1939

London W.I

21 February 1939

My dearest sister Elsie:

I have been working hard at my novel. It is nearly finished now, but I shall then have to go over it and make some improvements before I am really satisfied with it. When you start to write one you always wonder if you will be able to make it long enough, but by the time you get to the end it is always too long – I love cutting out bits and crossing out whole pages.

The best piece of news from London is that spring has come. Has it come to you yet? It started here on February 5th, a Sunday. There was that absolutely unmistakable feeling in the air that sends people mad, particularly old spinsters like your sister Pym who is already rather queer in the head. But now that she is twenty-five she has reached years of discretion and does not do the things she would have done when she was nineteen. And London is so different from Oxford anyway. One behaves much more soberly. But the weather has been lovely – we have had a lot of sunshine, especially today, and for months past the streets have been full of flowers. Now they are selling daffodils, narcissi, tulips, blue irises and of course lots of mimosa. Somehow I always think of my sister Elsie when I see mimosa! I will send you a piece in this letter, although I expect that you do have such flowers in Finland too, just as you have deep armchairs. But I hope you will agree that it is the thought that matters, even though the flower will be all dry and squashed and fall on the fine carpet so that Mr Harvey will be angry.

I was so touched at the picture of him decorating a Christmas tree with his own hands – things like that make me want to cry.

We went to two Surrealist Exhibitions last week – one of pictures – paintings and drawings – by Man Ray which I didn’t understand or like very much, though he does wonderful photographs. The other – Wolfgang Paalen – was more interesting. The first object that met our eyes as we opened the door into the gallery was an umbrella covered entirely in sponges! Your practical sister’s first thought was oh, what a waste to cut up all those sponges, when they are so expensive too. There were also some curious leather objects made of a sort of grey suede. There was something very unpleasant about them, I think because one expected them to be in stone or some hard material and of course they were quite soft. He had done some quite nice paintings, very dreamy and fine like the skeletons of leaves or birds. These exhibitions are very amusing, although I can’t say whether they are really good. I think they can hardly be, as so many of me things one could do oneself! But didn’t somebody say I was a genius? I think it was a very long time ago, in the old Imperial Russia before the war, or in Oxford in the days of Jowett when one played croquet on the lawn with bearded undergraduates, Henry Stanley Harvey and Patrick Marsden Wall perhaps!

But you see I am raving. Perhaps it is because I am hungry. I have two beautiful cakes and a fine box of homemade sweets from my aunt, but I want meat, red meat. You see, it is about seven o’clock in the evening and so it is really a natural appetite I am feeling. Perhaps I will eat an orange when I have finished this letter. It is known that oranges are very good for the health, and I have two fine large ones on my mantelpiece.

I hope Herr Lektor Harvey is well. I had a spare Valentine and very nearly sent it to him, but then I decided it would be more prudent to send it to young Mr Michael Benthall, who has asked us to sherry in his dear little flat. He is twenty years old. Jock thought I was in love with him, but although he can divine all the secrets of the human heart he made a mistake and now of course there are really no secrets in my heart.

Now please write and get Henry to if such a thing can be possible. I long for news of you.

With much love to you –

Barbara Frederickovna

To Henry and Elsie Harvey in Helsingfors

London W.I.

11 May 1939

Dearest Elsie and Henry!

I hope you are both well and that you will soon be coming to England. I shall be terribly disappointed if you don’t! I am imagining that Jock will be coming back too and we can all be dear brothers and sisters together, except that some will be husbands and wives, which is an even more satisfactory relationship.

Now I am back in London, in my minute little room at the top of a lodging house in a quite good district of London – conveniently near all the shops and art galleries and Mayfair – though why I should want to be near there you may well ask. Hilary has just got a job on the secretarial staff of the B.B. C. and she is very pleased about it. It will last till September and if she is good enough she will be able to get on the permanent staff. I think we may get a little flat in the autumn as it would really be more convenient than rooms. We can’t cook anything here and there isn’t much space to put things. But we are very happy and the people in the house are nice and we are near Marble Arch and Hyde Park and Oxford Street (and the Edgware Road which is not a very nice district for two young women to wander about in late at night). (I have rather a fancy to live in Kensington, but don’t know if Hilary would agree.)

