Eileen Alexander - Love in the Blitz

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

1In 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.

2Helen Marion Wodehouse (1880–1964).

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

4The 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.

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

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

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

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

10Eileen 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.

11Margery 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.

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

13 Macbeth , Act II, scene ii.

14A glass coffee machine.

15Gershon 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).

18Hore-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.

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