Dear Mr Bigelow

by Frances Woodsford

  At that, I was extremely bad, but hope to be better next week. I was surprised to find how easy a large and powerful vehicle is to drive: it could be turned in a normally wide road in three goes, quite easily – a lot more easily than the Austin which is only half the size of an ambulance. By now, my motoring experience consists of:

  1 ancient Ford 8 hp. wreck

  1 fairly ancient Singer 9 hp. car

  1 fairly new Hillman Minx, 10 hp.

  1 oldish Austin 10

  1 32 hp. Buick ambulance

  1 32 hp. Packard"

  Next lesson, a double-decker bus, yes?

  At work, we are in the throes of rehearsals for the summer show, due to open on Friday next. The consumption of indigestion tablets is reaching wholesale figures. I am getting new frowns of worry, trying to decide whether to ask the Mayoress to have a drink before I ask the Mayor, as she is the lady: or whether the Mayor comes first, as the Head Man in the town for the year. My boss stays well behind the scenes, seeing that the chorus girls are on time and so on, and leaves the gracious hostess work to me, all dolled up in black satin, new shoes, and a harassed look. I shall no doubt moan about this next week . . .

  I will say 'au revoir' until next Saturday, and I hope you had a lovely visit from Rosalind, who was looking forward to it as much as you, and as equally sorry it had to be so short.

  Very sincerely,

  Frances

  BOURNEMOUTH

  June 12th 1954

  Dear Mr Bigelow,

  . . . Friday, worked until 10 p.m., rushed home and did my week's washing, so that today, Saturday, I can set off for my summer holiday with a clear conscience. As the 'holiday' consists of three and a half days during which I have to do all the car-driving and Dorothy, who is going with me, is likely to refuse to do anything to help (such as paying the bills and seeing to tips, reading the maps and so on) I can imagine my return Tuesday night will see me rather tired . . . Today, Saturday, the skies are lead and about ten feet overhead, letting out gallons of water in a solid sheet. Just the weather for motoring or walking. Just my luck.

  And talking of my luck, I'm beginning to feel confirmed in my belief that I have a jinx. You remember in my last letter I said I was bewildered, bothered, and very, very depressed, and if you were right and Rosalind wrong, I would be even more so. This morning, on top of the weather, was a letter from Rosalind, in which she quite calmly confirmed the newspaper cutting Mrs Dall sent me last week, wherein you were reported as saying proudly that you were '91, just getting going'. Now I wouldn't mind if you were 101, personally, but for one thing. In two letters I had from Rosalind in 1948 (December) and 1949 (Jan.) she mentioned her father (84) whom she was about to visit, or had just returned from visiting. After I had written to you for some time I looked up these early letters, to confirm whether it really was possible that any-body as spry in his writing could really be 84 or 85, or whatever it was by then. I made a note in my diary, and each year since have brought it forward so that I would know, well in advance, when you were due to be 90. According to Rosalind's early information, this great day was to be in 1954, in September. Since early January I have been preparing for the event. Since early January I have been taking trips to the Reference Library, and spending my lunch hours in my office with scratch pad, drawing paper, pen ink paint and brushes. All those elaborate questions I asked you were only to one end – to discover the difference in cost of a letter being sent locally, and being sent to England, so that I could send Mrs Dall enough money to pay her for the stamps she was to use. For she, poor dear, was to be dragged in, as the 'surprise' was to be in nine parts, and each part was to be posted separately, so that the first came ten days before your birthday, and the final one on the day itself. That was why I wanted to know if you had a mail delivery on a Sunday, remember? I even spent an hour or so looking up an impossible word in a rhyming dictionary, knowing your fondness for long and unusual terms . . . . . . you try to find easy rhymes for Ninety.

