Love in the Blitz

by Eileen Alexander

  Darling, Joan may be getting married in two or three weeks’ time. I can’t say very much because she’s asked me not to – but I wish you were here, my darling, so that I could talk to you about the whole thing & clear away some of the clouds of confusion and bewilderment in my mind. I hope it will not result in unhappiness for her – posting with such dexterity to once-used sheets.

  Monday 17 August Darling, Joan told me this morning that she had reconsidered her request that I shouldn’t say much to you about her marriage – because she felt that, knowing that I always discussed everything with you which touched me at all nearly, she couldn’t ask me to keep silent about this. She is almost certain, my darling, that she’s going to have a baby. (And I don’t think she’s wrong this time, my dear love.) She is very happy about it. She says that she’s quite certain that she loves Robert, but she has been so much hurt once that she would never have been able to bring herself to the point of getting married only circumstances had forced it on her. She feels, too, that to have a child very soon will be the best way to start off married life with Robert, whose self-confidence has been badly shaken by the failure of his first marriage. As Joan can’t have been going to have a baby for longer than 3 weeks, if she is married immediately the dates can be fairly safely camouflaged. Those are the facts from Joan’s angle, darling. For my part, I would have wished her to marry in different circumstances. Her whole emotional outlook since her break with Ian has bewildered me, my dear love. Clearly I am in no position to judge – but I wish I could understand. My main concern now is to back her up with my parents. We’ve decided to say that Robert can only get leave in 2 or 3 weeks’ time – and that if they’re not married then, they’ll have to wait a year or else be married on one day and go to work the next. Of course, they’re going to be terribly hurt if she can’t wait until Pa gets back. I only hope he will be back by then to find everything settled. I want, above all things, to spare Joan any unhappiness or bitterness on account of hostility at home. All this needs very careful handling, tact and a good deal of play-acting. I tried the play-acting out on Joan Pearce at lunch today. I could see that it carried complete conviction with her, but oh! Darling, Pa is another matter. He is l’homme du monde par excellence – and he is not easily deceived – and if he’s not deceived his criticism will be ruthless and very painful. At the same time as all this is spinning round inside my head, I have to present an unruffled front to Joan, who must clearly not be allowed to get into a panic. Oh! God I wish you were here, my darling. It’s like moments like this that I realize how tremendously I rely upon your wisdom and sanity. By the time this reaches you Joan will probably be married and the Crisis will be Over, so please don’t disturb yourself on my account, my darling. Il n’y a pas de quoi.

  Tuesday 18 August Darling, Joan’s problem is getting more & more complicated. Robert doesn’t want a baby at this stage, & Joan says that if he won’t have it she’ll never feel the same about him. She’s seeing a doctor this morning, my love. They both change their minds every 5 minutes & I don’t know where I am. It was incredibly painful to see Joan last night in an absolute frenzy. I’m so desperately sorry for her, my darling – and I feel so helpless.

  Darling, Joan has seen the doctor & he says that in view of the state of her ovarian cyst the baby can’t possibly develop beyond two – or at most – three months – so the problem settles itself you see, but in rather a horrible way.

  Darling, I’m telling you all this because I always have & always shall discuss things with you as though you were my husband and because I know that you’ll never speak of it to Joan or anyone else. (Though she knows that I’ve told you the outline of the situation.) It’s an incalculable comfort to be able to talk to you, my darling, otherwise I should go nearly mad with anxiety for Joan who is very near collapse.

  Wednesday 19 August Darling, the copy that I’d been pining for walked into Fuller’s and dropped into the seat beside me – like Manna. It was Edith Carlyon. I asked her if she was still enjoying her work with the Theatrical agents & she said, ‘Adoring it, my dear. The Manager now calls me a Dreary old whore when I make a typing error so I feel that he has really come to accept me as one of the family.’ Then she told me about a fan-letter which Robert Helpman had had from an old lady about his ballet of Hamlet. She said that she’d always known there was something wrong with Hamlet and now she realized what it was – it was the words. Seeing my face when she told me this Edith roared with laughter & said she had known I would look just like that and had been longing for an opportunity of causing that very expression to flicker across my face.

