused’, and they smile kindly, for Duncan is beloved of them all – and they also are liable to desert me for him, at any moment of the day – and this is how he came by his name.

As I have often told you, in Drumnadrochit I live next door to the bathroom (and Duncan) and, when we have a house-full of people, there are often battering queues of devotees waiting outside his door (true, we have a Poor Relation established in the garden – but few people care to venture out into the blast on cold mornings to see a mere lateral branch of the family) and one morning, when there were more banging than usual on the bathroom door, I found myself murmuring absently ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking’,13 – and of course from that time forth Duncan it was and is and ever more shall be.

Merry Christmas (but don’t tell your parents I said so) and Happy New Year, Darling.

Saturday 30 December What you’ve had to put up with from your grandmother is just nothing at all compared with what I have had to suffer from my brothers. They want vociferously to know which I prefer, you or Aubrey. Lionel is sure I prefer you; Dicky thinks it’s Aubrey. They asked me all sorts of personal questions about you both, to which I replied primly & non-committally. ‘Which of them has nicer teeth?’ Dicky asked. I said you both had mouths full of orient pearls. ‘Which has most teeth?’ Lionel wanted to know. I said that, as far as I could tell, you both had the same number. They obviously felt at this point that a deadlock had been reached – then Lionel brightened. ‘Has either of them any gold fillings?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Gershon has two.’ Lionel positively glowed. ‘My dear,’ he said (he has a paternal way about him). ‘Mind you, I’m not urging you to marry money, but times are hard, and two gold fillings should be looked upon in the nature of an investment.’ With that I left the room but I heard the two of them discussing you & Aubrey’s chances from the next room. ‘When I was in Cambridge at half-term,’ Dicky said lyingly, ‘I went into Aubrey’s rooms and found him kissing Eileen’s photograph.’ Lionel gave a hollow laugh. ‘When I was last in Cambridge,’ he said, ‘I went into Eileen’s room and found Gershon kissing Eileen!’ ‘Good God!’ said Dicky in awe, ‘Did you?’ ‘Certainly I did,’ Lionel answered – and then there was a shuffling outside my door – and Dicky burst in to ask for confirmation!!! I was very cryptic, and he went away uncertainly scratching his head. Do your young brothers behave in this unseemly fashion, darling?

***

Tuesday 2 January 1940 Good morning, darling. I’m in Disgrace! It is all very sad – because it’s PA No. 1 I’m in Disgrace with – and it is, as you know, essential that Perfect and Beautiful Concord should prevail among the elaborate hierarchies of Public Adoration. Moreover it’s all because of a Cona,14 and although no-one realizes better than I what a vital spoke a Cona can be in the Wheel of Life, I sorrow at the thought of seeing Miss Sloane forever henceforth through a glass bulb darkly.

And this is the story. The prelude goes back to the Friday on which I had lunch with you – (oh! that there were more such Fridays in the vacation calendar, but that is beside the point). On that day in the afternoon my mother telephoned me in a state of extreme agitation (at about 3.30) not, as you might suppose, to find out whether I had got back from lunch or not, but to cluck about our Cona, which had inconsiderately fallen to pieces in her hand – funnel and bulb – at one fell swoop. Could I please ring up Fortnum & Mason and ask them to send me the requisite spare parts which I could then bring back to Middleton in the evening. I said I could and would. I duly telephoned that ’igh-class emporium, and asked them to send the Cona round to Miss Alexander at the War Office before 5 o’clock. They didn’t – so I arrived home without it. My mother greeted me more in sorrow than in anger and suggested that I might collect the parcel on my way to the theatre with Lionel the next day. I said I would – but owing to the temperamental tendencies of the South Down motor-bus service, we missed the train we intended to catch, lunched on the next one & reached Victoria just in time to seize a taxi and get to HM’s theatre as the curtain was going up. We came out of the theatre into an impenetrable fog, bleated impotently for a taxi, took refuge in the Carlton – and were only able to get a taxi in time to catch the 6.18 train back to Middleton (we had intended to get the 5.30). My mother observed the absence of Cona much more in Anger than in Sorrow this time – but I promised faithfully to bring it back on Thursday (which was to be my first day at the office after Christmas) if I died in the attempt. Figures-toi donc mon chagrin when I got to the office, to find, No Cona awaiting me. I immediately set Wheels in Motion (not to say such wheels as were within wheels and therefore hardly worth mentioning), and telephones buzzing – and it finally transpired that F and M had delivered the parcel to the War Office – but that nobody seemed to know anything about it. It took me the whole day to get as far as this, (case histories got somewhat neglected in the process) and I left the office in the flappiest cluck of the century – and got back to Middleton – without the Cona. When my mother had recovered from her Swoon and decided not to cut me off with a jade cigarette holder, I explained the situation, and she was appeased. On Friday, as you already know, I did not go to the office – and yesterday was New Year’s Day, with the result that the train was in a Holiday Humour and I got to work an hour late. However, I tripped happily up the marble steps at 11.15 and burst into Miss Sloane’s room with ‘Mikado’ on my lips. ‘A Happy New Year’, I said convivially to Miss Sloane taking her hand warmly, and failing to notice the lack of response in her clasp. ‘A Happy New Year’, I added affectionately to Miss Fox – and I was just making my way to the Inner Doors to say the same thing to Leslie when a Frosty Silence hit me between the eyes, and trickled moistly down my nose. ‘Oh! er – yes?’ I said, retreating a step in acknowledgment and then my eye lighted upon a huge wooden crate addressed to ‘Miss Alexander – The War Office’. This, I thought, misguidedly, was better. ‘Aha,’ I said. ‘My Cona.’ ‘Yes,’ said Miss Sloane. ‘Your Cona,’ and her words froze into sharp icicles in the air before her. Something was wrong. There was a significant pause. ‘I was nearly court-marshalled15 during the weekend on account of your Cona,’ she added, and the vitriol dropped steaming and sizzling on to the desk. ‘Oh! were you?’ I muttered ineffectually. ‘I am sorry’ – and then the whole story poured out like wine out of the mouth of a narrow-necked bottle, which, as Rosalind knew, comes out not at all or all at once.16 It transpired that there was only one Miss Alexander on the permanent staff of the War Office and she (fate is unkind at times), works in MI5, which is the most Secret and Sinister branch of the Intelligence, and has a notice on the door of its department saying ‘No Admission except by Special Pass’. (I have often quailed, in passing, before this notice.) She was sure it was a bomb, and sent it off to Wormwood Scrubs to be opened (this is True, darling, though I shouldn’t blame you if you don’t believe it – it sounds too fantastic even to happen to me). When they found (at Wormwood Scrubs) that it was only a Cona, they sent it back – and enquiries were set on foot to locate the owner. The entire War Office by this time knew about it and Miss Sloane happened to overhear it talked of in a corridor and said (poor soul, she knew not what she did!) that there was a Miss Alexander working in the S of S’s department, thereby bringing the August and Collective wrath of MI5 on her innocent head for allowing Strange Parcels (which might easily be bombs) to be delivered at a Government Office. Furthermore, to add to her general sense of ill-being, F and M had spent the whole of Friday ringing me up about the Cona – thereby blocking the Official Line.

And that is the story of the Cona. It was the first that ever burst into that silent sea,17 and I think – & Miss Sloane hopes, that it will be the last.

I looked in the mirror this morning and was appalled at how plain I was. I’m so sorry, dear. I’ve known it for years but never so overwhelmingly as today. How Awful for you to have to look at me as often as you do. It is Very Beautiful of you.

Saturday 6 January Darling, I’ve just this minute-as-ever-is finished writing to Leslie. Of course, I Know Nothing about the reason for Leslie’s resignation,18 and I never suspected for an instant that it was coming. I’m sorry – not because I agreed with his politics but because he knew how to remain human in a clogged and sluggish machine. (I mean Neville and his Naughty Ninepins.) He was a man (and still is, bless him – (Dear Leslie).) Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

Sunday 7 January I am now unemployed. I had a cryptic telephone message from Miss Fox saying that, for reasons that I wotted of (or words to that effect) my services would not be required on Monday morning – or subsequently. Oh! darling, Leslie has been most notoriously abused (as Olivia said of Malvolio in a different connection). It is a Great Sorrow to me. I hope a nasty judgement descends on someone for this. I shall just go on Adoring – and Hope.

Joyce and I had a fantastic journey to London on Friday – with Sir Alan Cobham.19 He’s an Awful man. He talked all the way about the ‘Dirty Reds’. (‘Pity,’ he said, slappin’ his thigh, ‘Pity Germany went in with ’em. Why, if she’d attacked ’em, she’d ’ave gone through ’em like a dose o’ salts – what? And we’d have bin in the background, sittin’ pretty. Suited our book, what? Dirty Reds. I flew the next aeroplane from Goering in a race in Germany once – and I beat him. Ha! Ha! Got £1,000 for it too. Not bad goin’ – a thousand pounds for beating a dirty narzi – what?’) He then went on to talk of Famous People I Have Met – but two can play at that game – especially if one of them is Really Trying – and it didn’t take me long to leave him standing. Joyce sat convulsed with mirth in a corner, and my voice was all aquiver with the giggles too. It was like something out of a play. Silly old man.

Saturday 27 January Darling, I’ve got a grey hair – I mean white! I found it this morning in the Library – and I rushed off to the Catalogue Room to tell Joyce – in a dramatic stage whisper. There was a smallish man at the next catalogue who resented the interruption – he turned round (perhaps in order to catch a glimpse of the celebrated hair, which I was holding away from my head with two fingers – perhaps not) and it was Dr Bernard Lewis!20 He thought I was mad before, my dear love, now he’s sure of it! Isn’t it Awful?

I saw John Gielgud in Trinity Street this morning. He looked old & plain & knobbly – and he carries his nose higher than any man I’ve ever seen – with his head thrown right back – he looks like a parrot that’s trying to make its beak look retroussé! Fantastic!

Monday 5 February I didn’t sleep last night, Gershon. Not on account of the Warning – but because you are reproaching yourself on my account. Listen, my dear love. I have known, ever since there was anything to know, exactly what your attitude was – and because of this there has always seemed a touch of irony in the kindly advice of Mrs Turner, Joyce & Joan Friedman who (in that order) advised me to take stock of my intentions before I went Any Further with you.

I told Joyce (but not Mrs Turner or Joan) that I sincerely and honestly believed that in this matter I was not being unfair to you, because you knew and I knew that my Intentions would change according to your wishes. She said, yes, but I must consider the question of whether I would be prepared to make a drastic change in my attitude to marriage should the occasion arise. I said that it would be unfair to myself even to consider that question, unless the occasion arose – and I didn’t believe that it ever would arise. She said that she thought I was deliberately evading the issue – but I maintained that since my whole plan of living was based on the assumption that I didn’t want to marry, I dared not reconsider it, since I believed that you had shifted the basis of our relationship only because you thought I was safeguarded from being seriously hurt when it ended, by my views on marriage. And now you aren’t sure, are you dear, whether I am safeguarded by them? And neither am I – but that is my fault and not yours. After all, you told me very seriously, quite a long time ago to hang onto my independence, and you’ve often told me that you’d never met the woman you wanted to marry. So, darling, please believe that you have nothing with which to reproach yourself – and all I want, is that our relationship should go on until you are tired of it – and it won’t be any more difficult for me later than sooner – since it is quite clear in my mind (I hope) that the break must come – and, as far as I’m concerned, the longer it is put off, the better.

As for my changed attitude to Forwardness, I haven’t any regrets about that, either (though I’m glad I still think the same about Wantonness). I feel, rather arrogantly, that the nobleness of life is to do thus, when such a twain & such a mutual pair can do it.

I’m afraid all this sounds rather clumsy & solemn, darling – but I want to be faithful, even at the risk of expressing myself stupidly.

In conclusion, darling, please don’t worry about me. ‘I wonder, by my troth, what thou & I did till we loved’ and now – ‘you are all states and all princes I. Nothing else is, Princes do but play us.’21

Monday 19 February Last night you were wondering about Aubrey, darling. Wonder no more – I had a letter from him this morning – written in a barracks room which he was sharing with twenty vociferous & newly-inoculated privates – all singing ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major’. He’d just had a meal consisting mainly of spinach. (‘Dear Leslie,’ he says in an embittered parenthesis – and I can’t say I blame him in the circumstances.) You shall see the letter when we meet – but I’ll keep it for the present so as to be able to answer it point by point – as is my way.

Sunday 25 February It really has been a very varied day. I had a terrific discussion with Jennifer about the way Men of Genius treat their wives (the particular instances in question were Shelley, Byron, Milton & Dickens). She said all the wives must have been Fools to Put Up With It. I said, with Infinite Wisdom born of Age & Experience that if they (the wives) were fond of them (the Geniuses) I expected they thought it was worth it. She snorted & said Tush, or something equally intolerant – & added that No Man was Worth Anything unless he knew how to treat his wife. Shelley & Co. were therefore all hypocrites – posing as social reformers indeed, when they’d have been better employed in reforming their own conjugal habits. (Further snort.) Women who married Geniuses, she added, were fools. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove,22 I said mildly – but I’m afraid she thought it was a quotation from ‘The Desert Blooms’23 – so it didn’t carry much weight. Ah! me.

Monday 18 March Oh! I’m so tired, darling. Mr Turner hammered on my door at seven, this morning – and it seemed such a short time since you’d left, that I thought you must have come back to collect something you’d forgotten! I almost said – ‘Come in, darling’, but fortunately I woke up, properly, just in time. Poor Mr Turner – he’d never have been the same again – and it would probably have disorganized the Administration of Justice at the Saffron Walden Courts (where he’s appearing today) very seriously. Think what he was spared – if only he knew!

