Gerald your sympathy, and friendliness made me happier than I can quite ever tell you. Don’t let Valentine and her coal black charms obliterate Watendlath and
Your Doric xxxxx
To Gerald Brenan
The Mill House
Thursday, 12 o’ck, 8 September 1921
I had to send off your letter yesterday without reading it over again, so you must forgive me if it was ungrammatical or ill-spelt. There was a slight scene. All was nearly lost. After all our care I nearly ruined ourselves. I thought Ralph was writing to his parents & not paying any attention to me sitting the other side of the room writing to you on the sofa. I put three crosses at the end of my letter & then looked up & then saw he was watching me ‘x x’. He instantly said ‘who are you writing to’. I lost my head slightly and said that I didn’t see that it mattered who I write to, he had no right to ask me. He then became suspicious. An argument blew up. Then I lied, and said I was writing to someone else. It was all rather horrible. I said that if he treated me as my mother used to, I should deceive him. He said unless he investigated me I was so childish I was capable of doing anything. Well, the argument went on, I refused to give up my principle & he purported in his authority to control my letters & relations with people. By the end of the argument he had forgotten the reason of it, so I rushed upstairs & posted my letter to you before he remembered his curiosity. For it is only that […] But I paid for it last night. I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed when the room was pitch dark listening to the rats gambolling in the mill, trying to forget you & trying to go to sleep. I think I must have been awake at least 6 hours. I went over everything and wondered if it was now over or just beginning. I hated myself for having these affections & for deceiving Ralph. At last when it was light & the hops showed pale green against the blue sky I fell asleep.
I thought of you this morning still in England. Now at 12 o’ck I suppose you are on the ship. Leaving Newhaven behind you.
I was jealous of H. J. [Hope-Johnstone] yesterday going away with you. Suddenly Spain seemed to be the most perfect place, & I envied you your liberty. Yet how lovely Tidmarsh is, and who am I to complain today! Yet I feel I have lost a friend & it’s a day of mourning […] I write now as Ralph is out of the house & I am quite alone with you. You must tell me all you do. I am even curious to know how you spent Wednesday after you left us in Gordon Square? And every detail of your voyage to France.
I lay in the Roman Bath yesterday under the cold water and you weren’t there to see me in my loveliness. Can I write at random to you? Have you pockets enough to contain all my nonsense? No one but you may read my thoughts today.
In the cool green bath yesterday I lost all the greyness of London & became a Watendlath character again.
‘But where are the dancers the dancers all in yellow,
where is the sweet music & where the green hills O.’
The heat is superb here and the garden is full of singing birds, and exquisite flowers … and yet one wants more … why? Why?
Give Valentine my love again today when you get this letter. Will you be as fond as I am of you & write so often? Tell Valentine I will be with her. I am going to live very economically till then to save up enough money for a long stay with you.
Forgive me, if for a little I write rather restrained letters. You will understand. I cannot at the moment live deceiving Ralph & having the burden of writing to you with my doors bolted. Not just now. It adds too much to my depression. You will know I care still, as I cared, in our Yew Tree house.
In a few weeks I will write unrestrainedly.
Oh I wish you were here on this most perfect of days. It is such another day as two people once spent on White Horse Hill.
It’s three o’ck now, and you must nearly be in Paris. I am making rare pickles in the kitchen & putting my house in order. In a few days I will paint my sign boards. I am full of a new picture now. Your figure in the olive green stream at the ford last Tuesday made me think of it, you looked so lovely in the water. Like a Piero della Francesca figure.
Gerald how can I thank you for making me so happy – I loved my herb book you gave me. I am going to do some herb pictures for your walls at Yegen this month.
Now goodbye, this letter tells you nothing, but I find it’s not possible.
I shall be glad when I’ve forgotten you a little! This loneliness makes me restless.
Goodbye dear one
Xxx Yr Doric
To Gerald Brenan
The Mill House
Friday, 6 October 1921
You alone have made me alter my slovenly habits and put numbers & dates at the top of the sheet.
