Love in the Blitz

by Eileen Alexander

  Joan & Joyce & I had lunch at the Spanish Restaurant today, darling. Joyce is still making a terrific thing of not doing any work. It was rather a flat sort of hour really. Joan had sent some Marine Superintendents to the Atlantic Coast instead of the Pacific Coast (or vice versa) by mistake – and she was, not unnaturally, Somewhat Put Out. Joyce was just rather Bored – and I was bowed down by the thought of tray upon tray of work sitting in room 509.

  Darling, my mind is Stagnating – I’m so absurdly tired when I get home that I can’t describe the incidents of the day to you with any sparkle at all. Fantastic things happen – like the Return of Mrs Elliott – (whom I’ve always suspected of Drinking). She suddenly stopped coming to work – and we assumed she’d Left Us – for which we were Fervently Grateful (Darling, she’s Wronger than Marcus if possible, although on quite a different Plane) but as we were afraid it was Suicide – committed in an excess of Bibulous Self-Pity – I sent someone round to her address to Investigate. She was out – and, her landlady said, perfectly well. Well now she’s back with a Medical Certificate calling it Nervous Debility – (Darling, the number of Civil Servants who have to stay away from work because of Nervous Debility – it may be Drink or an Aggregate of Darning or Shopping – or a Party – or a Film – but it’s always called Nervous Debility – and if you meet your Principal in the cinema or the Pub – you just say that the doctor says you need Distraction and/or Stimulus. I’m due for six weeks’ Nervous Debility with pay myself, darling – You couldn’t get a long stretch of leave, could you, to Coincide with my Seizure?)

  Tuesday 19 August Darling, I’ve had a hell of a morning. When I was being flippant about Mrs Elliott in my letter yesterday I hadn’t seen her – She’d just left her medical certificate and gone home. But today she came in to see me, darling – and she was trembling so violently that she could hardly stand. I asked her why she’d come back as she was obviously unfit for work and she hesitated a moment and said when she went to the Doctor, he said: ‘Get back to your work, you’ve been drinking.’ ‘I suppose everyone can see I’ve been drinking,’ she said. ‘Do you think I’ve got DT?’ Darling, I was so non-plussed that I said confusedly ‘Have you been Seeing Anything Peculiar?’ ‘Peculiar?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Pink Elephants or anything?’ Darling, if I hadn’t been so unhappy on her account, I suppose it would have been funny. Then she told me that there had been a Man Following her Everywhere. ‘Such a common Man,’ she said. ‘Labour – I told him I didn’t like labour people.’ Oh! darling, the poor old soul is entirely alone and half-crazy. I’m going to send her to Dr Minton who specializes in the human touch. Damn – why isn’t something done to prevent lonely old women from being properly looked after? I shouldn’t want to live if I was as old and as lonely as she is. And she has a kind of pathetic dignity, too.

  Wednesday 20 August I don’t remember if I told you, in my letter yesterday, of Mrs Elliott’s suggestion that ‘a drop of brandy would steady my nerves’. ‘Dear me, no,’ I said, ‘hot coffee is what you need.’ Her eye lit up with a cunning gleam – ‘Or Guinness,’ she said ‘Guinness is good for you.’ ‘That’s only what the people who are trying to sell it say,’ I told her Earnestly. ‘And even if it is good for some people,’ I added firmly, ‘It is not good for you.’ Which, indubitably, has an element of truth in it.

  I went to fetch Joan from the Ministry of War Transport last night & one of her Cronies offered me sherry. I said no, thank you, with a shudder, and on being asked for an explanation of my revulsion, I told Mrs E’s story. I added that there was one consoling feature, and that was that she’d been drinking ‘cheap red wine’ and not spirits. The man stared at me for a moment and then burst into wild laughter. ‘Good God!’ he said, ‘Don’t you realize that she’s been Drinking “Red Biddy”? – They drink Gallons of it in the East End – It’s half a bottle of Chianti to two bottles of methylated spirits.’ Darling, I was so Put Out that I dreamt about the Met. Office all night – and Alcohol and Upper Air Research and Stratosphere Bombers were all jumbled together in wild confusion.

