How dare you resent anything to do with the rustics of Herefordshire? Little do you realise that my grandfather, the bishop, was curate of Kington in Herefordshire and I have spent my holidays there ever since I can remember, and it is in fact the only part of the country I can bear and the only part that makes me placid, with fat horses, fat haystacks, fat rustics and a happy lack of anything famous or distinguished. It is odd that you say that there are some trees that you take to be limes, there are some just outside our cottage, a kind of avenue, green as you say and charming, and one of our few discussions there – there aren’t many subjects of conversation, you see is the great question of whether they are limes or not. Somebody always suggests hornbeams towards the end of supper. Well, everyone here says
1. That Liverpool docks have been reduced to ashes.
2. That Chamberlain, Col. Lindbergh and Laval have got together and are arranging peace terms.
3. That the Germans are arriving in motor launches and amphibious tanks on July 2nd.
4. That Halifax is to be dismissed and replaced by Lord Strabolgin. I want a dog more and more. I suppose the price of Pomeranians has gone up as all the dogs have been shot in Germany, but after the war I shall save up and buy one nevertheless. I have got into the frame of mind, you see – I don’t know why – when I think the war will possibly come to an end one day.
I hope you come to London soon, through the agency of Cyril Falls or any other way,
love,
Mops.
Ministry of Food
Great Westminster House
Horseferry Road
London, sw1
8 July [1940]
My dear Ham,
Thankyou very much for your letter, and I would have answered your first one before if I hadn’t thought you wanted me not to – and I am very nervous of saying anything where people’s feelings and sensibilities are concerned, which often makes me appear even stupider than I am.
I don’t know exactly what you feel about me. I have always been very fond of you and very proud on the occasions when you broke your three silences and spoke to me, and I have always looked forward to seeing you when you come up to London. I hope I shall again. I don’t know whether Oliver ever told you that ever since I broke my engagement* I have been mixed up in a rather stupid and unsatisfactory way, I suppose, but it is the only thing I can do, it goes on and on and it makes me appreciate my friends all the more.
Oliver has left the flat to go and stay with Kate, and in the meantime Mrs B. gave an amazing party at which your sister was a tower of strength with the coffee, wine and cutlets and there was a strange babel of languages – Mrs B. pre-eminent in a torrent of mixed French and English, easily drowning the harassed player at the piano. Jouky was present, but did not sing.
I had a dreadful time at Guildford on Sunday with the L.D.V’s.* The colonel lent me his very large horse to ‘see the fun’ – i.e. 50 men crawling about on a parachute scheme in the height of misunderstanding and confusion – but it bolted and scattered the people disguised as Germans – the colonel however referred to me afterwards as ‘the little secret weapon’ at tea-time.
I have never been to Somerset. What is it like?
love,
Mops.
16 Avenue Close,
Avenue Road, NW8
20 July [1940]
My dear Ham,
Thankyou very much for your letter. It is difficult to follow you in your rapid course through Devon and Somerset but I hope that wherever you have pitched your tent now you are comfortable and at ease. I am sitting in the Breakwells’ flat and Mamma is lying back on the sofa which is draped with an Indian carpet and telling Oliver he is repressed – she has just been appealing to a bus-load of people to throw away Oliver’s stick, to show that she doesn’t believe in the Guards and that French people are understanding and sympathetic.
I have nearly got the sack from my office but I had a last-minute reprieve and I am being protected by the Editorial Officer who is prepared to swear I am indispensable. Meanwhile I am sitting everyday and answering letters to the minister threatening to strangle him if the writers aren’t immediately given more tea.
Raven is in the Field Security now which gives him an excellent excuse for stopping all conversation as subversive (’it’s my job now, you know’) and talking about himself and his latest, and quite dreadful, French girlfriend – supported violently by mamma, of course.
We had our very last champagne party before the invasion the other day – I wish you had been there, as I am all for celebrating, and fiddling while Rome burns,
Hugh and Oliver send their love and Hugh adds that he owes you half a crown,
love,
Mops.
Ministry of Food
Neville House
Page Street
London, sw1
22 August [1940]
My dear Ham,
The lobster salad poisoned me, and there may be a moral in it somewhere. It was extremely nice to see you. You wouldn’t, or at any rate didn’t, tell me anything about what you have been doing, but you looked well and didn’t repeat any stories about sergeants and I consider that these are two excellent signs. I missed however the moment at 5 o’clock on Sunday afternoon when you read through the cinema announcements and condemn them all in round terms. Mrs B.’s French soldiers, I am relieved to say, are expecting to go back to their country next week and then perhaps an autumnal peace will descend on Stamford Court.
