Darling, I entirely agree with Mr Walters’s assertion that I am not artistically creative but appreciative. I’m sure that my metier is interpretation and not creation.
I do lack scope for self-expression. I think that explains, not my love, of course, because you are the explanation of that, but that complete dependence on you which you find so worrying. You see, my darling, you give me the two things I need more than anything else in the world – emotional security and complete self-expression on all levels – and you give me a third thing too which is the most important of all – the peace & rest which passeth understanding. Oh! darling, I think you can call my lack of emotional balance self-pity without too great injustice. I do from time to time indulge in self-pity and afterwards there’s a violent reaction of disgust & humiliation at my own lack of control but on the other hand, my darling, I can see that all this is going to leave no permanent mark because even the very uncertain prospect of your return in March makes all my pain seem unreal & unrealizable.
Ismay sent me another photograph of my Pudding Faced Godchild this morning, darling & wants to know whether Isobel is to be taught to call me ‘Godmother’ or ‘Aunt Eileen’!! I am going to insist on being called ‘Eileen’.
All my love for ever & ever, my darling – and I am smiling.
***
Saturday 1 January 1944 My wedding ring came by the evening post, my darling. It’s beautifully solid & heavy. I’ve hidden it away, my dear love, in the drawer where I keep your letters and I shan’t take it out again until I hand it over into your safe custody.
Wednesday 5 January My darling, I had a lovely lunch hour. Pamela came with me to supervise the fitting of my suit. On the way, darling, I glanced idly into the windows of a Woman’s underwear shop and saw, to my horror, the most obscene sight I ever clapped eyes on – brassieres with the middles cut out so that they make a supporting ring round your bosom leaving most of it naked. Yes, my love, they do look rather like an outsize pair of spectacles. Don’t Order me to buy a dozen at once, darling, I couldn’t. You do see what I mean, don’t you, my love? And in Grosvenor Street too with the place just seething with the rude & licentious American Soldiery. Maybe the idea is to save material, my darling, but it’s pretty Horrifying all the same.
Friday 7 January Darling, I’m going to University College Hospital on the 19th and Mr Mollinson will operate on my nose on the 20th. He says, darling, that I’ll be able to breathe perfectly after the operation so you will after all be able to preserve the illusion that Women don’t Snore!
Sunday 9 January I had a long letter from Mr Murray telling me that the violets and primroses are coming up in his garden & that they make him feel the Urge to become Permanent Under-Secretary of State to a Ministry of Inspiration with a staff of competent writers. There’s no doubt, my dear love, that that and that only would be Mr Murray’s Niche. He’s running a Counter-Offensive against anti-semitism with his Local MP, my love; I gather that progress on those lines is slow, but not static. Oh! Darling, when I get letters from Mr Murray I realize how much I miss his humane wisdom, his idealism & superb honesty. This mountebank who has taken his place sets me prickling with indignation at every pore – and he dares to imply that Mr Murray was not a Good Civil Servant – perhaps he isn’t, my love (though I believe he is) but he’s a good man & that is something which High Handed Melville is not.
I had a letter from Basil, darling, Rather an Entertaining letter, my love. He seems in excellent Spirits & as far as I can gather it’s due mainly to a brief sojourn in a mental hospital! he seems to thrive on Insanity, darling. I haven’t heard him so gay for years.
Friday 14 January My darling, I enjoyed my lunch with Joan Fisher today. I was telling her about my wedding veil and she said: ‘Yes, it would be worth being married in full regalia with a man as handsome as Gershon to set it off.’ I was speechless with pleasure, my dear love, & I said: ‘Oh! Do you think Gershon is handsome?’ ‘Oh! yes, I do,’ she said. ‘I always thought that he was one of the best-looking and most distinguished men in the Union – a man with whom one would be proud to be seen about.’ I would have been glad to have had anyone say that of you, my darling, but Joan most of all because she is intensely conscious of masculine good looks – a veritable connoisseur. I can’t help being delighted with the opinion of an expert.