  Thursday 20 August Darling, Pa arrived back at Break of Dawn this morning, much Larger than Life Size and as Expansive as a Walt Disney Cockerel. His first remark was that you and I must spend our honeymoon in the Game Reserve in S. Africa! Ye Gods! Can’t you see us Mollocking among a Pride of Lions, my love?

  Saturday 22 August Darling. I’m having a sort of nightmare – like all that Hecate nonsense in Macbeth – and the people in my nightmare are floating upward in a sort of sickle movement like the skeletons in ‘Night on the Bare Mountain’ – you remember? There’s Joan, darling – She has lost her way – she looks frightened – she’s floated outside my line of vision. There’s one of our clerk’s – her fiancé died in an aeroplane crash in W. Africa. She has an empty look – She has lost her way too – We have all lost our way. My way is towards you – but there’s a wall – and a locked door that way. I am lost on the other side of the wall. There’s Pan, who wants to fling away his future at the controls of an aeroplane. Oh! he’s badly lost, my darling. Only David & Sylvia are not lost, my dear love, because they are together. My parents are not lost – but they’ve completely lost sight of Pan and me whom they do not in the least understand – not when it comes to fundamentals anyway. I am but mad nor’ nor’ west, darling, but the wind shows no sign of blowing in a southerly direction at the moment. I wonder if you know how I love you? I don’t think you can – I don’t think anyone can except me to whom it is a miraculous & blinding light – and we have to be separated when we’re so young and have been and could be so happy. Oh! The pity of it, my darling, the pity of it.

  Sunday 23 August I forgot to tell you, my dear love, that Joan’s Robert was Looked Over by Pa on Friday evening and that he Found Favour. Thank God, darling, that’s one fence o’er leapt. This morning Joan & I are going to walk along Finchley Road to Robert’s flat to meet a musician friend of him – an impecunious young man who has been, in his time, a Harmonium Player on street corners. He rejoices in the Picturesque name of Jerry Bird.

  Darling, when Pa got to the railway station on his way to London, he saw a diminutive boy of about 10 or 11 leaning on a wagon & he said: ‘Would you like to earn some money?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said the lad with commendable promptitude. ‘Well, then,’ said Pa, ‘Find me a Porter.’ ‘I am the Porter, Sir,’ he said – so Pa loaded on the luggage & the lad wheeled the wagon. Pa says he never worked harder in his life to earn someone else a shilling.

  Darling, Victor has just been lunching with us. He’s on a Refresher Course in Wimbledon & the Petty Officer in charge was a Hangman in civil life. ‘A really charming fellow,’ says Victor without a trace of sarcasm.

  Robert’s friend, Jerry Bird, is extremely long and lank and dirty. He wears check shirts (very loud check) & he sees himself as a Mute Inglorious D. H. Lawrence. We walked back from Robert’s flat, darling, and Robert was talking to me about the attitude to sex of Joan & Sheila & me. He said that all the women at London University (including his first wife) had an abounding sexual curiosity. They sought sexual experience, darling, for its own sake. He said that until he met Joan & Sheila & me he had always thought that women who were only interested in love – as distinct from sex for its own sake, were either undersexed or, to a greater or lesser extent, inhibited. Isn’t that odd, my darling? The only girl I knew at Cambridge who had that kind of interest in sex was Joan Wilson – an
d we all thought of her as an Oddity. Robert says that, on the whole, the women at London University looked upon their work as a matter of very minor importance. Their main purpose in going to the University was to find out more about men. I wonder how true that is of the Provincial Universities, my love.

