. . . Now, in case this letter gets to you in time for Christmas, once again I hope it is a very happy one for you, dear Mr Bigelow, and you start off the New Year with lots of parties, and a new zest for life.
Yours most sincerely,
Frances W.
BOURNEMOUTH
December 31st 1960
Dear Mr Bigelow,
What else happened over Christmas? I read Bonjour Tristesse in French, in two evenings except for one or two words, which don't appear in my dictionaries and which, I suspect, would not appear except in the very fullest dictionaries – and then be marked 'Not used in polite society'. Also, started making a new hat in emerald and blue cellophane, which makes me look a bit like a Salvation Army lass only funnier, of course. And used up nearly all the writing paper given me for Christmas in writing to say thank you for my presents. Funny how the supply almost exactly coincides with the demand!
Do not have any worry in the world that my letters should be answered. Rosalind will tell me how you are, and if you get kidnapped and put in hospital again, no doubt the noise will reverberate across the Atlantic and if I don't think it's a thunderstorm, I shall know it's you 'wanting out' in your usual fashion.
And I do hope that you will look forward to, say, April. When the winter will be over and passed, and all the little boats will be hauled up having their bottoms scraped and painted in readiness for the summer. Rosalind tells me you are always fitter and happier in the autumn, when you have been able to get out and about a bit in the fine warm weather; so please, just sit back and cross the days off the calendar until that fine warmth comes back to warm all our marrow and send us out to watch the birds at close quarters, and to smell the sea and the wind off the marshes.
I was thinking about you the other day, and it occurred to me that it was strange, how very formal we are, one with the other, and yet how deeply I value our friendship. It does not seem to be a friendship as my others are – a familiarity – there is too much distance between us for that, but it is a different kind of friendship and seems to me to be mostly from my side anyway, with you very tolerant and forbearing about all my girlish outpourings. Thank you, thank you, for all this understanding, anyway. I don't know, sometimes, what I should do without you.
And now, of course, I can't fill in this last piece of paper with trivialities. Only with a very sincere wish that you will find 1961 a happier year than this one just ending; with a revival of your old spirit and a whole succession of friends calling to see you and take you out when you wish to go, and making life, if a little more restricted than we could wish, fundamentally happier.
Yours most sincerely,
Frances W.
1961
'Lady Bountiful in Poole Park. I always use Yummo Face Cream: that's how I manage to look 17 when actually I am 18 1/2.'
BOURNEMOUTH
January 21st 1961
Dear Mr Bigelow,
At first sight I thought my newly decorated bedroom was going to be a major disaster, like illegitimate twins, but in the end it turned out not too badly. Not a success by any means and I still can't imagine why I chose pink, a colour I detest, for my walls. Ah well. At least, I did in the end bring about a marriage between the walls and the ceiling . . . . . . When the walls and ceiling were done, the grey paint on the picture rail suddenly turned from being grey to being turquoise and looked absolutely unmentionable. I washed several gallons of pink off myself and dashed down into town to change the second tin of dark pink for mushroom. Painted the picture rail mushroom, and the door pink with mushroom frame. The skirting board, too. And that was as far as I had got in last week's letter. I left the window frame until Saturday afternoon. My windows suffer badly from condensation, but before starting to paint them I wiped them down with a dry rag, to remove the last of the damp spots; took down the old curtains and the net ones, which I washed. Painted everything mushroom. Looked quite nice. Waited three hours, and then put up the net curtains and made and put up the new green ones. Result – it looked like something in a shop window, and on going to bed that night in my bright pink fluffy nightgown I felt like something in a shop window, too – say a French pastry . . .
