So I Have Thought of You
Page 12
Still wondering about 10 o’clock feed – hope all went well!
much love Ma X
[St Deiniol’s]
[1974]
[incomplete]
Daddy is bearing up very well really and I notice he keeps looking at the map, and working out the distances.
Poor Mary* has been called up for jury service, just as she’s going to take her 2 weeks’ holiday: admittedly she was going to spend it typing out 3000 envelopes to all the polytechnics, but she wanted to do this. I’m trying to get her to ask for a postponement, and I’m sure Rawle and everyone else will suggest the same thing. Certainly she’s showing amazing energy, but the publishing business seems a bit difficult on one’s own. I wonder how all these little presses manage – but then they do get grants from the Arts Council.
I see the Tories say they’ll peg mortgages at 91/2 per cent, but I shall have to read the small print carefully – I’m not sure it’s not part of their obsession with getting council tenants to buy their houses on the grounds that all house owners are bound to vote conservative – but it does madden me that you and Valpy and of course 100000s of others have to pay so much at the beginning of your lives.
As for me I shall stay in my foul old nest till the time comes for me to put my head under my wing for good.
Back on Monday, Tues: Miss Freeston and Sainsburys! (A kindly minister asks if Daddy and me would like to come into Liverpool and see the big Marks and Spencers!) I don’t mind that, but can’t bear the idea of Puerto de las Reinas. Longing to hear about Paris – much love from us both xx Ma.
P.S. I read Criticón* last thing as a treat! – The Natural Man is getting quite critical and sarcastic! –
[St Deiniol’s]
[postcard]
22 August 1974
Got your lovely letter, proudly put by silver plate, gong and visitors book in the Gothic hallway, lovely here and you’re now allowed to make tea all the time in a Somerville-like pantry as well as general tea at!!, 4 and 10. Plenty of tec yarns in the yellow drawing-room for Daddy and we’ve got the rules for croquet out of the encyclopedia. I only wept once when Daddy didn’t appreciate light through stained glass on Gladstone’s Boat of Death where he lies in marble with Mrs G. Marvellous about the drier. Many amiable lunatics here, chatted and bowed to by Daddy. Best love in Paris, imagining you in Louvre XX Ma
[postcard from Alderney*]
20 July [1978]
I’m afraid this won’t get to you in time but you will know I am really on summer holiday when I tell you everything including my ears and my shoes are full of fine white sand. Lovely here and they still go out to milk the cows in the fields. Boat comes in from Guernsey today with new supplies, big excitement. Mike has an outboard engine with a string, which actually starts! This seems unnatural –
Much love Ma. X
[25 Almeric Road, sw11]
[1979]
Dearest T and T**
All well here, sun and rain, drainpipe working well, your geranium is coming into bloom. Ria says I am not to make a fuss about my Travel Arrangements, but I am v. worried. Paul Bloomfield’s tea-party was very mad, not to say macabre, cake made by mad daughter, I was asked there to meet a silver-haired man in Olympic track outfit and sneakers, he is called Lindsay Anderson and seems to be something to do with films, perhaps Terry wd: know who he is, – the good news is that Mary’s landlord offered to sell her the flat for £10,000, £30 ground rent – Mary’s bank manager she says actually rubbed his hands – of course he says it must be done through a bank loan, so that the ‘excellent investment’ as he calls it, will actually belong to the bank – she is working hard at herb drawings and is well, came here to lunch to draw herbs &c – I want to give a party in the autumn, for all these Hampstead people who’ve asked me out, but Mary says yes and I could ask the S——–s (who are absolute death) and the vicar (with pectoral cross, guaranteed to wreck any party) &c. – do you think she’d be hurt if I suggested 2 different parties, I’d be glad to help with both of them? I don’t say my acquaintances aren’t awful, but they are differently awful, and I had hoped to give them something hot to eat and even sit down, do advise.
Two calls asking to buy frig.
Mary says my book-jacket for Offshore is terrible – as you know she usually praises everything. Gloom.
Virginia Surtees rings up very madly and says we must all unite to stop the M——–gallery (he’s just sold this lovely Burne-Jones) as he is only a hairdresser who has married one of his wealthy clients and knows nothing about pix; also I’ve got to go to lunch to meet the Director(ess) of Jewels at the Bmuseum – I know nothing about jewels and care less – and now I owe her 1 dinner and 1 lunch, it’s all so hopeless.
Don’t know if this article would be of interest – prob: not as you’ve finished it long ago – dreaded name of Ackermann appears!
I was knocked down by a bus queue and have a round bruise on my arm, just like the mark of Cain,
much love ma
76 Clifton Hill, NW8
[postcard]
[April 1983]
It was a lovely Easter and like all inhabitants and visitors to Theale we hated to go, but as you stood waving goodbye in the doorway in your brown corduroy pinny you looked, we all of us suddenly felt and said, very pretty, and a good deal better* – much love and thanks to you and Terry XX Ma
Have not prepared anything for anywhere – feel I’m going rapidly downhill.