I went to a dreadful diplomatic party on Monday night. We had to eat more lobster salad, small biscuits and drink a weak decoction of punch, alleged to be prepared in the Czechoslovakian manner. This was in honour of the Czech minister to Paris and his wife, who had arrived in England and we all had to sit around on gilt chairs and listen to their tale of privations and desperate escapes. This lasted half an hour and was much interrupted by showers of tears from the wife which mingled with the enormous pearls she was wearing and shook the whole sofa till it tottered on its little gilt legs. The conversation was entirely in French and everyone seized the opportunity to make idiomatic exclamations. In the end it turned out that she had had no difficulties at all except losing a fur coat and having only room for nine when she was travelling with an entourage of eleven. But everyone seemed overcome at this disaster and the insult to the diplomatic corps. No-one paid any attention to me except the poodle. Fortunately the household has no bulldog.
I suppose it is quite useless for me to say that I hope you are not in too much danger, as you quite certainly are, and as you said the other night, it’s necessary to talk about serious things, but also quite impossible,
Love,
Mops.
Ministry of Food
Neville House
Page Street
London, sw1
[September 1940]
My dear Ham,
I hope by this time you have heard all about Freddie and that he is safe and well, though his flute is lost, and he is very tired. I saw him in the Café Royal the other night with Kate and he looked the colour of cream cheese but otherwise just the same as usual. I haven’t heard from Oliver about it as he is off down to the country for three weeks, but I am afraid it may have an even worse effect on him than on Freddie, as is often the case with catastrophes.
I wish you didn’t always go to places where danger and boredom are mixed in equal proportions and I have a suspicion, though you don’t say so, that you don’t much care for your companions. It is bad enough being forced into uniform, every war does that, but every war doesn’t drag you to uncongenial watering-places with unsympathetic spirits.
I hope you come to London soon, although it is true that the outer suburbs are falling down like a pack of cards, to the great joy of the town planners who are now revealed in their true colours as ghouls laughing over the wreckage and erecting garden cities with communal health centres, peoples theatres, and spacious boulevards. You may wonder how I know anything about town plan
ning, but it so happens that Mr McAllister, my small short Scotch problem boss, is a mad town-planner, besides having stood for Parliament and appeared as a Tam o’ Shanter in the pictures in the early days of the talkies. If you don’t know what a problem boss is you should look at the Secretary’s page in the Ladies Home Journal which tells you how to deal with them. Mr McAllister is what is known as a caution, it seems that he has been engaged at various times to practically all the short women doctors in Scotland, or all the ones shorter than he is.
I am falling out of favour with Mrs B. who calls me a frivolous little idiot because I had forgotten to post her 25 photographs of the French soldiers and also didn’t appear (mercifully) in a colour film taken of them and her in Hyde Park at a picnic. I am afraid that during the winter hibernation she will come to dislike me intensely but you must support my cause, if you will.
Jean* is up today, but she is just fluttering through London as her parents’ natural distrust of the metropolis has now greatly increased.
I now have to write an article on communal feeding for a paper called ‘Our Empire’. I rang up ‘Our Empire’ a few minutes ago, but, ominously enough, it wasn’t there,
much love,
Mops.
Ministry of Food
24 September [1940]
My dear Ham,
The news about Bill is dreadful, and as I don’t quite know how well you knew him I, as usual, don’t quite know what to say for fear of treading on your feelings, and so I shan’t say anything at all.
I hope at least you are stagnating in Devonshire, that is the quality for which it is famous, and that there are apples, red cows, and the beautiful undulating landscape which I detest, and that your general stupidity, which I don’t believe in, is in harmony with the pervading quiet. All the same it will be nice when you come back, if you do, to the quite alarming noises (alleged to be due to a new anti-aircraft weapon) of the London night.
Mrs Breakwell now hates me so much, and says such curiously far-fetched things, that I don’t think it matters what I do at, or about, 24 Cornwall Gardens – but I forgive her everything, as she has to spend her nights in such appalling conditions.
Dear Ham, I wonder if by now you are imbued with an offensive spirit, or if after all you have decided to fold your hands.
We have had a large oil-canister bomb which came through my bedroom window, so that I have a twisted piece of metal as a souvenir, but I was not there at the time and so although all the windows in the flat collapsed I did not.
I am wretched as I have got a pair of red gloves against the winter, as they say, which make me sneeze continually. It isn’t the colour, because my blue ones make me sneeze, too,
love,
Mops.
There is a photo of me somewhere, I went into the box-room to find it but a large naval gun blew in the window and I retreated in disorder, but I will find it and send it you though it is horrid.
Long Meadow
Longdown
Guildford
6 October [1940]
My dear Ham,
I have not heard any more about Bill, but Oliver and Fred are convinced that he must be a prisoner of war and are doing all they can to find out through the Red Cross and through some mysterious friends of Fred’s in Spain.
Do tell me some more about Devonshire. I like to hear about all the counties and it seems to me that you visit most of them.
Our land-mine has been removed, parachute, tassels, and all, without damaging Avenue Close, but on the other hand a bomb seems to have fallen very near Cornwall Gardens. Mrs B., however, has sunk into her hazy September melancholy and not even the return of Oliver from Chequers seems to arouse her.
We are down in the country getting some fresh air – that means that we all sit indoors, owing to the hurricane outside, and eat too much, and try to prevent the dogs getting on to the sofas or making nests in the Sunday Times. I must soon stagger out, however, and pick some wet Michaelmas daisies.