  And now it turns out you are 91. Or, anyway, will be on your next birthday. I might just as well send you theatre tickets for a show which closed last week, as to send you my 'surprise' now. But in order not to waste entirely the time and trouble, I have done the whole wretched lot up in a bundle, and posted it off to you today, and will you please just imagine you are celebrating your ninetieth birthday last September and I'm just a day or two late, due to circumstances over which I have no control. If Mrs Dall hadn't been kind and sent me that newspaper cutting I might never have known I was too late. As usual, my good intentions go wildly astray. Do you think I should decide just to be selfish and let everybody else go hang, so that perhaps, by my usual contrary luck, I might hit the bullseye by accident? A thing I have, of late, never, never managed to do by design. Do you mind letting me know in plenty of time – say at least ten months beforehand – when you intend being a hundred? I am determined to be on time one year or another, but 91 is such an in-between age, it fails to inspire me one little bit. Oh, damn my bad luck!

  On which heartfelt note I will leave you and go dashing out in the downpour (matching my mood) to post this. I hope to sound a little more cheerful by next Saturday, even if tired.

  Very sincerely and down-in-the-dumps,

  Frances W.

  BOURNEMOUTH

  July 10th 1954

  Dear Mr Bigelow,

  Oh dear, I am sorry about the Adventures of A. Marsh. The Telegraph critic referred to it as a full-blooded masterpiece, but I didn't have any idea it was bl—dy as well! Writers these days seem to think that as so much has already been written, there is only left for them those subjects hither to be discussed only in medical books. Anyway, I am awfully sorry to have inflicted this one on you. I hope it hasn't irredeemably damaged your gay innocence!

  And oh dear, again, that Sir Bertrand is here once more. Fortunately, this time he only came down for the day, so as I refused to take time off work (not having known he was coming) I had him only from 5 p.m. until his train left at eight. Now he has progressed to the stage where he remarks lugubriously that he has 'had time to have a look at himself, and doesn't like what he sees' but perks up to say there is 'always Seconal'. Or whatever the thing is called – a sleeping drug people are apt to commit suicide with, I believe. I told the silly thing to stop crying in his beer; if, as he said, he was of so little importance, then he was too unimportant to ruin good beer. I think Dr Russell should have been born Dr Russelsky, with his Russian love of misery and emotion, don't you?

  Admittedly I do feel sorry for the poor man, for he's been in England only about a month, and already his bad lung is giving him trouble, so he has to go back to America. He is aiming at California, which is the sensible thing for him to do and the thing I've been advocating ever since 1946 . . .

  What with Sir Bertrand threatening suicide on Wednesday; a woman customer considering herself 'insulted' because the bath-attendant put her in a bathroom on the right-hand side of the corridor instead of the left-hand side which she preferred; and a man complaining bitterly that he didn't like the way a male attendant looked at him – and my boss shouting abuse at me because I hadn't told either customer I thought they were cranks, well, not in so many words! – and Mother ringing up in the middle of all this to complain that the expensive Hoover I had bought her the day before wouldn't work, I am back in my old slough of despond with a vengeance. So I was rather silent with my miseries in the car this morning, and Mac was as funny as Danny Kaye, trying to get the normal chatter out of me. And Mother at lunchtime was going around with her 'sorry I spoke' attitude. How we do affect one another with our moods! I can quite understand why Russ rushes to me when he can, for a good blowing up, or advice or sympathy, for my own family do just the same. Never mind what calamity overcomes them – they'll just 'ring Norah and tell her; she'll do something about it!' Oh yes – on top of all those horrors I described at such heart-rending length in this paragraph, I finished up my Awful Yesterday having a lady pass out wi
th (query) heart trouble during the water show, and I had to get an ambulance for her. Afterwards, I had to rinse out the towels and blankets I had wrapped her in, because by the time I had run downstairs, across the hall, up the other side, into the café, around the counter, to the sink, and run back all that way with a basin for the patient to be sick in – it was too late! I didn't dare let them stay overnight, for the boss might have found out, and as his idea of First Aid is to get the victim out of the building and his jurisdiction as quickly as possible, he would have been furious at having our towels and blankets used for such a purpose.

  With such sharply divergent outlooks, it is odd that Mr Bond and I have managed to work alongside each other for so many years, isn't it? . . .