Dear, how good it is to write to you again. Yet you have deserted me shamefully. You reached Yegen 2 weeks ago next Monday and I haven’t had a letter yet and who was to going to write first? Who indeed? I am all alone today. Ralph is in London & Lytton with his old mother in Gordon Square. My day has been one of which you entirely disapprove. It has been spent since 7.30 this morning entirely in useful labours. Every minute of it. But that is the only way that I can do things. All laziness one day. All painting another. And concentrated virtue and industry on the third. The results are the sitting room has been re-wallpapered for the winter. The carpets cleaned, the floors washed with Annie’s help. And 6lbs of red apple jelly in a store cupboard and now I lie exhausted gasping in a chair at 3.30.
Valentine wrote me a charming letter last week. I feel in love with her, just for her letter, all in a moment. She appreciated you properly and said many delightful things about you. Oh Gerald, I wish you were here. That such remarkable days should slide away unseen by you – because after all it can’t be quite so exquisite in Yegen – and not spent with me – is lamentable … I can’t write properly as I am literally lying down in a new chair Lytton has installed. It looks a vulgar chair but once one falls into its velvet caresses it is impossible to sit up right and one forgets all one’s aesthetic taste for shapes.
Lytton will never write again unless we seriously keep him from ever sitting in it.
Now I’ve had my tea woken up and sit properly upright in a chair. Shall I tell you again how extremely fond I am of you? But the curious details of my fondness cannot be told bleakly with a pen and I cannot really be very fond of a person unless I see them. Already you are beginning to fade away and I have to go back to Watendlath to see your face. My brain is scattered today so you will not have a good letter.
We have burnt sienna curtains now in our sitting room. I bought the canvas for 8 lira a yard in Venice, it is the same material they use for the sails of the ships. They completely alter the room making it very rich and autumnal in effect. You would approve I think. Do you know this morning as I lay in bed at half past six watching the starlings eating the red apples on the tree in the orchard, I saw an exquisite bird alight on the top most branch. I thought it was a hawk at first, I jumped up and ran into the pink room and fetched the spy-glasses to view it better. It was a green woodpecker with a most lovely face & beak and a yellow bar on its green coat tail. It stayed some little time eating the apples and then flew off. Wasn’t that an honour for our garden?
Yesterday Ralph didn’t go up to work, and as it was so hot, too hot to work indoors, he climbed to the very top of the big apple tree and picked the apples. He looked so lovely against the blue sky, his head and shoulders above any branch, swaying like a fat quail on the slender branches, Annie & I held a big sheet below and he rained down apples into it. We carried in baskets & baskets of apples. I give a great many away & the rest we bake and make into jelly. They are such lovely things, I lie in the wet grass looking up at Ralph amongst the shining red fruit – I want badly to use it in a picture. But I can’t quite conceive it. We have a big attic now full of apples. It smells so heavenly when one steals in there, in the dim light, with a new load […]
I go back in my week to you because it is the only way I can remember what I have done. On Tuesday Annie and I went into Reading for a tre
at. A short Tchekhov story, as we sat in the baking sun on the little platform bench I heard a bell ringing, so I said to Annie ‘that must be two o’ck’ she said ‘no it’s John Low’s funeral today’. I thinking John Low was someone I ought to know said rather vaguely ‘oh is he dead?’ she said ‘I told you Sunday he was. They brought his body all the way from Bournemouth in a glass hearse. I saw it pass through Tidmarsh this morning, they are going to bury him this afternoon at Pangbourne. He was only ill 5 days. His father is a gardener. Isn’t it sad, he was only 19. And he looked so well in the summer.’ Then she stopped. I felt rather embarrassed for she remembered how I had caught her with him under the lilac bushes in the evening & how I talked to her and she cried. And I thought of it and remembered how much more upset I had been than Annie and then the bell tolled again and our train came in & we left the station and the bell and the funeral behind.
I shopped in Reading. Tried to find a kitchen dresser for the dining room. Saw a marvellous beautiful picture of Tibetan mountains, equal to our Niagara fall masterpiece. Found several good furniture & old china shops then met Annie again at 4.30.