Darling, I’m to have my operation next Friday.
Saturday 22 January My darling, I feel scarcely any discomfort today than I should if I had a very bad cold. I slept beautifully last night & my morale couldn’t be better.
Dr Minton says I’m to have at least 10 days’ holiday, my love, and then I’m to have a day or two at home before I go back to work.
Monday 31 January My darling, I had an exhausting journey. I travelled First Class so as to have a little more comfort & elbow room but in fact the Third Class could hardly have been more crowded. There was one Awful Woman in the Carriage, darling, who had spent the weekend in London flat-hunting – apparently one of a long succession of flat hunts, my love. She had a Crony with her, darling, & she was telling her at the top of her not inconsiderable voice the entire history of all her earlier searches and the result of the last one. ‘I found a flat in the City, my dear,’ she said, ‘In the heart of the Fur District. Everyone says I shall be murdered in my bed if I’m not eaten up by – by creatures out of the Furs first. I had my eye on a much nicer flat where a woman was murdered last month. I thought it might stay empty because of the Mishap – but no, my dear, it was snapped up, so I shall have to make do with the Fur District and the little Animals. So unfortunate but one has to take what one can get these days.’
When I got here, my darling, I was almost crushed by the small forces of arms. I’ve never had such a lovely welcome in all my life. I glowed, my love, and in spite of the fact that I was feeling desperately tired & had a pain in my nose from the wind I let Lindy & Margaret & David hang about my neck all the way up the path & into the house because I was so glad to see them.
Thursday 4 February My darling, I’m not just stammering – I’m gibberring. The whole morning I heard myself chattering in a high-pitched & yet blurred voice to Mrs Turner. The shops spun round me. The spires of King’s Chapel against a suddenly blue sky swayed drunkenly. Darling, I think today brought a moment of the purest happiness I’ve ever known. I was sitting in the nursery waiting to go out, my very dear love, and hemming a handkerchief when the telephone rang. I didn’t pay much attention & even when Mrs Turner called out ‘Eileen – it’s your mother’ I brushed aside my instinctive reflex of ‘Special news from Gershon’ because that’s what I always think & walked unhurriedly across the hall. Mum started, my darling, by apologizing for having done something she didn’t orter – something she’d never done before, but she said she’d been impelled to do it by a Queer Feeling & that now she couldn’t help being glad. What she’d done, my darling, was to read the back of one of your letters, which had made it clear that you were already almost on the first stage of your journey home. Oh! darling, darling, I was nearly sick with joy. I want all the world to be gloriously intoxicated with joy today, darling. Give me happy faces. I’ll have no sorrow about me now. No, never, never, never, never, never.
Sunday 6 February Darling, did you know that Mr Turner got the Military Cross in the last war for going back to his deserted dugout under heavy fire to fetch a wounded soldier & carry him to safety? I didn’t until Mrs Loewe told me yesterday & today I asked Mrs Turner & she confirmed it – but urged me On Pain of Death never to mention it to Mr Turner. Of course, I wouldn’t, my dear love, because I know him well enough to realize that if I did he’d Come Over in a Wave of Embarrassed Gruffness, bless his Inhibited Heart.
Thursday 10 February Oh! darling, these last four years have been years of chaos & uncertainty for everyone & not less for me than for other people. Now that there is rest & joy ahead I can feel tremendous reserves of energy & vitality in me. I know you will bring me to life, my dar
ling. I shall skip along by your side in the street and look up at you & ask you what you’re laughing at & perhaps it will just be pleasure at being with me again. Do you think it might be that, my very dear love?
Sunday 13 February I coughed dreadfully all night, my dear love, & when I told Mum & Pa I hadn’t slept Mum said, ‘Why?’ so crossly and aggressively, my darling, that it led to a full-dress scene. I’m so sick of the clichés ‘nerves’ and ‘smoking’ whenever I don’t feel well. Pa said he’d known hundreds of engaged girls but none who had behaved as I have while you’ve been away, and, if you please, he cited Joan after Ian went away as an example! Joan whose love did not survive the strain of the separation from Ian. Yesterday she told me that she hasn’t told Ian she’s married!
