by Sylvia Plath
Frieda has turned into a wonderfully pretty little girl, amazing both Ted & me---we hardly feel to deserve her. She is very lively and excitable, with big blue eyes. Nicholas is quite different. Even at 2 months, he seems much more peaceful, quiet and dark. It is hard to tell what color his eyes will be---they are a dark slate-blue now. Ted thinks they will be hazel, like his. That would be very nice.
We have a lot of dreams about fixing the place up---getting the old tennis court into shape, growing luxury items like asparagus, strawberries & mushrooms, plus all sorts of flowers, but just now I will be delighted if we manage to produce a few onions!
You are an angel to think so generously of us. You have such exquisite taste. I am looking forward someday to another baby girl who will inherit the lovely blue party dress you sent Frieda when she was little. This blue cord suit will be perfect for Nicholas---blue is really our family color!
Lots of love,
Sylvia
TO Marvin Kane
Friday 23 March 1962
TLS, Indiana University
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
March 23, 1962
Dear Marvin,
Many thanks for your good letter. We are really rooting ourselves in Devon, having bought an ancient thatched farmhouse complete with cobbled courtyard, thatched barn & cottage, stables & 2½ acres including 70 apple trees & millions of daffodils. Both of us are rather stunned---we did it, or rather, discovered the place, in one fell swoop last summer, goaded to it by the prospects of a second infant, now two months old, and the morbid leakage of rent. We were, without quite knowing it, very lucky---this “ugly ancient decayed market town” (as the guidebooks have it) has all the practical things which I as a loyal American housewife demand---butchers, grocers, banks, & a good chemists & fine midwife. People are surprisingly friendly & the country peace is very good for writing.
Both of us, out of the blue, have become very excited about the possibilities of our land---and Ted is laying out an ambitious vegetable garden. Eventually I hope to try my hand at raising the bits of Americana I most miss---Country Gentlemen corn, Kentucky wonder beans, pumpkins---the lot. As we are plagued by large, insatiable & invisible nocturnal slugs, we may not have all the luck we need. But we are armed with pellets of SLUGDEATH and SLUGIT. Wish us success!
The program* sounds an exciting one. I hope it is destined to be broadcast in England & not just on the overseas services, so we can hear it. I’d love to be on it. The only problem, as you can guess, is that I never get up to London, with this baby, even for a day (I miss London a lot more than Ted does!) Is there any possibility of the BBC (or somebody) loaning you a tape recorder? In any case, we’d very much enjoy seeing both you & your wife Kathy* down here. It is right on the way to Cornwall, hardly a detour at all. If you let us know the day, let’s plan on you having lunch or supper with us.
North Tawton is between Exeter & Okehampton, just to the north of the A30, & about 7 miles before Okehampton. Our phone number, by the way, is NORTH TAWTON 370. If the operators claim there is no North Tawton just tell them to connect up through Okehampton, which is big enough to be known, & which knows of our existence.
Do let us know if you can stop by. The weather should be gentler & our place showing a few signs of the idyll we hope it will 10 years hence be! And try to wangle a tape-recorder. Won’t the BBC consider you as a traveling correspondent?
All good wishes,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 27 March 1962
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
Tuesday: March 27, 1962
Dearest mother,
So nice to get your happy springy letter! I have been suffering from the March megrims---we seem to have had nothing but a horrid raw damp east wind (which blows around our antique back door & straight through the house) for the last month. March is the worst month when it is mean, it seems one has used up all one’s resistance to winter, & is left vulnerable. Just when I was most dismal we had one glorious sunny day when I had the babies out & and ate out & gardened from sunrise till sunset. We all got little sunburns & felt wonderful. Then the cold & grey closed in again. I am becoming a devout gardener---knowing nothing about it. It is so soothing & kindly to work in the earth, pruning, digging, cutting grass. Ted is doing wonders with the back which will be our vegetable garden, digging & fertilizing it. I hope we have some luck, though I expect this year we’ll be mostly learning. Do make Frieda a “corn-bag”. We eventually hope to get our little greenhouse working, too. I have so many ideas for flowers: I love the outdoor exercise. Frieda has a little imitation lawnmower with a bell & she follows me around with mine, which she calls “Mummy’s Oodle-Ooo”, after noise it makes. She says “daffdee” for our daffodils, which are coming out in their heavenly startling way, like stars. I am going to be practical and sell bunches of a dozen a week via the local greengrocers who have offered to buy any of our surplus flowers and vegetables. Eventually we’d like the garden to pay for itself.