And then Came the Dawn, as alas, it always does. I looked around me, and thought sleepily, 'Now why can I see those black damp spots down the centre of the window?' and, when I climbed out of bed, I noticed that not only could I see the old damp spots, but the paint was almost grey, and not mushroom as it had been when I went to bed. On looking with horror, more closely, I found that my nice matt mushroom paint had run all down the metal parts of the window; formed little puddles of mushroom paint on the sills, whence it had been greedily sucked up by the net curtains. Oh, comme j'étais fou! [sic] That means I was up you in French. Mad, mad, mad. I tore down to work, where the painters are at work in the hall using the selfsame paint, and complained bitterly at them. The senior one laughed, the creature, and said now I knew better than to use a waterpaint on metal work, and, worse still, to use it while the metal was frosty. I am now waiting for the spring, when a) we shan't always get frost, and b) we might not always get condensation either. Whether we shall avoid both at the same time is another matter, but in the meanwhile I have one strip of grey paint and the others are mushroom and the curtains are permanently fringed with brown. Why do these things happen to me, Mr Bigelow? Do you think it is an evil spirit, a sort of personal gremlin or jinx perhaps? I feel myself the object of a malicious vendetta, and if only I knew who was behind it all I'd give 'im something to vend about.
Do you ever get noises in the head, Mr Bigelow? If you do, you have my heartiest sympathy because I do, too, and a darn nuisance they are. I remember one night early last summer jumping out of bed about midnight and hanging out of the window to shout to Edwin Ridout and tell him to stop revving his wretched motorbike all night outside my home. Only to find everything was quiet, and it was me all the time. This eventually passed, but it came back before Christmas and has been with me, on and off, for about six weeks now. It's a thorough nuisance at night, when it wakes me up and also prevents me getting to sleep for a long time. I have tried warm olive oil in the ear; knocking myself on the side of the head, shaking it, turning over, blowing down my nose whilst pinching it at the nostrils. Oh, everything but going to see a quack. At times it even goes on so loudly that during the day it gets between me and my work (not that it requires anything very thick to do that) and at home in the evening it is sometimes necessary to turn the radio on to drown my other row. It wouldn't be so bad if the noise wasn't so darn monotonous . . .
Mac took me to the social and dance that this particular Evening Institute held last Friday, and as we came away rather before the end I muttered 'Dit, l'oiseau noir' which is my French for 'Quoth the Raven'. Trouble was, not enough people knew each other, and there were not enough masters-of-ceremony to make people get to know each other. And, of course, the refreshments being cups of tea didn't help the social atmosphere. And Mac was cross, because it was his night out with the lads and he'd given it up to escort me, bless him, and this was what he got – a couple of dances with his sister, and a cup of tea and a bun! He also got in a mix with two very small girls, ages being about seven and eight respectively, whom he drew as partners in a sort of Scottish dance where each man has two ladies as partners. To see Mac going under the arch made by his arm and that of his partner, first on one side and then on the other, was very amusing, and quite the highlight of the evening . . .
It is a glorious sunny day today, and so far, the Jonahs who predicted a cold harsh winter have been eating their words. Looking to my right, on my windowsill is a pot with a blue hyacinth in it, and a pot with red cyclamen, and then a dirty windowpane and then sunshine everywhere, reflecting back from the water and drying the pavements which got soaked, along with me, last night.
And now to say au revoir until next Saturday. I do hope you are obeying my behest, and enjoying life a little bit more. Summer is not far off, as I know from th
e urgent preparations now going on for our next water show, curse it. In the meantime, stay snug and warm in what I have else-where described as your sea-edge home.
Yours most sincerely,
Frances W.
BOURNEMOUTH
January 28th 1961
Dear Mr Bigelow,
Last evening, as I walked across a short section of public gardens, I looked around me, as I wanted some dead twigs on which to rest my artificial flowers, and thus, provide support which would enable me to extend the range of the flowers. I had asked my boss for a bundle of pea sticks, but he complained that as there were no peas in the ground as yet, there would be no pea sticks in the shops, Q.E.D. So, as I said, I kept my eyes open. I was debating whether or not to pick a few then and there and carry them back to my office in the dark, when suddenly a voice said, 'Hallo!' and I looked up about a foot and a half, and there was Tony Hutley, a policeman.
