Dear Mr Bigelow

by Frances Woodsford

  I have now read, twice, the article about you in Yachting, and have looked with some amazement and much enjoyment at the rest of the magazine. Amazement, in this tax-ridden country, that people can still afford to run such yachts as are illustrated in its pages – although I did notice most of the larger ones advertised were suggested for 'Executives' or 'Corporations' with the hint there that they might be run on an expense account, which is a great help whichever side of the Atlantic you may be. Some of the articles might have been written in Sanscrit for all the sense they made to such a land-lubber as me, but fortunately the one about The Commodore was in clear English (for the most part) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. How you must have chuckled at that letter in the magazine suggesting you would know better, when you had had more experience of Racing Committees!! Does the young man concerned now race with red sails, to match his face?

  . . . Mother has (I heard through a friend) now come to the conclusion that my brother wishes to get married, and all this refurbishing of the home is in readiness for his bride, Mother then being asked to go and live elsewhere to make room for her. How can anybody be so much a stranger to her own offspring? Mac and I were both hurt and offended when we heard; the explanation did cover Mother's careful reading aloud to me from the advertisement columns of the local paper, of all the small cottages, tiny flats, and bed-sitting rooms that appear there. I wondered at it a bit, for although Mother is very inclined to read me bits of news (usually backwards) she doesn't, as a rule, include the small ads as well!

  . . . Now to go through this for the more obvious typing errors, and get it mailed to you. I do hope you are feeling well, and not doing anything silly like clearing your own driveway or scootering, while this bitter weather lasts.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Frances W.

  BOURNEMOUTH

  March 15th 1958

  Dear Mr Bigelow,

  Another blank month; an especially blank week, in which absolutely nothing has happened except that I have inspired 489,562 times, and expired (up to this second) 489,561 times. Even for me, that pair of facts is difficult to work up into a two thousand word letter, so I must look about for something else . . .

  Oh yes, I know what did happen this week! Having, as perhaps you don't know, an extremely bad complexion on which I try everything from spirits of salts to handcreams, I read somewhere the other day that the best thing of all was an egg-mask, made from white of egg spread on the face extremely thinly. I always have an egg for my luncheon, so one day I whipped up the yolk in milk, and had that for lunch, and carried the white upstairs to a bathroom. Once undressed, I washed my face in the bath (before getting in, of course) and then, leaning over the water so as not so spill any on the floor, put my hand in the cup and scooped up a bit of egg white to slap on.

  Well, I don't know whether you've ever given yourself a face-mask of egg white, Mr Bigelow (although the odds are you haven't) because the egg white doesn't come up, a bit at a time, but adheres to your hand in one horrid slippery mess, or falls off just as you are about to slap it on. In the end I just emptied the cup into my hand, and splashed the whole lot in the general direction of my face. About 87%, at an estimate, slipped off my chin and nose, eyebrows and ends of hair, and – of course – fell in the bath. Have you ever had a bath in a collection of floating meringues, Mr Bigelow? It's like trying to catch mercury. By the time I had soaked and washed and the face stuff was nicely set (talk about Mrs Frankenstein!) the egg white in the bath was almost hard-boiled, and what the attendant thought it was when she cleaned the bath out after me, I hate to think! And if you wonder, was all this kerfuffle successful, I don't know, but if I turn peaches-and-cream, or even raspberries-and-cream (that being this month's complexion colour, I understand) I will pass on the good news.

  Looking for a number in the telephone book the other day, I came across this man – Reginald Pobjoy. Glorious name. Can't you see him? Not very tall – about five foot seven, plump, with a little moustache and hair parted in the centre. Spectacles, probably gold-rimmed, and a nervous habit of coughing to indicate his presence. Reginald Pobjoy. How could his parents have been so unkind as to so christen him?