In ending a letter from the country I notice that people always say ‘I must rush now to catch the post’ – however, I have already missed the post by several hours, so I must just send my love,
Mops.
Ministry of Food
Great Westminster House
Horseferry Road
London, sw1
15 October [1940]
My dear Ham,
Thankyou very much for writing and for saying you aren’t going to West Africa, an idea which alarmed me considerably, though if you had really made up your mind to it I would have pretended to like it.
Similarly, Oliver seems so delighted about going to Egypt that it doesn’t seem worth while saying how unhappy I am about it and Mrs Breakwell, poor Mrs B., keeps pointing at soldiers of all ranks in the streets and saying why can’t he go. I secretly feel the same, but what’s the use, because Oliver is pleased as punch, literally like punch, he is effervescent.
I have had my brother on a week’s leave. He slept in the passage, and the Danish cook evidently regarded him as a soldier billeted on us and ran the carpet-sweeper over him remorselessly.
We have had two more bombs on the block, one of them on the show flat, which now has a sign Luxurious Flats To Let swinging over a crater. I think my brother was really glad to get back to the peaceful battery in Scotland. I do love having him on leave but a week is no good at all, a brother should be there all the time like the church and the post-office.
If you get leave do ring up and tell me how to pronounce Melhuish for I have never known,
love,
Mops.
Ministry of Food
Great Westminster House
Horseferry Road
London, sw1
28 October [1940]
My dear Ham,
It is one of my minor ambitions to write as good letters as you do, but short of that I must just say how very glad I was to see you when you were on leave, and I may add that Oliver seemed as gay as a lark when I went to visit him on Sunday at the Duke of York’s barracks, where he was sitting among the ruins drinking a large cup of horrid sweetened tea. Mrs FitzG also came and delighted the sergeant with her furs, pearls and smart black hat.
I do not believe Oliver is going to Egypt for a month or so at least anyway and I hope this means the end of one cause of misunderstanding. The person most to be pitied is Mrs B.
I haven’t got another job yet so I am still at the ministry under the shadow of dismissal. Now that I am going however the rest of the staff are rather kinder to me as they have a comfortable feeling of superiority. Perhaps I shall even get a leaving present from them. A cake-stand or the works of John Masefield. How I hate the poem about the tall ship and the star to steer her by! I believe that you oughtn’t to dissipate your hate in all directions but ought to save it for the Germans, but I can’t help it.
I wish you didn’t always have such horrid billets. I can’t read whether it is a ‘hutted’ or a ‘dratted’ camp. Both, I am afraid. You must start calling it the ‘War House’, by the way,
much love,
Mops.
Ministry of Food
Great Westminster House
Horseferry Road
London, sw1
13 November [1940]
My dear Ham,
I have just discovered that I don’t know how to write out B.N.C.* in full, but hope this will get to you, or at least lodge in the Sheldonian and be found there, or perhaps be handed away next door with the leaflets after the university sermon. You are lucky really to be in Oxford, and although when I left I swore never to be sentimental about it I always am, in fact I feel my soul becomes a positive watermeadow, but if you say you get nothing to eat these memories may not be part of your troubles.
I have just had letters from both Jean and Janet, independently pointing out how nice you have been to them, at some length.
I do not remember a saddler called Forty anywhere near George Street. Perhaps you had your historic 4-in-hand fi
tted out there.
I looked very closely at the pages of ‘Picture Post’ last week to try and find you in one of the backgrounds of the photographs of Pat Kirkwood visiting Oxford. I didn’t see you. I hoped you might be leaning over a bridge observing one of your 3 silences, or disappearing in a cloud of dust, or rather water, on your motor-bicycle.
I have heard nothing from Mrs B., and I am afraid the incident of the tinned lobster, with her usual autumn melancholy and Oliver’s departure to Egypt, has made a breach between us.
My brother suddenly appeared yesterday in the course of taking his men from Aberdeen to Portsmouth, and gave me a sandwich and some good advice. The men, who are all very simple lowlanders, were fascinated by the moving model of Mickey Mouse at Waterloo station and stood open-mouthed, grasping their lunch-money in their hands.
I hear that Oxford is violently gay and in general suggests those bits in comedy films where you see champagne glasses superimposed on merry-go-rounds to suggest dissipation, so when I come up I do hope you will be able to show me some of it,
Love,
Mops.
P.S. By the way, do you ever regret your 30 men? I should really like to know.
16 Avenue Close
Avenue Road, NW8
26 November [1940]
My dear Ham,
Thankyou for your note – our telephone is going to be restored soon under the character of Primrose 1256 but I do not quite know when this will happen – it is a graceful official promise – meanwhile the porter’s lodge is Primrose 6741, but I shall be in the London Library on Saturday anyway. I do hope you will have time to tell me about the telephone battle – it is the only military activity which has aroused my deepest interest so far. I had a terrible leaving party at the Ministry of Food – the messenger cried, and we had Dundee cake –
love
Mops.
So I Have Thought of You Page 6
