by Mary Wesley
With a loving eye, I observe that you are the only woman I have ever known who would have said she was returning from a wedding on the following night – and done so. And with a meticulous eye, I observe that the only thing of which there is no account are the goings-on after the wedding on the Thursday night …
In spite of your audacity in offering me advice on vocabulary and the art of letter-writing, I must admit that you have some magnificent phrases. I, too, ‘writhe quietly’ at night – more quietly than poor Sylvester, perhaps; but no believer (like you) in separation, and truncated without you. I met a young woman with almond-green eyes the other night, and over innumerable brandies I extracted from her everything that she knew about sexual or emotional relationships. She protested against ‘being the spokesman of her sex’ – which indeed she couldn’t be; but what she told me did not make me happy about separations. We ended up in a boite, where we decided that we had exchanged such intimacies (my question and her answers) that we couldn’t possibly meet again, so I handed her over to a charming (if slightly bewildered) American officer, while I wrote a long letter to you, and we separated without knowing each other[’s] names and with a fervent and mutual vow never to find them out.
As to the plays, there are two; The Negro and The Return (of soldiers, to London). But as you heard about one in a state of exhaustion at the Ambassadors, and about the other in a state of exhaustion at the Café Royal, it is hardly surprising that you confuse the two. Your encouragement – as they say – is noted, and more than noted, appreciated; and 1945 it shall be, glue or no glue. And I too prefer gold. More complete love than I have ever felt goes to you with this ‘scrap’.
Eric
Boskenna – 11.12.44
Darling,
If you knew the pleasure your scraps give! …
I am amused that I already know you well enough to have guessed that you would have noticed my omission in my description of the wedding. The Thursday night was spent innocently with the girl I was staying with in her flat, an over-garlicked dinner cooked by me, gossip and ensuing indigestion.
I look forward to the umbrella, as the only one I have has original habits which do not include protection from the rain, and Bourgeois Soir de Paris is the scent I use and if you like it will go on using …
We have had a solid week of hail. Most unpleasant, especially the day spent meeting a very lovely horse Betty has bought off the train. Widely advertised as ‘dead quiet, a child could ride him’ he came off the train like a V2 leaving base …
I love your story of the annulment. Diana Blackwood whose child we have here is going in for it too. So is her sister, and the man Diana wishes to marry now, and he has two children. All hope for the Pope to wink at the little children, pocket the money and annul. I understand that there are 57 varieties of annulment, like Heinz Sauce …
Later
I was interrupted by a macabre search for a missing coastguard. (Due back from his beat at mid-day they began organizing search parties at dusk!) Considerable hue and cry over the telephone and storm lanterns and torches bobbing along the cliffs, starlight and bitter cold, beautiful and frightening. The children knew all about it before anyone else. He was found dead in a blue mackintosh, by his brother, having fallen over Lamorna cliff. Personally I think one of the elementals gave him a push. The search parties ended up here keening in the kitchen and drinking beer. The parrot joined in with some pithy remarks and made me giggle. He has about as much tact as my Aunt Violet.fn23
I had a typing lesson today and was interested to find that the most indelicate words are the most difficult, which explains perhaps why good typists are so seldom prim …
Alec has taken a house ten miles away, from which to fight the election. He is afraid too much Boskenna damages his reputation. He should have been frightened sooner …
It’s late, I’m going to sleep, although thinking of you is no soporific. Je m’imagine dans tes bras.
M.
Boskenna – 13.12.44
My Darling,
… Such a heavenly day yesterday. Betty and I rode miles across country. It [Dartmoor] was looking incredibly beautiful. B’s new horse is a dream. I climbed up – it’s a long way – and rode side saddle for the first time in twenty years feeling madly insecure and cursing Catherine de Medici for inventing such a thing. The horse goes like a train but we managed not to part company although I laughed so much I’d no grip at all. Betty looks just as funny riding astride.