Today I had lunch with the wife of the British vice-consul in Katowice – the place in Poland where I was teaching English. Things seem to be about as bad as they can be there – she and the children have come back to England and see no prospect of returning to Poland yet, and the Embassy and Consulate in Warsaw have sent all their women and children home. So if I had gone out again I should have had to come back a second time probably! As you know, we now have conscription for men of 20 – 21 which may make things a little better. If there is going to be a war – and we can’t be sure that there won’t be one – we may as well be prepared for it. I don’t know what Jock would say to these views, if he is still a Pacifist, but with the world in the state it is now, it seems to be no more than common sense. But yet the whole thing is such a farce, everyone spending millions to get ready for a War that nobody really wants! I am going to get a First Aid certificate which ought to be quite useful even if there isn’t a war – I am going to classes every week. Fancy me learning how to make splints and bandages! I rather look forward to it. I made some boxes for gas masks when I was at home – it is rather a pleasant sensation to fool oneself into thinking that one is doing useful work!

Apart from all this I have been working very hard at a new novel which I finished before Easter. I am now making some alterations in it though, so heaven knows when it will be ready to go round the publishers. It is really quite a nice novel in its way but needs to be made more exciting. ‘Be more wicked, if necessary,’ says my agent [Ralph Pinter], who is very kind and helpful. Can you imagine an old spinster, frowning anxiously over her MS. trying to be more wicked? Or rather trying to make her people more wicked? It is difficult to imagine, is it not?

Do write very soon – I hope you are both well. Hilary sends her love.

And so of course does your affectionate sister,

Barbara

May

What is the heart? A damp cave with things growing in it, mysterious secret plants of love or whatever you like. Or a dusty lumber room full of junk. Or a neat orderly place like a desk with a place for everything and everything in its place.

Something might be starting now that would linger on through many years – dying sometimes and then coming back again, like a twinge of rheumatism in the winter, so that you suddenly felt it in your knee when you were nearing the top of a long flight of stairs.

A Great Love that was unrequited might well be like that.

So many places where one has enjoyed oneself are no more – notably Stewart’s in Oxford – shops are pulled down, houses in ruins, people in their marble vaults whom one had thought to be still living. One looks through the window in a house in Belgravia and sees right through its uncurtained space into a conservatory with a dusty palm, a room without furniture and discoloured spaces on the walls where pictures of ancestors once hung. One passes a house in Bayswater with steep steps and sees a coffin being carried out.

Walking in Mayfair just before eleven on a Sunday morning (21st May), the air soft and warm and lovely, trees in leaf and red hawthorns in flower. There is a delicious nostalgic smell of churches and new paint and later a Sunday dinner coming up from the basements. His [Jay’s] house is newly painted in cream and royal blue and a window-box next door has petunias in it. How all things are in tune to a poor person in love. A fine, sunny afternoon in May, Beethoven and German lieder. I go to my irises, thinking to throw them away, but find that each dead flower has a fat new bud at the side of its stem. And so I take off the dead flowers and the new flowers begin to unfold. The photograph of him at the Union stands on the mantelpiece and in front of it a spray of red roses – but they are artificial ones from Woolworth’s.

Whitsuntide weekend – an old lady with a curious bakelite apparat – perhaps an ear trumpet – talking about spiritualism in a restaurant. A clergyman composing hymns, where perhaps emotion and fervour get the better of reason.

6 June. On the hottest day of the year I saw two nuns buying a typewriter in Selfridges. Oh, what were they going to do with it?

17 – 18 June. Prescription for a lonely weekend in London. After getting into a good emotional state over Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in Love Affair go into Lyons and have tea. Then walk in the park and back through the deserted streets of Mayfair. Such of the aristocracy as still lives here is away for the weekend. Turn off Park Lane and stand at the bottom of Park Street – you can look right up over Oxford Street and along Gloucester Place to some distant view of trees and spires which is comforting. One day you will really go and see what it is. But not yet. You must go back and read your new Vogue and wash stockings – for that is an essential part of a lonely weekend in London. A great deal of washing and tidying must be done, and if it is the Oxford end of term, well, so much the better.

July

On the 4th of July I met one I loved and had not seen for more than a year [Jay]. Such meetings should be avoided if possible. On this same day I went inside that curious house in Mayfair with its oil paintings and smell of incense and met his mother, a splendid character for a novel.

In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity.

I used to quote that two years ago but it was only recently that I read the whole poem. Here is the last verse –

Ah! would ’twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
To know the change and feel it,

When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steal it,
Was never said in rhyme.

[Keats]

And so it is, I suppose, with this gentle girl and boy. But now when the world is in this sad state, when one hardly dares to look ahead into the years, all this is a warm comfort … the remembrance of meetings, letters, a photograph (absence – cheek pressed against the cold glass), all the little relics, all the jokes, everything that did happen and didn’t quite happen and might still happen. Twenty hours – but perhaps twenty years of memories.