It’s been a wearing day. Aubrey drove Semiramis24 to London – just as if she were an Army lorry, darling. I shall never be the same again. Occasionally, he thought Semiramis was a motor-bicycle, and that was even worse. Outside the Blue Boar I met Raphael Loewe.25 When I said I was on my way to collect Aubrey – he said intensely ‘Ah! yes – he left me at eleven last night’ just as though he were describing a Tender assignation which he felt to be Very Beautiful. Then he wished me a happy vac in an impassioned voice – & vanished – it was a Beautiful moment, in its way.

The Nester baby circumcision was Awful. As soon as I got to the hotel, I went to see Duncan – leaving Aubrey & Mrs Turner to drink coffee with my mother. I suddenly had a Horrible Thought and, parting hastily from Duncan, I rushed into the drawing room & asked my mother – d’une voix mourante – whether we’d actually have to witness the circumcision. (I’m frightened of shots in films & plays – my dear love – but it’s all as nothing to the Terror I should feel at seeing a smallish, pinkish baby wriggling beneath the surgeon’s knife.) She said rather coldly that it would not be necessary – it was obvious that she thought that certain things should not be discussed in mixed company – and even more obvious that circumcision was among these things. I’m a Great Sorrow to my mother, Gershon – even on my first day in the Family Bosom and that is a Heartly Sorrow to me. Ah! well.

At lunch – I was wedged between Dr & Mrs Weizmann. They both ignored me acidly & ate steadily – but I did elicit two words from Dr W which is at least a beginning. After about half an hour of agonized silence during which I looked at his beard – and thought of you – and sorrowed – I Plunged. ‘I think you know a friend of mine,’ I said – adding helpfully ‘Aubrey Eban’. ‘Nice chap,’ he replied distantly – and silence reigned again. Not a very fruitful morning, darling.

Tuesday 19 March Oh! darling – London is close and clammy & tomorrow is Wednesday and I shan’t be having lunch with you – and I have a headache – & my mother saw a lad we know mollocking on a sofa in the Hotel lounge & said some harsh things about public mollockers – and Life is a Great Sorrow to me – but it has its Solaces too.

Thursday 21 March Yesterday afternoon Basil & Nellie Ionides came to tea. Basil was in a new blue tweed country suit – his face all round & pink & sunlit – looking altogether more like a hand-printed smock than ever. Nellie was in black, and obviously on a Higher Plane, every inch of her. Soon after they’d gone Horace and his wife arrived. Horace was on the way to a Chess Tournament, and too preoccupied with his Next Move to say very much. When he’d gone his wife launched excitedly upon a series of Intimate Revelations about Flaubert’s love-life. She’d just got to the point where he ‘threw his whore out of the house – literally, my dear. But of course he was in love with his mother (wonderful woman!) all his life’ – when my mother came in.

Saturday 23 March D’you remember that in a letter from London at the beginning of this academic year, I outlined at some length and in detail, the development of my attitude towards ‘darling’? Well, I’ve progressed a good deal since then – not only do I toss it off with the utmost ease, verbally and graphically, (there was a time, Gershon, when I always had to ponder for half an hour before saying it – and so when it eventually did emerge – it had always ceased to be relevant) but if it’s absent from your letters, it’s such a Sorrow to me (in a minor way) that I almost cluck!!!

Monday 25 March D’you remember my telling you about the harsh things my mother said about my childhood friend who was, (I gathered from Dark Hints) mollocking in the lounge of the Mayfair with a girl for whose reputation my mother wouldn’t have traded a fig? Well, Aubrey was there at the time and the incident gave rise to some interesting Revelations which I will quote in full – because they are so Beautiful.

‘When I left you on Tuesday I looked avidly round the hotel lobby seeking your compatriot whose violations of the Moral Code stirred such virtuous indignation in Room 426. Sure enough, there he was, but not in flagrante delicto. A somewhat dishevelled young lady was re-decorating herself … and it seemed that neither participant was a believer in the Worse-Than-Death-Concept.

I would regard a hotel lobby & battle-dress as uncongenial conditions for mollocking. But neither would I sit around in the King’s Uniform in a hotel lobby eating an orange. But – let it go no further –’ (he wasn’t talking about you though, darling – he knew I’d tell you) ‘in private life and all unbeknownst I do Eat Oranges … (the dots are to give time for completing the analogy.)

In this connection my Greatest Sorrow is the shattering effect I have on middle-aged married women who succumb long before any offensive is contemplated, whereas those with fewer attachments & less experience regard me with the same platonic affection as one has for the Encyclopaedia Britannica – and ostensibly for the same reasons. But all this belongs to a future volume on Sofas I have Mollocked On …’

Dear Aubrey. I didn’t tell him what mollocking meant – it came to him all-in-a-flash while he was listening to us talking at tea the Sunday before last. (Oh! my dear love – is that only a week-and-a-day ago?)

Thursday 28 March Did I tell you, darling, about my urge for a Red Dress – a very bright red dress, preferably with white buttons. When Aubrey and I walked from the Mayfair to the New Gallery to see ‘Pinocchio’ – I kept darting away from him to flatten my nose avidly against window-panes in which red dresses were displayed, with cries of Rapture and Longing. (The cries of rapture and longing came from me, not the red dresses.) Aubrey was not only Alarmed – he was Appalled.

What shall I do about it, dear? If I don’t have a red dress – I shall probably suffer from Repressions for the rest of my life – and if I do – you’ll probably never speak to me again – and that would be such a Sorrow to me that I can’t contemplate it, even in jest.

Saturday 30 March Yesterday, I had lunch with the Nathans – the most agonizingly well-regulated household in the world – each member of the family has a little saucer with the week’s butter ration on it, and a little flag bearing his or her own initials – and they have competitions to see whose ration lasts longest!! Mrs Nathan billowed in, rather late for lunch – she was in black-and-white checks, from head to foot again. Why does she do it? After an excellent lunch which culminated in a Camembert as resilient as a spring mattress and as smooth as cream – Joyce and I went to see Raffles26 – undistinguished but pleasant.

In the evening Herman & I went to The Beggar’s Opera. After the theatre we went to supper at the Landsdown Restaurant in Berkeley Square. There were some fantastic people dancing. There was one man in uniform with the tiniest hand I ever saw and little feet, and the most colossal massif centrale outside France. He was very tall and there was a little woman with him who was simply prancing about like an india-rubber ball, holding her two fore-fingers in the air and skipping from one foot to the other – occasionally pausing to prod him in the stomach. (Each time she did this Herman & I were certain that he was going to explode with a loud pop.) We hoped for her sake that she was tipsy – we feared she wasn’t – particularly. But the most absurd thing of all was that the man, who looked like a General suffering from protracted adolescence – was in fact – a 2nd Lieutenant! Why this was so extraordinarily funny, I don’t know – but it was. Perhaps because it was so incongruous.

Monday 1 April I’m glad you liked my farm,27 dear. The scenery is rather staggering, isn’t it? In a guide book entitled So You’re Going to Wales, the view from the farm is described as the most beautiful in the world.

I wasn’t surprised at Aubrey’s mollocking either, darling. Of course he’d be ‘sound’ at it – everything he does is sound. Why should mollocking be an exception?

Bless you for not minding about the red dress. My father is sending me a cheque for my birthday. I may get one with that. I saw one in Bognor today with white spots. It looked like spring – as it would catch a Tired Intellectual in its strong toils of grace – I hope it does.

Wednesday 3 April I forgot to tell you in my last letter that there is someone who always calls me ‘luv’, too. He’s an aged Jew from Baghdad – but he made several of his millions in Manchester. (He’s a British Subject now – and his three sons are English Gentlemen from head to heel.) Someone told him once that to be an English Gentleman it was also necessary to be a sportsman. That’s easy, sez he – and he employs an expensive coach and his eldest son became a Ju-Jitsu expert – and his second ran for England in the Olympic Games. The youngest is the most promising of all – but he’s still at school. Mr Smouha28 is Pleased with his Brood – and so he calls me ‘luv’ – because he can afford to be generous.

Saturday 6 April I had a Beautiful letter from Aubrey this morning. He says, of my letter: ‘I read it between parades this morning & a Sergeant Major gazing at the blatantly feminine note-paper winked at me with misplaced lechery & enquired “What does she say?” (He said something else as well which my pen, schooled in moderation, cannot set down.)’ His superior officers have set him problems in slogan-writing for the troops. His suggestion, he says, was received without enthusiasm. It was: ‘Private soldiers are the Braces of the High Command: not noticeable but quite indispensable.’ I’ll tell him what you say about writing to him. It may produce some effect – but I doubt it because he thinks you have far more to tell him than he has to tell you.

I had a letter from Ismay this morning by the same post as yours and Aubrey’s. It was almost human, and it had a rosy glow of retrospective pleasure on its face when it described Charles’s six days leave at Easter, which they spent at their London flat. (I gather they spent most of the time entertaining their relations to meals – but no doubt they had the evenings to themselves – in which to knit happily on either side of the hearth!) Even her clichés had a glimmer of life – like Lyons’s pastry – if you warm it up in the oven.

Monday 8 April Have you any wires you can pull, dear? If so try for your life – and mine – and don’t forget that the Air Force and Navy have intelligence services too – and if you get into them you’re not expected either to fly or run the Gauntlet of the U-boat pest. (I’m not suggesting that you would mind if you were – but I would.)

Oh! why didn’t I cultivate the acquaintance of Sir Edward Grigg – permanent under-secretary for War – when I was at the War Office? My father wrote to me at the time, saying, ‘Look up old Grigg, we were at John’s together.’ I told Leslie about this and asked who Grigg was. He said, ‘Oh! Grigg,’ as one would say ‘Oh! spinach,’ if one were Aubrey – and so I pursued the matter no further. What a damned fool I was, and am, & ever shall be.

Thursday 11 April Darling, ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’29 sounds nonsense until you suddenly & sickeningly apprehend its meaning in a kind of leaden stupor, as I did when I was confronted with an actual date – July. Then the vague and frightening notion of you in battle-dress and in a place where I am not, formulated itself into a dark reality. (Oh! apparently that thought didn’t lie too deep for tears after all! It was really a delayed action of my tear ducts.) You are ten thousand times a properer man than I a woman, my dear love, and it’s shallow and selfish of me to twitter at you. But once this particular cloud has out-wept its rain,30 I promise you’ll hear no more on’t – but please don’t be cruel only to be kind, and remind me of what is past and passing and to come. You treated me like a child in not telling me, until it was over, that you were going to see the Military authorities (bless you for it). Please go on treating me like a child – and only tell me things of that kind if and when you have to, for I am pigeon-livered and lack gall31 – and when I think of you as a cog in the military machine I am sick and sullen32 (though, as I once pointed out to Aubrey, I’m like Cleopatra in that alone).

Friday 12 April I don’t like the Miss Sloane: Leslie: Eileen: Gershon equation. Leslie can’t do without Miss Sloane, but he is nevertheless wholly & permanently unaware of her as a living person. She’s just the Hand that Wields the Pen. You would be quite justified in looking upon me in just that light, of course – but nevertheless I hope you don’t.

On the other hand, I do like the Thought of being built for comfort, not speed – though it does make me feel rather like a hearse – (a feeling, I might add, wholly in harmony with my present mood, which makes Mariana in the moated Grange seem like a Bright Young Thing).33

1 In May 1939 the government had introduced a very limited programme of conscription, and on the outbreak of war this was superseded by the National Service (Armed Forces) Act, under which all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one, with numerous deferments and exemptions, became liable for conscription.

2 Helen Marion Wodehouse (1880–1964).

3 A reference to ‘Jabberwocky’, by Lewis Carroll (1832–98).

4 The sinking of HMS Courageous off the coast of Ireland by a U-boat with the loss of 519 lives. Hailed as a triumph in Germany, it came as an early blow to British pride in the Royal Navy.

5 ‘An unconsidered trifle of the goldsmith’s art’, the vinaigrette was a small ornamented container with a pierced grille containing a perfumed sponge. A lifelong passion of Eileen’s, she would have the best collection in England and after the war write a book on the subject.

6 From Adonais: An elegy on the death of John Keats, by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).

7 A drama (1936) starring Isobel Lillian Steele and based on her own experiences.

8 A play by the Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904).

9 Characters based on the life of Francesca de Rimini (c.1255–85) from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (c.1265–1321).

10 Eileen would be a little unfair to Hore-Belisha: on his death in 1957 he left two-thirds of his estate to Miss Sloane and the other third to Miss Fox.

11 Margery Kempe (c.1373–1438) was an English Christian mystic, known for dictating The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language.

12 An allusion to ‘Sonnet 55’ by William Shakespeare.

13 Macbeth, Act II, scene ii.

14 A glass coffee machine.

15 Gershon was always complaining about Eileen’s spelling, and she happily confessed that she could not spell in any language, including in Hebrew.

16 As You Like It, Act III, scene ii.

17 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).

18 Hore-Belisha had been at odds with his generals since he first took office, and disagreements over the disposition and readiness of the BEF in France finally led to his dismissal. Public opinion was on his side but it was the effective end of his political career.

19 An RFC pilot in the First World War, Sir Alan Cobham was a famous pioneer of long-distance aviation.

20 A controversial Jewish orientalist and historian, Dr Bernard Lewis worked in intelligence during the war.

21 From the poem ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne (1572–1631).

22 ‘Sonnet 116’ by William Shakespeare.

