Love in the Blitz

by Eileen Alexander

  Darling, I was thinking the other day, in connection with the loss of idealism which arises out of wantonness without love, of Mr Crotch. I remembered his having said to me one day: ‘My wife had so little interest in physical love, so little emotion about it that although she’s incredibly prim & conventional she allowed herself to be seduced by me before we were married – she looked upon the whole business as totally insignificant. The girl I lived with before I met my wife was a naturally wanton little animal & the contrast was a great shock to me – but, of course, all women are either wholly animal or totally insensitive, like my wife.’ I suggested that I wasn’t, darling, & he said: ‘Oh, well, after you’re married, Gershon will find out that you’re either one or the other – I wish him joy of it.’

  Sunday 20 December Oh! darling, as I was listening to the broadcast report of German brutality to the Jews in occupied Europe, I remembered that forgotten man who shot himself in the League of Nations to call the attention of the world to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. No one heard the shot then, darling. It was only when the rest of Europe had a taste of the Nazi whip that Europe began to think – long after the harm was done. I hope you & I will be able to play a part in the building up of a better world.

  Darling, Pan has just come in and he Wants to Talk. I’m terribly tired. I must Shuffle him off Tactfully. He’s getting too old for me to say: ‘Bed – Pan’ or preferably: ‘Pan – Bed.’

  Tuesday 22 December Darling, Dicky has been behaving with quite abominable selfishness all evening over his gramophone. Pan chose Handel’s Water Music as a Christmas present from Mum & he was dying to play it but Dicky said: ‘I don’t want his bloody music.’ He won’t let Pan touch the gramophone, darling. Oh! darling, it’s so grossly unfair. Do I sound childish, my dear love? Oh! come home soon, my very dear love, and take me away from it.

  God, darling, there’s Dicky coming up the stairs with Pa as matey as you please & saying: ‘You know Daddy, it’s Eileen you should speak to. She is always making the most monstrous accusations about me. She has a Nerve you know. I really think you should speak to her …’ You can hear his hardness in his bright, metallic voice & see it in his hard black eyes.

  I’m crying, darling, because it’s so hard to wait & wait & wait until your nerves are as taut as violin strings – and what you’re waiting for is still as far away as ever. I feel terribly tired & old & restless.

  Sunday 27 December When I spoke to Mrs Eban on the phone, my love, she said, in rather a luke-warm kind of voice, that Joyce was rather pretty wasn’t she? I said that I thought she was very good-looking & distinguished – pretty was hardly the word – slight pause, then Mrs Eban said: ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, my dear, I think you’re much more intelligent than she is …’ I said I didn’t mind at all, darling, but it never fails to surprise me that people who know us both superficially & have only her poise & charm & assurance and my nervous chatter to go on should think that. Basil surprised me too once, darling, by saying that after our evening walk to Granchester, when you raised all those Blisters on my feet, you told him that I had far greater depth of character & intellect than Joyce. You see, my darling, I shouldn’t have said that I was more intelligent than Joyce – just intelligent in a different kind of way. She’s more intelligent socially & in her work as a Civil Servant (She’s making a great success of it, my love, & I am not) I am more intelligent academically and about people (I think Joyce’s judgement of people is superficial & obtuse, darling.) but the fact remains, my dear love, that I never got to know you and Aubrey really well until I met you with Joyce, I would have been too frightened alone, too certain that neither of you could possibly want to be with me – but with Joyce I was a convenient fourth. I’ve never wholly recovered from my astonishment, my darling, in discovering that I could be interesting to both of you in my own right – but – shall I tell you a secret, my darling? Joyce’s obvious amazement, though I could so well see what she meant, cut me to the quick! Are women really as queer as you’re thinking they are at the moment, my dear love?

  Thank God for your letter, my darling. If I hadn’t had it, I’d have gone to work tomorrow half crazy with sorrow. I’m going to listen to the School for Scandal on the wireless tonight, my love. Vivien Leigh is in it and Robert Walker’s ex-wife whose stage name is Jenny Laird. Have you ever heard of her, darling? No, neither have I. More tomorrow, my dear love.

