Eileen Alexander - Love in the Blitz

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.