Had tea with her in a cheap little shop where the market people drank their tea from saucers & then went to the cinema and saw Charlie Chaplin in The Kid. Annie loved it and laughed the whole time. It had a curious interest apart from its brilliance but that would need a discourse. We came back by a 6 o’ck train & Ralph got in our carriage at Reading, he had been to London all day. I thought of poor Johnnie Low when we reached Pangbourne but I saw Annie was only thinking of Charlie Chaplin & the glories of Reading.
Last weekend the genius Saxon Turner was here! And a young Cambridge man, a doctor. On Sunday Lytton hired a motorcar & we drove to Savernake Forest & ate cold chicken in a grove of green bracken under the great beeches.
The desolation and wildness of Savernake always surprises me afresh. It looked particularly beautiful last Sunday. We then drove back, the most lovely journey in England. Round Chute Causeway, through my old village of Hurstbourne Tarrant. Past our old house (where Jane Austen once stayed) & then over Combe Downs. I got out and looked at Combe House and wished Headlam had never lived to steal that most beautiful of all houses from me.
When you come back again we alone will go to Combe & my Hurstbourne and on your bended knees you will confess you have never seen such country. All evening we gambled at poker. Now I must stop my letter or the post will vanish.
Alix & James sent me the most superb book on Spanish architecture & china from Munich. It has marvellous photographs in it. Will tell you more of them in my next letter.
Bertie Russell has married Miss Dora Black. She staggered to the Registry office heavy with child, just in time, to save the Earldom of Russell from sinking to illegitimacy. For Bertie’s brother has no child.
Bunny Garnett’s wife, Ray Marshall, who J. H. -J. knew, had a dead child born to her.
I have had bad colds & throats but I revive today. The heat is still amazing. I still have baths outside in the Roman Bath in the mornings –
My love dear one
From your Doric
xxxx
To Noel Carrington
The Mill House
8 October 1921
Dearest Master Noel,
[…] We live in an old mill lodge consumed like old cheese by the rats. My husband is still kind to me and I hope when you next come back we will still be the loving pair that we are at present.
Which are loving doves in case you don’t recognise the sweet birds.
I am only writing to you as I see Mister R. is doing the same. I once met Tagore,fn137 but I doubt if he remembers the honour! It was at Rothenstein’s house in Hampstead. He was a great friend of Albert R’s little brother.fn138 I thought he was slightly too self conscious and precious. His voice rather charmed me and his exquisite manners. I thought he showed up compared to the crude English very well. But I dislike people who suffer themselves to be iconized … one shouldn’t be vague about such matters, one should say ‘clear out’ to Mr Andrews & his kind and only keep good company.
After all more intelligent and able men than Tagore have moved in the world as human beings. Tolstoy for instance didn’t suffer such ‘reverent’ admiration.
I’ve no news. We live very peacefully & quietly down here.
R. goes up to London not every day by any means, in case he is writing his life too blackly to you, in a most luxurious arm chair over a log fire. He spends most of his day when he isn’t working adoring his geese & counting his apples & talking to his ducks. Lytton thanks you […] Write again soon please.
My love
Your Muchacha
To Gerald Brenan
The Mill House
18 December 1921
An old variety of handwriting born of a new china inkpot and a new Ladies’ nib. A Happy Xmas and a Happy New Year.
It’s a pity after three years that mellow plum pudding should have been devoured by the heathens of Malaga! Now I’ll answer your letter. What fun it sounds, masons, masons everywhere. I have built 2 new fireplaces since you visited Tidmarsh, and I have a big box of cement in my larder with which every day I bung a hole to keep the rats out.
