by Chris Barker
We climbed a pear tree and ate what we picked. We ate blackberries, thick upon the bushes. There were lemons on the trees, oranges, pomegranates, limes, walnuts (not yet ripe), almonds, figs, prickly pears (from cactus), elderberry bushes: locusts. Events in the war send me hoping ahead to my hope of early return to home; to you, to your arms, your lips, your bosom.
We met an old man who took us to a couple of fig and pear trees, shook them and told us to help ourselves.
Love
Chris
3 September 1944
My dear Bessie,
No mail came yesterday, but I am, as usual, quite hopeful that some will arrive today. The news about the Allied men in France is very good, and I hope it leads to the end of the flying bombs. I suppose there is a good chance of them setting up their sites elsewhere, but they cannot again be such a menace.
My decision to burn your letters was the sort of decision one has to make when a move is made. You should witness the heart-searching that goes on, when chaps consider whether they shall or shall not discard books, papers, letters, tables, beds, chairs, lamps, tin cans, buckets, and private kit and excess kit. Slowly, then rapidly as the necessity for doing so sinks in, a pile of odds and ends grows on the floor. It is tossed outside, and if there are chaps staying behind they come along and take what they want. In our little move yesterday I gained a German aluminium ‘Trinkwasser’ container. It holds about 2½ gallons of water, and is very light. I have had a private ambition in this direction ever since I first saw one. This one has been used to hold paraffin, but I am washing it out frequently and it will be OK to drink from shortly. Just as the new dress or new suit makes you a little happier in peacetime, so last night, I was a little happy when I went to bed.
Today, Sunday, fifth anniversary of the war, is a strange day here. Thunder and lightning and rain. The rain is nice to be in, but if it keeps on for any length of time, we shall be in some trouble. Tent life after rain is no joke anywhere. There is much that is very enjoyable in the kind of unit that I am in (almost non-combatant in most cases), and after the war when one comes back to streets, trams, houses, every day except Sunday when perhaps a ‘hike’ may be undertaken, most of us will notice the difference. Do you get one ‘rest day’ a week, or less frequently than that? Do you get only one Sunday off each seven days, and how do you feel about working on a Sunday? Even in the Army there is always a little difference about Sunday; ‘Reveille’ and Breakfast are usually half an hour later, and probably one only works in the morning.
Throughout all this movement, shifting, this war, I think of you and want you. I can sigh for you. I can cry for you, and know that you can hear me.
I love you.
Chris
5 September 1944
I am now having a daily massage for my hips. I omitted it yesterday because the previous day I had had diarrhoea (a result of some grand black grapes) and had to report sick with it. I suggested to the masseur that it would be unwise to do his stuff that morning. I had a day’s excused duty, and am on ‘light duties’ today and tomorrow, though I am quite OK now. While I was there I saw a chap who was going to hospital with malaria. Yesterday his temperature had been 106! Terrific, isn’t it?
I expect you are delighted with the news from the fighting fronts. I hope you are, to yourself, quietly understanding that the people to whom honour and praise is most fittingly given are the dead and the wounded whose efforts have made the successes possible. The non-appearance of the Flying Bomb for several days is a fine bit of news for all of us out here who are from London. I hope there will be no more.
6 September. Hard luck, I have heard the news since writing the above and learned that you had some Flying Bombs, but I hope there will not be much chance of the Germans launching any more.
I went for a walk in the valley last night, and was delighted to add three more fruits to the list I sent you earlier: apples, damsons, plums. I sampled them all, the plums were jolly fine, although we only saw one tree bearing them. They were grand. When I think of our plum tree at home, the blossom of which is carefully counted by my parents to discover whether we shall have 13 or 14 plums this year, and look at this tree, it makes me wish for a little of the Italian climate over England. I do not want you to buy it, but I should be pleased if, at your convenience and when you are looking in a bookshop on your own behalf, you would have a look for some kind of popular book on Geology.