23 Most likely a reference to ‘Desert Bloom’, a poem by Gertrude Thomas Arnold (1876–1962).

24 Eileen’s car, ‘the most delicate shade of ivory imaginable’, named after the legendary queen of King Ninus of Assyria.

25 Jewish writer, translator, poet and decorated wartime soldier, Raphael Loewe came from a long tradition of Jewish scholarship. His father, Herbert, the Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge, had written a letter of support for Eileen’s application to Girton.

26 A British film made in 1939 starring David Niven and Olivia de Haviland, based on ‘Raffles’, the amateur cracksman short stories, by E. W. Hornung (1866–1921).

27 On his walking holiday in north Wales, Gershon had stayed at the farm Eileen owned near Beddgelert in Snowdonia.

28 Even by Egyptian standards, the cotton manufacturing Smouhas were spectacularly rich. In the wake of the Suez conflict they would lose a huge fortune when Nasser confiscated Jewish Egyptian property. Joseph’s son, Edward, won a bronze medal for Britain in the 1928 Olympics.

29 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, by William Wordsworth (1770–1850).

30 Adonais, by P. B. Shelley.

31 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii.

32 Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, scene iii.

33 A reference to ‘Mariana’, a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–92).

May–September 1940

On 7 May, in the middle of the disastrous Norway campaign, Neville Chamberlain opened a two-day debate on the debacle in the House of Commons. The idea of the campaign had from the start been Winston Churchill’s, but three days later it was Chamberlain who was gone, a scapegoat for Norway and belated judgement on the years of appeasement and moral failure, and Churchill was prime minister. It was not a moment too soon. On the same day, German armies swept into neutral Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland. The Phoney War was over.

The Battle of France, which began on 10 May 1940, was effectively all but over for the British by the end of the month. At that time, and since, the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ masked the extent of the humiliation inflicted on the Allies, but the brutal truth was that within the space of three weeks, neutral Holland and Belgium had been overrun, France brought to her knees and almost 340,000 British and French troops, minus almost all their heavy equipment, transport vehicles, tanks and guns, left trapped in an ever-diminishing pocket on the French Channel coast. The campaign would limp on hopelessly through the early weeks of June, but by the 22nd, France had gone the way of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium and the invasion of Britain seemed only a matter of time.

To those returning from France to Britain in June 1940, however, London still seemed remarkably untouched by events across the Channel, and the ‘terror bombing’ it had expected in September 1939 no nearer than before. In many ways, in fact, the war had yet to affect Eileen directly, but when on 10 June Mussolini’s Italy declared war on Britain and France, her mother, Vicky – married to a British citizen, and the mother of three British children, but like so many Jews within the old Ottoman empire, the owner of an Italian passport – suddenly found herself categorised as an ‘Enemy Alien’.

At a time when an invasion was expected at any moment ‘Fifth Columnist Fever’ was in the air – even Jewish refugees would find themselves interned on the Isle of Man – and while Vicky herself was at no risk her money was. The fear in the Alexander household was that with an Italian army threatening Egypt, and so many Egyptian Italians known to be fascist sympathisers, the family-owned Mosseri Bank, and with it all Vicky’s capital and their only regular source of income, might be confiscated.

The news of the death of Vicky’s brother, Eli, the head of the bank, only the day after Mussolini declared war, further darkened the future, and one of the first casualties was Eileen’s academic career. The fears would eventually prove groundless, but with dire talk of what the Nazis would do to Jews when they invaded, and her father threatening to take the whole family to Canada, Eileen, like most of her Girton friends over the next eighteen months, gave up her dreams of Arthurian Romance and Cambridge to apply for war work in one of the government’s rapidly expanding ministries.

The war had at last caught up with Gershon, too, who – after spending his final month of freedom walking in Wales, where he stayed on the farm owned by Eileen, and farm-labouring in the West Country with a Cambridge friend – was now ‘1310136 Aircraftman 2 G. Ellenbogen’, the lowest rank in the RAF. For a man with his education and language skills his future lay in intelligence work, but in 1940 he was still too young for a commission into the intelligence branch, and for the next eighteen frustrating months his life would revolve around a succession of bases and camps across the country, punctuated only by the occasional snatched and uncertain leave in London.

This at least meant that he could see Eileen, because in the middle of May 1940 the Alexanders took a house in London’s Swiss Cottage, and for the rest of the war 9 Harley Road, NW3, would be her home. The house was a comfortable, detached, red-brick building not far from the anti-aircraft battery on Primrose Hill, sandwiched between larger houses on either side, with a couple, Mr and Mrs Wright, to cook and generally ‘do’ for them, an Austrian refugee called Mrs Seidler as their first semi-permanent ‘guest’, and a big garden at the back, complete with its own concrete air-raid shelter.

The shelter’s time would come, but over the long summer months of 1940, as Beaverbrook’s factories worked heroically to keep up with fighter losses, and RAF pilots were thrown into the fight with only a handful of hours of air time behind them, the battle between Goering’s Luftwaffe and Dowding’s Fighter Command – the ‘Battle of Britain’ – raged largely over the villages and fields of south-east England. While there were continuous attacks on airfields, ports and shipping, it was only at the beginning of September 1940, when the Luftwaffe turned from the airfields, radar stations and strategic targets of the south-east to the capital, that London’s volunteer army of wardens and fire-watchers – soon to include Eileen and her mother – found themselves on the war’s front line alongside the city’s firemen, gunners, barrage balloon teams, medics and bomb-disposal units. The Blitz – short for Blitzkrieg, Lightning War – had begun.

3
My Young Fellow

Saturday 13 April 1940 [Eileen’s twenty-third birthday] Darling, when I wrote to you yesterday, I felt as though I should never smile again – but I was wrong. This England1 produced not a languid twitch at the corners of my mouth or anything like that – but a twinkle, and then a wide smile, and then a giggle, and then the loud laugh, which is such a source of surprise to you, dear.

The birthday atmosphere is somewhat marred by it’s being Saturday, and the fact that I have a headache as though the flames of Hell were roaring in my skull.

Well, with all this, my gloom fell from my shoulders like a cloak – and now, I’m ready to laugh at anything – even at the merry absurdity of my ever casting you into the limbo of Men I have Known & Forgotten. As a matter of fact, I never forget anybody, not even the young man of Jewish Lineage and Parisian up-bringing who, for some reason known only to himself, wanted to impress me – and set about it by telling me that he’d had his first Mistress at the age of 12½, and that she was the mother of his best friend at school. He hastened to add that the suggestion came from her – and that Love (by which he meant Lust) was Very Beautiful. All this happened by moonlight on a Messageries Maritimes Liner in the middle of the Mediterranean – and was intensely funny. I listened solemnly to his catalogue of wantonness – and then laughed and laughed and laughed – and said ‘Goodnight’. I don’t suppose he’s ever been the same since.

Thursday 23 May I bore my Mother away to the West End to see Gone With the Wind, which, darling, is unendurably long (3h 58m). The acting is good (but no better than that). Some of the photography is lovely – and you know what I think of the plot – and all its shoddy melodrama stands out far more glaringly on the screen than in the pages of the book. No, my comfort, it is not worth all the publicity which has been lavished on it – it is not worth getting pins and needles in the rear elevation for, either – and, above all, it is not worth Titanic feats of Endurance in connection with Duncan.

Horace is so bracing. He came to see me yesterday evening & solemnly urged my mother and myself to evacuate ourselves to my farm in Wales, so that when the Nazis smash us, we can make a ‘quick getaway’ via some northerly port. Dear Horace.

Oh! darling. I haven’t seen you since Newton started Taking an Interest in Apples – and that was hundreds of years ago.

Monday 10 June Aubrey came into the drawing room, stiff and correct and every-inch-an-officer – and the bridge-players (including my mother & father, darling – what a Sorrow) just looked at him with a glazed eye &, as he said afterwards, made him feel like the Shrinking Man in every Bateman cartoon. My father then bore Aubrey & me off to the Front Parlour & told us All, with vague & gloomy expansiveness. All he said could be condensed into one poignant & succinct phrase. ‘What a sorrow.’ Aubrey called him Sir, and put his case – in the Pauses for Breath – and my father said he’d do what he could for him with Colonel Kisch & Lord Lloyd. He then said A Few Words on the subject of Glorious Evacuations & went back to his bridge. Aubrey seemed to think he might be helpful – but he (Aubrey) was tired & nervy & stilted – and when I told him about the Importance of Shoes in marking the distinction between Forwardness and Wantonness, he was only able to manage a wan smile – and it was obvious that his Mind was elsewhere.

I felt suddenly & frighteningly out of touch with Aubrey tonight. Perhaps because I’d hung on to the thought of his coming as a kind of indirect link with you – and he was completely detached from us and our idiom and our Solaces & Sorrows.

Of course, it’s not surprising. It looks as though MI2 is off – but he hopes with the help of Dr Weizmann, Major Cazalet & perhaps Pa, to get to Egypt & Palestine, and do the kind of work that interests him – once he gets there. Everyone in Whitehall disclaimed all knowledge or responsibility in the matter or expressed Great Sorrow – Oh! I hope All will be Well with him.

Tuesday 11 June When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions, darling – as I may have said before.

This morning Lord Inverforth3 telephoned & my mother picked up the receiver. He asked if he could speak to Dad and then urged him to go into another room – alone. Something in his voice must have frightened my mother because she turned dreadfully pale – and I, rather foolishly, advised her to pick up the receiver & listen in. She did – and oh! darling, she just lay back in bed gasping & choking with dry, coughing sobs. Lord I had had a wire from her sisters asking him to tell her that Uncle Elie had died suddenly (acute appendicitis with complications). She has this rather frightening & very Jewish bond with all her relations – & in this case there was no warning or preparation of any kind. Dad came into the room & sat down – his face was quite grey & blank & he kept muttering ‘She doesn’t deserve it’ over & over again – & nurse danced around squeaking with maddening ineffectualness. Mon dieu, quel cauchemare! (I can’t spell, darling, even in an emergency. I don’t know whether there’s an ‘e’ in cauchemare or nor.) Now, there’ll be another year of black and apathy & withdrawal for my mother.

Yesterday she was worried because all her money is in her brothers’ bank & may be confiscated by the Egyptian Government – and that would mean that our only steady income would be cut off completely – & now there’s this. I’m glad I’m here today, my dear love – not but what I’m completely useless & ineffectual – but she seems to be pleased that I’m back in London.

This isn’t a letter – just thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.4 (Eliot is a great poet, dear.) Oh! I am out of suits with fortune!

Referring to you at lunch today, darling, my father said in mock-bewilderment that he couldn’t understand ‘this business’ at all – but no doubt it had some profound Medieval Significance – to which I replied that you were a verray parfit gentil knight5 – and, in addition, a Great Solace to me. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Solace? Solace?’ and then, dear, the Beauty of the word dawned upon him, in all its glory. ‘Solace’, he murmured into his Camembert. ‘Solace!’ he added later between noisy sips of coffee. ‘Solace’, he said, puffing the word out with his cigarette-smoke. This is the first glimpse of my idiom he’s had as yet. Perhaps I was wrong in keeping it from him for so long.

It’s been a wearing day – my father has suggested that a Good Way to end Italian intervention would be to dress the Pope up in Full Regalia & send him between the French & Italian armies saying ‘Shoot if you dare!’ (A Beautiful Thought in its way.)

Wednesday 12 June Yesterday evening my father & I walked to Primrose Hill for air. He was peering over fences at potato-patches in an ecstasy of dig-for-victory enthusiasm – but I was looking wistfully at the mollockers in the long grass & thinking that the nobleness of life would be to do thus if you & I could do it. Oh! my God, the Dragon School has just notified us of a violent epidemic of measles & Dicky is coming home on Saturday for a fortnight! where’s that kindly & protective providence you told me about?

Friday 14 June I’ve just fled upstairs to escape the 1 o’clock news. Cowardly, dear? – but the tension here is growing & growing, & I’m so terrified of my father’s deciding suddenly that we are to go away – to Canada or God knows where. If that happened, then that dream I’m always having about not being able to get to you would be real, darling. Oh! God. I’m bereft of all words at that thought.

My mother is eating off a low stool with a slit in her petticoat – a gloomy business – & my father sits & speculates upon our chances of survival when the Germans occupy London. Tomorrow Dicky will be here to give us a taste of Nazism in the Home. Tired of all these, for restful death I cry … as I said in one of my best sonnets – adding hastily however – save that to die I leave my love alone.6

Saturday 15 June I’ve been keeping out of my father’s way – & last night he commented on it – acidly – & then took on a martyred air, & today he keeps coming into my room & asking me to go downstairs & talk to him. It’s exactly as I told you, darling. I can’t escape – and every time I’m with him, I simply quiver with fury – because he took me away from Cambridge, darling – and I can’t bear it. Dicky has come home today, doubtless to spread measles & havoc. There is no light … no light.

I had a letter from Aubrey this morning. There’s no question of MI. Dr Weizmann’s son is in exactly the same position, it seems – and Dr W has had a Cackle of Cabinet Ministers pulling wires All in Vain. However, he hopes to get to the Near East & establish himself as an Asset when he gets there. His training ends on Friday & then he gets a fortnight’s leave.