Roger has mutilated the Blackwood child by … cutting her hair off all on one side. She now looks as if the moth had been at her. I was enchanted at getting a Christmas Aerograph from Paddyfn24 to whom I’ve not written for months with ‘Boo!’ written on it and nothing else. I bought a Christmas Card depicting a very frosty scene and wrote ‘Boo! to you’ and that I think is the fizzle finale …
I have an extraordinary feeling nowadays … [that I have] settled into quite a new mode of thought and nerves all due to loving you. I have never loved before without knowing I could somehow manage without it. Nobody can really hurt me except you now …
M.
Boskenna – 17.12.44
My Darling,
… For three days the house has been bedlam with scenes between our Nannyfn25 and the cook – both forceful personalities. Tears into the frying pan and tears in the sink – both threatening to leave instantly. I took a hand with Nanny, but got madly bored with cook and kept away and read Chekhov. Betty … lost all sense of proportion and I angered her by reading aloud. ‘The husband killed his wife,’ shrieked the parrot. Like all storms it blew over and they are still here being too sweet to each other …
My prescious [sic] Miss Truefn26 is on heat and has already slipped up with some low suitor. I was illogically disappointed the other day to find I hadn’t. ‘Tant pis’ as the Douanier said, ‘On recommencera’ [‘Never mind … We will start again’] …
There’s a very good novel called The Cup of Astonishment by a woman called Mirsky [Vera T. Mirsky] who hasn’t written before. Not yet reviewed … about the women’s concentration camps in ’39 and under Vichy …
Philip Toynbee’s article on the literary situation in France in last month’s Horizon left me gasping with the amount he has read. Peter [Quennell] contributed a quite unreadable article on the psychology of refugees …
Boskenna – 21.12.44
My Darling,
No letter from France for ten days … [Here] Christmas fever is at its height, fearful mortality on the farm. Old friends of the children in the pig line laid out and chopped up and the children helping with total lack of sensitivity. Yesterday was a hell of goose and turkey plucking, feathers and down everywhere, tempers exceedingly short and Colonel P. losing every key on the place. In the middle of seeming chaos the man who comes every year to arrange the Farm accounts to show a loss (and thus diddle the income tax) arrived to stay …
[I have been] swaying on step ladders and garlanding the house with hydrangeas and violets, anemones and narcissus … It looks very fantastic and gay, far more like a spring festival than Christmas. I need a large white Italian Ox to complete the effect.
The wine merchant is so overcome by a letter from a confrere in France telling him that he has preserved all his old stocks from the Germans that he has been most generous. How I wish you were here …
C. [Carol] is acting so nobly about not coming down and being so generous …
M.
Boskenna – 22.12.44
My Darling,
… I feel no goodwill to all men (only to you) and am wildly depressed by the war news, Greek news and Polish news, and should like news from you …
My youngest child has decreased in popularity since he painted Betty’s child all over with white paint and rubbed in mud and feathers from a goose. The effect was startling …
Grand Hotel Toulouse – 27.1244
My Dear Love,
… I left Paris suddenly at two hours’ notice without time to wr
ite to you again. Then, five days and nights (often) on the road owing to a defective Ford V8 – and no jack! …
Then icy cold here, no fires, heating or hot water; and a rush of work opening my show of photographs … Conditions are tough – too tough for you, possibly, until April … Foul food in a dining room which is half-morgue and half-Frigidaire. No comforts …
Lunch today with Julien Benda.fn27 Christmas Eve ‘réveillon’with ‘les beaux milieu intellectuels’ until 4am – and then I spent Christmas Day in bed! … The show went well. I was photographed shaking hands with the Commissaire de la Région [Pierre Bertaux], replied stutteringly to two speeches, bad champagne. Then thank God that was over and I just meet people – accumulating en route quite enough material already for a Penguin size ‘In Search of a New France’. (I’ve kept full notes – your influence. To get you I must finish my books in future. My past has been a succession of first chapters. I want you to be an epic.)