  Thursday 27 August I can understand why people go mad, my darling. They do it to escape from emotional responsibility. I don’t think the business of living can ever be a clear-cut issue. I don’t suppose my case is more complex than anyone else’s but look at the burden of emotional responsibility that’s crushing all the vitality out of me, my dear love. Let me take Pan as a starting point. He’s 17, darling, and he wants a little time to himself to sort out his ideas & to work out some kind of personal philosophy – but if he goes into another room to be by himself – if he goes out alone, my parents think he’s selfish – that he’s neglecting them – and Dicky. If I ask him out to lunch so that we can talk – my parents say: ‘Dicky must go too.’ So Pan is an emotional responsibility, darling. The fashionable philosophy of the schoolboy is Crucify the Hun. The Humanities – the value of knowledge – all these things are, by comparison, academic trivialities. So Lionel doesn’t read any more, darling, he works endlessly at navigation & mathematics and aircraft recognition – and when someone says: ‘The Russians must have accounted for two million Germans,’ he says, ‘Good,’ and he says it with relish. I’m no Pacifist, my darling. I believe that this war is necessary, but it’s heart-breaking to see anyone as potentially good as Pan talking about the killing of men as though it were the same thing as bringing down a bursting bag of grouse. (I dislike blood sports, darling, because potentially they foster that spirit.) If Pan could have some time in which to develop independently – either at school or at home, darling, he would very quickly become a different person, I think – but even when he comes into my room at night to talk – my mother says: ‘It’s time you were in bed, Lionel.’

  Then there’s Joan, darling. I have, on the one hand, to try and help her to straighten out her emotional tangles and on the other to sweat blood to keep the real facts from my parents – and there’s the added complication in that I feel that she’s mishandling her life most crazily and I can do nothing – because that is no-one’s business but her own. The only clear-cut issue, my darling, is my love for you – and even that is complicated by our parents’ attitude. If you’re able to come back before the end of the war, my darling, we’re going to have to face grave complications vis-a-vis our parents when we say that we want to be married. (In this case, darling, I think my parents will be more amenable than yours.) Oh! darling, I’m in such a tangle that I simply don’t know what to do or say or think.

  Darling, Pa had lunch with Leslie yesterday. He (Leslie) is in such confusion of spirit that he’s going to stay in a monastery in the north of Scotland for a week to try and sort out his ideas. Poor Leslie. I would not need to go to a convent to sort out my ideas, my darling, if I could be back in your arms for an hour with the warmth of your hands on my hair and body – with your head on my breast and your wonderful smile very close to me, darling. Oh! My dear love, I’m so sorry for the people for whom kisses are nothing more than sensation, who don’t know what it means to be lifted above time and space by love – for whom the love which is God is not compressed into and symbolized by one man. Those people, my darling, don’t know the meaning of being alive.

  Friday 28 August Darling, Joan talks of going to live with Peggy Mitchell. (She’s going on leave today.) She wants me to Boost the Idea with my parents. But I can’t, darling – I just can’t bear at the moment to put forward a suggestion of any kind which is likely to meet with antagonism and criticism of Joan and the Younger Generation and this, that and the other. You see, darling, as I may have said before, my parents are not such fools but that they’ll realize that any suggestion of leaving us will be an admission that Joan isn’t really happy with us – and, darling, it’s no good sheltering one’s eyes to it, it is impossible for anyone to be really happy in our home for long – anyone young, I mean. If we are tired at the end of a day’s work, we are Effete and Decadent – if we go out we are indulging in Frivolous Activities which are Out of Place in War Time – If we go to our rooms to write letters or to get away from Dicky’s noisy insolence or slobberings, we are selfish and inconsiderate and we treat the house as a hotel or a boarding-house – If we are uneasy because there aren’t any letters, we are unbalanced & hysterical – If we discuss ethics, our attitude is symptomatic of the Degeneracy of our Generation. Of course, I’m over-stating the case, my dear love, but I’m not misrepresenting it as grossly as you might think.

  Saturday 29 August Darling, have you ever read The Brothers Karamazov?5 I was thinking about it the other night – thinking that it was the greatest novel ever written. It is as vast in its scope as the Divina Comedia. It is the journey of a man through Hell & Purgatory to Spiritual rest. I’ve only read it once, darling, but it’s so powerful and tremendous that I should need to read it six times before I could absorb a tenth of its significance. Please read it, my darling, if you haven’t read it already – and tell me what you think about it. In the meantime, if I can find the leisure, I shall read it again (It’s 3 years since I last read it) because the details are very hazy in my mind – only the impression of spiritual power remains.