  Monday 28 December Darling, listen to this for a bit of Higher Truth! My parents asked me yesterday evening what you’d said in your letter & I was Surprised but Interested to hear myself telling them that you’d been to a birthday party given by my step-cousin Rosette & had remarked that her dress was cut so low that you felt irresistibly impelled to offer her a safety pin.

  Darling, I was amused at your remarking that you were rather disgusted to see Jews wrapping themselves round large quantities of Ham but could apparently take them behaving like the creatures of the Demi-Monde to which they belong with such sang-froid. I could forgive them the Ham, darling, if their emotional standards were a little higher.

  The School for Scandal was enchanting, my love. Vivien Leigh as Lady Teazle was exactly like a Dresden figure of an Arcadian lady. Robert Walker’s ex-wife was alright but she was the milk-and-water Maria who is anyway Neither Here Nor There. Joan, for some obscure reason known only to herself, is terribly anxious that Robert’s ex-wife should make a Good Impression on me – perhaps to establish the fact that Robert has good taste – though I should have thought the material point would have been to establish his wife’s good taste in having married him. As for that, darling, if she thought she had good taste when she married him, she obviously thought better of it when she ran away from him, but I’m not going to let it worry me, darling. Joan’s Life is Her Own from now on – and although, every time I see her, she tries to provoke me into some sort of comment on the situation, I am callously refusing to get involved again. I just can’t bear any more of it, my dear love.

  Tuesday 29 December I spent most of yesterday trying to comfort Miss Anderton whose mother (a crazy old woman, darling, with a mouth as pinched as a paper clip) had written and accused her of stealing a twopenny crochet hook. A horrible, insane letter, darling & the poor soul cried most dreadfully. Oh! darling, when I see through a crack into other people’s lives, I feel ashamed of my plaintiveness – because, after all, I have what I want more than anything else in the world – and that is your love.

  Thursday 31 December I met Phyllis Mason outside the National Gallery, darling, & she asked me if I was still a Civil Servant. I said regretfully that I was whereat she Fixed Me With her Glittering Eye and said: ‘I hope you are Active on the National Whitley Council – Remember – Union is Strength.’ (The National Whitley Council, darling, is the Civil Service Trade Union.) I said Hastily, ‘Quite so,’ or words to that non-committal effect & was just on the point of Fleeing when she said: ‘But at least you belonged to CUSC which I never did.’ I explained, darling that my participation in the activities of the CUSC were confined to the handing over of a terminal subscription & that Cambridge Communists weren’t really my idiom because they were Too Intense & because their chief contribution to the Cause was to Refrain from Washing or Shaving or Wearing Socks – on the theory, I suppose, that that was how the Other Half Lived – which I always thought was rather an insult to the Other Half, darling. However … She cited Eric Hobsbawm as a Pearl among Cambridge Communists, darling. I had to admit that I could hardly judge of him as I’d never seen him except on the other side of a Mouth-Organ but that, even with that dreary instrument between us, he had always Radiated such Intense Loathing of me that I could hardly be expected to Burst into Flower at the sound of his name.

  On the bus coming home, darling, there was an old man who had Celebrated the New Year Not Wisely But Too Well – & he was saying to the bus conductor: ‘Meddles? Meddels from the larsch war? A Mockery – that’s what Meddles are – A mockery. Democracy? A
Mockery. Give a shigarette t’the driver lad – He’sh an Englishman – Not many Englishmen about this New Yearsh Eve – all Furriners & Jews – Wars & Jews & Furriners – Thash Life. Democracy? Mockery – Thash wattitis Mate – a Mockery!’ I couldn’t help laughing, darling, though I couldn’t quite see where the foreigners & Jews came in, poor souls – except that the bus was full of them.