P.S. Rosa Moyesii. I don’t know who Moyes was, a Himalayan explorer I daresay.**
76 Clifton Hill, NW8
11 May [1984]
Love and remembrance* for May 15th
I’m sorry this is an oldish card, but it’s the picture I wanted to send, a favourite of Daddy’s too.
Ma
76 Clifton Hill, NW8
[postcard of the cover of Innocence]
[July 1986]
So glad to hear news but I feel bewildered and wd. like to ask so many other things, looking forward to seeing you on Monday week but please let me know won’t you if I can be of the least use** as really the things I’m doing are singularly unimportant now I come to look at them.
Collins have printed these cards at vast expense, please leave it casually on the mantelpiece if there’s room! And please could you look at the thunbergia in the greenhouse and fill up its water-dish, hope it has not passed away. No matter.
Still sneezing. So glad the house will soon be rid of the dreaded mark-sheets and brown envelopes,
So much love to you all
Ma
76 Clifton Hill &c
12 January [1987]
Dearest Tina,
They say it’s going on for several days, and ‘elderly people living on their own’, old folk, like myself, are given useful advice, which is to keep warm, and to remember that it is warmer inside than out – not quite true here, where all the pipes have stopped working and Theo has gone down to work (which he never does on Mondays) because there is central heating at the College of Heralds. He left his bath full of water and Desmond and I found it had turned to solid ice – would be bath-shaped if it was taken out, which Luke would like. And that’s the main point of this letter, to say how tremendous it was to see Lukey himself again, and more so, eating and bustling about and putting us all in our places. You and T have been so steady and patient with him all the way through and that’s made him able to come through it, because it was an illness, even if it’s never likely to come back again.
I wish I’d finished digging up the back garden before the great cold, as the frost would have got into the earth then and broken it up, but then there are so many things I ought to have done. I’m reading Virginia W.’s diaries again, not from the genius point of view, but all her little jealousies and miseries about the reviewers and the housekeeping and Leonard’s rash, and going upstairs to tell him (where he sat solidly pipe-smoking and advising Labour Politicians) ‘my book is hopelessly bad, I must destroy all the proofs at once’
and Leonard steadying her down and saying ‘you know you always say that, you know you say it every time’.
The lunch party on Sunday wasn’t at all what I expected, not really a Virago one, but it would have been wrong not to go. Tim Hilton cooked enormous quantities – mussels, wh. I couldn’t eat, but fortunately a little girl, a 5-year old, Lily, was also very critical of the idea of eating them and that, I hope, meant I wasn’t noticed so much – pasta with a nice sauce, wh. I thought was the main course, then a beautiful leg of roast lamb with roast pots.cut small and mangetouts – the baby (9 months) sat there very gravely and good as gold, reminding me a little of Paschal – he has a cot in their bedroom and a wooden playpen in the corner of the living-room (bookshelf built all round the picture-rail, quite a good idea, but how to reach the books? But the bookshelves were all completely full) – one of the guests, in fact the mother of shellfish-rejecting Lily, was Jemima Thompson, now living at 34 Well Walk, where I was brought up, with a nice journalist husband from Newcastle looking like Philip Larkin, and her mother, Ursula Thompson, but I don’t know if you remember them next door at Chestnut Lodge or going to stay with them near Lulworth Cove, or the little brother Toby, now a psychiatrist. I walked back with Jemima through the freezing Hampstead streets (she was going to give someone a Greek lesson, having given up her job at Time Life when Lily was born) – enough of all this, you’ll say.
Now a weather report on TV, showing those brightish clouds in the SW and very black ones in the SE, so hope it isn’t, in Lukey’s words ‘terribly cold in Weston’ you always manage to make things easy wherever you go, but still, with 2 tiny children, it does mean managing. – They keep saying it’s the coldest night for 425 years – but can it be worse than those nights in Fergie’s time, when the tree fell, and you all had to huddle into the living-room? Or indeed when Valpy was born, and all the patients crowded into my room because I had a new-born baby and so was allowed a coal fire? At least you’re not in the shop and won’t have to discuss the matter of the cold with an endless succession of people.
Desmond says he’ll ring up a plumber and take him out ‘for a few pints’. He (Desmond Maxwell) is not a bad sort really. I have one cold tap running (just), and a kettle of course. – He tells me (perhaps indiscreetly) that Theo’s ‘flat’ at the College of Heralds, which Joan told me (and I think believes) was to sleep in while he was on official duty, in case the Queen wanted to make someone a lord in the middle of the night – is really just a spare office with a sofa, in case he can’t manage to stagger home. And Joan bought some pretty tea towels for it!
I’m sure you don’t realise, as one can’t, working away at it, day by day, what an immense amount you’ve done at Moorland Rd, and how well everything is beginning to look. The hall, with the coloured glass, is such a good introduction to the house, then the other colours follow.