I said, 'Oh, Tony! How you did startle me – what are you doing, prowling around in mufti, it's not fair!' and Tony roared with laughter because I had jumped half a mile.
Just goes to show how careful one should be, when contemplating an illegal step, to have a solicitor handy in case you get caught! As it was, I went over again this morning with my eyelashes curled and asked the head gardener if I might have some twigs, a bundle of pea sticks, and if it was too much trouble for him I could ask one of my men to come over and pick them for me and get arrested for doing so. The head gardener chuckled and said 'Yes, that's about what usually happens. I'll have them sent across for you. Will this morning, a little later on, do?' So I thanked him profusely and went back and started sorting out my flowers. Two hours later, I had been away from my office for a few minutes, and when I opened the door to come back again, the floor was covered with enormous branches of flowering and berried shrubs! Pea sticks, I ask you! What I wanted was a lot of leafless twiggery, because it had to stand in big baskets fastened to the wall about ten foot above the floor. Certainly there is no water available. So now we have enormous bowls of greenery everywhere, and Mr Bond says we look like a dam' Palm Court. (That's what every second- rate little boarding house or hotel calls the place their clients sit in, usually entertained by a two-piece orchestra and the clatter of washing-up coming through the door from the kitchen premises.) So now I shall have to go foraging in the New Forest for my own pea sticks at the weekend, and Mr B. will just have to put up with us looking either like an institution or a Palm Court. His criticism that without the flowers on the walls we looked like the former, I took as a great compliment from him. It is only with such difficulty I can wring compliments out of my boss, so I hasten to report them when I do succeed in getting one.
Tony Hutley – we used to know him as a little boy, and he is an absolute darling of a young man – asked if we still had the Austin, and of course I said no, we had changed it. Tony looked a little odd, and said, 'Yes, I thought I saw your brother the other day driving a Jaguar.' I hastened to tell him that we weren't that mad, the Jaguar being Mrs Fagan's property. 'Well,' said Tony, 'I must say your brother looked the part.' Mac was very pleased when I recounted this, and made a mental note to continue wearing his white silk stock with the Royal Marine crest embroidered on it!
. . . Mother, bless her Jonah-like disposition, is saying each day as I get home and there are no letters for me from anybody, 'I expect Mr Bigelow's ill, dear,' which is nice of her. I prefer to believe you are just miserable and disinclined to write. Besides, you and I know – and Mother doesn't – that I told you not to write. And, as I told you at the time, I mean that. So don't you; just you stay snug and warm indoors until the better weather comes. Wish I could join you – today it is raining in buckets, and blowing a half-hurricane, with the result that the rain is being forced in all the windward windows and we are mopping up every hour on the hour, and the draughts are just whizzing around our necks.
All the moans and groans for this week . . .
Yours most sincerely,
Frances
BOURNEMOUTH
February 2nd 1961
Dear Mr Bigelow,
Although naturally I am intensely sorry that you are ill, in another way I can bring myself quite easily to envy you. All you have to do (it's enough, goodness knows!) is to lie quietly there and do what you are told, and hold fast to my promise that you'll feel much better in the spring – and that's all. You have your every want attended to when the nurses feel like doing it, and all your friends are flocking to see you, and none of them think 'Oh, he's got nothing to do all day, let him come and see me'; your room probably resembles Westminster Hall when the monthly exhibition of the Royal Horticultural Society is 'on', and that funny smell is probably the mixed outcome of daffodils, roses, violets, hyacinths, and nasty medicine.
All this attitude of mine is a part of my lifelong envy of very small babies lording it in perambulators. Or, as you so comically say, 'baby carriages'. Not entirely lifelong, for no doubt I disliked it intensely when I was stuck in one myself. But looking back at those innocent days, what a great pity it is that we cannot appreciate how coddled and 'babied' we are, when we are; for all too soon we have to start and fend for ourselves, even if it is only warding off the blows of our larger siblings, to prepare us for the battle of Wall Street, or fighting the kitchen stove or what-ever forms the major cause of warfare in our adult life . . .