  Do you remember my telling you, some time last summer, about the little boy who stopped me in the Baths hall and told me he could swim two-thirds of the way across the pool? And that, when I mentioned this to his mother a little later, she told me that her son had given me this item of news because, months earlier, I had promised him sixpence when he could swim the whole width? Well, yesterday he came up to me as I was just going into my office – and claimed his prize! He was absolutely beside himself with delight when I gave it to him, and saying 'Oh, thank you! Thank you so much' and so on, he gave it to his even smaller brother to hold ('. . . . . . and don't you drop it!') while he went in to swim. That his father was holding a wodge of swimming lesson tickets that had cost him nearly a £1, was unimportant; what was important was that he had won sixpence. I told his father the child deserved it for sheer tenacity of purpose, or for a darn good memory. Later, the instructor told me that yesterday was really John's Day. I had given him his sixpence and praise for, at long last, learning to swim: then I had gone upstairs and given his brother two bars of chocolate, one for him because no doubt he would get hungry applauding his brother's prowess in the water, and one for John because he would obviously be exhausted after his long swim. Not only this, but the instructor took John up to the deep end of the pool and let him swim across there, all by himself. Oh, definitely, it was John's day. How delightful, Mr Bigelow, to be so pleased with such simple things. A nicer pair of children it would be hard to find: plain little things, both of them, but so well mannered and so happy, and their little faces shine with cleanliness, like clean plate-glass windows for their sunny little dispositions to shine through.

  This has been an extremely dull week for mail: nobody had had any-thing of interest, and only Mother has had letters – and those from our famous Aunt Ethel, noted for her interminable chatter (is it inherited I hate to wonder?) and her enormous size. Mine has consisted of one catalogue from Holland, of rose bushes, of all things, and an invitation to take part in a whist drive got up by the Civil Defence. Neither item of any interest to me whatsoever, although the roses look nice and I do have two in the garden which could be replaced.

  I am currently deep in the making of a spring (or summer, if the summer is chilly) dress, made up of some of that hand-woven towel material I used for Rosalind's apron some months ago. I was going to have only a full skirt, but when the stuff was made, I got ambitious and managed to get a short-sleeved sheath sort of dress out of it, and have lined it with butter muslin. It should be delightful to 'dress up' with coloured accessories, but at the moment it is rather less than delightful as the hand-woven stuff is very loosely woven and every time I put my scissors within yards of it, masses of bits come adrift and float all over the living-room carpet and the moth-eaten bearskin rug in front of the fire that, as Mac supplied it, we cannot discard. So, Mother is hardly on speaking terms with me, the more so as she suggested an old sheet should be spread over everything while I am working, to save her carpets from getting littered, and I looked up and said mildly that I thought we used all our old sheets on our old beds! Poor Mother, she was very cross indeed, and it was some time before I got her to giggle a bit and agree. However, all is nearly finished now, and after all, what use is it to own a Hoover if you can't put a nice bit of litter on the floor before Hoovering? . . .

  Yours most sincerely,

  Frances W.

  BOURNEMOUTH

  April 12th 1958

  Dear Mr Bigelow,

  . . . I went to my brother's girlfriend's home last evening, to see their new car – an enormous peacock blue Jaguar, very wonderful to look at and with every possible gadget including one for sweeping away people they run over. Anyway, as I was saying, we went there and I expected OF COURSE to be the star turn because of this sciatica. But oh no, not a bit of it
. 'How are you?' said Mrs Fagan politely, and equally politely I said 'Very well, thank you: I always am', and that was that, she went straightway into how worried she was over Wendy's weight (she's the little sister) and from there to her husband's peculiar health, and then Audrey piped up to say, pleasedly, 'I'm going to see Dr Lucas soon', as though somebody was going to buy her a lollipop. Between whiles they kept commiserating with my brother whose teeth were hurting, as usual, and giving running commentaries on Wendy's chickenpox (three visible spots, to date, but my dear, absolutely smothered with them on her chest!). In face of all this opposition, I could not allow even a twinge to cross my countenance, and in fact, I don't think I'd even try to enter such competition. For somebody who respects and likes doctors as a body, I do try to avoid them as practitioners, but this Fagan family seem to keep them in the house like pet dogs, almost. Father Fagan is once more in hospital for a check-up, and judging by the symptoms that were tossed around with the cocktails, he needs it. Either that, or the doctors are finding life a bit hard on the National Health Scheme and anybody who comes along with a fat pocketbook is manna from Heaven for them, and they aren't going to tell manna he's a fit man, not for a long, long time. I am quite probably quite wrong, and poor Mr Fagan may well be a very sick man, but I've never met him and am not likely to do so, so I judge by the rest of his family to the last little hypochondriac. Anyway, it was a beautiful Jaguar, and they gave me a big bunch of daffodils for Mother as I came away . . .