I think your chance to buy Margaret’s Syward’s car shouldn’t be missed: when you want & need to buy a new car again, you’ll be uneasy if you don’t have one you can rely on, & this is that sort. So I am refunding with great thanks your loan which helped us get the house so you can get the car for your birthday. I am so glad we are in a position to do this. I love the idea of not being indebted in any way. That seems a marvelous thing to me at our age! I’m enclosing a letter to the bank so they can make you out a check from our account. Now you won’t need to think of cashing in any securities. Please do buy the car right away.
I am sitting in our “red room”, the babies in bed, and Ted in London for the day doing a BBC broadcast* on his children’s poems; I’m enjoying some Haydn* piano sonatas over the BBC---you can almost listen to good music continually on one or the other of the two good stations. I long for a 2nd hand piano! That is the next thing we’ll save for, after the playroom floors are done: the man should do them (or start to) any day now. It will be an upheaval for about 10 days, but very much worth it! I am so grateful for my Saxton grant---modest as it is, it has enabled us to buy rugs & make the most needed alterations in the house. I have a great yearning to practise piano again---when we get the piano I’ll ask for some of my old music! I have such a nice children’s songbook from my reviewing I long to play the songs to Frieda.
My poems should be in the March issue of Poetry. I got the dearest handsomest little cocoa or rather café-au-lait colored corduroy suit for Nicholas from the Aldriches & the sweetest long letter from Do Cruickshank saying a parcel was on the way---shall write them both soon.
The christening Sunday went very well. I had said I wanted it in midafternoon when the rector had some other babies saved up. Originally Margery Tyrer was going with us, but she came down with bad bronchitis, so I asked Rose Key instead. Margery had loaned me the sweetest christening dress which her 15-year-old daughter Nicola was christened & which is made of Limerick lace from her grandmother’s wedding-gown. Of course you could hardly see this under all the sweaters & blankets & bonnet I swaddled Nicholas in against the cold, but I liked the idea of it. Frieda looked a doll in the little blue French coat & white & blue embroidered pinafore we got to match it last summer. She carried her minute “dodie”, a little plastic dog Ted got her, which I am sure made her behave. Both children were angelic, & someone else’s baby, bless it, squalled through the service. So they are christened.
The Exeter dentist* seems very good---the nicest thing I can say is that he reminds me of Dr. Gulbrandsen. I get free care for a year on the National Health after a baby; Ted’s course of treatment---several weekly appointments, was only the token pound ($2.80), so I have at last got a good dentist without having to pay steep private prices. He is very attractive & genial with two children under 10, so I hope he lives a long time & stays
in the district! He has very good ideas about children---I felt him out about this, & he said to bring Frieda along when I come next time for a few rides in the chair so she’ll get used to him & the office before she ever needs any work done. And he also seems to believe in saving, not pulling, teeth & regular half-year checkups, so I am very relieved with him.
I ordered the two-tone rose blanket at the store in Exeter---they have to order it from the Yorkshire factory because it is a specially large size, so they’ll let me know when it’s sent off to Margaret. I do hope they like it! I want to know when it arrives safely!
I think that when the good weather comes I shan’t set foot in the house! I really haven’t had a proper summer since I’ve been in England; in London summer doesn’t count. After I’ve soaked up six months outdoors I may be more eager to spend the winter six writing & studying & turning pale. I am thinking of learning to ride horseback at one of the local riding schools about here---I anticipate Frieda & Nicholas learning to ride, or wanting to, and would like to be practically grounded myself. But this is as yet a notion. I mean straight riding---no jumping or hopping or skipping. Life begins at 30!