Tonight (it's midday Thursday at the moment) is the crucial night, when I shall know whether or not Mr Peet has corrected the French in my essay on you. If he hasn't, I have arranged a sheet anchor. Last night after the Wednesday class I helped Mrs Noble on with her coat, and she protested, so I said blandly that I wished to ask a favour of her and was just softening her up. So she said what favour? and I told her about the uncorrected essay, and please, if Mr Peet hadn't done it tonight, could I bring it around to her house over the weekend and get her help because it just had to be sent off by Tuesday, and even then, would cost a mint of money in airmail postage because it had been held up so long. She was delighted, bless her. Asked if I could come either after 10.30 a.m., on Saturday, when she would have been out and done the shopping and done her washing at the launderette and be home again cooking the Sunday dinner 'which we always have on Saturday'. Or, as she goes to the Reference Library to check up on details of lessons for the following week, on Saturday afternoon, I could come at six o'clock in the evening, and although she couldn't ask me to have tea, she could ask me to have a drink. All this when I was the one asking the favour! Poor dear – she is a widow with two now-almost-grown-up children whom she keeps by teaching languages. It's pretty hard going to earn a living and run a home at the same time, and do the shopping and the washing, let along undertake to correct 2,000 French word essays that get suddenly thrust at one!
My brother is in the doghouse again. If you went through that box of letters from me, no doubt you could tell me how many times he's been there during the past twelve years, but I can save you a lot of bother by saying it is x to the nth degree and no strange abode for him. This time he's there because the arrangement was I had the car last weekend. Well, I went around to his home at six o'clock Saturday and he wanted it, so he had it and promised to drop it off chez-moi at nine in the morning, on his way to the golf. At 10.30 a.m. on Sunday morning Audrey 'phoned and said he'd gone to golf but not bothered to stop in, as he had used his car all the way. He would come in at one o'clock on his way home and I could have it then. At 1.30 he telephoned to say he'd played golf and now he was playing snooker and would I please telephone Audrey and say he'd be home at 2.40, after leaving the car with me at 2.30 if I wanted it. I said yes, I did want it. Well, Mr B. at 4.10 p.m. I caught a bus . . . . . . Of course, I could not then do all the visits I had intended doing between nine o'clock in the morning and six at night. So into the doghouse it is for Master Frank MacPherson, and as a result I am getting the evening use of the car this week whenever I want it and sometimes when I don't, and I am to be taken next Wednesday to s
ee Frankie Vaughan at the theatre. I cannot bear Frankie Vaughan, but who am I to say no when invited out by a penitent brother?
Oh joy! Last night I had the car to go to French class, while Mac stayed at home with Mother after having had dinner with us. I am always late home from this class, which goes on until 9.30 p.m. anyway (the other stops dead on nine) and last night I ran three other students home, and waited while some baby-sitters got ready, and then took them on my way home. So it was ten before I reached R— Drive, and Mac had been pacing up and down the sitting room, coated and ready, for half an hour, and Mother was almost in hysterics, he had been so infuriating! He didn't dare say anything to me, after the Sunday business, so I felt very pleased this morning when Mother complained at her suffering through my tardiness, and feel I have had my revenge a little bit. It made me wonder what he would be like, had he to wait from 9 a.m. until 4.30 p.m. for the car one Sunday.
Well, Mr Peet turned up complete with corrected essay on one Commodore B. last night. Whether he just didn't have anything to say, or whether the shock of reading it rendered him speechless, I don't know; but he just marched up to my desk, gave me a meaningful look (but what meaning I could not interpret) and plumped the manuscript in front of me. So by Monday it will be typed out, put into the hard covers along with the others and some illustrations, and posted to Rosalind for a birthday present. And, of course, knowing my sort of luck, she will have flown east to see you and not be there on the date. Never mind, it will be something for her when she gets back again after seeing you on your feet again.
Dear Mr Bigelow Page 37