by Mary Wesley
So I am treated as a recognized person, and not – as I had begun to fear – a ‘sub’ who had sunk into obscurity …
Nice, quiet supper with Nancy. All about sex and religion, I need hardly say. The latest is that as she may want to marry ‘Jack’ (who, though divorced, shows no signs of marrying her) she had better go slow on Catholicism … She longs to see you, and is really very good though neurotic and pitiable …
Thornworthy – 11.7.57
My Love,
I have taken refuge in your room to write letters …
Biene Schacht is an enormous darling armed with a dictionary and understands a lot already. Sonya is a tremendous help. Michel spends his life by the lake having silences with Comrade Potter. Thierry is very French and jolly. They are all alright. Impossible to tell now what profit I shall make with them all having parents who chop and change the dates but gradually I am paying bills which is a lot and the tax [rebate] will pay for the rates and rent …
I have never worked so hard in my life but it’s alright. I am making them work too …
Are you alright? What is the Newsroom like? Good that you are having a repeat in August …
Being submerged in a bunch of adolescents is very queer indeed! Each one different, each one needing different treatment. It’s like having six children all the same age.
I love you,
M.
Thornworthy – 12.7.57
… Mr Langton Lopton comes twice a week to give lessons and is amazed and amused at what he finds. Tried to teach them from Churchill’s war memoirs this morning, but caught on sharp when I said No, something Neutral!
They live on chocolate, tea and tomatoes. Very strange. Biene is ably fixed up with a dictionary the size of a pea. She is at least twice my size and has a half-sister of fifty-four …
I am writing this under the drier in the village hairdresser … I try to spend a little time alone with each every day – and especially the ones worth cultivating, i.e. the intelligent ones …
I get up at 7.30 and have the house to myself, le petit dejeuner at nine and I get to bed when I can. It’s like the War only one isn’t terrified. Sonya with all her slovenly faults is splendid. Betty rang up last night to ask whether she was being untidy, sexy etc. I said ‘Not at all and my advice to you is to shut up and leave her alone’ …
Biene is Lutheran and will have to go to church with Lady Waller! …
Glad The Times are nice, what a difference it makes.
Your loving M.
Thornworthy – 13.7.57
… My English is becoming practically unintelligible I notice. Teaching five children of the rich to wash up and make their beds is quelque chose! …
The boys do their best. I should like to have seen more of Thierry’s papa, obviously a terrific collaborationist in the war. ‘Mon appartement, je l’ai emprunté à un grand seigneur Allemand, qui a laissé tout en ordre.’ …
The Belgian woman hater only likes Sonya and me because he thinks we are both mad. Sonya hit Yves over the head with a chess board which gave pleasure and is teaching him to ride …
Thornworthy – 14.7.57
… Exhausted I went to bed, only to hear sudden shrieks, cries, thumps and a broken ashtray. Sonya losing her temper with Yves who had hidden her shoes or something equally infantile …
White with rage I sprang out of bed, put on my pretty pink dressing gown (which I afterwards discovered to be transparent) and made a silent entry, hissing ‘I don’t care who is to blame, what it is about, clear up the mess and all go to bed’. Wonderful effect! I’ve never seen sheer terror on so many faces before, Sonya’s in particular. ‘People do not behave like this in my house,’ I added illogically and disappeared. Positively intoxicating as they are all twice my size. La discipline, hein? …
Clapham Common – 15.7.57
My darling and disapproving wife,
I missed you badly this weekend … I have been worrying as I don’t get on with my book and the winter depends on my finishing it …
There is a Regency church with a negro in stained glass (Wilberforce had some local connections) and I am quite comfortable though lonely. The loony maid, as I foretold to a day, bunked yesterday …
I shall go mad unless I work, which is the only way to regain my nerve …
Thornworthy – 16.7.57
Sweet love,
Do not lose your nerve. Leave the first chapter unwritten and go on from there … The paralysis of not being able to start is most ordinary …
My adolescents are losing their first gloss … Thierry, the ‘smart’ little French boy, has chummed up with Yves and picks up girls in buses. Michel is a gentleman and behaves as such except that a. he never washes and b. wears his gum boots indoors. Sonya is a great help in the house, lays the table etc., but of course as she has never been given any upbringing since the age of nine, does not know how to behave …
The object of her chase is Michel and this takes the form of a lot of squawking, not unnatural but boring. I have condemned squawking. Michel is fortunately too young and too well-brought up for there to be any danger. After being particularly irritating, talking foul French instead of English, which she is here to do, for two days she took charge of the house [and] left the kitchen in a filthy mess … At breakfast Michel announced that he and Sonya were riding this morning and Biene this afternoon. Who, I asked, had arranged this? Sonya. And since when does Sonya run this house? Silence. ‘Either you all three ride together or not at all.’ Sonya sulked. Then Thierry arrived for breakfast. ‘Does anyone want any bread?’ ‘No, but I should like you to say good-morning to your hostess and shake hands.’