We had a diversion yesterday in the shape of a fat little refugee rabbi who came to instruct my mother in the Art of Mourning. (She ought to Know All by now – she’s had enough practice, poor woman, but she’s so frightened of Leaving Anything Out, that she always likes to have a Spiritual Guide to Hold her Hand.) He was small & round and his features were richly curved – & he thought up a perfectly incredible number of things which my mother ought to be doing – & then when he got home he remembered yet Another – & he telephoned to tell my mother that she must on no account wear leather on her feet (Give me a shoe that is not leather soled! – or a bedroom slipper, for that matter) lest we should all Perish or be Cast into Hell. It was obviously a matter about which he felt strongly.

I’ve done nothing since I left Cambridge but let my melancholy sit on brood – and read crime-stories – the bloodier the better. I’m suffering from an infinite prolongation of the feeling I have in Cambridge when you’re an hour or two late. I haven’t smiled since I left you standing on the station in your white shirt & blue jacket which I could see for such a long time after the train had started moving.

Darling, Colonel Nathan’s peerage makes me feel awkward & embarrassed with Joyce. You see, I think it’s ludicrous – & she thinks it’s Just & Proper. (Of course I didn’t tell her I thought it was Ludicrous – you have learnt by now that I don’t invariably Tell All, haven’t you?) So there’s an Enormous Gap between her Idiom & Mine on the subject – even in jest.

Sunday 16 June Col. Nathan a peer, darling! However the Hon. Joyce will carry her courtesy title with an air – & doubtless (I mean Mrs N (as was) of course) Her Ladyship’s F. H.7 will become more formidable by several inches.

I had tea with Joyce and her mother today. I peered wistfully at the exquisite square inch of tea-butter and, like Marie Antoinette, decided that the common people had better eat cake. I saw the report in the evening paper when I got home. I rang Joyce up to rebuke her for failing to Tell Me All. She said there wasn’t a word of Truth in it – and half-an-hour later rang me up to say that it was now official. Can’t you imagine the Colonel coming home & coyly unburdening himself like a bride announcing that an Heir has been arranged for? How Fantastic!

Friday 21 June Oh! darling, it was fantastically selfish of me to suggest that you should come to London on Saturday – but when it’s a matter of keeping you with me or having you back again soon, I have no morals – I’ve always felt in complete affinity with Cleopatra when she turned her ship round – knowing Antony would follow her – although it meant shame – shame – ever for ever – and she knew it.

Monday 24 June I went to Kilburn with my mother this morning to buy vegetables (vegetables are cheaper in Kilburn, darling!) & now I Know All. You burst open pea-pods & taste the peas & unless they’re a Solace in the Raw, you Reject them – you squeeze cabbages & unless they squeak, you say in a voice of withering scorn, that they Have no Heart – and cast them from you – a lettuce that you can’t stub your finger on is No Good – & when strawberries are two shillings a pound, you lose Heart & decide that you might as well have done your shopping at Swiss Cottage & saved a 2d bus fare.

Tuesday 25 June Oh! darling, things that love night love not such things as these. The sirens started screaming at 1.15. (Sirens are louder here than at Girton Corner.) I got up to see what my parents were doing – and Pa took such exception to my suggestion that we should all stay in bed, that I put on my new dressing-gown, wrapped my eiderdown round me & followed him to our outside shelter. It was a clear, still night and the stars couldn’t have been more sharply focussed if there had been a frost – half a moon & little greyish clouds. We packed into the shelter like chocolate stick-biscuits in a round tin. We sat in deck-chairs – large deck-chairs – & my feet didn’t reach the ground – but Stanley chivalrously stretched out his legs & let me rest my feet on his slippers. We sat quite silently for the most part – the only sound was the rumbling of poor old Wright’s recalcitrant digestion – & occasional bursts of impromptu & heavy jests from Pa. At about 2.30 (the shelter is distempered concrete & as bare as a picked bone, and I was getting colder & colder), I was suddenly doubled up with cramp – (Nurse said nastily that it was due to my being out in the rain on Sunday. I pointed out tartly that there hadn’t been a drop of rain anywhere except on the pavement by the time we got out of the house!). Anyway, I quaffed a sherry glass full of brandy & warm water in one nose-wrinkling gulp & went to bed. The All-Clear sounded at four – but I never heard it – the brandy having done its work – but that was only the beginning of things for my parents & Stanley – because poor old Wright had a heart-attack & they had to summon a doctor & send him off in Mrs Wright’s care, to hospital. So this morning everyone here is a little blear-eyed & vague.

Wednesday 26 June Darling, I’m almost angry with you. Here are the papers all buzzing with vague & terrifying reports of continuous raids on the SW – and no letter of reassurance from you this morning.

I spent a fantastic afternoon with Joan at her crazy school yesterday. The children wear purple shorts and white shirts – the garden is a carefully cultivated wilderness – the school-building, rambling, beautifully furnished, with a touch of arty-craftiness here & there. The staff sits about on tree-stumps Musing upon Life in rather uninhibited clothes. (Joan tells me that the Headmistress, who is nearly 83, and of titanic dimensions, appeared in the air-raid shelter on Monday night in a pair of trousers all tied together with safety-pins – declaring that her zip fasteners had been sabotaged either by one of the children or the staff – and after seeing the school, I can well believe it.)

Joan told me, more in sorrow than in anger, that she had met Joy Blackaby at her interview with the Cambridge County School, & the first thing Joy had said to her was that she’d seen me one day mollocking abandonedly in KP!8 Joan said that in Cambridge of all places there was no excuse for Public Mollocking, because the facilities for kissing & clipping at home were unlimited. I agreed in principle – but I pointed out that in my case, there was a factor which had never entered into her relationship with Ian – Time fear. I said that taking a short-view, she too had often heard time’s winged chariot hurrying near – but that against this – she had a confident feeling of permanence which made it unnecessary for her to hang on to the reassurance of physical contact. Because she has a sense of having all life before her, darling, she never has that terrifying ‘Is he really here?’ doubt – nor the crushing fear that every moment of Solace may be the last. She couldn’t see why I should assume that you’d stop wanting me as a Solace one day. She said that, from what she had seen of us together, our regard for one another was unhurried & restful & built on more permanent foundations than most people’s. I said that mine was – but that you had warned me from the very beginning that yours might not be – but I hoped to God she was right – whereupon she withdrew her censure of my public behaviour, & added that she was sure that, ultimately, All Would be Well.

I got a letter and a Character from Miss Bradbrook this morning. She is serving her country by pounding mangle-wurzels and working for the Hush-hush from nine-till-five every day. Only Miss Bradbrook could have thought of such a Beautiful juxtaposition of labours – turning mangle-wurzels into cattle-fodder – and hearing All – at one fell swoop. She’s a wonderful woman. My Character is on a very high Plane, darling. I’m looking forward to showing it to you. She advises me to get into the Civil Service if I can, because I’ll only be allowed to take up my research where I left off if I’ve been doing war-work in the interval.

Thursday 27 June I have been to Kilburn again for vegetables. Cauliflowers have risen in price, whereas beans have Gone Down. The situation on the Asparagus Market remains unchanged.

I’m seeing the Secretary of the Appointments Board tomorrow to Tell her All. I liked the sound of her voice over the telephone – which is encouraging – voices make a lot of difference. Did you hear the Princess Royal asking us to join the ATS on the Wireless? ‘Over your dead body!’ I replied sullenly. ‘If it’s the last thing I do.’ (Aren’t everybody’s idioms but ours silly, dear?)

Then Aubrey rang up to ask if we could meet for tea instead of lunch, as his cousin Charles had decided to get married. I said oh! wasn’t that rather surprising? – to which he replied Yes and No. Charles, it seems has been Walking Out for eighteen years – but, Aubrey says, after you have been Walking Out for eighteen years, people just assume that you have Got into a Rut, and stop wondering about Intentions – (what a Solace, darling, we’ve only got seventeen years to go!) & when you have an over-night whirlwind courtship with your wench of eighteen years standing, and get married the next day – it is, on one plane, surprising, although, on another, you’ve really been expecting it all along. This is the gist of what Aubrey said, though perhaps he didn’t say it quite in those words.

Later: Aubrey arrived at the Cumberland rather late. He was delayed by the wedding. It’s a Beautiful story, darling. It seems that Charles and his lady would have gone on Walking Out quite happily for another eighteen years, had it not been for his parents & the lady’s. She is a Palestinian &, as such, subject to the Alien curfew. ‘Poor Shulamite,’ said her parents, in sorrow (Shulamite, believe it or not, is her name.) ‘How inconvenient’ – and they called on Charles’ parents, who forthwith sent a wire to Charles saying, ‘Be a man Charles – marry her – or she’ll have to go to bed every night at 10.15.’ So Charles called on her & said ‘What are you doing on Thursday, sweet chuck?’ & she said she had a short-hand exam in the morning but that she was free in the afternoon. ‘All Right,’ said Charles, ‘we’ll get married in the afternoon.’ And they did – in the presence of Aubrey & his mother. The ceremony lasted 15 minutes & then Charles went over to the cash desk & handed over £2. 4. 6½d (Aubrey says you can do it for 7/6d if you really try – but Charles decided to do the Big Thing for once in his life. Aubrey says he is disgustingly rich – and incredibly parsimonious in the normal way). Aubrey arrived for tea looking harassed & a little disillusioned. He says he now knows why so many people prefer to Live in Sin. Registry Office Marriages – culminating in a sordid little transaction at the cash desk are, he assures me, no solace at all. What an anti-climax, dear, after Walking Out on a Higher Plane for 18 years!

Friday 28 June I have had an eventful day, darling. I arrived at Bedford College much too early for my interview – so I went into the Botanical Gardens to smoke and muse. Then I went in to see Mrs Woodcock who was wearing a beautiful emerald ring – & was efficient & soignée and altogether quite a solace. She said the Higher Grades of the Civil Service were obviously The Thing. The Civil Service, she went on, loves Classicists & Economists & distrusted English Specialists but, she added consolingly, they were very partial to firsts. Then I told her about my mother being an Enemy Alien & she was in Great Sorrow & went into muse – out of which she emerged suddenly to ask briskly whether I knew anyone with Influence. I said, without enthusiasm, that I knew Lord Lloyd. ‘Ask him to write a covering letter to your application – saying that your family is well known to him and is All Right.’ She finished up by suggesting a teaching job in a boy’s school, if Lord Lloyd couldn’t help.

Dicky’s Disgrace culminated at lunch time in his throwing one of the dining-room chairs at Pa & then telling him to go to bloody Hell. I did not participate in this exchange of badinage – as I haven’t spoken to Dicky for nearly a week – but I was, in a sense, the onlie begetter of the Scene9 – as it arose out of the fact that it was about time Dicky apologized to me for being such a sorrow. This morning my mother spoke to me about Dicky, saying that I wasn’t really very fair to him – then, darling, I could see a struggle Going On Within – and finally she said – as though she were quoting the scriptures – ‘Gershon told you that he didn’t think you were just to Dicky.’ It was very beautiful to hear my mother citing you as the Ultimate Authority, dear. I hope she does it again – often. Something has gone wrong with the style of this letter – perhaps it’s because I’m tired – and oppressed with the frightening knowledge that I can’t do without you, my dear love – and what’s going to happen to me?

Saturday 29 June Aubrey rang up this morning to tell me that Dr Lewis is getting married on Monday. He wanted to know if you were in London so that he could ask you to be his best man. Oh! darling – I wish he could get hold of you before Monday. Not knowing when I’m going to see you again is driving me mad – & that’s not just a manner of speaking, either.

I had a letter from Mrs Woodcock this morning suggesting that I might like to teach in a school in the Midlands. English up to University Scholarship standard & Scripture & Games throughout the school!!

I had a Civil Service form to fill in this morning. They want to know if I’m a specialist in anything. ‘Medieval Romance’ looks so helpful, dear! They also want to know All about my health. Well, they asked for it – I’ll show ’em.

Oh! Dicky has just been in to ask for an Armistice. I gave way without much enthusiasm – but because I thought you’d like me to, &, as I said once before – being your slave what should I do but tend upon the hours & times of your desires?

Sunday 30 June Darling, following my newly learnt lesson of telling you All, I want you to listen to me tolerantly & patiently now. I’m so frightened that my hand is shaking – but because, you are, after all, my friend as well as my Young Fellow, I don’t believe you’ll be angry with me. (Please don’t be angry with me, my dear love.)

Do you remember, when we were walking from Grantchester one afternoon, you said ‘If your father were to ask me my Intentions, I know what I’d say to him’? Well, I wanted to ask you then, what you would say, not because I didn’t think I knew the answer, but because I hoped I might be wrong – but I didn’t ask because I felt then that indecision was better than crushing certainty. Now, however, I want to tell you what I believe to be the reasons for your Absence of Intentions, and to ask you if I’m right, & if, as far as you can judge at present, these obstacles will always be insurmountable. And here they are.

a.) My inadequacy as a Solace – the fact that you’re afraid that if you were with me always, you’d be made restless & irritated by my clucking & possessiveness & would become obsessed with the idea of breaking free.

b.) You are in no position financially to have any Intentions. (Note – the present war-situation might over-ride that consideration, if your Intended-as-might-have-been were economical, practical and useful-about-the-house. It’s a Heartly Sorrow to you, (though perhaps not for this reason) that I am none of these things.)

c.) You have a very strong feeling that I wouldn’t be a success with your family. I am not Orthodox enough – or useful enough – or adaptable enough.

d.) As circumstances make it possible only for us to meet sporadically, you may at any time meet another & more adequate Solace.