We also are preparing for Xmas, and for the great Shah of Persia, Maynard Keynes and his attendant slave, Sebastian Sprott.fn139 Yes, that is really his name! Boxes arrive, not on mules, it is true, but on a carrier’s cart from the station, by every train. Boxes from Fortnum and Mason, a large bacon from the Jew Waleys of Essex, crates of rare wines from Soho, and vast cheese from Jermyn Street. I have just made two silk dressing gowns, one for myself and one for Ralph. Mine is speckled like an eastern sky and Ralph’s deep sea green. Then he is also having a pair of yellow silk pyjamas. By the way you never sent me a pattern of your silk. I can easily get it for you at Liberty’s. For it is awful to think of you night after night lying naked from the knee to the toe! I saw some superb handkerchiefs in Liberty’s. What a mixture of horror, and taste is mingled together in that shop.
I went up to London last Thursday. Had tea with my super-refined sister in Finchley Road. No, you couldn’t imagine such a perfect specimen of horror if you thought for 20 years. She talks disparagingly of the whole world. She is very refined and superior and constantly says ‘I can’t think why she married him, he only has £700 a year.’ ‘They must have come in for some money lately they have 2 cars now.’ It was the most hideous house I’ve ever seen. Such good drab taste. Two footmen like the footmen one sees in West End plays. In fact she looked very like Irene Vanburghfn140 sitting at her writing table when I entered the room. She gave me a petticoat for a Xmas present and a pair of stockings. As they also have a house in Portland Place and a car, I expect they must have £3,000 a year. Her saggy discontented face still haunts me and to think for 10 years we lived side by side and slept in the same room together. Now I feel she is more removed from me than Mrs Lloyd George, or Princess Mary […]
[…] In the evening Lytton, R, Alan MacIver and I went to a play, Charles Hawtrey. It had a curious merit. One had to laugh all the time. It combined the pleasures of Gilbert and Sullivan and a music hall melodrama. I slept at the MacIvers house in Kensington. They are marvellous those respectable houses. One ought to be preserved intact every 10 years to show to future generations. They should be on view. How lovely it would be to spend a day in one, when we are about sixty. I always fear some ghastly revolution will sweep them all away from us, as they were swept in Russia. How nice it is when the year is nearly over. Already I am tired of these grey drawn out days, the stale memories of this year. I long for a new blank year, with no regrets, no sentiments. Clean, and entire with 365 days to spend.
Tragedy. An unknown friend sent me a lovely Treacle Print.fn141 Prudence and Justice. It arrived in a paper parcel completely smashed. I pieced it, tearfully, together only to see it had been one of the best Treacle Prints ever made. I have not the heart to throw this broken image of loveliness into the dust bin, and yet it is
impossible to stick a thousand pieces of glass together. And all my life I have longed to possess a Treacle Print. What irony! Death haunts me, I think of it at least three times a day and last night I dreamt of the dead. It is menacing but I hope if I put off writing my will, God out of decency will wait till I have done so. Of course one of these days out of sheer idleness I shall make a will, and then he will have no excuse for delaying. I hope you will write to me soon and tell me about your visitor. Is Hope-Johnstone as good at Spanish as you are now? Lytton bought on my advice a most lovely bedspread, Queen Anne embroidery with a big sun flower in the middle, very pale colours, with flowers embroidered all over it. It is a vision of delight. You will be envious! I will write to you after Christmas and tell you of our feasting, and the conversations. There are so many things for me to do. A lampshade to design, a dresser to paint yellow; Lytton’s bed also to paint. Two wood cuts to make and at least forty letters to write before Christmas. I am old fashioned enough to love writing letters at Xmas. I suppose it’s a complex because I really love getting them back. Not a complex to investigate certainly. My poor mother hates Spain. It rains; it is cold; and my brother and sister in law are unkind to her. So the poor woman returns again next month. Bringing an Andalusian hen and cock for our establishment.
Ralph has become a hen-maniac and secretly I have a complex against them, because I don’t like the taste of eggs. If you had read Mr Aldous Huxley’s latest book you would realise that a certain young lady called Mary Bracegirdle always talks about complexes. But it’s a book which makes one feel very very ill. I don’t advise you read it. […]
Please don’t write anything in your letters, as it’s not so easy as it was to get them from the postman and Ralph always wants to read your news. Give J. H. -J. my love
Yr Doric
1922
To Gerald Brenan
Carrington's Letters Page 22