I love you.
Chris
13 September 1944
Dearest,
I received this evening your LCs: 22, 23, 24, 26 and 27. I was very, very, very pleased to get all these letters after so long a break.
I was a little sorry to discern that you are still uncertain about our future, still doubtful of the depth of me. But I want you (I have warned you) to remember the varying circumstances of my writings, and always take for granted that I LOVE YOU, that I know what that implies, that I know what I am saying, and am determined to keep on saying it so long as you will let me. (Please read that last five lines again [from ‘always take for granted …’], slowly.) I have been leaving the public page blank lately because sometimes I feel it would be a bit of an anti-climax to use it and always I have to bear in mind that there are ‘nosey’ people who can see what I am saying if they care to look (chaps playing cards on same table as this).
It doesn’t depend on what you look like or whether you can cook or have ever read King Solomon’s Mines. I love you in my bones.
If my letters stop, will you again wonder about my constancy? If you get only a few words on a LC, or a Field Service Card, will you again be a’doubting and a’worrying? – Please don’t. I want my lips to meet yours in understanding, I want to caress you, to kiss your breasts, to put my hot hands full upon your breasts, to squeeze till you cry out. I want to put my face in your bosom, my hands to your loins, then to kiss, then to salute, to meet you there.
I love you.
Chris
22 September 1944
Dearest,
The White Paper on demobilisation, published this morning, is all that is being talked about by our chaps. I think that it might be worse. I have written to Sir E.T. Campbell, my MP, urging him to represent that (1) no scheme shall be allowed to detract from the need for bringing home quickly all men who have spent any length of time overseas, (2) that for such service, one year shall be added to the age, for each two months spent abroad. I don’t hope for much from Campbell, but I think it right to let him know the view of most chaps here. He is a Conservative, a supposed poet, responsible for these lines:
‘It is Hitler, the Hun, we are up against,
For all that he does is sinister,
And the best way to put an end to him,
Is to assist Churchill, our great Prime Minister.’
Don’t, for goodness’ sake, spend more than a couple of shillings on Geology. I should be disgusted if you did, as I shall have the run of the libraries when I get home.
You say my sex (as though I care tuppence about them) have been dirty dogs to women in the past. I am under the impression that men have been ‘dirty dogs’ to men, and ‘dirty dogs’ to women, and that women have been ‘dirty dogs’ to men and ‘dirty dogs’ to women. But I think most women are (unfortunately) fairly content to be regarded as nice pieces of furniture. Honestly, right now, wouldn’t it suit you? And aren’t you prepared for me to treat you as a piece of furniture at some time or other, despite my high flown equality reasonings? If you are not, then you will probably be shocked. Hope your plums will delight you – next year. Sorry, too, about these flying bombs. I wish they’d finish so that I could have a little more peace of mind.
I love you.
Chris
23 September 1944
I have now finished skimming through the great file of printed papers that Deb sent me. One of the reviews in The New Statesman was about three recently published works on Geology.
In my last LC I asked whether you did not ex
pect sometime that I should treat you as a piece of furniture. Really, I think I am bound to do so, though I shall probably try hard not to do anything you don’t want. But you can be sure I will occasionally forget and on those occasions expect your forgiveness, which is a sauce, but natural. You see, I want so completely to dominate and possess you. If I were less certain of you I should find my thoughts less riotously arranged, but I know that you await me and have waited long, and I want to fling myself upon you and devour you.
I do not think I mentioned that while in town the other day I went to the ENSA pictures. – Frontier Badmen – the only one I remember in it was Diana Barrymore. It was all about cattle selling and more or less rustling. Set in 1869, the gunmen all had automatic pistols that appeared to fire on and on and on. We shared a box (free, by the way) with a couple of Americans, and I felt like an argument about the superiority of US films, but there is a certain barrier between us, and nothing happened. We are like their poor relations.
