Eileen Alexander - Love in the Blitz

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.

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

2Military Intelligence.

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

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

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

6From Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 66’.

7Full Height.

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

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

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

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

12At 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.

13Officer Cadet Training Unit.

14His Full Height.

15The 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.