Eileen Alexander - Love in the Blitz

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 Raffles 26 – 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.