So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald

love,

Mops.

16 Avenue Close, NW8

[1939]

My dear Ham,

I hear you are being visited by Mrs Breakwell, which I suppose is a refresher course in itself. She went flying down to Devon on full sail with the bomb bags trailing after her. I should very much like a list of the objects these bags contain.

Here is a photo of Oliver, Mrs B., Kate and me entertaining the famous French soldiers at an al fresco meal in Hyde Park. They ate cakes and drank lemonade which one of them declared, with a forced smile, was the champagne of England.

Oliver has become very wild and spends his time disappearing in a cloud of dust on his motor-bicycle and reappearing with a headache next day after an evening at The Nuthouse. The Nuthouse is a night-club, and I should say what the Daily Mirror calls a haunt. You frequent haunts, and Oliver accordingly frequents the Nuthouse.

The mulberry tree at the back of the flats has suddenly produced a large crop of fruits which, though you live in the country and don’t realise it, is a very pleasant surprise in London, so we have made quantities of jam and jelly.

On second thoughts this seems a remarkably dull bit of news, so perhaps if I have sunk to this level I had better stop.

There seem to be rather too many bombers over your part of the island, so you might learn to dodge,

love,

Mops.

‘PUNCH’

10 Bouverie Street

London, EC4

30 October [1939]

My dear Ham,

I don’t know if you are still in Yorkshire. I can’t believe that you are, everybody seems to be so mobile nowadays, and to flash to and fro past or through the metropolis leaving me glued to my desk. There is something to be said for remaining static, however, for it gives one an illusion of being nailed to the mast, or steadfast at the post. A message has just come through from the censor forbidding us to mention the state of the weather in any part of the country – the proprietor apparently takes this seriously and has qualms about the only too familiar snow scene which is appearing on the cover of the Christmas number. – The sub-editor from Lowestoft has lost a good deal of his timidity since he came into the office during a thunderstorm (did you have one in Yorkshire, presuming that you are in Yorkshire?) and found me crouching under the desk among the back numbers. Further, he actually came to dinner and made several independent, though not original remarks, until he was silenced by a large cigar which my father gave him. Though he draws a considerable salary he only has bread and cheese for lunch, and lives in Fleet Street to save tube fares – what can he be saving up for? I believe he is a Gauguin at heart and yearns for the South Seas, but isn’t quite abandoned enough to go there until he has got enough for a return ticket.

I have no news at all, for I haven’t seen Oliver and I missed Janet

(#litres_trial_promo) on her last leave, though I believe she is going to abandon the Air Force if she can. I have a practicable idea however, which is to exchange the Magna Carta for all these aeroplanes instead of paying cash. It’s at New York anyway, and the Americans seem to be fonder of it than we are,

love,

Mops.

Punch Office

10 Bouverie Street

27 November 1939

My dear Ham,

I can’t bear to think of you being so uncomfortable. You ought to curl up on silk cushions like a cat and exist against a luxurious background. The only thing I can say from my brother’s experience in camp, is that it gets better – that is, the discomfort – not worse, but I suppose this is due to a gradual dulling of the faculties, known as merciful oblivion. As everything is so horrid, I can think of nothing consoling to say, except that I am glad you are not in the Navy, and being sunk every day. Sean and Oliver and I were at the ballet the other night and very much regretted your absence, especially when the Lac des Cygnes was danced in a highly kitchy manner with clouds of dust and reverberating thuds.

Lowestoft sits opposite, basking in the warmth and sucking his pipe. I am getting very fond of him as we have a kind of tacit arrangement by which I hold him responsible for the bad news in the paper every morning, and he leads me to look on the brighter side of things. ‘It is no good’ he says ‘being pessimistic.’ With that, and a piece of chocolate, I am able to face the morning.

Please forgive this odious piece of paper. I love apologising for the quality of the paper and ink when writing a letter, as it is so perfectly pointless.

love,

Mops.

‘PUNCH’

10 Bouverie Street

London, EC4

1 January 1940

My dear Ham,

Happy new year (the Sergeant Major here actually says ‘the compliments of the season’, but I never met anyone else who did). I think the gramophone records are wonderful, I didn’t know either of them before, due to my ignorance, but I took to them like a duck to water and play them all day, and even try to sing them in the bath, which is disastrous of course, and it was better when I stuck to ‘Run, rabbit, run’ with my own variations; only I do love the records and it is now one of my premier ambitions to go to hear Otello in the flesh.

I went to an alarming dinner party at the Hoods the other night. For want of other conversation I told Mrs H. (quite accurately) that I couldn’t abide bulldogs, and insulted the horrid but apparently precious specimen which she keeps. Now she is stalking up and down and saying that intelligence is all very well but other things are more important. I was terrified of Sinclair too. He looks so dry I want to wash him; but this may be my feline instincts coming to the top. Oliver was kind and covered up my social errors as well as he could. Jean is up in London today and we are all going to the Toy Symphony with Kenneth Clark conducting.

I gather a lot of rum was issued to the troops at Christmas, so I hope that if you didn’t get leave you at least passed the time in a vaguely pleasurable daze. I was at Oundle, where I had to appear in a charade as a British slave dressed in a bathing suit and Mrs Fisher’s fur coat, which, it seems, disgusted and appalled the audience. I am back at the office now and have made the room so hot, by the simple process of shutting all the windows, that Mallet has fallen fast asleep,

love, Mops.

Ministry of Food

Great Westminster House

Horseferry Road

London, sw1

11 June 1940

My dear Ham,

Thankyou very much for writing – I wish I could have come down last Sunday but I had to stay here and draft a message for the Minister to send to the National Association of Bee-Keepers – and though I have applied all the brains and training I have to the question I am unable to think of anything, though I am very fond of honey in the comb. I’ve got a new straw hat, such a one, with red roses, which seems vaguely connected with the subject somehow.

My ideas of Officers’ Messes are based on lurid films and novels by P. C. Wren which I read under the bedclothes at school. They include quarrels of honour, with cards and glasses all over the floor, and horses jumping on, and off, the table, and also jackboots and being roasted alive by Roundheads. I do hope you are enjoying yourself. I suppose, however good and broadminded you are, there is some satisfaction in being an officer and superior by profession to so many people. Have you a comic batman, I wonder?

You will be pleased to hear that I haven’t been to any films at all lately as I have a vague feeling that it is wicked, and I expect I shall gradually lose the habit and be able to despise films as you do, though I suppose not with the same fine scornful profile.