That is how I interpret your attitude to the situation, darling. Am I right? Whatever you say will make no difference. I am yours now and hereafter and for ever, on any plane you will – but I feel it’s cowardly of me not to ask you what you really think – & I know that whatever you say will be generous & kind, as everything you have said to me has always been.

Do you remember, as well, that when I told you about my recurring dream about our being separated by a room-full of people, you said that it was because I realized, as you did, that there was something standing in our way? Did you mean any of the things I’ve mentioned, dear – or something else – and, if so, what? I believe, you know, that I could make a success of being a permanent Solace to you – because I’d put every ounce of energy I had into trying to be what you wanted me to be – but if you don’t, darling, it’s no matter. I haven’t any will but yours.

I’m so exhausted by this avowal, Gershon, that I feel as if I’d had a baby – limp & wan & panting! I am, I mean – not the Baby!

In the evening Norman Bentwich came to sherry. He has a job in the Ministry of Information. In the event of London’s becoming a besieged city, his job is to Keep the Population calm with Soothing News-bulletins. Horace, if he knew of this, would Snort and call him an Eye-wash-monger – I feel. Horace & Norman were at St Paul’s together – they are no Solace to one another on any plane whatever. Norman Wilts visibly at the mention of Horace’s name – Horace Seethes at the mention of Norman’s – it is all very Intense & Concentrated.

This morning Mrs Seidler suddenly arrived here – she is coming to live in London. My parents are thinking of offering her a home with us, (She wants to live with a family as her husband is likely to be interned any day, and she has no friends in London) but Pa wants to think over the position before actually suggesting it to her.

Please write to me more often, darling. On the days when I don’t get a letter from you, I feel like a Gothic Ruin in an 18th century landscape – an empty shell, overgrown with the tangled ivy of Desolation – which sounds very picturesque – but as a matter of fact it isn’t.

Monday 1 July Darling, I’m in Solace – so please don’t answer my questions in yesterday’s letter – because I don’t want to be in sorrow all over again. Thank you.

Wednesday 3 July Oh! please let’s get this Intentions question settled in your next letter, darling. It’s no good being stern about ‘troubled sleep’. Last night I didn’t sleep at all, because I thought I was going to hear the Awful All this morning.

I had rather a Harrowing afternoon, yesterday. Joan & Ian came to lunch. It was their last day together before Ian left for Nyasaland10 – and during & after lunch, we all Glittered with Synthetic Gaiety – then after coffee, Ian said he’d have to leave at 4.30 for Croydon where his people are staying – and Joan went upstairs to put on her hat & she sat down & cried & cried & cried. Then she went into the bathroom to wash her face – & remarked that she’d better see Duncan while she was there – when we suddenly became Aware of a Strange Man on the Windowsill. (We found out afterwards that it was the Gardener trimming the hedge.) It was so fantastic that it broke the Tension & we laughed hysterically for at least ten minutes.

Then they went off to the Portuguese Embassy to get a visa for Ian for Mozambique – & at 4.30 I met Joan at the Cumberland. (She asked me to have tea with her somewhere detached & noisy – & it seemed the ideal place.) She behaved, darling, with marvellous dignity & courage. I have the most tremendous respect for her – perhaps more than for any of my other college friends. I wish I were more like her – & I know that, at the end of three years, she & Ian will resume their relationship as though he’d never been away. Their love is Serious, Complete & of a Certain Magnitude – and after Sorrow there will be Regeneration.

Nurse is a fool. I was trying to make Joan & Ian laugh at lunch (and succeeding, darling) by telling them how Sheila explained to me the other day that Allan failed in his Tripos because he would insist on sticking too close to the point. (I’d stick to it too, if I only had one point – I’d cling to it as a drowning man clings to a straw – wouldn’t you?) & Nurse, to whom none of my remarks were addressed, snorted & said: ‘I think you spend your whole life saying nasty things about the people you call your friends.’ Joan & Ian just stared at her coldly & my mother said ‘Well, I’d rather see her laugh than cry.’ Nurse gave us all a Comprehensive Dirty Look – and subsided. My idiom is so much Bessarabian to Nurse (Is there a Bessarabian language, darling? It doesn’t really matter – but I thought I’d like to know).

Friday 5 July I came home, wilting, to find Joyce waiting for dinner. She was looking very soigneé in pill red – & we had a pleasant evening talking of you and Mr Mosley (who is, after all, a close relative of Sir Oswald!11 – but his branch has Cut Oswald Off – so that, says Joyce rather uncertainly, is All Right). She described the absurd procedure of Lord Nathan’s investiture with insight & wit. (Joyce has the Right Stuff in her, hasn’t she, dear?)

Negotiations are almost complete for the transfer of Mrs Seidler from the Turner ménage to ours. I think she’ll be rather a Solace. Mr Turner rang me up last night. He’s joining the family in Devon today – They’re leaving for Canada from Liverpool in about ten day’s time. (They haven’t been told the exact date, of course.)

Did I tell you Jean’s Wonderful Private Information about Cambridge & the Fifth Column? ‘Cambridge is Full of the Fifth Column,’ she said portentously in a Sinister Whisper. ‘I am Privately Informed that whenever an Air Raid Warning is sounded – All the lights go on’ – then, when I seemed unimpressed she added, by way of explanation. ‘To help the Enemy planes to find their Way About.’ (Capital letters Absolutely Everywhere, darling!)

Saturday 6 July Joan doesn’t know what to do this vac. She wants some kind of job, I think. We are considering trying to find something to do together, as soon as I hear from Lord Lloyd & find out what my position is with regard to the Civil Service.

Yesterday, I was able to collect quite a considerable parcel of jewellery to send to the Red Cross. I found I had a lot of gold bangles and lockets & trinkets which could be melted down for their metal value & I sent, as well, a diamond & sapphire bar brooch – a brilliant brooch and a seed pearl & lapis lazuli necklace.

In the afternoon my parents took me to Christie’s to see the things that people had sent. The jewellery was rather staggering – colossal diamond necklaces – and superb single-stone rings – as well as smaller things running the whole aesthetic gamut from Horrified Sorrow to Extreme Solace.

Monday 8 July Good morning, my dear love. Thank you for your letter. You’re right, you know – my mother in her twenties was very much the sort of girl you describe. Leslie H. B. realized this when he said ‘If I could meet a girl who was what you must have been at twenty, Vic, I’d marry like a shot’ (His idiom – not mine). And the look he gave me as he said this – spoke volumes for my inadequacy.

I’m more grateful than I can say, darling, for your just and generous summing-up of the situation. It seems to me that if I make up my mind to be a little less inadequate as a Solace – it will be something to keep me busy – & I think that, in future, if I’m busy, I shall be well, and that will be a Solace to you, won’t it? You see, now there’s nothing organically wrong with me. It’s just that my mind is being pounded down ceaselessly with the fear of not seeing you – & the endless hammering tires me so much – that by the end of the day, I do feel ill. The Victorians called it a decline, dear, but stronger women than the milk & water heroines of Victorian fiction have suffered from the same thing. After all, Lady Macbeth’s madness dated from the time when ‘my lord went into the field’.

I’m going to learn to be useful. (You’re right, darling, I can be useful – but it bores me.) Furthermore, if, at any time you want me to dance with you, I shall. (But you wouldn’t really like to dance with me, would you, darling? No? Thank you.)

Nevertheless, my dear love, although, now, I know exactly what you want from a Real Solace, I shall try to be more like the girl you want. (Not as an affectation, dear. (Heaven forbid!) What I want to do is simply to make use of certain characteristics ‘that I have of my own’, which aren’t developed at all because I wasn’t interested in them – but they are there.)

Strangely enough, Gershon, one of the things that I value most highly in you is the fact that your affection for me does not blind you to my shortcomings … (Incidentally, dear, ‘In love’ is not my idiom – because its opposite is ‘out of love’ – whereas the opposite of ‘to love’ is ‘not to love’ which is less frighteningly consecutive!) That is why you are incontestably my friend as well as my Young Fellow – because, though my feelings are a sorrow to you on one plane, you are able to meet them with wonderful sympathy and understanding on another – whereas, if your regard for me were uncritical – you’d be so shattered when you found me out, that you’d cast me off at one fell swoop.

I often feel that you think that my affection for you is blind & undiscriminating – but, as a matter of fact, darling, it isn’t. The things for which I love you are real – your tolerance & understanding – your infinite patience with me – your unswerving sense of honour – which has led you scrupulously to keep me abreast of what you were feeling from the very beginning of our friendship – the subtlety and delicacy of your mind – the broad sweep of your humour – and your charm, of which other women must have been aware before me. Besides these things, what do the qualities in you which frighten me, or which I don’t understand, matter?

For instance, we’ll never agree in our estimates of the significance of physical love. I am not able to understand, but I have learnt to accept, that you would not regard kissing another girl as an irrevocable act of infidelity on every plane. If I were to kiss anyone but you, it would be an irreparable betrayal – because, to me, a kiss is a symbol of complete surrender. It is something so personal & intimate, that to kiss anyone I didn’t love would be nothing less than obscene. (It makes me feel ill to think of it!) But, darling, I do realize that you feel differently about this – just as lots of people feel differently about the actual presence of the body & blood of Christ in the bread & wine of Christian communion – & I’m not less fond of you for that.

I had a letter from Aubrey this morning. He’s being moved, Mess & all – and he was all-of-a-flutter because his CO had asked him to go to the pictures with him. It is all Very Beautiful.

Lord Lloyd wrote this morning to say that he’d be glad to give me the letter of recommendation I need – so I’ll be able to send my Comic Form to the Central Register12 within a few days – and then I really shall feel that I’ve taken the first step towards economic independence. (What a Solace!)

Wednesday 10 July Ismay’s dear little Charles has at last been transferred from an OCTU13 darling, stripes and all. She’s asked me to have lunch with her one day to celebrate his Rise.

Darling – there is one point arising out of your last letter which I want to make clear. You say that you would like your perfect Solace to be the kind of woman who would not allow her own personality to be submerged if it ran counter to yours at any point – & I don’t think it’s just a fancy of mine to suppose that you believe that my personality would be so submerged. Well, dear, I should always want, with you, to put your wishes before my personal inclination (as in the instance when you were so angry with me because I went to the theatre, in accordance with your spoken wish, instead of going for a walk as I wanted to – it’s a trivial instance but ’twill serve) though often (as on the occasion when I wouldn’t let you leave me – to write vitally important letters) my own selfish wants might overrule this – but, darling, if an ethical principle were involved in our conflicting wishes, then I should not want to give way to you – but, because I have absolute confidence in your moral dependability – I don’t believe such a conflict could ever arise between us – if I thought it could, I couldn’t love you.

Looking back on everything I’ve said to you in the last few months it occurs to me that I haven’t a shred of dignity left in the world. (You know, I think I did once have a kind of dignity, in spite of being dumpy & silly-looking.) I wish I still had a little.

Friday 12 July Darling, you should see Nurse’s Air Force Hanger-On standing sentinel at the gate while she’s pinning the last curl in place – (Tides – Seasons – Armies must wait while Nurse pins her curls into place. She has no Uncertain Opinion about her looks. She bought a new cotton dress the other day & came into my room to show it to me. I was wearing my blue & white checked dress at the time, & I remarked that hers was very much more attractive than mine. ‘It all depends on who wears a dress,’ she said, tossing her head. ‘Now you might look very silly in this dress, while I think I’d look rather nice in yours’ & she left me gasping. Darling, I know I’m plain, but there are kinder ways of saying it, don’t you think?)

Mrs Seidler has just arrived dear. She asked after you, and said such nice things about you that I think I’ll find her a Solace for the rest of my life.

Saturday 13 July Some of the characteristics that I have of my own, darling, are the following:-

a.) The ability to talk vaguely to strangers about anything, as though I were interested in them and it. (As it is, I only talk to people who interest me on subjects that amuse – but I do know how to be universally ‘sociable’.) In future I shall try & put this into practice.

b.) A real joy in household usefulness, efficiency & neatness – countered by a dislike of doing these things myself – but rather than see a room or a house messy & ill-managed, I would do it – and now I shall do it – in spite of the fact that if I left my room in a mess someone would come in & clean it up.

Bombshell of the Year – Sheila has just rung up to say that Hamish has announced his engagement to Charlotte – & Joan & I were congratulating one another on Tuesday on his Impending Happy Release – and now this has Happened. Oh! woe – how are the mighty fallen. Mr & Mrs Falconer are Numb – Sheila is Shattered – so is Allan – so am I – so, doubtless, is Joan. Charlotte arrived in London with him & her mother – All Dewy & Clinging – then she went to Devonshire & sent Sheila a pot of cream. This, says S, tragically is The End – & she rang off in Sorrow & Anger.

Tuesday 16 July I had a letter from Aubrey this morning – His address is 14th Battalion S. Staffordshire Regt, Racecourse, Hereford. He seems happier in Hereford than he has been anywhere since he was encased in the habiliments of war (this is his idiom as well as mine). He has a batman called Nightingale who is a Great Solace to him. He says he asked him the other morning whether he ever sang in Berkeley Square, to which Pte Nightingale replied Rather Beautifully ‘No Sir’ and would he be wanting anything else? Aubrey says that the Paddock at Hereford has the finest array of Duncans in captivity, and that is a further solace to him. He loves letters, darling – write to him if you can spare the time – after you have written to me.

Wednesday 17 July What a Beautiful Picture, darling, – you in the Air Raid Shelter trying to make your mother & Raymond & Alice aware of the Consummation of the Marriage of Literature & Life.