  I had a card from Rosalind this week, which had come by surface mail and so taken rather a long time. What a romantic address her hotel had – 'The Surfriders Hotel, On the Beach at Waikiki'. It should definitely be set to music.

  And that's the lot for this week.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Frances W.

  PS There has recently opened a new shop in one of the suburbs of Bournemouth, which amuses me. It is a poorish suburb, with nothing in the least imaginative in the shopping line, and this new store is all frills and flounces, and they have called it 'Mes petits'. What's the betting the district immediately nickname it 'My smalls'? It is rather a silly name for a store selling children's clothes in such a district.

  BOURNEMOUTH

  May 3rd 1958

  Dear Mr Bigelow,

  Did I tell you my brother went into a shop the other day and asked for one razor blade, and when the shopkeeper (who knows us) looked a bit surprised, Mac explained loftily that he was 'trying to cut down on expenses and one has to start somewhere'. The shopkeeper's obvious disbelief in this explanation apparently penetrated, because this morning Mac asked if I would go over to the shop, which is quite near home, and buy him a blade, and of course I had no such nerve and bought a whole packet! There's extravagance for you, Mr Bigelow – a whole half-dozen at a time. Cost me all of 1s.8d. it did, too. Poor brother: he has to pay a £20 repair bill on the car all at once, because he has claimed income tax relief and has to produce receipted accounts to prove his expenditure! So you see, he is busy saving tuppence here and tuppence there, and no doubt will soon have a few shillings saved up . . .

  Having been, Sunday last week, around a lovely garden alongside a river, I thought last Sunday we would make a change, so we all went around one of the Rothschild estates in Hampshire. Rosalind would know the sort of terrain it was in, for the estate runs alongside the river at Beaulieu, and she and I (and Mrs Beall) had dinner there at Buckler's Hard many years ago, and looked across the lovely river at the wooded slopes on the far side – the Rothschild place.

  It was a very sad visit to me. Sad and pathetic, but I could not make up my mind whether I was right in feeling this way, or whether I should be tough and democratic and say to myself, 'Well, why should I feel sorry because they can't afford to live here?' Of course, being me, I am jumping to my own conclusions. This was what happened.

  The Exbury estate of, I think, Leopold de Rothschild is famous for rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias and orchids. We didn't see any orchids, but that might be because the place was so vast Mother's feet gave out before we'd gone far. The house, Edwardian, was the queerest sort of triangle in shape and not large – probably twenty bedrooms at the outside, plus a few attics for staff – but it was very ugly. The front, or long side of the triangle, faced open meadows giving a long view of the Isle of Wight across the Solent, and there was an enormous salon or ballroom with a colonnaded terrace in front of it. There were a few enormous scented magnolias trained up the side walls. No other furnishing, either inside or out; no curtains, no nothing. The stables were occupied, and a small wing had cheap curtaining at the windows, but the main house was empty, with nasty sightless eyes staring in rows. But the park around was sown with clouds of daffodils, here a mass of rich gold, there a pale cream, beautifully placed around the trees. At the edge of all this parkland was the wooded part, in which the rhododendrons and azaleas etc. were in abundance – and very beautiful, but not a patch on Stourhead, where the setting is ideal for them, with the three lakes reflecting all the massed colours. Here, all the enormous flowers were in woods, and some of them were so enormous, and fleshy, they made one shudder and wish not to meet them on a dark night.