  Very sincerely,

  Frances W.

  BOURNEMOUTH

  August 14th 1954

  Dear Mr Bigelow,

  . . . My favourite police inspector came in this morning with a reasonable excuse for his visit and a bit of grit in his eye! I think he went out a very disappointed man. No little-womanly gesture with a bit of lace-trimmed hankie was forthcoming. No lace. Instead, I handed him an eye bath and a towel to weep into, neither of which can reasonably be said to come under the heading 'the woman's touch'. I never indulge in little-womanly gestures unless I am quite sure they'll come off, and as I know grit is extremely difficult to get out of an eye, the poor man was forced to roll his around on his own. My own eyes, today, feel as though the lids were literally lined with emery paper, due to a series of bad nights. Why don't people sleep? One of life's major mysteries; along with my favourite, Why Do Acorns Grow into Oak Trees and not Poplars, and the one about who started the common cold . . .

  On Sunday afternoon last weekend I took Mother to Durdle Door in Dorset. This is an enormous block of rock jutting out from the main edge of the coast, in the last bit of which is a natural arch of rock – the Door – famous in this part of the world for its beauty. Of course, this being our first visit we must needs find the beaches strewn with hundreds of people from a nearby camp – as if I didn't have enough people at work! There were four or five perfect curved beaches, and as we sat halfway down the cliffs we could look down at their waters and watch the changing colours as the sun came and went. When it was out, the water was purple and deep emerald and peacock blue; when the sun went behind a cloud, then the water was blue-grey and brown. The cliffs here are white, grey, or sometimes streaked with vivid red, and we could see them stretching their heads towards the south for miles in both directions. To the west, we could see Portland Bill – the dark prison on its heights looking quite pleasant in the sun – and three aircraft carriers at anchor in Weymouth Harbour. To the east, the sun shone on the Needles at the western end of the Isle of Wight. I suppose this would mean a stretch of view extending some fifty miles with us in the middle. It was an unusually clear day (portending more rain, of course) and we don't usually get so long a view, but we enjoyed it while we did.

  As a contrast to this noisy scene of people enjoying themselves, we stopped the car for tea on the topmost point of the Heath which is used by the Army for training tank crews. And if you don't know what tanks do to countryside, don't try to find out for it's too depressing. Miles and miles of black and brown earth, with here and there a stunted, scarred little tree or a bit of heather. Talk about blasted heaths! It is part of that heath made famous by Hardy under the name 'Egdon Heath', and it explains amply and without words why his books are so depressing. They merely reflect their surroundings. Parts of Dorset are extremely lovely – the hills towards Devon, and the northern part of the county where it nears Wiltshire or Somerset; but that small area which Hardy wrote about is almost without exception an indifferent countryside. Many people have written of this facet of its character: it is a country age-old – long, long before the Romans or even the Druids, and it is filled to overflowing with burial grounds and ancient earthworks and so on. The earth has been lived on so long it has become quite indifferent to what human beings care to do to it; it just goes on and they don't. It gives me the shivers.

  This appalling summer is making us break all records for attendances in every department at work. A side-result of this is that people keep walking in and out of my office smoking big cigars, and as today (Saturday) I have a smashing headache, they are not being very well received. Neither have I the self-control left, what with headaches and sick feelings from too many aspirins and more nausea from cigar smoke, to polish a nice final paragraph for you. Will you please rest content, this week, with my felicitations,

  Frances Woodsford

  BOURNEMOUTH

  September 25th 1954

  Dear Mr Bigelow,

  It was just as well the police held their annual swimming gala here this week because they always give me a large drink during the course of it and this week I needed it, having just returned from mailing your birthday card at the post office. Talk about profiteering! Why, for another seven or eightpence I could have bought you the Brooklyn Bridge for a present, and on that there would have been no extortionate postage, as it is already there, in place, ready for you to cross next time you go into New York to do some town-painting. Anyway, flummoxes notwithstanding, I hope the card arrived on the right day, and hope the birthday went off very well indeed, with Rosalind's presence in spirit adding to the occasion . . .