Tomorrow Michel is being sent off with Cripps [ a local poacher] until 1am and to spend the night with him … Michel is thrilled! After that Sonya will leave I think. I am dreadfully sorry for her but … I am very worried that she will turn into another Betty or a Newton and see no means of stopping it. It is perfectly natural that at sixteen she should want men but Betty has let her loose in night clubs, dumped her anywhere, and she hasn’t an inkling of how to behave. She can be absolutely wonderful, then she gets excited and becomes a moll … The result is that I have to sit up until they go to bed … My pensionnaires must be guarded!
It is very amusing, particularly now that they know I have a bad temper when necessary. Very necessary with these six footers! …
Thornworthy – 17.7.57
… Last night was very peaceful as Michel spent the night fishing with Cripps and only returned this morning after having a lovely time and being taught a lot of poacher’s tricks. Sonya, after sulks, came sweetly beaming and apologised and says I am please to tell her as nobody else ever does …
I think Michel is going to have a bath. I think so. Next to get washed is Thierry and to hell with his shaving. The girl picked up on the bus has disappeared very neatly. ‘Pas d’histoires dans mon village, hein?’
I have written to Malcolm Muggeridgefn26 asking him to return my article thrust into his pocket and out of his mind …
Clapham Common– 18.7.57
… Yesterday was my day off. Awful. I couldn’t work. I took buses, any bus. I saw two movies. A gloom had begun, the night before, when I saw the photograph on the front page of my Standard of the body of a woman who had thrown herself out of the fifth floor of the Strand Palace. Then I read it was John Davenport’s wife.fn27 I don’t recognise evil when I see it. I am afraid Betty is evil. I don’t blame him so much as people like Betty who egged him on and were so foully cruel to and about her. Am I being morbid? Anyway it gives much to think about. Sonya is good at heart, but the influences are worse than silly – evil. I am now sorry I relented as far as I did towards Betty. Yet she was your friend, and we are far from perfect! It is a puzzle … It was a shock …
Fed up with yesterday’s desperation, I have mailed a dozen address cards – to your real friends only … I lunch tomorrow in Hampstead chez the ‘Mossbachers’ (alias Gwenda David: the reader, who
wrote).fn28 They are professionals … and they may have useful advice about e.g. my two plays. NOT about translations where, like Antonia White, rivalry enters. What a life! Mossbacher sounds nice. I may see Tony [Antonia White], at last …
I am lunching with Nat to meet the MP who runs liberal publications … I may propose something like The Weekfn29 – run from Devonshire?!
Too many irons in the fire. I’ve hardly written two thousand words. Your wise, brave words are a real help …
Thornworthy – 18.7.57
… Michel is having a bath. Grand triumph! Thierry writes on p.c.’s, which he gives me to post, that he has some nice copains and the food is not bad for England. Yves writes, also on postcards, that ‘there is an odd girl called Sonya staying’.
No more.