  Monday 31 August Darling Prince Habib Lotfallah6 was here this evening when I got home. He’s a client of Pa’s. His brother was the favourite candidate for the throne of Syria after the last war. We used to know them all in Cairo & we looked upon them as a Huge Joke – but all the Great Ones here seem to look upon old Habib as quite a Personage & he’s persona grata with the lot of them. He said to me: ‘Your fiancé is seulement Pilot Officer, hein? Reserve volontaire? A pity – I could not make him more than an Air Commodore.’ It was obviously a genuine sorrow to him, my love! He was talking about his brother’s marriage (which has dissolved in a nice je m’en fichiste oriental kind of way) & he said, in French: ‘You understand my brother has given too much freedom to his wife. Pardon me miss, but women must be held fast, otherwise they fly like my sister-in-law.’ (He speaks execrable French, darling.) He’s a comic old bird, my love.

  Darling, I want to talk to you about Joan again – but I want you to make a mental vow before going any further that you won’t be angry with her for causing me anxiety – that you’ll never speak to her of this (because I’ve no right to speak of it even to you, my darling, only I shall really collapse if I don’t talk to you, my dear love) and that you’ll remember that Ian’s attitude was such a tremendous shock that she has never recovered from it & that therefore, her actions can’t be judged by any normal standards.

  For the last week she’s been away. My parents think she was in Cheltenham with Robert’s people but actually she’s been staying with Robert a few hundred yards from here. She’s been having the business that I told you about put right artificially – that’s why I was almost crazy with anxiety last week, my darling. I couldn’t get any news of her because she hadn’t told Robert I knew about it & I had to put up a terrific show at home – as far as my parents were concerned, darling, everything was normal – everything was grand. Today she told Robert that I knew & I went to see her after work. Darling, she looks appallingly ill but she says she’s very well & very happy & that everything went off splendidly. (My God!) Then she walked a little way along the road with me & said suddenly that she was going to live with Robert very soon. I felt very faint, darling & said: ‘You mean you’re going to marry him?’ She said, no, that he was not prepared to be married yet – his last marriage had been a failure because he’d entered into it too suddenly – but that she couldn’t live away from him so she was going to move into his flat. Darling, it was as though I’d been hit over the head. I said: ‘Joan, I’ve never been so distressed about anything that was happening to someone other than myself in all my life. You have said a hundred times that you couldn’t bear the lying
& the sordidness of a situation of that kind – And it would be one lie on top of another. Could you go to your family & say to them: “I’m going to live with Robert as his wife, because he doesn’t want to marry me yet?”’ She said she would, darling, but I simply don’t believe her. I said: ‘Well, when you come and tell me that you’ve said that to them, I shall reconsider the whole situation.’

  Darling, I’ve watched this relationship from the beginning and although Robert is a man of immense charm and intellect I think he is more selfish than anyone I’ve ever known. He mixes in a set of people who have no standards & above all, no sense of emotional responsibility. The Great Thing is to Express Oneself, and everything & everybody else can go hang. Up till now he’s only met people like himself – people who tossed aside their families, their friends, everything for the sake of their own personal whims. (His remarks about the women he’d known at London University were very illuminating in this connection, darling.) But Joan is not like that – she needs her friends and her family & he wants to uproot her – to wipe out her entire background & all her interests at one blow – for his pleasure – and because she’s infatuated & has just emerged from a gruelling emotional & physical experience, she’ll agree to anything. I said: ‘If there were any obstacle to your marriage, Joan, I would gladly say, “If you love him it’s right that you should live with him as his wife,” but there’s nothing in the way of your marriage except Robert’s personal notions – It’s childish and utterly fantastic & I can’t pretend that I can condone it in any way,’ and I left her, darling. I was trembling violently & I felt really ill, particularly as she looked so terribly pale and thin – but I couldn’t let it pass without making a stand. It’s only for her sake, darling, only for her own sake. I can’t bear to think of her living as Robert’s mistress until he gets tired of her & blandly & with the utmost charm, turns to some new form of amusement.