Keep me posted on all the wedding plans. Is there any chance of Warren & Maggie ever getting over here???
Lots of love to all,
Sivvy
PS: Do you have grammy’s recipe for bread? Does it kill yeast to mix it with a too-hot liquid? I’ve been trying to make my own bread, but for some reason it won’t rise---I use dried yeast & think I may have scalded it. The loaves are flat & dark & primitive but taste good & Ted loves them. However, I’d like to make a proper loaf!
xxx
s.
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Tuesday 27 March 1962
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College
Court Green, North Tawton
Devonshire, England
March 27, 1962
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
It was wonderful to get your letter. I’ve thought of you so often & am so glad you are still there to talk to! We, too, have moved since I last wrote, & bought a house.* I am still overwhelmed & very proud---it is not only big, it is huge, rooms we haven’t even used yet, plus two studies, a dusky attic one up a flight of stairs all to itself for Ted under the thatch (we have a thatch) & a big light sunny one on the 2nd floor for me with a lush red carpet & six foot elm plank table Ted sanded to velvet for me. Our finding Court Green was a fantastic stroke of luck. We almost went mad, or were mad, last summer when mother came over---in our narrow 2 rooms 2 steep flights up in London, with Frieda having learned to walk & bouncing from wall to wall & another baby due & rent flowing out morbidly with no returns. So we left mother with Frieda & took a weekend off to drive to Devon (Ted’s always wanted to live there; I’d never seen it) to find a house. In two days. We had a list we’d weeded out & our first night was hysterical---funny, but unhopeful. The places were something out of Charles Adams---a dying Great Dane met us at one door (the houses of our size are invariably ancient decayed rectories) & there were no lights, except via an engine loud as souls in Hades, the “ornamental lily pond” a sort of baby-trap sump & one of the “two capacious garages” was a pile of rotted boards. At the other house, hung on a cliff over the sea with nothing to do but fall off the porch into it, a desperate woman kept pouring us more & more tea & telling us what a fearsome place it was (but very nice when sunny); one place, uninhabited, had so many palpable spooks (the “oak paneling” in the diningroom peeled off like paper) Ted & I banged into each other in a panic to get out. The modern places (1930ish) were worst, mean, cramped, hideous British-respectable. Then we found Court Green. We had laughed about it, because it had a thatch (something we resolved never to touch) & was owned by a Sir, but it knocked us over. Very cheap, too, compared to the rest of the awful lot, because no-one wanted it---too big for a retired couple, too far from Exeter, the nearest main city, for commuting. It is white, with a storybook peaked thatch riddled with birds, an ancient cobbled courtyard surrounded on 3 sides by a thatched cottage, thatched barn (our garage) stables etc, with 2½ acres, one of solid daffodils just now leaping to life, 70 apple trees, a large vegetable garden which we hope eventually to make pay for itself, laburnum, lilacs, cherry trees, all of which we’ve not seen in bloom & are dying for. We had them treat the place for woodworm (which it had) before buying it, with the aid of loans from both our parents. It even has an overgrown tennis court I hope to be rich enough to reclaim when the children are old enough. I have never felt the power of land before. I love owning bulbs & trees & all the happiness of my 17th summer on a farm* comes back when I dig & prune & potter, very amateur. The town (we are in the middle of it, though when leaves are out it can’t be seen---our house is the Manor!) is described as an “ugly decayed market town” but it looks beautiful to me: a good young doctor, a fine midwife, chemist, banks, butchers & all sorts of odd colonials & kind, open locals whose Devon accent sounds indistinguishable to me from American. The winter has been grim---we heat by coal, & mushroom shaped electric fires in every room, & I got what I thought was a Dickensian disease---chilblains. Sir Robert was born here, his ancestors all rectors (he is a Made Sir, Governor (ex) of the Bahamas, I think). We love it. 4 hours from London by express, so we later hope to makes stays there. Nicholas Farrar Hughes was born January 17th, at home, a day-long labor, with the midwife coming