  The estate was beautifully kept; the bushes well fertilised, the shrubs trimmed, the paths kept in good order. We found two disused tennis courts (hard) with a little pavilion shrouded in roses, connecting them, and a handful of moth-eaten tennis balls inside. The courts had been out of use for years; one was moss grown, and the other had all the nails coming out of the metal lines. The birds were singing, the river sparkled through the trees (you did get the occasional view) and the flowers were magnificent; it was all planned, it seemed to me, for the family to live in the house, on the estate, for five or six weeks of the year – no longer, just while the flowers were out. Now perhaps I should feel that nobody should have enough money to keep an estate up merely to use it for so short a time, but I did feel it was sad that they could not. And I felt sad, too, that apparently they liked it enough to keep the grounds in good order, even if they could not afford to live in the house at all. And perhaps I am letting my (vivid) imagination run riot, and my feelings were miles wide of reality. Right or wrong, we all felt the place was a bit haunted by Edwardian ghosts of wealthy, unthinking, sophisticated has-beens.

  Mac was happily engaged, on the way home, in phrasing little sentences . . . . . . 'called on the Rothschilds on Sunday but unfortunately they were away . . . . . .' . . . . . . 'oh yes, we went over the Rothschild place – y'know, the Exbury estate', which he hoped to drop casually into his conversations. As we reached Beaulieu, where there is a very nice hotel, I said, 'Well, now, we've enough money for one of us to go in and have tea while the others wait outside', which quickly put a stop to Mac's highfalutin airs. As it was the last weekend before payday and I hadn't borrowed even a penny from any of my various funds, I thought we did very well indeed to have enough money amongst us to pay for the petrol and the entrance fees, let alone for one to have tea! That's part of the fun in being poor; you can get such a delightful contrast with imagining what it must be like to be rich. I should think to be rich all the time must be awfully boring, for you would surely never put yourself into the imagined place of the poor in the reverse way. Could you, for instance, ever imagine that silly creature, Barbara Hutton, visualising such a situation as ours – going slumming over a millionaire's estate without enough money in our pockets to pay for tea! It touched my funny bone, and the others enjoyed the point, too. Incidentally, the children we met in our ramble nearly all carried little twigs or sticks, on which they were putting the dropped petals of the camellias – they are cup-shaped, and drop off in a whole piece, so that you can thread them on a string – so that they were toddling around with little wands of coloured flowers, most prettily . . .

  Yours most sincerely,

  Frances W.

  BOURNEMOUTH

  May 10th 1958

  Dear Mr Bigelow,

  . . . Can you see from the snap
shot where some horrid person backed into our radiator grid? The car was left outside the tennis club while my brother was inside watching the English Hard Court Championships there last week, and when he came out, this was what he saw. We asked our garage, and they said they could straighten it, but as we knew it involved removing the radiator inside the bonnet, we knew also it wouldn't cost sixpence. So Jemima had a brainwave – suggested we tied a piece of rope through the grill and fastened it to something solid, perhaps the plum tree in the garage forecourt, and then very delicately backed the car away. Mac loathed the idea, so one evening when he was having his dinner and, as usual, was nearly an hour late so that I had long before finished mine, I went outside the flat and tied a bit of string on, myself, but having nothing to which to fasten it, I just pulled on the string myself. After a few long, strong pulls the string broke and I fell over on my back in the gutter, which is quite an unusual place for me to be in, I can assure you. But I had managed to get some of the 'push' removed.

  A neighbour came rushing out, literally wringing his hands! An old Jonah, he said why hadn't he come out in time to stop me, for as sure as eggs is eggs I would split the soft metal of the grill. I said thank you, but I hadn't and I wasn't going to do any more because the string had broken anyway. I told Mac what I had done, and later when he looked he was so impressed he tried it himself, only with stronger string and a stronger pull – and he got the dent completely out again! Oh, we are a clever family, aren't we! Mac was furious that the dent wasn't removed when this snapshot was taken – last Monday, but it is, now, so you must just picture the car looking in its usual perfect state. The shadow sitting by the driver's seat is Mother, and I have already taken up the hem of my coat once but it appears from this, not enough. Excuse me while I get needle and thread, and to work . . .