  David and I talked of you for hours. It was enormously comforting. He knows you so well and he really likes talking about you. I am going to meet his Sylvia when she comes to London. I didn’t tell him, my dear love, that you described her as a Fine Figure of a Woman – though I smiled irrepressibly when he spoke of her and I expect he wondered why – though, not being Me, he didn’t ask.

  Friday 22 August Darling, I’m alone in the house and it’s very quiet and restful. I can write on and on and on if I like & I needn’t feel that I must stop because my parents will be wondering what I’m doing. I wish you were here with me, darling. (Interruption in the form of one of Joan’s Canadians ‘calling’ to ask her to choose a fur cape for his ‘girl’. He’s the one who Wrecked the Spring Manoeuvres by failing to recognize the enemy, and when they got mixed up with his mechanized columns on the road, he nipped onto an island and Waved them by. A perfect piece of traffic control, darling, but not quite what was required at that particular moment.)

  You don’t write love-letters very easily, do you, my dear love? I think you’ve written me about three – and they all made me cry – I always want to cry when you suddenly say you love me in the middle of something quite different.

  Do you remember a very wet day when you came back from Liverpool and we ate something in the Chicken Inn and went to a News Film. You suddenly bent down in the middle of the film and said, ‘I love you, darling’ – apropos of Nothing at All – I nearly cried then.

  Friday 29 August Darling. Mr Crotch has just been in to discuss the appalling pay conditions of Civil Service Typists. ‘The poor girls hardly earn enough to keep body and camisole together,’ he said, and added maliciously: ‘And don’t forget to tell Gershon that one.’ I assured him that I wouldn’t.

  David rang up and asked me to dinner at Kew. I had a very pleasant, restful evening, darling. David’s Sylvia has grace and repose – she has very large, kind blue eyes and a lovely skin – and soft light-brown hair – done up in a bun! We talked of research and Jewish superstitions and teaching and the Civil Service – and Sylvia said she’d met you once but she very much wanted to meet you again. I asked them to come with us to The Cherry Orchard13 next Saturday, and they said they’d be delighted.

  Saturday 30 August Darling, I was almost angry with you today – (but it didn’t last for long – it never does). I waited at the Ministry until almost four & as there was still no letter, (it wasn’t on that account I was almost angry with you, darling, even you cannot command the GPO) I left. When I got home there was a message from the Air Ministry to say a personal letter had arrived for me. So, darling, because I love you on the other side of idolatry, I went back to the Strand (an hour and a quarter each way) and got your letter – and it was such a very little letter, my dear love, that I almost cried – and I was so very tired with travelling and not smoking and clucking that I read the most Awful Things into your remark about jumping to conclusions. Oh! my darling, I hope I haven’t been jumping to conclusions about your love for me. I’ve been diffident about it for so long that I feel I should really snap in two if I found that in this, as in so many other things, I had gone to the other extreme and become over-confident.

  1 British historian and Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012).

  2 Air Raid Precautions.

  3 Hamlet, Act IV, scene v.

  4 Worse Than Death.

  5 Assistant Private Secretary to the Under Secretary of State.

  6 ‘Sonnet 73’, William Shakespeare.

  7 Cymbeline, Act II, scene ii.

  8 Bruce Belfrage (1900–74) was an English actor, BBC newsreader and Liberal politician.

  9 ‘Song from Arcadia’, by Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) ‘My true love hath my heart and I have his’.

  10 Cambridge University Socialist Club.

  11 Gershon had been promoted to sergeant, and posted to a listening station in Bodmin
, Cornwall.

  12 Hamlet, Act III, scene i.

  13 A play by Anton Chekhov.

  September–December 1941

  On 22 June 1941 Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, and for Jews across Europe the horror of the Holocaust had begun. The bureaucratic formulation of a ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ did not come until the following January, but by then Nazi death squads, operating behind the line of the German advance across eastern Poland and over the border into Soviet territory, had already murdered over 444,000 Jews.