No – I’m not surprised about Hamish & Charlotte – only in sorrow. She’s such a dam’ silly, prim, kittenish little thing. I don’t know why Allan is shattered – probably because Sheila is. I’ve never known him to have any reasons of his own for anything yet – but Charlotte is enough to make anyone come out in a rash of sheer irritation – & Allan, like the rest of us, is very fond of Hamish.

Darling, I do blame my school-fellows for being unkind about my appearance. You don’t know what it’s like to be fat & ungainly & acutely conscious of your supreme unattractiveness – & while I didn’t want anyone to try & soothe me with mendacious flattery – I was grateful to the people who made no comment at all. I’m still very self-conscious about being plain – (Joyce says that what I lack is showmanship – the power to make the best of my appearance & to make an impression on people by physical self-confidence. Look at Ursula, she says, 50% of her charm is good showmanship. No-one stops to remember that she has nobbly features & is too thin – because she’s vivacious & assured & she dresses & carries herself strikingly – perhaps she’s right) and Nurse’s constant jibes are a real Sorrow.

Thursday 18 July Sheila & Allan are coming to dinner tonight. I haven’t heard from Sheila since she went into a Swoon over Hamish’s engagement on the telephone the other night. I’m in Great Solace at the thought of seeing her again.

On Tuesday, Ismay is coming to London & I’m having lunch with her at her flat & then we’re going to a theatre. She said in her last letter that Charles looks worse, if possible, than most people in Battledress, because they haven’t been able to find one to fit him. (What did I tell you? I knew that they ought to have sent up to the Small Ladies Dept.)

Peggy writes that Mr Loewe has had a relapse – but that he’s on the way to recovery again. She called there the other day to find Raphael wallowing in gloom. You know, darling, Raphael has missed his vocation. He would have been a Prince of Undertakers. He is the Platonic idea of an undertaker – and I don’t suppose he’ll Ever know. I’m afraid (if I may borrow your idiom for a moment, dear) that even his best friends won’t tell him.

Friday 19 July Joan Aubertin was in London today. She came to lunch and told me (in the strictest confidence, of course – I wasn’t to tell anyone – not even you) that Sheila had told her (in the strictest confidence – she wasn’t to tell anyone – and particularly not me) that Hamish had bought a Wedding-ring & was hoping that Charlotte would join him in S. Africa on the cargo-boat of an Uncle of a lady-friend of one of his colleagues in the Air Force.

You know, your mother is not the only harbourer of half-witted maids. Lady Nathan’s parlour-maid leaves Alice standing. The other night, Lord N, in his Hospitable way, fell-a-snoring before the coffee had been poured out – so Buxom Nellie told the maid to leave the Cona in the Library. ‘Shall I leave the cups too?’ the girl wanted to know. Lady Nathan thought it would be helpful if she did leave the cups. Then, at dinner, we had some difficulty in mopping up our cream with our raspberries – so Joyce called for spoons. The maid took away our fruit knives & forks and laid pudding-spoons & forks beside our plates. She obviously took the view that, if we looked upon the raspberries as Dessert, then all we needed were dessert knives & forks – but, as we were going to be eccentric & regard them as Sweet – there was to be No Compromise. Pudding-implements were what we needed, and Pudding-implements were what we were going to get, willy-nilly. A Young Woman of Character – the Nathan’s parlour-maid. Joyce has a theory that whenever she introduces Mr Mosley into the Library, she feels as though she were in a conspiracy, and gives Joyce a Lecherous & Understanding Leer – It’s a Great Sorrow to Joyce.

Monday 22 July Joan and I have a Beautiful Scheme, darling. You know that it was announced on the wireless recently that if the town in which you happen to be living is declared a prohibited area, you are allowed to leave it with your debts unpaid for the duration. Well, we thought we’d tap every available Well-Informed Quarter, and find out what the next prohibited area was likely to be – then we’d take a beautiful house there, fill it with lovely furniture, pictures & ornaments, and live there in the Grand Manner, entertaining our friends in Voluptuous tea-gowns, & becoming Centres of Intellectual & Social Life. When our home was declared a prohibited area, we would Move On – to the next potential PA – and so on. Joan has sixteen pounds and I have five – and our only expenses would be train-fares & Removal Vans – so we ought to be able to do very nicely.

Wednesday 24 July Darling, my remark about your last letter being ‘distant’ wasn’t a rebuke. There’s no need to apologize. All your letters are a Solace, whether you have any news or not. The tone of patient exasperation in this letter (I mean your letter, which I’ve just received) is more than justified. I try not to cluck, darling – but it’s no good. I know that I’m adding to your irritation at a time when you’re already restless & irritated. I know that you’d come & see me if you could – That’s the real reason why I’m such a hopelessly inadequate Solace. What you want is sympathy & amusement – and all you get is cluck. Damn you, Eileen, you’d be much better dead. (I’m not suggesting that you think this, though you well might – but I do. I’m sickeningly angry with Eileen Alexander. She hasn’t any balance or any control. She professes to love you & all she can do is worry you. She’s egocentric and a fool – and oh! so ludicrously inept. Tell her once & for all time, to let you alone, darling, and find a Solace worthy of you – a solace who will make you laugh & feel light-hearted & young when you see her, who has life & colour & charm, not one who can only cry & clamour and look pale, not one who would see you ill rather than away from her.)

Monday 29 July I had a letter from Aubrey on Saturday. He goes around the countryside in a car (with or without Attendant Sergeant – It All Depends) ostensibly engaged upon Detailed Reconnaissance – but really drinking Gallons of tea beside the Wye. He’s in Great Solace. Pte Nightingale is sure he (Aubrey) is winning the War – Aubrey is not so sure – but he finds Pte Nightingale’s devotion & loyalty (In Spite of All) Very Beautiful. (All this is, of course, my idiom – not Aubrey’s.)

I hope you’ll find the work interesting in the Air Force, my dear love. It isn’t dangerous, is it? Oh! please God don’t let it be dangerous. Darling, it would be so humiliating to be in Grade II (feet) that I’m almost glad you’re ineligible for Special Duties. Grade II (eyes) is an Intellectual Grade – All the Best People are in it – It’s an honour to be in Grade II (eyes). But Grade II (feet). Oh! no, dear.

Wednesday 31 July My mother & I had a very dull day with Ismay & her mother at King’s Langley yesterday. We looked at the new house that they’ve bought. It has a lovely garden – but nearly all vegetables. Talk about dig for victory – what with the Girl Guides & the Canadian Soldiers Club – and the fruit-bottling – and the sock-knitting – they’re winning the war with a purposefulness unparalleled. It’s all very Disconcerting.

Tuesday 6 August I had a long letter from Joan Aubertin this morning. She says her sister, Alice, solemnly assures her that Chamberlain may not recover from his operation – which was an attempt to put guts into him! (Alice’s idiom – not mine.) She hasn’t heard from Ian again – and she’s had her eyebrows plucked. She says the effect is a Terrific Solace – but I can only say, what a sorrow. She was knitting me a square for my blanket – but the dog got hold of it – it’s Alice’s dog, she says defensively, as though this was enough to exempt her from All Responsibility – but, on the other hand, it was her knitting – ah! Well.

I’m lunching with Pa & Mr Gisborne at the ‘Cheshire Cheese’ today. I gather the food is good but Beefy – but it was a favourite haunt of Dr Johnson – and I’m going there in search of Resolution – the Resolution to Write – a quality which the Great Cham of Literature had, above all others. (A wonderful man, Dr Johnson – the greatest prose stylist of all time.)

Pa & Mr Gisborne talked war across the table & I just sat steeping myself in the Atmosphere. Of course, the place has been exploited – The menus are distinctly Ye Olde … in Gothic lettering with deckle-edging – and there’s an iron grid sentimentally protecting the step worn down by Dr Johnson, Charles Dickens & others. The café was rebuilt in 1667 & hasn’t been touched since. It’s down a tiny alley off Chancery Lane in the city & it has a wrought iron sign over the door. The fact that the shop opposite assures all comers in heavy white enamelling that it sells All Birth Control Appliances, illustrates the profundity that Time Marches On – but otherwise you’d never suspect it. The rooms are low and square with flagged floors covered in saw-dust – and heavy oak panelling & benches – leaded glass, old pewter, and framed playbills, 18th century newspapers, and great mugs of clay pipes everywhere.

Wednesday 7 August I’m very tired, dear, – I’ve done nothing all day but go with my mother to the butchers to help her buy several miles of miscellaneous sausages – and take my shoes to be repaired. I woke up this morning with a great Longing upon me for tripe & lemon sauce – I mentioned this to my mother who said hesitantly that she wasn’t sure that it was Kosher. We rang up Mrs Greenberg to find out what she had to say about it – but she wasn’t very helpful – she said it wasn’t on her Forbidden List – but that she’d never seen it in a Kosher butcher’s shop. We approached Mr Rubenstein in some trepidation, and timidly put the question to him – He emerged from an Outsize in Bowler Hats, and stood for a moment bemused and blinking in the sunlight. He murmured something about having to get a Certificate for it – and any way they weren’t issuing it since the war – but the major problem still remains unsolved – and to whom should I turn in my bewilderment but my solace? Tell me, darling, is tripe Kosher or is it not? Everybody Hedges so, when confronted with this seeming-simple question that I begin to believe that it must have some Awful Mystic Significance – like the Question in the Fertility Rites of Antiquity. If it has any such Significance, you will know it. (After all we know Everything between us, don’t we, dear?) So Tell Me All.

Thursday 8 August Miss Sloane rang up this morning to ask me if I’d like to become PA No. 2 again for a time – if I had nothing better to do – I said I had nothing better to do (and I said it more in Sorrow than in Anger, darling) and promised to call at Leslie’s Office on Monday & do what I could.

Oh! and one other news item before I go to sleep. Lord Lloyd’s secretary phoned Pa to ask whether I’d got a Civil Service job yet. Lord Lloyd, he said, was particularly anxious to be kept informed. This may mean nothing or it may mean a great deal. I’m not banking on it as a Great Hope, but it’s encouraging, isn’t it, dear? I’ll never say another word about Lord L. He’s really been extraordinarily kind in the matter.

Saturday 10 August Pa & I had Words this morning – because neither of us were smoking. He said I did nothing but sit in my room & write letters – He hoped I was proud of my War Effort, he added acidly. I said that I only stayed in my room to Keep Out of the way of his Incivilities. My mother intervened soothingly and there the matter ended.

Darling, please don’t start your letters ‘Dear Eileen’ – I always feel as though you’re about to Congratulate me on the birth of my third son, or ask me to dinner to meet your deceased wife’s sister – such an interesting woman, you’d have so much in common – or offer me a ticket in the House to hear your Budget speech – or ask me to return that book I borrowed from you in ’86 – and I always miss the Solace of the first page, because I’m busy adjusting my mind to the queer convention which moves you to start a letter to me in the same terms as you would start a letter to your grocer – ordering a pound of tooth-picks. Plunge straight into your letter, darling, please, and then I won’t have the disconcerting feeling that you’re writing ‘Dear Eileen’ to gain time – & thinking ‘What on earth shall I say to her today?’

I came back home from the cinema to find a long & Beautiful letter from Aubrey waiting for me. He says he despatched one to you by the same post. Don’t I get your friends to write to you, darling. Aubrey is Running His Regiment. He is being Exploited & Overworked by the High Command. Aubrey has Told Me All. He has unburdened himself to me in what some people might call a Big Way (only that’s not my idiom). ‘Now you’ve got me pouring myself out,’ he says & goes on to describe the Company Commander as ‘an elderly commercial traveller with a nauseous accent, no knowledge of war but an expert grasp of cross-bow tactics picked up as a subaltern at Agincourt, periodically goes to bed with gout leaving me to command the Company.’ Poor Aubrey – Nor was there any sorrow like unto his sorrow, as you might say. Let’s write to him, darling – he needs Solace.

Monday 12 August Think of me in the next few days, recording applications for the abolition of Rats & other Vermin (unspecified) in tenements, in a ‘neat, round, complacent hand’ – which reminds me of an authentic remark made by one of my father’s Egyptian Students in the days when Pa was Professor of English Law at the University of Cairo. The young man had been absent from his class for several days, & my father went up to him after the lecture and asked whether he’d been ill or anything. The young man looked woeful & said no, that he hadn’t been ill – but that his wife had died – but it was the idiom in which he announced this unhappy event which was so remarkable – because, darling, believe-it-or-not, he said – ‘The hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.’ My father has never really been the same since.

Listen, my love, (talk about trembling fingers) has it occurred to you that if you should become hurt or anything, on active service – I could only find out about it by reading the casualty lists in The Times or by casual report? I’m not being morbid – just provident – D’you think you could ask Basil to write to me, if your family were to hear that anything had happened to you?

What’s the good of saying to me that the question of your going abroad ‘probably won’t arise for months’. What are months? – Darling, I have resources of love to last me till eternity – and then there shall be new reserves in store – and you talk to me about months. If you spent every second of your time with me for the next seventy years, I should still be clucking at the end of it because you were going to leave me for an hour – and you talk to me about months. Oh! darling, don’t go overseas – at the thought my heart is turned to stone – I strike it & it hurts my hand.

Saturday 17 August Yesterday was quite Adventurous. I was just coming back from Haverstock Hill with Lionel – I’d been there to have a piece fitted onto the end of my gas-mask at the Town Hall – when the sirens went. We walked into a shelter in a leisurely way, sat down on one of the benches – and I did my knitting until the All Clear sounded an hour later. There was one girl in the shelter besides Lionel & me. Most people took no notice of the warning at all. I arrived very late for lunch with Jean – but she was quite happy, contemplating a heavy gold signet ring which one of her Air Commodores has just given her.