I packed her off to Betty today. For days she has been working up towards two things, a flirt with Michel who is going to be very attractive – more lipstick, more squawks, more scent, more cigarettes, and he not responding and the other boys bored …
Then a blistering, disgusting scene made by her on the telephone to Betty. For days she had not written to Betty until I forced her to. Then two mangled lines and later a telegram to ring up urgently. When Betty did ring up yesterday evening, in an agreeable friendly mood, Sonya immediately began to shriek, stamp her foot and be unbearably rude. I removed her from the telephone, told Betty I would put her on the train today and then told Sonya just exactly what I think of her. She tried to make me a scene but it did not work luckily, and after four hours appalling sulks which upset (or if it had not been for Giselle’s intuition and Biene’s niceness would have upset) my whole apple cart she came and apologised and told me she had never been so frightened in her life ‘as by you Mary of all people’.
Poor child. It is all Betty’s fault. Sonya wants to be respectable and have a background and marry and have children. Betty would like her to be bohemian. Since no one has taught Sonya Anything since she was nine her manner of setting about being respectable is quite terrifyingly like Betty’s. Since she is very stupid, I told her, that she is stupid, that she is behaving like some Teddy boy’s moll and that no respectable person will want to have anything to do with her as she is. I love her, so I was able after my initial anger to ‘tell her what’ lovingly.
Her position is very bad and Betty is a dreadful mother but the child is a fool. I suppose it’s her age but she does dangerous things like trying to get Roger to invite her to the Sandhurst ball meaning to meet future guardsmen through him and leave him flat, and accepting invitations from Tom [Paynter, Sonya’s cousin] who puts himself out for her then telephoning that she has found somewhere more amusing to go. The chasing of the gentleman is quite naturally done by a child of her age, but she does it unsubtly like the fourteen year old’s who hang around American bases.
Anyway I think a little penetrated her thick head and she can be perfectly sweet, gay and everything else but while this ‘phrase’, as Alice calls it, lasts and I am having all these children here I cannot have her. Later and nearly alone, but not now …
All my love,
M.
PS Naturally, as I feel like the ham in the sandwich, not a word of Sonya to anybody.
Authors’ Club – 19.7.57
… Horrifying lunch with Gwenda David, an old grey trout who wanted once to be a rainbow. She had just been to the Davenport funeral – and was full of anti-Catholic (and other) blasphemies. Then John’s daughter by his first wife, a hideous girl of 16, came in for coffee, blaspheming (she is Catholic-trained but in revolt) with stories of how drunk her father was, kissed the girls, and said he will marry again. L’enfer …
Thornworthy – 19.7.57
… I too was horrified by John D’s wife’s suicide but proud that she is being given a Requiem mass.fn30 If ever anyone was hounded to death by Newtonia, she was. I last saw her in Peter Jones, a despairing terrified woman and thought to myself she would crack soon. Poor John D. will have remorse and I hope it leads to the A.A! It was never necessary for him to do what he did to her, it is never necessary to be led however easy. Damn all those bloody people who killed her. Betty no more than the others, she only ‘opened’ earlier than the pubs and had a free telephone.
A very nice peaceful day without Sonya … I wrote a pretty tough note to Betty blaming her for what she sowed. No use being full of self-pity now, as she is, but she is a very unhappy woman.fn31
Sonya and I parted with all ties (for what they are worth) intact.fn32 Biene and Giselle have gone to Exeter to buy presents for their families before the bus strike starts. The boys have spent the day playing cards in French … I am recovering from the shock of Sonya’s scenes, which had to be seen to be believed, and heard too, and am taking pills for fibrositis which I have in my right shoulder, arm and neck. A curse.
It will be tremendous joy to see you and I have informed our real friends of your whereabouts. No point in being without me and hiding. You seem to get like that sometimes … And let it flow, the book, stop bottling it up and riding on buses …
I wrote a lovely letter to the German papa giving him some pretty hot references and saying that I for my part wish references, that I may possibly have room for his son and that if he comes I wish to be paid in advance and assume that he will behave as my own sons and other visitors do. Quite a lot of fun to be had out of this game.
It’s quite wonderful how the Belgians loathe the French – sales types, ligne Maginot etc. The Germans seem to be almost popular by comparison! No destruction in Belgium and grands seigneurs in France. A lot of bitterness for ‘le bombing par les Américains’ felt by both.