Here, because there are no real washing facilities, I get my laundry done by a woman about here. The other day she invited me into her living room (there are no passages, one foot over the front door and you are on top of the big double bed). I went in, rather awkwardly, and looked about me – shrine, stone floor of course, pots and pans, but not dirty. On the wall a photo of a male child, aged 2, I should say, nude and front view. Funny way of going on, to us, but I suppose that everything is due to be judged by different standards. I gather that no one out here eats tomato skin. They are thrown away. The main meal seems to be a hunk of browny bread, with tomato pips and juice on the top.
I hope you are well.
I love you.
Chris
Geology For Everyman – the late Sir A. Seward (Cambridge, 10/6)
Teach Yourself Geology – A. Raistrick (English Universities Press, 3s.)
Geology in the Service of Man (W.G. Fearnsides and O.M.B. Bulman) Pelican 9d.
26 September 1944
My Dearest, Dearest One,
I am pleased that Bartlett’s Quotations arrived. Was it badly knocked about? You do not seem to be as delighted with it as I imagined. Have you seen the Index at the back, you can put your finger on anything with its aid. It had a lot of Shaw, so you should be able to remind yourself of much. Have you looked up Kipling? Read A.P. Herbert ‘When love is dead’. There is hours of sampling to be done, if you will. I don’t expect to use quotations with you in those far-off happy days when we shall be TOGETHER. I shall be original if at all possible.
I have just bought one of the long handled straw brooms to use in these parts (60 lire). Had to get a receipt and took the Interpreter along. The lady who sold the broom could not write, but her 13 year old daughter could, and signed her name: Maschia Maria Bruno. Excuse my occasional failure to start the letter off properly. Oh for a place where I can write you fully and privately.
You ask me about the chaps who have been abroad, whether they are depressed as much as a newspaper article says. My comments on this if in full would require to be censored. I have no desire to talk of ‘blooming old newspapers’ as though they were benevolent Uncles. Apart from Reynolds and a rare exception elsewhere, they are owned by people who would chain my body and cloud my mind for ever. The regulations do not permit denunciations, so how can I say much? ‘I want to go home’ is everyone’s chorus out here, although the reasons are not always the same. YOU are my main one.
I love you.
Chris
* The ‘letter cards’ were folded in a particular way so as to contain both a public area visible to all and a private internal space. Chris and Bessie’s intimate exchanges were necessarily contained within the latter.
* A khamsin is a hot, dry, sandy wind.
4
Nuts
28 September 1944
Dearest,
In the last six months (and it is not much more than that since we turned to each other in gladness and relief, for comfort and security), we have seen much of what is in the other’s mind. I see you more clearly. I love you more dearly. From having a hazy idea, I have a clearer outline. I have learnt to respect you, I think a little more, because, although there are things to be straightened, there is so much evidence of our mental suitability, and that, whether it is my mind or not that is the clearer, we are nearer each other than we thought. I do not want to think of you as a fool, and I have had no reason to do so during this period. My every glance at your letters tells me of your intelligence. I want you to believe that. I want you to know that I think it. I want to tell you that I am proud of you.
You know that, before I left the desert, I had to destroy most of your letters. I kept a very few, I felt that I must because you had said so much to me in them. I kept your surface mail of the 1st January – ‘I plonked up the blackout, slightly lopsidedly and with hat over one ear’ – ‘I am wallowing … in the past, and having a wonderful time’. You asked me what I had that ‘other blokes hadn’t got’. I knew I had nothing, but I knew that you had always thought I had. I can’t understand why my reply took 12 days to write, but it did. Yet I really think that 7th February, the day I got your letter, was the day I started wanting you, since when I have grown to want you much more. Remember a letter where you said you were alive between the legs, that you were damp, that I had made you so? I kept that. Because I glory in your dampness, because you make me damp. Because I am interested in your body and between your legs. Remember writing of ‘all guards down’, of being attuned to me, of sharing my upsets, of your lower regions aching with desire for me? I kept that.