  For any Jew, events in Europe brought home in the starkest form the question of what it meant to be Jewish, and as her letters show, Eileen was no exception. For her father’s generation the Balfour Declaration had made it seem possible to be both a good Zionist and a ‘good Englishman’, but for men and women of Eileen’s age, confronted on the one hand by a volte-face in British policy and on the other the imminent extermination of European Jewry, any such double allegiance was more and more problematic.

  Over the next three years, as the full extent of Nazi persecution became known, these issues would rumble on below the surface of Eileen’s letters, but in the summer of 1941 it was something else that gave the question of her Jewish identity a more sharply personal focus. If Eileen believed in a God it was certainly not the God of the Ellenbogen household, and between her proudly secular, intellectual and ethical sense of what it was to be Jewish and Gershon’s parents’ ‘rigid observances’ lay a gulf that a potential daughter-in-law could only look across with anxiety. First, though, there was the still unresolved question of Gershon’s ‘intentions’.

  7

  Your Intended

  Tuesday 2 September 1941 Darling, Joan said last night: ‘If Gershon looks like coming over all marriage-conscious at any time – let me know, and I’ll go away for a day or two – I don’t want to be in the Family Circle when the Bomb Explodes.’ I assured her that there would be no need for her to take her second week’s holiday precipitately – but that we’d give her due warning! You do realize, don’t you, darling, that, if and when you get Taken with an Attack of Intentions, Pa will probably go all Difficult? – but not, I suspect, for very long. When Lionel & Dicky make pointed remarks about Us, darling, he always says ‘Nonsense’ repressively, but with a hint of a smile nevertheless. He can never resist an opportunity of coming the Heavy Father. However, he also enjoys Gestures – There’ll be a Struggle within him if you ever want to marry me, darling. He probably won’t be able to resist the Truculent line at first – but after that, he’ll evaporate in a cloud of Sentimental Good-nature. An odd man, Pa, and not as much like me as you think, darling. (Though there is a lot in what you say. There always is.)

  Oh! darling – only three more days. I can hardly believe it. I bought some peppermints the other day, to Celebrate – I loathe the things – I never touch them except when I’ve been smoking and I think you’re going to kiss me. Forward, aren’t I, darling? I think, in fact, I’m sure, (because I remembered it afterwards & made a mental note that I must tell you sometime) that I forgot to tell you one of the things David said that night when we were being so personal: ‘It’s very hard for a man to tell whether a woman loves him or is just being sympathetic – Particularly if she is not a Forward woman – which you, of course, are not.’ He Little Knows, does he, darling?

  Mr Crotch has just been in. He’s in a state of acute nervous depression. I think he thinks his wife is getting tired of him – and he loves her, darling, though he tries to pretend to himself and the rest of the world that he doesn’t. Poor Mr Crotch. I really like him, you know, though I get so irritated with him at times.

  I’ll tell you something, darling, if you promise never to refer to it either in conversation or in a letter to me. I’ve been holding on to my leave … (oh! Dear, I don’t want to tell you now, but having got this far, I’ll have to or you’ll think it even worse than it is) because I thought that perhaps before the end of February when my leave-year expires, you might want to take me to your home to meet your family – as your Intended. Darling, never mention this to me – I shall be quite ill if you do – It’s the most shockingly Forward thought I ever had – I’m sorry, darling, but I want you to Know All – however Awful.

  Monday 8 September Darling, this is the first letter you’ve ever had from your Intended – and the first I’ve ever written to mine, so may I begin please by saying that I love you, which I always feel is a Useful piece of Information for one Intended to have about the other? I rang up Joyce this morning and Told her All. She said: ‘I’m very pleased.’ ‘So am I,’ I said, as one who is replying to a conversational remark about the weather. She laughed, darling – but I can’t help it – I am so comfortable and safe and happy that I’m Bereft of all but rather simple, prosaic comment. But what a story I’m weaving in my mind for Aubrey, notwithstanding. (It’s all right, my dear love, I won’t be Too Imaginative.)