Saturday 19 February My darling, my feelings towards the raid last night were very mixed – fear at the horrific noise of the guns and the whistles of rocket shells & bombs – cynical amusement at the thought that we, bungling amateurs as we are, might at any moment be called out to cope with the fires which were so close that we could see the flames – sheer amoral delight at the beauty of the scarlet parachute flares and golden rain from the guns.
Wednesday 23 February My darling, Pan’s school room suffered damage from fire-fighting hoses last night. He says everything he possesses is sodden. It was a beastly night & this morning, my darling, there is a story that I’m going to be transferred away from S9. I have to go & talk to Mr Melville. I feel sick with apprehension. I think he’s going to be rather nasty to me. Oh! God. He doesn’t like me, my dear love, and that’s why I’m being transferred. Of course, it may work out for the best, my darling, because it may give me the opening I want from getting away from the AM.
My darling, my interview with Mr Melville wasn’t as bad as I expected. The fact that he was Sending Me Away in Disgrace hardly emerged at all, he simply said, with absolute truth, that there was no doubt that I was not fitted for the Civil Service & that he thought he could persuade S1 to get me a job in Adult Education. Oh! darling, I was so delighted at the thought of getting out of the AM that I hardly paid any attention to being in Disgrace.
Bernard told me, darling, of a friend who, though he is neither an atheist nor sufficient of a linguist to be able to read Russian, always gets the Russian equivalent of the ‘Freethinker’ in order, my love, that his extremely Prim landlady may weekly pick up off the doormat a periodical endorsed with Russian Lettering & the translation ‘The Atheist – Published by the Society for the Propagation of Ungodliness’.
Thursday 24 February You know, my darling, living at home is going to be even more trying under Air Raid conditions than it would be normally. I have always been all for staying in bed during raids, my love, but now I’m so desperately anxious to be alive for you when you come home. I’m still not in the least afraid of Death, my darling, but I certainly feel that if He were to turn up now or soon after our marriage I couldn’t regard him as anything more than an unwelcome Interloper – there being a Time & Place for everything.
Saturday 26 February I’m very glad, my dear love, that I went to see Joan Fisher’s mother about Birth control. She’s gentle-voiced, fine-boned Scotswoman & her attitude is sane, kind & healthy. It seems, darling, that tablets alone are practically no protection at all and she says that you must wear a very thin rubber contraceptive called ‘Durex’ which you’ll be able to get from the Marie Stopes Clinic by saying that you’re a patient of Dr Evelyn Fisher. She says, darling, that it’s so thin that it can’t possibly bother you – especially if you damp it first – but the snag is, my dear love, that it can only be used once and that it has to be put on when you’re half excited. That’s a sorrow to me, my darling, but she says it’s the best she can do for us & that if I go back to her after our honeymoon she’ll teach me how to use a rubber semi-permanent attachment. When I have one of those, my darling, you won’t have to bother with a sheath anymore. She told me that the most natural way for us to be wanton would be for me to lie on my back. I didn’t ask her for this information, my darling, but she said that it was something we ought to know because such a lot of nonsense had been written about it.
I had an uneventful lunch with Felicity, my love, the only thing of note was that a Man Assaulted her in Fetter Lane last night & she landed him an Uppercut on the jaw which sent him away bellowing with pain! That’s the stuff, darling!
Sunday 27 February My darling, Nelly Ionides telephoned to ask how we’d been getting on in the raids. ‘Well, as a matter of fact dear,’ said Mum, ‘we had a little trouble the other night – an incendiary in the garden.’ Nellie’s rejoinder to that, my love, was about as pat a rejoinder could be. ‘Did you?’ she murmured & added with elaborate casualness, ‘Well as a matter of fact we had a crashed German bomber in the garden & there isn’t a window or a speck of plaster in its place on the whole estate.’ That makes our poor little fire-bomb look pretty silly, doesn’t it, my darling.