  1 The Order of St Michael and St George.

  2 Redcliffe Nathan Salaman (1874–1955) was a British botanist.

  3 Vic Oliver, Austrian-born British actor and comedian (1898–1964), was married to Sarah Churchill; they divorced in 1945.

  4 Ram Nahum, a Jewish communist and brilliant young physicist, was killed in Cambridge by a stray bomb in July 1942.

  5 A novel by Russian author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81).

  6 A Cairo-born Ottoman diplomat, the prince was involved after the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire in Middle Eastern Arab politics.

  7 Schnorrer is a Yiddish word meaning beggar or sponger.

  8 The actress Jenny Laird, real name Phyllis Edith Mary Blythe (1912–2001).

  9 Carmen Miranda (1909–55) was a Portuguese-born Brazilian singer, dancer and actress.

  10 Dorothy Lamour (1919–96) was an American actress and singer.

  11 King’s Regulations.

  January 1943–March 1944

  One of the less predictable consequences of the terror of the Blitz was that the sharp divide between the civilian population and the fighting man that had bedevilled the First World War was no longer there. It would be deep into the war before service casualties exceeded civilian, and if there was nothing particularly heroic about Eileen’s war – nor Gershon’s for that matter – few wartime letters so brilliantly capture the huge attritional strain – the social dislocation and corrosive loneliness, the nervous breakdowns and failed relationships – which was the reality of life in many areas of wartime Britain.

  This is especially true of the letters of 1943, when the wearing effects of thirty-nine months of war are there in every line Eileen writes. By the end of the summer the Axis armies would be driven out of Africa and Italy out of the war, but with D-Day and a Second Front still eighteen months away and no sign of Gershon’s return, the vast majority of letters from this period are those of a desperately unhappy woman at the end of her tether in a world of disintegrating emotional and ethical values.

  The quality of Eileen’s misery is so intensely personal that it is easy to forget that the malaise that infects these later letters mirrors the country’s mood during these middle years of the war. There were certainly victories – Stalingrad, North Africa, Sicily, the U-boat war – to lighten national spirits, but as the Allied leadership passed from a weary Britain to the USA and the Soviet Union and minds turned towards the reconstruction of the post-war world, the brief but genuine sense of national purpose and political unity that had marked the early years of the war began to fray.

  Not even the military successes could be unequivocally enjoyed. Victory in North Africa and the fall of Mussolini had been countered by the Nazi advance into unoccupied France and Italy, while the slow progress of the Allied advance up the boot of Italy only added to the growing frustration that the real fighting was being done by Russia. In the Far East, too, where India was in turmoil and only the Chindits, led by Eileen’s controversial friend Orde Wingate, offered some solitary propaganda comfort, there was still less to celebrate and it was little better on the home front. A growing number of illegal strikes (all strikes during the war were illegal) was just one symptom of this, and the government’s decision at the beginning of 1943 to postpone the implementation of the Beveridge Report – that symbolic document in the evolution of the welfare state – raised the spectre that all the hopes for a different and better post-war world, all the determination that the sacrifices of the people would be rewarded in a more just and equitable state, that the shameful class inequalities revealed by the evacuation of the cities were a thing of the past, would go the way of the promises made during the First World War. For the country, as for Eileen, it would be a long year.

  10

  The Long Wait

  Friday 1 January 1943 Darling, your letter 58 was waiting for me when I got home this evening. Oh! what a Solace, my love, to start the New Year with a letter.

  Darling, apropos of French Knickers & Respectability, you’ve no idea what a lot of difference a bit of elastic can make. When Jean came to stay with us in Cairo, my love, she met a Man on the Boat & he Arranged to Seduce Her (with her full Knowledge & Approval) in the Eastern Exchange in Port Said. However, when the Hour Came she couldn’t pull her dress off because she had very tight sleeves and one of them got caught on her elbow – and this gave her time to Think Better of it and so she decided not to be seduced after all (Not on that occasion anyway). The end of the story, my love (in case you’re interested) is that she pulled on her dress again and walked out of the Hotel with Dignity.