I was on my way home to change for dinner with Joyce, when the second warning went. I took shelter at Hyde Park Corner – and knitted again. When I got to the point when I had to measure what I’d done – I enlisted the help of four old charladies (all girls together, y’know) and they rewarded themselves for their assistance by Telling me All – inveighing darkly against ‘Them’ the while. ‘They’ are the bloated plutocrats who own offices, carpeted in rich Persian carpets which have to be swept and cleaned without so much as a ’oover – O’ course it’s the ’ousekeeper – She takes the money. Very Sinister, darling.

Then there was a ’bus driver off duty. He was musing on the Queerness of the Passenger breed. ‘Last winter,’ he said, ‘I was drivin’ along an’ I sore an old gel lying frozen in the snow. My pal & I, we got aht and started rubbin’ ’er feet & ’ands – and we gave her a drop o’ spirits & she came rahnd “It’s Orl Right Muvver” I sez – “Muvver?” she says. “How dare you call me Muvver, young man. The name is Miss Sylvester.” Blimey, I sez to myself – That’s torn it. But my pal, ’e looks at ’er thoughtful like … “Miss Sylvester” he says, y’ought to be ashamed o’ yourself, old gel.”’ He had his wife & children with him & he was telling us what a Good Thing Education was. He drew himself up to HFH14 and said he had won a Scholarship to a Secondary School – but he hadn’t taken it.

Dinner at the Nathans was uneventful – except that the Col. asked Pa & me to one of his Wednesday lunches at the Dorchester, which ought to be interesting. Joyce sends greetings.

I went in to call on my parents this morning – and Pa greeted me with the words ‘And what does Lord Nathan think about the war?’ & suddenly, darling, my patience snapped. I’ve heard nothing but war from Pa for months – a handful of clichés – an alternation between that gloomy optimism which Victor used to find so trying, and the ‘if we have to take refuge in Canada …’ strain.

I said nastily: ‘I never discuss the war with anyone.’ Then he gave me a dirty look & said ‘No, I suppose you prefer to discuss your love affairs with the Nathans.’ I was so angry that I felt as if someone were sewing up the corners of my mouth with a needle and thread. I didn’t answer though, and he said that he was ‘fed up’ with my behaviour and he never wanted to speak to me again. I said – thank God for that & would he kindly stop bellowing at me now – whereat he leapt out of bed & left the room – & I haven’t seen him since. The whole thing is so damned sordid that I’m sickened by it, darling. – N’en parlons plus.

Bless you for your letter. Thank God you’re not fit for the Air – I hope your inoculation didn’t hurt too much. I have a phobia about injections. They make me feel iller than any other sensation in the world. It’s the jab of the needle wot does it.

Sunday 18 August Lionel & my mother were hovering around me all morning – palpably sent on a mission of Reconnaissance – and, if necessary, of Appeasement by Pa. The Actual Peace Negotiations started while I was in my bath. My mother sat on the marble edge Appealing to my Better Nature. Lionel stood at the door – declaring that he had been authorized to say that Pa had Meant no Offence – and had Spoken in Anger – and was Very Sorry. I decided that you’d want me to Come Off It, darling – so I did – and it was really just as well – because it’s difficult to register Unflinching Aloofness in the confined space of an Air-Raid Shelter – and Pa was Genuinely in Great Sorrow for what he had said.

Pa is giving a lecture on ‘Egypt & the War’ at the Royal Empire Society on September 17th. It ought to be good. He spends his days at Chatham House & the Egyptian Embassy researching frantically. Darling, with all these warnings, my mother thinks I ought to have a siren suit – I saw a Rill Red one at Jaeger’s when I was buying your wool. It’s a terrific Solace – but I’ll have to wait for it until my mother gets some more money from Egypt.

Tuesday 20 August Good morning, my dear love. Nurse is going to be married – her intended is an RAF Sergeant – She’s welcome to him – I only know his voice & the back of his head – and neither are a solace to me on any plane whatever. She expects to be married in three weeks’ time – to go away for a week’s holiday & then come back to us. She’s in Great Solace and all Dewy. It was all Decided in an Air Raid Shelter and is Obviously Very Beautiful.

I went reluctantly to Leslie’s office yesterday & when I got there Miss Fox told me that He was coming in to work that afternoon. When he came in, he asked Miss Fox whether Miss Sloane had arrived yet. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And Miss Alexander is here too.’ ‘Oh!’ he said, with what seemed to my sensitive ear a marked absence of enthusiasm – but a few minutes later he came in and looked over my shoulder at photographs of himself – and fulsome press accounts of ‘Our Popular War Minister’ and, simulating confusion very prettily said: ‘I’ve never seen any of these – but this kind of work isn’t quite in your line is it, my dear?’ Then he left me – but in an instant he was back. The office is really a small residential flat & the room where I work must have been the bedroom, because there’s a washbasin in one corner and a bathroom within. Now as the bath is crammed to the brim with press-cuttings, darling, the only reason anyone ever has for going into it is to commune with Duncan, as the vociferous plug stridently testifies. It is impossible to be Bashful about Duncan in that office – so Leslie decided to Brazen It Out. ‘The lavatory,’ he said with Elaborate Unconcern, ‘is in There. Do you mind if I use it?’ ‘Not at all,’ I said Graciously. I wonder what would have happened if I’d said it would be a Great Sorrow to me? I shall Never Know, now.

Later in the day, I heard him rating Miss Fox soundly for only providing dry biscuits for my tea. She came in all chastened to ask if I’d like a doughnut. ‘No, thank you,’ I said mendaciously – and – when she went back to report – he positively exploded – ‘Of course, she’d say “no thank you” – what else could the poor girl say in the circumstances. She’s good enough to come all this way to help and all you can give her is a handful of water-biscuits. I never heard such nonsense – Don’t let it happen again.’ And when I left, he expressed Great Sorrow at my not yet having a job: ‘Tell ’em all to go to Hell – and go back to your books where you’re appreciated,’ he said. So you see, darling – I’m not In Disgrace with him any more.

Wednesday 21 August Lionel & Dicky, on hearing of Nurse’s engagement, asked wistfully when I intended to Follow Suit. Lionel thought Antony Ellenbogen would be a nice name for my first-born. Dicky favoured Winston S. Eban! Lionel said oh! no, the country would be Overrun with Winstons in the Coming Generation – besides, I was, after all a literary specialist though, of course, Dicky couldn’t be expected to know All the implications of ‘Antony’ – Dicky (who had thought Lionel had chosen Antony as a compliment to him – Dicky’s name is Anthony) shrunk from his F. H. to normal & withdrew from the Discussion. Lionel added that Eban was a trivial little name. He, for his part, preferred the Rich Resonance of Ellenbogen. (What then would he say of Kazen Ellenbogen if he Knew All, dear? One day, I must Tell him.)

Darling, while I was in my bath the other day a Great Sorrow Swept Over me – sorrow that you & I had never mollocked on your sofa at King’s. What a waste, as my Grandmother said when she was sick as a result of over-eating at Dicky’s circumcision party. (He was circumcised on the Day of Atonement.) ‘What a waste’ was a favourite expression of my grandmother’s.

Joy Blackaby has just written to me saying, ‘Whether it’s love or the motor accident you’re certainly a pleasanter person than you were’! Look what you’ve done for me, dear.

Thursday 22 August Thank you for your letter in Morse, darling – but don’t do it again. It has a stultifying effect on your style. Lord Nathan did Pa & me much honour at the Dorchester Lunch.15 We were at the same table as his mother & brother & Mr Oppenheimer. I was sandwiched between Pa & Mr Oppenheimer – who was all Gracious Civility. He said he couldn’t see a trace of the accident – and told me coyly & In Confidence that he was dining with Fanny that evening. I will encounter Darkness like a bride, his look seemed to say – and hug it in my arms.16 Sir John Anderson was dull to yawning point, but he told one nice story about an Anderson shelter. He was investigating the damage at Croydon last Friday & he came to an enormous bomb crater in a working-man’s back garden. The man pointed to a few scraps of shattered metal at the bottom of the crater and said rather shyly ‘That was my Anderson Shelter’. ‘Oh!’ said Sir John – rather fatuously, as he admitted, himself – ‘You weren’t in it then?’ ‘No,’ said the man, ‘The warning sounded too late for me to be able to get there.’ He also told of a mother who turned angrily to her fifteen-year-old daughter who was quietly reading in the shelter and said: ‘Shut that book, Mary & pay attention to the air-raid.’

Allan unexpectedly got his calling-up papers for September 12th and he & Sheila are getting married by special licence tomorrow week.

Lord N. has asked us to the lunch on the anniversary of the outbreak of war (Sept 3rd, in case you’ve forgotten, darling) to hear Eden.17 It should be interesting – only if you’re in London then, I shan’t dare to tell my parents I’m not going. Oh! Damn – I’m clucking already at the very thought.

Saturday 24 August Darling, If I sound querulous (and I am going to sound querulous) you may deduct 20% for Saturday – but the rest is real. Your twopenny snap is damned awful – and I wish you’d never sent it to me – (especially as you’re wearing a jersey under your tunic which wasn’t knitted by me. Yes, I do notice everything) because now I know you’re in the Fighting Forces – and I’ve been crying ever since I had your letter – it makes me feel ill – and the thought that you are only going to write to me twice a week – because you’re too busy being convivial with your fellow Air-Craftsmen isn’t much of a Solace. Oh! darling, please don’t be angry with me for saying this – but do you remember how often at the end of last year & the beginning of this, I used to be in Great Sorrow at some of the things you used to say in jest – and you used to explain that you were just absent-minded and that most of the girls you knew didn’t mind flippant remarks in that strain. You won’t be likely, will you, my dear love, to get into the way of making that kind of remark, through casual contact with girls who don’t mind them? I’m frightened, darling, frightened that the new idioms & new values of military life will make you impatient and bored with mine. Please don’t be bored with me, dear. (Pause – for more crying.)

I’m afraid this is a very Great Sorrow, darling. I’ve had three cigarettes in rapid succession & they’ve had no effect whatsoever. What has actually happened is that the solace of our time together while you were in London has lasted until today – and it’s only worn off now because I’ve suddenly realized that you’re in a new environment – among new people – and wearing new clothes. (Perhaps I’ll feel a little better when you’re dressed in my pullover, dear.) These strange men with whom you live and play cards & go to dances frighten me, darling. You’re starting a new life in which I have no part. What do you talk about? Oh! darling, is all this going to ‘iron wedges drive and always crowd itself betwixt’?18 Please, dear, let me have a long letter on Tuesday and another on Saturday, and a little reassuring one on Thursday. You’re so far away and I can’t do without you – Indeed I don’t want to. Does anyone want to go on living without a heart or lungs?

Pa has read & approved my letter to Lord Lloyd’s secretary. Something ought to happen soon. Bernard Waley Cohen told me yesterday evening that he’d got a high administrative Civil Service job – and he hasn’t even got a degree.

Miss Fox is away on holiday and I’m going to Answer the Telephone & Be Efficient for Miss Sloane all next week.

I met Nurse’s YF19 last night. A wisp of straw, darling, but quite inoffensive – though he’s neither here nor there.

I wish you were here to mollock with me in Air Raids. I don’t mind Air Raids if I can mollock while they’re in progress. As it is I just Brood Savagely – & knit.

This is an unsatisfactory letter, dear. But if I were to have to do without you – why then let Rome in Tiber melt & the wide arch of the ranged Empire fall20 – oh! God, I hope they give you leave soon.

Sunday 25 August There’s no place in the world where one is so suffocated by Family as in an Air Raid Shelter. I pretended to go to sleep in an endeavour to Escape – but there they were – Everywhere. Nurse, who hadn’t bothered to see that the children had rugs – lay back on pillows – enveloped in an eiderdown – and Relaxed. (She’d obviously been reading the Women’s Papers which tell you to Lie Back, Drop your Lids, and Relax completely whenever you can, or you’ll get Wrinkles – I have wrinkles.) I’m getting a very severe attack of Emotional Claustrophobia, darling. It’s not pleasant.

Tuesday 27 August God! darling, what a night. Hell has no terrors for me anymore. As the sirens shrieked, I called on Duncan & went, quite good-humouredly into the shelter, thinking that having a warning at 9.15 might mean an undisturbed night. I knitted quite happily for about an hour and a half – and at quarter to eleven, Mrs Seidler turned out the shelter light & I tried to sleep, dear. We could hear the dull thud of AA21 fire and the spattering of machine-gun bullets – and close overhead the thick chugging of aeroplane engines. It was an oppressively hot night and the only sound apart from war-noises, was Pa’s ear-splitting snore. By midnight, darling, I felt that I’d rather die slowly of wounds than live in a room with Pa and Dicky. It wasn’t a reasoned loathing, darling, it was just intense & hysterical & suffocating – the spiritual equivalent of the stale and thick air of the shelter. Then Pa said something nasty about Nurse, who had been caught in the raid – & his tone implied that no-one should stir from the house in these times – and I got up & said quite quietly that I was going to bed. Then, darling, the trouble started. Pa said that if I moved he’d go out into the night – (I knew it was only histrionics but I dared not take the risk of its being genuine for my mother’s sake). I said he was a damned bully – and stood in the doorway, watching columns of sparks scattering outwards in the sky – and after that, I sat on a cane chair by the door until the All Clear sounded at four. I didn’t get to sleep till about five – and now I feel infinitely old & tired – & so bitterly resentful of my father that I feel it would make me physically sick to be in the same room with him. Oh! darling, I wish you were with me – though even if you were here I can’t see that we would have anything but Sorrow under this new martial law notion of Pa’s. Darling, I’m sick & sullen – & I’ve only had two hours sleep – I’ll write more later. Oh! I’d trade a kingdom for a laundry basket, if only I could get away from my father for ever.

