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

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 planning, 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

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.