I stare at your photographs: I don’t know how I got on without them. But the day will come, the years will go by, and I shall be at your side, to do your will.
I love you.
Chris.
1 October 1944
My Dearest Elizabeth,
It has been raining hard for nearly twenty-four hours, and things are pretty damp around here. This does not affect me very much at present (my main concern is the dampness of the latrine seat!) as we are in a big house and the rain does not get in, but of course most of us react to weather very quickly, and it is miserable to have leaden skies where once was blue, and to see everyone wet and miserable and bedraggled. I didn’t have any mail yesterday from you (though three from home with the good old newsy items about my brother’s romance, the wireless breaking down, and so on) and none came for anyone today, so my one hope of cheering up through the general depression has gone. I am having a very easy time just lately and doing some tidying-up and writing around. This afternoon – goodness me Sunday afternoon, but it is no different from others – I have been reading extracts from Dickens in a book The Younger Characters of Dickens and it is good to be reminded of Oliver Twist, Squeers and Mrs Squeers, Old Fagin and the rest. The chap who remains in the office with me asked what I was reading. I told him, and he said ‘Piffle – I like a good cowboy yarn.’ I need hardly say that his views on other subjects are those of an obedient stooge of the kind produced by reading the Mail and the Sketch, and that unwittingly he does just what they want him to do. His history is bad, his geography is worse.
I hope you are liking better Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, for, honestly, I think it is a magnificent collection. My own little book in which I enter noteworthy things, I have called ‘Barker’s Unfamiliar Quotations’. I have entered the one of Goethe’s (how do you pronounce his name?), ‘All your ideals –’ which you sent me.
We shall not have an easy time immediately I return, because restraint will be necessary. I am hoping you will be able to do something in the way of house-finding before I return, but I know it is difficult. I also hope that when the flying bombs are finally settled you will feel like looking for little things of use in the home. You’ll need potato peelers, egg whisks, all sorts of things which if you can get beforehand will save us a lot of trouble and delay. When we first meet perhaps I shall be a little rough, but with your help I cannot fail to improve. I will b
e what you want me to be. I want your beauty for myself – I want you, I want you, I want you.
I love you.
Chris
2 October 1944
My dear Bessie,
We have so much in common, so much need of each other, so much to say, so much to do, yet all these things are nothing to anyone but us, and we must wait our turn in the long queue of human beings waiting their chance of happiness. There has been a recent order showing that the War Office is not unappreciative of an angle on the subject. Men who have been separated from their wives for three years may apply for compassionate leave if their wives are over 35 and, being childless, are desirous of having a child. This would suit us fine. The only barriers are (1) we are not married, (2) we have not been separated three years, (3) you are not over 35.
I have been hearing more of the customs of these folk in this village, and it is probably the same all over this part. There is no ‘courting’ before marriage. The young man writes his prospective wife’s parents. They consent to him coming to tea. They are never left alone, and the first time he holds her hand is when they are man and wife. Some marriages may be arranged in Heaven, but none are around these parts! None of the girls dare be seen talking to men (let alone soldiers), lest they be the subject of gossip. Our chaps are not very happy about feminine availability, although some have had happy moments, though a little expensive.
I met a chap here, eighteen months younger than me, who went to the same school. We had a good talk about teachers and remembered pupils. I have also had a talk with a chap who lives in Leeds. Married a couple of years before the war, one child, been away from England two years. His wife gave birth to a child (by a married man with two children) in June. She asked for his forgiveness, but not unexpectedly, it has not been forthcoming. I have heard many similar cases, or variations on the same theme. It is nice to think we live in a world of constancy and adherence to vows, but we certainly don’t. I rather except from this the quarrels of engaged people, and so on, because they have not achieved moral and legal responsibilities to the extent of the married. Some of our chaps moan about the Yanks at home, but there is plenty of evidence that many Englishmen do not act honourably.