  Saturday 2 January Darling, your letter 59 arrived before I left the house this morning. Darling, your saying: ‘I can’t offer you any prospect of my moving from here I’m afraid,’ made me feel as though I’d been shot. I am lapt in Darkness Visible.1 My staying power is being gradually stripped away & each fresh piece of evidence of the impasse that we have reached over this bloody & apparently interminable separation is more appalling & more terrifying.

  I’m having lunch with Miss Malyon because I hadn’t the courage to say no – but she’s the sort of girl who believe that to have Europe over-run by the Reds (sic) would be just as bad as to have it under the Nazi yoke – so I don’t expect very much comfort from her, my dear love. Oh God! How I hate everyone & everything, my darling, except you, whom I love with dangerous fanaticism.

  Sunday 3 January Darling, when I first loved you I thought I could not have loved you if you had been the kind of man who had believed that Woman’s Place Was in the Home & that Intellect was out of place in the Female of the Species – but I was wrong – I could love you if you shut me up in a dark room & never let me see a book or a picture or another living soul – because in you there is enough to fill my mind & my spirit for ever and ever and ever, my dear love.

  Monday 4 January Darling, Mr Murray has just been in to ask me to have lunch with him & his wife.

  Darling, Mrs Murray is rather like the mother deer in Bambi. She has the same kind of large, gentle brown eyes & velvety muzzle. She’s extremely charming & carries herself beautifully. I enjoyed my lunch. We talked of Mr Murray’s cousin, The Tutor of Girton & they seemed much amused, my love, when I said that the trouble with her was that she was born with a hockey stick in her mouth. I am always a little taken aback, darling, when people seem really delighted with something I say off-hand.

  Oh! darling, I’ve got a Confession too – only it’s one that I’m afraid is going to make you really angry. I’m smoking like a chimney – I daren’t tell you how many a day – but I can’t help it, my darling, if I didn’t drug myself with cigarettes I couldn’t get through the days at all. I promise you most solemnly, my dear love, that the moment I hear you’re on your way home, I shall give it up altogether.

  Miss Anderton, poor soul, is crippled with rheumatism, darling. Her fingers look like ping-pong balls but she can’t take any sick leave because she just can’t afford to live on her salary without overtime. Isn’t it monstrous, darling? It makes me Fume & Fret but my Fuming & Fretting is hopelessly ineffectual because I can’t do anything. And to add to the general fracas she’s just lost a stone out of her engagement ring & when she goes to get it replaced they’ll tell her that the stones aren’t diamonds, which in itself doesn’t matter, of course, but I know it will disturb her because she thinks they are.

  Friday 8 January Darling, Joyce is going down to Honeymede for the weekend on the Back of Bernard’s Bicycle. Whether this means that Gordon is on the Decline and Bernard on the Upward Path or whether it’s just that no fo
rm of Transport is to be sneezed at in these Bunion-producing times, I’m not quite sure – but it is an interesting fact, my love, that the Elders of the House of Nathan, Pillars of the Convenables as they are in all matters relating to Gordon Mosley, can Swallow this Adventure with perfect equanimity. Parents are unaccountable creatures, my darling. Oh! my dear love, I wish my parents would do something unaccountable like suddenly Packing Me Off to Cairo for a change of air.

  Saturday 9 January Darling, quite unexpectedly I enjoyed yesterday evening. I find Square an entertaining Period Piece – The Bon Viveur of the 18th century par excellence. Quite unreal, full of fantastic affectations – he would not have been out of place, darling, between the pages of The Rape of the Lock. He is, if anything, even more Restoration than 18th Century, so I knew him at once. He’s a Excellent Creature in expensive & synthetic surroundings, my dear love, but I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly think of marrying him. I’d as soon marry a Sèvres dinner-service! However, each to his own, I suppose – but Jean is in for a Tough Time.