Your letters reached me splendidly, only a week from Cornwall. Only there was a gap … and after the 13th – silence. Ominous after what you implied about correspondence with Paddy drying up, and that being the end of it. Pride because I didn’t write? I love you …
Too much to tell you about Toulouse and the rest of it. This is Resistance country, quite different from Paris. The mood is self-conscious, touchy, aggressive … (They literally believe the Anglo-Americans are slowing up the war ‘for political reasons’). Plenty of Spanish repercussions. A France–USSR demonstration at the theatre; last night at which ‘les sportifs de Toulouse’ were followed closely on the stage by ‘les intellectuels de Toulouse’ … Tremendous even dangerous freedom of thought; a new world fluttering, as it did in Spain in ’36, the brave new world which is never born, I think.
Boskenna – 30.12.44
My Darling,
No letter from you for so long that I am saddened …
Christmas has been exhausting and only really enjoyed by the children. I was unwise enough to put trumpets in their stockings so that we were all roused at 5 by a discordant cacophony. I took them to church hoping to quell them but they refused to be parted from toy tanks and … trained the guns on the parson during the prayers and ejaculated Bang and Pop to my acute embarrassment and I had to send them out to the pub where they are infinitely more at home …
The cook spoke so sharply to the daily housemaid that she went off her head … Finally the cook showed up in her true wolf colours and walked out of the house never we hope to return … I am temporarily replacing her which I can manage fairly well but I am rather at a loss dealing with the insane housemaid … I am terrified of mad people but fascinated at the transformation in this poor woman.fn28 She was a very plain, ugly, neat, respectable middle-aged frump in spectacles and false teeth. Now wearing only a nightdress (she barely wears that) and having thrown the spectacles and teeth at her bewildered husband, she has turned into a Blake drawing with wild red hair standing out from her head, blazing blue eyes and the appearance of youth. Even her hands have changed …
Toulouse – 2.1.45
Oh darling,
Everything has gone wrong. What a fine beginning to a critical year! First, Mac – my American – left our car outside a night club on New Year’s eve; a car which I had borrowed, by personal contact and with the prestige of renting premises, from the authorities. I wasn’t there, but I reproach myself with being too lax and using it myself to go to restaurants and so on, whereas I should have given clear orders that it should be used only for work.
Disaster! – the transport situation here is serious. It was stolen – immobilised, without petrol and ‘en panne’, which is why he left it. Yet there are regular car bandits, and they must have towed it away between 3am and nine the next morning. I was luckily (not that it helps) in bed; but I’ve had to take the blame and how I loathe this Anglo-American integration anyway. I can’t really give him orders: for instance, he wants to go skiing in the next car I’ve been able to obtain. He is among the best of them. New England, relatively conscientious and good-mannered, and he works hard. But the outlook is hopeless; no sensation of the tragedy around him, and his comments on France are just ‘that she is evidently still unworthy to take her place’ among the ‘big’ powers. And this is called ‘propaganda’. I long to have my own team, and hate to take the onus of their shortcomings, of which they are ridiculously unaware, as well as of my own, of which I am fully conscious but which I carry around like a tin on my tail.
Then, as my journey to Bordeaux was thus stopped, instead of taking the ice-train (6am and the only one) I risked waiting for a lift with a Scottish HLI [Highland Light Infantry] colonel today; and now I’ve waited all day for their bloody car to be repaired. But I shall get off in an hour or so. And worse, worst of all your silence; no word since the 17th and god knows what the implications are meant to be. Either that you concluded logically that there were no communications; – or P on leave? [‘Paddy’ Green] – or else a slap in the face, implying that you assume I’ve walked off to my French girl or other thoughts; or merely a lesson in manners, which I don’t need. When I don’t write, please write. The cold is bad enough, and you have given me an inward glow with which I find I can’t dispense!