Mr Melville told me yesterday, darling, that S1 were agreed to offer me to London University for Adult Education, so things should begin to move.
Thursday 2 March My darling, I have this morning received Intelligence which indicates almost beyond a peradventure that you are on the last lap, so this is to be my last Air Letter.
Oh! Darling, darling, I love you so terribly that at the thought of seeing you & hearing you & feeling the touch of your mouth against mine and of your hands on my body I feel dizzy & dazzled & bewildered. I’m holding out my arms to you, my darling. Don’t be long – please.
All my love, for ever & ever, my darling,
E.
1 From Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton.
2 The Book of Jonah depicts Nineveh as a wicked city worthy of destruction.
3 ‘Little Gidding’ is the fourth poem of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
4 Ministry of Aircraft Production.
5 P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) was a Russian esotericist.
6 Heartbreak House (1919) is a play by George Bernard Shaw.
7 Brigadier Kisch died on 7 April 1943, after stepping on a landmine in Tunisia.
8 The 1869 novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
9 Sanatogen was a tonic.
10 American wartime propaganda film concerning the German occupation of Norway (1943).
11 The Cross of Lorraine was the symbol of Free France and the Free French forces during the German occupation.
12 The future Labour Party MP and leader; editor of the Evening Standard during the war.
13 The brutal governor of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and commander during Italy’s annexation of Abyssinia. Badoglio became prime minister of Italy on the fall of Mussolini and died untried for his war crimes in 1956.
14 The prominent Labour Party politician, Arthur Greenwood, best remembered perhaps for the inspiring speech he made in the Commons which helped stiffen parliamentary resolve against Hitler in September 1939.
15 Ministry of Information.
16 ‘The Lost Leader’, a poem by Robert Browning (1812–89).
17 Robert David Quixano Henriques (1905–67), Jewish British writer, broadcaster and farmer.
18 Winston Spencer Churchill.
19 King Christian X of Denmark (1870–1947).
20 Om Kalsoum (1904–75) was an internationally renowned Egyptian singer, songwriter and actress.
21 National Fire Service.
22 Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana (née Mitford) were interned after the fall of France and the British Union of Fascists proscribed. After a debate in Parliament the Mosleys were released from Holloway prison in November 1943.
23 Song: ‘My Silks and Fine Array’, by William Blake (1757–1827).
April 1944–March 1946
It was the last letter Eileen would write to Gershon as his fiancée. On 26 March they were married at the St John’s Wood Synagogue, Eileen in her long veil and Gershon looking irredeemably ‘civvy’ in his RAF officer’s uniform. As Britain and her allies prepared
for D-Day, and Gershon returned to his duties, Eileen settled into her new married life, left the Air Ministry, and began a fresh career as an Adult Education lecturer.
The letters from this last year of the war, with Gershon more frequently at home, are inevitably more patchy, but separation, when it happened, was clearly as much a misery as ever. In the wake of the invasion Gershon would again be overseas, and at the end of the European war in May 1945 was with the British Army of the Rhine, and still there at the time of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, which he attended.
Through these months Eileen’s married home remained the Alexanders’ rented house in Harley Road. Although Eileen owned a farm in north Wales – and got a paltry rent from it – and Lionel and Dicky would eventually buy their Drumnadrochit Highland retreat, Alec Alexander’s lifetime ambition was to own his own house in England, and in September 1945, while he was away in Egypt, Vicky and Eileen moved into ‘Baron’s Court’ in Hampstead’s Bishops Avenue – ‘a great, empty, echoing house’, as Eileen described it, that was distinctly more ‘Mosseri’ than ‘Alexander’ in style.
This would remain their home for the early years of their marriage, and it is from there that these last letters were written. Ahead of them, and all their friends – Joan, Joyce, Aubrey, Sheila, Hamish, Ian Nance – lay the post-war world: and with them all the memories, hopes, sorrows, mistakes, losses and wartime dreams so unforgettably caught in her letters.
Love in the Blitz Page 52