in the evening to hold my hand on one side & Ted on the other, all 3 of us gossiping happily about the town, previous tenants of our house, etc. I had lost the baby that was supposed to be born on Ted’s birthday this summer* at 4 months, which would have been more traumatic than it was if I hadn’t had Frieda to console & reassure me. No apparant reason to miscarry, but I had my appendix out 3 weeks after, so tend to relate the two. Nicholas is very different from Frieda---who is lively, hectic, & a comic. He is dark, quiet, smily & very much a Hughes. I love him & nursing him & have never got such fun out of anything as my babies. We have names for at least 2 more. I have a very nice ruddy Devon woman in 3 mornings a week (she’s cared for the house 11 years) to do all the work I hate---ironing, floor-scrubbing. She likes it & costs about 35¢ an hour. So I can spend my time doing what I like best---gardening, cooking (I am trying to do my own bread, but it won’t rise & is like a primitive black loaf, but Ted loves it) & playing with the babies. I write in my study mornings, which is all I need to make me feel professional & creative. I have actually done my first novel (after 10 years of wishful thinking): wrote it in under 2 months & it will come out here next year under a pseudonym, because I want to feel free to play around before I do something I really think seriously competent. Could I dedicate it to R. B.?* It is a serio-comic (if that’s possible) book about my New York summer at Mademoiselle & breakdown, fictionalized, but not so much that doing it & coming back to life is due so much to you that you are the only person I could dedicate it to. It is an immense relief to me to feel I can write you every so often; it heartens me no end to feel you are there, whether I talk to you or not.
Very much love,
Sylvia
TO Ann Davidow-Goodman & Leo Goodman
Wednesday 28 March 1962
TLS, Smith College
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
March 28, 1962
Dear Ann & Leo,
The lovely big card & costumed children arrived to our present & Frieda’s future delight. Here is my favorite-yet picture* of your goddaughter (I don’t think I’ve sent you a color one of her have I?) She is sitting in the only upholstered chair in our house---an auction triumph we got for 75¢. The nightgown is one of my primitive sewing efforts. See, her eyes are still blue. The villagers can’t seem to get over them.
We have been enduring the winter. Bit by bit making room by room habitable. With coal, wood & electric fires: still a freezing temperature in the drafty halls. Horrible weather: grey tombstone skies, sleet, a mean wind set perpetually in the east. Every nice day
or sunny hour we rush for hoes, spades, pruning shears & attack the garden, Ted preparing the large vegetable beds at the back & me among the roses at the front. We are very excited, gardening being such a miraculous and pacifiying pastime. Hope eventually to have all our own vegetable needs & a surplus for the local greengrocer. We dream of a few laying hens, hives, mushrooms. But if we bring a vegetable edible to the pot through the barrage of bugs the books say await each green sprout, I shall be utterly satisfied. I am to the end of my patience with the weather. The doctor’s diagnosing what I thought were stinging nettle bites as Chilblains almost demoralized me. I thought I’d been vanquishing our 38° interior temperature with noble spirit, then to learn the cold had been so secretly and nastily getting at me---well!
Nicholas Farrar Hughes arrived on January 17th. I had him at home with our admirable local midwife who breeds Pekinese puppies in her spare time. A fine lady. She sat on one side of the bed & Ted on the other, all 3 of us gossiping about the locals, with the cold dark night outside. Very cosy & nice. Nicholas is a true Hughes---craggy, dark, quiet & smiley, unlike the lively & almost hysterically active Frieda. I am emerging slowly from the inarticulate cow-state I go into before & after each baby & getting morning hours in my study again, slowly flexing my fingers and telling myself life begins at 30.
You sound very happy & wise to be back in Chicago. The bits you wrote about sit-ins* was fascinating & surprising, Ann. I’d always though the U. of Chicago was the most progressive of places racially. Has anything else happened? Do you really have a shelter craze over there---it sounds very grim in the papers: reverends saying it’s ethical to shoot your neighbors at the shelter door & so on. Say it’s not so grim.