All my children do what I tell them. I love Biene. Michel will be a charmer. No longer wears gumboots in the house and has had a bath. I rather regretted the bath as I took positively hours cleaning it afterwards. Never mind, the other two boys are bathing tonight or else.
They are all except Giselle at least a head taller than me so I feel like those ferocious sergeants in the A.T.S. in cartoons.
Both dogs very well. True sleeps with Michel. I am sorry you won’t meet him. He and all of them [have] come on tremendously by being treated as adults …
We must get Billy back,fn33 at first by degrees and then finally he can go to the Ruegg kindergarten. Do not worry. I am on top of my situation. I communicate every Sunday which helps tremendously and pray a lot. I also have faith in you and Billy and Roger and Toby …
The boys say my French is coming on splendidly. ‘Vous faites de grands progrès, Madame!’
M.
Clapham Common – 20.7.57
My love,
Having confessed to theft of umbrella, lust, despair and missing mass twice (without saying that I had, for some reason, attended two funerals instead) I got the quickest and lightest sentence: 3 Hail Mary’s. Now I can go to Communion tomorrow. Our church (St Mary’s) seems quite old, and has a torrent of masses … And it is just round the corner. I shall try to get to know a priest.
Having got over the contrast with the slum, I need hardly say that I find life in this boarding-house dreary and depressing; the only cure is work and that I’ve hardly begun …
No need for Alcoholics, Anonymous or Otherwise. The thing to do is pay all my wages into … my overdraft account, leaving barely enough to live on (7/6d a day). Drastic, but it works!
This morning I had the story of Sonya. She is certainly best away from your pensionnaires, and Betty seems to have been justified, for once, in what she said! I cannot yet speak about the horrors of la vie bohème as lightly brushed against yesterday: the malice, godlessness, and crudeness (of ‘Madame’ Mosbacher – she deserves the title. Self-adopted by my late landlady) and the horrors, maybe exaggerated, of John Davenport’s behaviour. Maybe God has shown me a slum and a slice of bohemia, to cure me for good …
I think I lunch with H. and C. (Benita’s one good joke)fn34 on Tuesday. The foreign editor has seen my cuttings, and now we await the editor, who is holidaying in N
ice. If I get trips, tant mieux; but they pay abominably. Also I’m afraid it is now a second rate paper. Did I tell you Haleyfn35 was once a telephone-short-hand-writer and married a typist? Vive le snobisme …
I live in squalor. My failure is complete. These things must be changed …
Oh dear, how I wish we had achieved security and were together …
All my love,
Eric
Thornworthy – 20.7.57
As I have an acute attack of fibrositis … all the children are being made to work. I made the two dirtiest boys bath last night and clean it afterwards …
Thierry has picked up a grammar school girl and gone to tea with her mum ‘pour jouer les disques’. She speaks perfect BBC English and it is all très comme il faut – so far …
How sad your lunch at Gwenda David’s was so gruesome.fn36 Stick to the beaten track of known friends. Thou shalt not judge but I cannot help feeling John Davenport might have protected his wife a little from the detractors and snubbers. One sharp word to Newtonia might have saved her life, not that it can have been an agreeable one. And the insidiousness of Newtonia is its strength. She is not the first to die of it. They flatter, the men pretend to befriend the wives and then watch the suicides. Very jolly.
I like Germaine’s grandson who is foolish but well brought up. Biene Schacht who is not only sweet but intelligent, Michel Cattier and Giselle who has all the Jewish gentleness. Her father is Russian Jew her mother German. She and Biene have made friends. I think he probably keeps a shop. Thierry is one of the notable French bores and always knows best.
I shall be very glad when the boys [Roger and Toby] arrive and speak English. It is uphill work forcing them to repeat in English what has been said in French …
You will only meet of this lot Biene and Giselle and I shall be in the process of breaking in two new French boys and a possible German. ‘Fermez la porte s’il vous plait! …’ Shades of Otto Siepmann …
The bus strike limits activities and the rain is bloody but they appear happy enough. Cards, chess, darts etc …