Eileen Alexander - Love in the Blitz

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.

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.