  It was just as well, to repeat my opening sentence, that the police were holding their gala here this week, when they gave me that large drink, because it was such a very large one I felt relieved, as I motored home directly afterwards, that most of the cops in the town weren't out looking for weaving motorists. And all I asked for was an orange-and-soda, as I was thirsty! They pooh-poohed the idea, and insisted I should have gin with it. Now, I hate gin, so I refused indignantly, and we com-promised on 'a drop of whisky'. I suppose a drop can mean many things, from a single globule of water to being hanged by the neck, but this drop of whisky was about halfway between the two. Fortunately, the full effect did not hit me until I climbed out of the car in the garage, but it took most of the night before I could get to sleep for flashing lights in front of my shut eyes. Liver? No, no, of course not – what a nasty mind you have, Commodore. It was over-tiredness, and over-excitement that did it. If only I had seven pairs of hands and three sets of brains, I could work the front-of-house part of the police gala with ease. One pair of hands could be counting out money for the stewards to use as change; the second could be making a note of where I'd borrowed the money from; the third could be opening drawers looking for last-minute requirements such as chalk, string, paper and pins. Pair No. 4 could be counting out programmes, chocolates, cigarettes, ice creams and matches, for the usherettes to take around, while No. 5 could be making unhurried notes of the value of all these issued. No. 6 could be using the telephone to ring up various expected parties who hadn't arrived, but whose seats were being held in the teeth of great competition from the general public. And No. 7 could be articulating graciously to the Important Guests who will always arrive when I am tying up somebody who has just fallen downstairs, coping with a man complaining that he can't get his favourite brand of cigarettes, sudden requests for 'change for a £5 note, please' and trying to stop my stocking from laddering where I caught it on the door as I rushed through just now. I think three brains could properly co-ordinate and control seven sets of hands, and if Mr Bond had only complied with my request, the Police Gala-before-the-last-one, and given me roller skates for Christmas instead of bath towels, then the seven sets of hands could get to their various jobs so much quicker than my flat feet take them . . .

  Very sincerely yours,

  Frances W.

  BOURNEMOUTH

  October 9th 1954

  Dear Mr Bigelow,

  . . . Something very nice happened to me yesterday. A letter came by hand for my boss; he opened and read it, then handed it to me to read the last paragraph. I will quote it:

  I am enclosing a cheque for two guineas made payab
le to you and I would be obliged if you will share it among your staff after one guinea has been given to Miss Woodsford with our special thanks for the help she gave us. I know for a fact that paints are expensive and that she will find it useful.

  Now, wasn't that kind? I felt a bit conscience-stricken, and it took some persuading on the part of Mr Bond to get me to take the money, because I had scolded the man who sent it, when he told me he was going to send that amount for the staff. I told him – it was my favourite police inspector of course, he's the only one running a gala here who ever bothers to say thank you –- that he always overpaid the staff. That we were always glad to help the police, partly because they ran their gala so efficiently, and partly because they always took the trouble to say ta ever so, and we all appreciated that no end. And the only result of my lecture is, as you will see, that I get half the swag myself! I didn't scold him with that end in view at all, so perhaps as I am enjoying the fruits it is only right and proper that my conscience should prick as I eat. Anyway, having the money (a guinea is a very polite £1. You pay a tradesman in pounds, a gentleman in guineas. Don't ask me why) I went out straight away and spent it on oil-paints and a lovely big palette before my conscience could think of another excuse (shoe repairs) for pricking . . .

  Very sincerely,

  Frances W.

  BOURNEMOUTH

  November 11th 1954

  Dear Mr Bigelow,

  For somebody who didn't 'know the date' you have done remarkably well, I must say. Today, the postman arrived with two boxes of chocolate liqueurs! And today we are having a specially good dinner, which will follow up with chocolate liqueurs all round (my choice will be the Grand Marnier) and a sip of Drambuie to make us all feel very content with the goodness of life . . .