This shall continue in Bordeaux. Mary, I delight in you. It’s quite simple, you must belong to me. I’ll do most things – (but much leeway to make up, before we are secure and prosperous) but you mustn’t jib away like a wicked horse at the first silence or difficulty. Don’t be heartless; you are not – I first loved when I discovered in the night that you didn’t like hurting people. So write, you wretch, write.
And I shall see you almost as soon as this letter reaches you. Do, please, try to borrow a flat as I’ve got no money. I’ve asked Dennis to get me a room in his filthy lodgings … I shall stay a fortnight …
PS Bordeaux – 3/1/45
Mary – I find there is no reliable mail to Paris, so I send this by hand. I am leaving Bordeaux by air today week i.e. Jan. 10th and I shall telephone to you – possibly before you get this? All my love,
E.
Boskenna – 3.1.45
My darling,
I spent the last day of the old year getting our lunatic off to the bin which was a complicated business as she lives miles from a road and we had to walk her up from the valley very drugged and raving – all this by moonlight – she shied like anything at shadows poor thing. We got her into our car with me and I had to drive her to the house where we had another car to take her to Bodmin. She nearly ditched me at one moment by giving a loud whoop and nearly snatched me out of the driving seat. I was torn between terror of the insane and giggles …
Love such as I always hoped to feel comes to you with this –
M.
Boskenna – 14.1.45
My darling,
It’s cold here … No telephones working and no signs that they will ever work again and the postmistress has different ideas to mine of the importance of telegrams and only delivers them spasmodically. Everything drips in a beastly thaw from the eaves to the Colonel’s nose. News percolating through from London is of Betty ensconced in a nursing home, Claud with an ankle broken catching a bus in the iced streets, and Paul and Mark having ‘a very big thing’ which may or may not be true but there certainly is no idleness during Sylvester’s absence. Bob [Robert Newton] and Ann are keeping warm fighting. I see them at the close of the century lashing out at each other from their respective bath chairs with rubber tipped sticks. [In fact the Newtons were divorced later in the year.]
Not much company here. Alec flashed by on his way to London from Scilly – just like the White Rabbit. He drank all my gin and disserted at length on the discovery of a communist cell on one of the islands …
One expedition to St Ives to spend the day with Romie Brinkman [sic]fn29 who waits six months for her husband’s letters to percolate through from Moscow. I felt a certain sympathy …
15.1.45 – Post girl as nasty as ever this morning, bu
t delivered an intimation from Gordon Daddsfn30 that my case is no. 1389 on the list …
All my love to you …
M.
Boskenna – 16.1.45 [typed]
My opinion of Separation would make a long tale and a sad tale like that of the mouse in Alice in Wonderland. Only it would be even more dull.
I suspect that I have already bored on about it enough, and to continue would place this separation in the category of FINAL instead of temporary, which I trust it to be. Between bouts of cooking I am reading a lot, but have had to abandon the Russians as the gloom is too much for me at the moment …
Betty has got herself into a bad mess, and I may have to go to London and extricate her …
The wish to contribute a mite to the reconstruction of Europe is like a fever in my bones. Here I am out of it and futile … My God the majority of people in England, especially in country districts, are uninterested and incurious about Europe …
There is something very unfeeling about a typewriter. All this hitting and the sly little bell, which rings away your thoughts. Giving them a mass produced leer. This reminds me of Betty’s Danish husband who always sent her the carbon copy and sent the top layer to the lawyers … Betty used to cry and get carbon all over her face which was funny too …
17.1.45 [manuscript] – I love the post girl. I love you and I am wildly happy as after a blank of over five weeks I have your letter and you may be home at any minute …
On 23 January Eric returned to England for fourteen days’ leave. Mary spent the entire period with him either in London or in a pub in Devon.
Eric returned to France on 5 February, taking the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry. In Paris he prepared to set up his office in Toulouse, where the murderous post-liberation insurrection was just petering out. Before leaving Paris, Eric visited Louis Aragon.
Paris – 6.2.45
My sweet and enjoyable Mary,
My loving thoughts followed you from the Café Royal to Betty’s and down to Cornwall …