Oh! darling, I could have done with a letter from you today – but I expect the mails have been delayed by the air-raids. It isn’t that you’re angry with me for the letter I sent you on Sunday is it, my dear love? Oh! please don’t be angry with me. Your affection is the only thing of worth that I have in this turmoil – Don’t take it away from me.

Later: Darling, I’ve just come home to find a letter from Lord Lloyd’s secretary, saying that Lord L. is going to write to the Central Register asking them ‘what exactly has happened to your application’. This is heartening news and a step towards achievement.

Wednesday 28 August Darling, I had a very queer experience last night. We had a small dinner party which I hadn’t even bothered to mention to you because I’d no reason to suppose that it would be anything but dull – and anyway I expected to be too tired to take any interest in anything. Our guests were Col. & Mrs Fred Samuel, Joyce, Herman and a Captain & Mrs Wingate,22 whom I’d never met before. My parents met them a few nights ago when they were dining with Mrs Gestetner & had liked them so much that they’d asked them to dinner. He has rather a nobbly face, with a strikingly intellectual forehead and a sullen mouth – she is twenty-two (she married when she was seventeen) and her eyes and face are alive with light and intelligence.

During the early part of the dinner, everything went as I’d expected. I was sitting between Herman & Capt. Wingate and I exchanged a few desultory & apathetic remarks with them – but mostly, I just sat back in a coma.

Then, darling, the Sirens went – and the thought that I need not go out into the shelter sent me almost crazy with relief. I laughed hysterically and said ‘This is an Air Raid de Luxe’ and I suppose my face must have come alive because Captain Wingate suddenly realized that I was there, and turned to me & started asking questions about Cambridge & what I’d been doing there. I knew I was talking well, dear, though I sez it as obviously shouldn’t, and I told him that my major interest in Cambridge had been the study of love in Arthurian Romance. He asked me a lot of very searching questions – paused over the problem of reconciling the attitude of the church and the nobility to sexual love in the Middle Ages, and then asked me if my research had led me to consider the nature of sexual love – through its manifestations in different ages! I said not very seriously – and he said that he thought the essential pleasure of physical love and emotional love lay in pressure. (Yes, I thought, the pressure of Gershon’s arms and mouth and head and hands – but I didn’t say anything about that, darling!) He said that in the final act of love there was the joy of violation – of breaking down a barrier – but in all the less primitive manifestations of love, (he didn’t use primitive in any censorious way, of course) pressure existed in two ways – actual physical pressure – and the pressure of repressing the normal biological urge – or rather pressing it into new shapes. If the pressure is too hard it becomes painful – but gentle repression can give very great pleasure. (That’s why you and I are on the Highest Plane of All, darling.) He also put forward the theory that all civilized trends were, in their early stages, an attempt to enhance the sexual market-value of the individual. The accumulation of wealth, for instance, in the days of barter, made the owner of fine wares more alluring – and so on. We argued and danced around one another and side-stepped – and then the women went into the drawing-room – and I discovered that Mrs Wingate was a student of Malory – and a girl of very great charm and acute judgement. What a Solace, darling. I talked too fast and too loudly, but I was alive again after a day of hellish weariness – and when they left – intoxicated with the exuberance of my own verbosity, I told my parents I was going to bed and I stuck to it.

Later; Oh! darling, I’m crying – Please don’t be angry with me – I’ve been regretting that letter ever since I wrote it – I’m sorry about the photograph – Please may I keep it? – it’s got a message on the back. In it, my dear love, you are most notoriously abused – you look like one of the Comic Characters from Follow The Fleet – but it’s faintly like you and I’d like to have it. I was ungracious – but I’m so sorry, that it’s inexpressible. The remark about the pullover was meant to be in jest – tearful jest, because I was (and am) in Sorrow – but I’m not surprised it didn’t come across in the right spirit.

Of course you got full marks for Morse – I don’t need to draw myself up to MFH23 for that – I knew you would.

Thank you for not letting your new life drive a wedge between us, darling – I’m only frightened because I love you so much – It’s not really surprising, is it? (I mean that I’m frightened! It would hardly be modest of you not to think the other surprising.)

Thank you for telling me that you were ‘rather irritated by (my) clucking’ at the beginning of your letter – but I had noticed – but please, darling, don’t be irritated with me again. – I can’t help clucking – and my clucks never mean anything. Please say in your next letter that you’re not irritated any more – I knew you were going to be angry – and when I came in from Miss Sloane’s office, I sat with your letter on my knee for well over ten minutes not daring to open it.

Thursday 29 August Hell was let loose in the sky last night darling – and I slept through most of it. The Sirens went at nine and, because I thought it would be uncivil to go to bed so early I sat in the shelter until ten, knitting – and then went up to bed. When I said goodnight to them, my parents were sullenly silent – but I undressed, and in a few minutes I was asleep. Mrs Seidler woke me at two and said ‘Listen’ – and I did and I could hear the bombs crashing quite close at hand – she told me that my mother had spent the whole evening crying piteously – so I went down to the shelter as a Gesture. There were red patches in the sky from fires – and the searchlights criss-crossed like basket weave. I sat in the shelter for half-an-hour & we could still hear bombs and AA Fire – after that things quietened down – and I couldn’t stand the shelter any more – I could feel that suffocating hysteria welling up inside me as it did the other night – and I went back to bed and I slept till morning, neither hearing the All Clear or anything.

Since I’ve been kept awake o’ nights my headaches have started again – it’s as though the bones of my skull had been battered in. My mother says that unless I agree to spending my nights in the shelter, she’ll send me out of London – Lionel suggested Blackpool with a wicked smile – (I’d told them at dinner that the sirens had never sounded in Blackpool since the war began) and after that she said no more.

You know, darling, I don’t think women discuss the ‘unmentionable’ topics, which all men talk of when they’re among themselves. Some of the dirty-minded little perverts at school used to stand in corners and smack their lips over pornographic talks – but they always stopped when I came into the room. Doris collected & retailed stories of hair-raising obscenity – but they didn’t offend – because she was so objective about them. Jean is different – Her conversation isn’t frankly & healthy bawdy in the Chaucerian manner, as I imagine that kind of conversation is among the nicest men, it is unpleasant & suggestive – and I should think hers is the idiom, verbal & atmospheric, of women who do discuss these things – jest – but I think it’s the exception rather than the rule.

I must go now and help my mother choose Sheila’s & Allan’s wedding present. They want an old book. They’re getting married tomorrow at 3 in Audley St (St Mark’s Church) & their reception is to be at Claridge’s.

Please forgive me for clucking & snapping, darling – but suppose you suddenly found yourself in possession of the Kohinoor diamond, wouldn’t your nerves be a bit frayed at the thought that the whole world was striving to take it from you by fair means or foul? I think you would – but I’ll try not to cluck again – I only want to please you.

1 A 1940 propaganda historical drama about a village defying tyranny.

2 Military Intelligence.

3 Andrew Weir, 1st Baron Inverforth (1865–1955) created and headed the firm of shipowners in Glasgow.

4 From ‘Gerontion’ by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).

5 From the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400).

6 From Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 66’.

7 Full Height.

8 King’s Parade, a street in the centre of Cambridge.

9 From ‘The Dedication’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

10 Ian Nance joined the Colonial Service in Africa, before serving in the Abyssinia campaign with the King’s Own African Rifles.

11 Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) was a British politician and later leader of the British Union of Fascists.

12 At the beginning of the war the government had set up the Central Register to process the thousands of temporary civil servants that Whitehall was going to need.

13 Officer Cadet Training Unit.

14 His Full Height.

15 The Dorchester lunches, organised by Lord Nathan in support of Army Welfare. Sir John Anderson, the guest speaker at this lunch, was effectively the home front supremo in the wartime government, but best known now for the ‘Anderson Shelter’ named after him, a curved, galvanised corrugated steel air-raid shelter, 6 ft high by 4.5 ft wide and 6.5 ft long, that could be sunk into the ground or covered in soil and sandbags. Issued free to all householders with an income under £5 per week, over 2.5 million were erected before and during the war.

16 Measure for Measure, Act III, scene i.

17 Anthony Eden, Conservative MP and enemy of appeasement, was Foreign Secretary from 1935–38 and after being Secretary of State for War returned to the Foreign Office at the end of 1940.

18 ‘The Definition of Love’, by Andrew Marvell (1621–78).

19 Young Fellow.

20 Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, scene i.

21 Ack-ack or Anti-Aircraft fire.

22 Orde Wingate met his future wife, Lorna, on a sea voyage from Egypt when he was thirty and she sixteen, and they married two years later. They were both committed Zionists.

23 My Full Height.

September–December 1940

For fifty-six out of the next fifty-seven days and nights, beginning on 7 September, London would be bombed. The shift in German tactics from the airfields to the cities might have been a tacit admission of failure, but if it arguably put paid to Hitler’s invasion plan, that would be of precious little comfort to the capital, where in the East End and the docks, more than four hundred were killed and sixteen hundred wounded in that first massive raid alone.

It was typical of Britain’s pre-war planning – too little and too late – that in crucial ways London, and particularly the poorest and most crowded areas, was hopelessly unprepared. The Luftwaffe might not have had the planes or accuracy to inflict the kind of casualties feared, but until Londoners took matters into their own hands and occupied the underground stations, a government wary of nurturing a defeatist ‘deep shelter mentality’ had left the capital criminally short of the kind of shelters that would have saved so many East End lives.

While it was of no help to the thousands already left homeless, however, with each passing September day the threat of invasion was receding. On the same Saturday that the Blitz began, the codeword ‘Cromwell’ – the warning of an imminent invasion – had been issued, but for all the false alarms and rumours of German parachutists, no invasion came and by the 17th, with the ‘weather window’ closing and Britain’s Fighter Command still defiantly intact, German invasion plans were indefinitely postponed.

But if the Battle of Britain was won, there was no let-up in the bombing, and with Britain’s night fighters as yet ineffective, and the capital’s anti-aircraft guns as much a danger to Londoners as Germans, the nights ahead would belong to the Luftwaffe’s bombers. In the early days of the Blitz the raids had generated a good deal of class hostility, but as the attacks spread from the East End across the whole of London, and the king and queen found themselves as likely to be bombed out of their home as was a bank clerk, ‘Britain’, as J. B. Priestley memorably put it, found itself ‘being bombed and burned into democracy’.

Something of this new democratic feeling – and with it a more richly varied cast of characters – finds its way into Eileen’s letters. For the first year of the war her view had not stretched much beyond her family and Cambridge circles, but with the beginning of the Blitz the letters broaden out to embrace a world and a London of bus drivers, chars, wardens, policemen, secretaries, cinema queues and – most fertile of all – work.

She had, of course, helped out in Leslie Hore-Belisha’s constituency office, but her first real job was at the War Office’s newly formed Welfare Department. The Army Welfare Service, to give it its proper title, was the brainchild of a distinguished veteran of Gallipoli and the Somme, the London-born and St Paul’s-educated solicitor, Liberal MP, newly minted Labour peer, Zionist and ‘Vociferous Clatter’, Harry Nathan. At the beginning of the war Nathan had realised that there was nothing in place to help soldiers with the myriad problems of long separations, and after consultations with service chiefs had come up with the Welfare Service, a voluntary organisation, dependent on unpaid workers and charitable donations – Nathan’s ‘Dorchester Lunches’ were a rich source of supply – and aimed at relieving ‘as much as possible the anxieties of a soldier about his family, his job, his home’.

As there was no Treasury money available for this, Nathan had persuaded his law partners in Finsbury Square to partition off fifteen rooms of the firm’s offices, and it was here, at the end of October, after the best part of a month humming and hawing over the offer of a job at Bletchley, that Eileen reported for her first paid work. It was an hour for her on the tube from Swiss Cottage to Moorgate and for the next two months, until the offices were badly bombed and their records destroyed in the terrible raid of 29 December, Finsbury Square and the bizarre antics of bigamist soldiers and unfaithful wives would provide Eileen and her letters with much of their copy.

The strategic bombing of Britain’s major cities and ports would continue deep into 1941, but Britain, under Churchill, was in it for the duration. By day, across the length and breadth of the city, Londoners like Eileen were finding their way to work, cramming into overcrowded and fetid tubes, sitting on diverted buses, picking their way through streets lined by the smoking ruins of shattered buildings, and heavy with the smell of broken sewage pipes and death. By night, too, London was coming to terms with life under the Blitz. In underground stations, in commandeered and improvised shelters, in ‘Andersons’ and ‘Morrisons’, in cellars, surface shelters, church halls and under railway arches, in whole sections of the tube network, equipped at last with bunks by authorities badgered and shamed into action, London sat, dozed, talked and grumbled its way through the raids. But, then, as Eileen wondered, what else was it to do? ‘When the papers say that people in London are behaving normally, they’re telling the truth,’ she wrote to Gershon, ‘everyone is pretending as hard as possible that nothing is happening … I don’t think Hitler will destroy London, because London, if its legs are blown away, is prepared to hobble on crutches.’

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