A letter from Broccoli Clark inc., Columbia, asking for my impressions of the Booker Prize. I think I might give them a few of my recollections, which would stop them being so painful, as surely nobody in England would be likely to read them.
I rang up Ria to congratulate her &, if everything doesn’t freeze up, hope to have lunch with her tomorrow, when she doesn’t have to lecture until 3.
We usually have the vegetable soup and French bread at Habitat and Ria recklessly takes more than one or indeed 2 of those miserable little squares of butter. I do hope nothing has frozen up in Bishop’s Road, there is such a complicated balance to keep going there, and of course Tom-Tom hates the cold, but he has plenty of room to extend himself there.
Theo has come in, and is smashing the ice in the bath. BBC advises elderly people living on their own not to cut down on the food, so shall have my dinner, parsnips and bacon.
Now I’m going to ask you something which I hope you won’t find mad or irritating or both, and that is, do you think that you and Terry could possibly find something else to go down on the living-room floor except the serape? I thought it was lost, and never expected to see it again, but since you’ve found it, and all the lovely colours (though not the right ones, I know) I should so very much like to keep it as what it really is, a bedspread, I haven’t one here in London and of course not the Bishop’s Rd bedsitter, (if John and Maria really feel able to do that) – it is the only thing I have left from Chestnut Lodge, as I wasn’t allowed the opportunity to say what I wanted to keep from the sell-up at Blackshore, and all the things I cared about most were sold – well, all that’s in the past, – but I carried the serape all the way from Mexico City, through N. York, then Halifax and back to Liverpool on the old Franconia, and it was never meant as a rug or a carpet, any more than your own heirloom patchwork quilt, and if it has to be on bare boards without any undercarpet I don’t think it will last long, if it’s walked over. Please don’t think me mad, or even worse, stingy, but please could you take it up, I was wondering whether the green cotton dhurries would do instead, they’re machine-made (the serape is hand-woven) and don’t matter a bit: but I suppose they would be the wrong colour? Anyway I would be glad to contribute to another rug for your birthday, if I could please keep the serape, I think you can see from the way it’s wrinkling up that it isn’t really intended to go on a floor? It never has before. – I wish now I’d kept the undercarpet from Theale, but no matter. Don’t be annoyed with me, truly I appreciate your goodness to me over so many years – it’s just a weakness of old age to want to keep a few ‘nice things’ connected with the past and the serape as we said is 35 years old – I could never buy one like it now – and I should so much like to keep it – perhaps it isn’t a ‘nice thing’ to anyone else, but it is to me. so much love to you all Ma.
28 March [c.1988]
Dearest Tina, so many thanks for lovely Easter visit – Mary said on the way back in the train that she realised she’d overdone things with the envelopes and this holiday had made all the difference and I’m sure it has, and you know what it means to me to see you all, and I think it’s gallant in the extreme of you and Terry to manage outings and expeditions to the beach as well as even more than the usual list of other things to do – but I think this has got beyond the stage of lists.
I hope dear Luke will change his mind about being tired of the human race, as he told me on the beach, or at least he’ll kindly make a few exceptions.
I have been brushing my best black coat with a damp brush, and it looks all right, but then the hairs come back again, they appear to be growing out of the coat while my back is turned – (now hanging in the lower basement while some fanciful alterations are going on)
much love to all from Ma
[postcard of Paul Klee image]
[1988]
Dearest Tina – I’m sending you this although it’s been up on the wall, because I thought you might like it – do you remember your knobblyhead?
I was so happy at Watchet, and loved the Vikings even in the adverse weather conditions. Thankyou for listening to my probably imaginary and certainly small and dull difficulties (I could feel how dull they were even while I was describing them) while you were at such a point of exhaustion and hateful headache and I can’t tell whether it’s gone away even now but I do hope and pray so, as it looked only just about bearable. Note that I’m not giving advice or talking about Nurofen or feverfew.
I got the train with 2 minutes to spare – wonderful, just like Round the World in 80 days – a train too grand to stop at Newbury, though they always do at Westbury, perhaps because there are so many Nobs there. The castors on my bed work very well – without them I know I should never have dusted behind it and perhaps I shan’t now – but I know I could. Joan asks to know why I left my ironing-board behind? When it’s hers and I only left it after a severe struggle of conscience. Too late now!
All my love to all the family and best wishes for
[incomplete]
29 November [1988]
– distraught –
Dearest Tina – Just off to dreaded all-day Commonwealth Fic
tion judging, followed by Kipper* exhibition (manias), still feel dreadful, but Ria much better and Sophie singing and chirruping. I’m in a terrible state because I wanted to ask you whether the weekend of 8 Dec would be any good, as there are various things (not important) I shd. be doing on 16th and 17th, but if Luke has part in play it’s different and MY TELEPHONE HAS GONE DEAD.