  I’m writing in the little room where you asked me to marry you, darling, and I’m smoking through the holder which was your first present to your Intended. (I haven’t given you a present yet, my darling. Please say what you would like – (Nothing is no answer at all – for as you know – Nothing will come of Nothing – speak again) I want to get you something which you will use constantly – (no, not a Toothbrush – think again) Something which you need – you see, darling, I want to Begin as I mean to go on – and give you presents which are useful as well as Beautiful.)

  Darling, I’ve just looked out of the window and Caught the Eye of the Woman in the Building opposite – You know, the one who saw you kiss me. She looked at me Coldly – but she’s Inhibited, darling, because she hasn’t got a Solace – poor old Soul – fancy having to work in a Government Department with no Solace. I shudder to think what it must be like.

  Darling, Mrs Elliott arrived this morning – a positive triumph of Mind Over Matter. I took her down to SI and now she’s Off My Hands forever, my dear love. Poor Mrs Elliott – It was Nostalgia for the Mimosa-scented snows of yesteryear wot done it. I’m glad you don’t compose dear little melodies about flowers, my love, or Moonlit Raptures.

  Nothing has happened since you left me, darling (which is not surprising as it was only 3 hours ago) so this must be a little letter.

  Darling, I believe, sincerely and most seriously, that I shall not Cluck much any more. Thank you for waiting until you were sure you loved me before asking me to marry you, my love. Because, I need have no fear that your decision was too rash, too unadvised, too sudden – and that, like the Lightning, it will cease to be ere one can say ‘It Lightens’.

  I am rested, darling, and infinitely happy. I feel as though, if it were suddenly to turn into an icy March day, I should not notice the change in temperature – (though I expect my teeth would chatter just as loudly as though you’d never asked me to marry you at all! Darling, isn’t it odd how one can exist on a dozen planes at once?).

  Tuesday 9 September Joan had a letter from Sheila yesterday evening with bad news of Hamish, darling. His squadron was shot to pieces over France and he was the only pilot to return. Rather than land in France and be taken prisoner he flew across the Channel, desperately wounded, with his wireless and controls shot to pieces, and crashed about 200 yards from the coast. He was too weak from loss of blood to open his rubber dinghy (his Mae West he calls it, darling) and he struggled and shouted in the water for nearly an hour until a soldier swam out to rescue him. He has been in hospital for some weeks but he’s home now, still limping badly and, Sheila says, in very great pain. Darling, Joan and I knew something was going to happen to Hamish that night we dined with him at the Café Royal. His insouciance and aliveness had something rather terrifying about it. I think, if you’d been there, you would have noticed it too.

  I had lunch with Joan & Joyce yesterday and we drank your health in a pale and insipid concoction which Joyce said was a Bronx Cocktail. Horrible – but we
couldn’t get any sherry. (That Gives one to Think, doesn’t it, darling?) Joyce said that she Felt Responsible for it All, darling (meaning Us) but she was really pleased, I think, and she was warmer and more unaffected than she has been for a long time.

  I wrote to Aubrey last night. My letter wasn’t quite such a Good Story as I’d hoped. You see, darling, I find it rather hard to be flippant about being your Intended. As a matter of fact, I can feel myself coming over all Earnest – but, I mustn’t lose my sense of humour, darling, that would be a major disaster – Hold on to a sense of humour.

  I told Lionel and Dicky All yesterday evening. Lionel shook hands with me solemnly but with rather touching sincerity and said he was very happy. Dicky dimpled and a wicked gleam came into his eye: ‘I shall put a Slow-Worm in your bed,’ he said – and added, ‘Did you say Gershon or Aubrey?’ When he heard that it was really you, darling, he Capitulated with quite good grace.

  On Friday evening, Joan & I are going to the Pictures with Joyce and then to supper at the Baronial Hall. This will be Joan’s first encounter with the Nathans en masse. I hope they don’t flatten her out completely. I shall have to talk to her like a mother about Flagged squares of butter, and not looking as though she’d like a second helping. (The riot caused by Oliver Twist, darling, is nothing compared with that which would Flare Forth if anyone asked for More in the Nathan ménage.)