Read the book: «Love in the Blitz»

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Contents

5  Foreword by Oswyn Murray

6 Historical Introduction by David Crane

7  1 Drumnadrochit, summer 1939

8  September 1939–April 1940

9  2 ‘No time to sit on brood’

10  May–September 1940

11  3 My Young Fellow

12  September–December 1940

13  4 Blitz

14  January–March 1941

15  5 Intentions

16  March–September 1941

17  6 A Rill Civil Servant

18  September–December 1941

19  7 Your Intended

20  January–May 1942

21  8 Separation

22  May–December 1942

23  9 Limbo

24  January 1943–March 1944

25  10 The Long Wait

26  April 1944–March 1946

27  11 Twin Compasses

28  Postscript

29  Dramatis Personae

30  Picture Section

31  About the Author

32  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Foreword by Oswyn Murray

In the autumn of 2017 I received an email from an unknown correspondent:

Dear Mr Murray,

I hope you will forgive the intrusion, but I recently purchased a large quantity of wartime correspondence, via eBay, written by Eileen Alexander (soon to be Ellenbogen) in which I have found many references to your father, as Eileen worked with him in S9 at the Air Ministry during World War Two. I attach details of a weekend she spent with your family in Summer 1943. I have considered long and hard whether this is the right thing to do, and am basing my decision on the fact that if there were written details of my own family from over 70 years ago I would very much like to read them. Eileen held your father in the very highest regard and her letters are bejewelled with words like kind, intellectual, understanding, humanist regarding him. Although it is only just over 70 years ago – the idyllic weekend she describes seems to certainly belong to a lost era …

With very best wishes,

David McGowan

I replied enthusiastically:

I have often blessed my parents for giving me a name (my grandfather’s) that is unique on the world wide web, but never more so than on receiving your email at the age of 80. Yes I still remember Corners vividly, our home from before my birth in 1937 to 1945, the doodlebugs, the air raid shelter, the 1945 election (when we were the HQ of the local Liberals), the garden and its wood. Your extracts are however the only written record I know of that period, and they are lovely. I do remember vaguely the name of Eileen Alexander, who sent Christmas cards every year, and I can locate most of the places and people she mentions.

It seems my father was still in the Air Ministry in 1943; but in that year he moved to be civil service head of SOE under General Gubbins, an experience he claimed had been expunged from his memory by concussion at the end of the war; but my first suitcase was one designed to hold a radio transmitter to be parachuted into France … Subsequently Patrick went on to the Ministry of Power, where he headed the electricity division, being responsible for the nationalisation of electricity and its denationalisation twenty years later, and for the creation of a nuclear power industry. He retired in 1965, and went to live in the south of France and Weybridge.

Thus began an unexpected friendship during which David and I researched his find. For thirteen years he had been the sole carer of his aged mother and confined to the house much of the time; to occupy himself he decided to buy letters on eBay and perhaps make a book out of them. By pure chance he bought a small bundle of letters from Eileen Alexander, and realised that these were truly remarkable; so he contacted the seller and offered to purchase the rest. A year passed, and he had given up hope, when finally the seller offered him the remaining letters for the original auction price.

Eileen Alexander graduated in 1939 with a brilliant first-class degree in English from Girton College, Cambridge; her subsequent accident in a car driven by her future husband, Gershon Ellenbogen, begins the correspondence and their love affair. There were approximately fourteen hundred of these letters, written almost daily, covering the years 1939 to 1947. David began transcribing them; he sent me a first volume and then three further ones, over sixteen hundred pages covering roughly half of the correspondence. I began to quail at the thought of a book as long as Proust, and suggested that he try to edit it down to a single volume with the idea of publication. Within ten days that volume arrived, covering the years of courtship up to Eileen’s reunion with Gershon and marriage. We christened it Love in the Blitz, and I introduced him to a family friend, the literary agent Felicity Bryan. She read it while confined with flu on her sick bed, and the next day phoned David and offered to be his agent. Together the three of us began to research the history of the correspondence.

The letters appear to have been first auctioned at Bridport Auction House in a bundle of miscellaneous papers shortly after Gershon’s death in 2003; presumably they had been part of his house clearance. The lot did not sell, and was taken away by an employee, who sorted the letters out from the rest of the papers and identified the writer, but found the task of transcription too difficult. A decade later, in January 2015, she put them back into the auction house as a separate lot:

Large quantity of correspondence (1939–1947) written by Eileen Ellenbogen (née Alexander) to Gershon Ellenbogen. Eileen Ellenbogen, a graduate of Girton College, was a noted teacher, writer and translator – especially of George Simenon’s Maigret books. In WWII Gershon Ellenbogen, who was in the RAF, worked for British Military Intelligence in Cairo.

The letters were bought for £250 by the dealer who subsequently began offering them on eBay until David’s intervention. Meanwhile David researched the family and friends of the couple, and Felicity tracked down Eileen’s grandchildren, who gave their assent for the letters to be published.

So these letters, surely some of the most beautiful and vivid love letters ever to be written during the Second World War, have survived through a series of chances, to be rescued from oblivion by David McGowan, their devoted transcriber and editor.

We plunge into the correspondence and follow the young writer’s experiences day by day with little knowledge of what lies ahead, as she lives through the war years. Slowly we learn to know her idiosyncrasies, her growing love, her relations with her rather ‘odd’ – as she describes them – family, her experience of the Blitz in London. We learn to trust her judgements on her circle of friends and acquaintances and we find them increasingly hilarious. Everything is seen through her eyes: even her beloved is only dimly reflected in her comments. We are amazed at her naivety and her ignorance of sex. We may admire her independent stance on Judaism and some of her progressive views on politics.

We begin, too, to appreciate that Eileen is involved in a new literary genre with a multiple purpose. The first is to enmesh her beloved in her life, to keep him engaged with herself and prevent him straying during their long separation – the sort of narrative letters that Ovid imagines Penelope writing to Ulysses. She wants to display all her talents, her knowledge, her first-class degree, her ability to find a quotation in Elizabethan literature for every eventuality. There is also much about her friends’ liaisons – perhaps in order to warn Gershon to keep faith with her.

The second is to create an intensely personal narrative, a type of Bildungsroman, so rich that it holds us as we follow the daily experience of a young woman setting out on life, with all its uncertainties, exploring her environment and learning from the mistakes of those around her.

The third is perhaps inadvertent; without knowing it, she is fashioning a feminist vision of war, a description of war as it is seen by women, not men – a time of absence and waiting, of hoping and doubting, of being caught between tradition and modernity, desire and faithfulness. That makes the narrative almost unique, the outside world impinges, disasters hit her, but she never acts, only reacts: and yet life goes on apparently normally. Elias Canetti’s famous description of contemporary London, Party in the Blitz, seems mean-spirited and randomly vicious beside Eileen’s instantaneous, daily, witty and loveable take on the undisturbed rhythms of Cambridge and London Jewish life in wartime Britain.

Did she ever think of publishing? She knew she had a talent for ‘the Art of letter-writing’, but publishing was never part of her plan. In September 1943 she wrote: ‘Pan has just come in to say: “Really, the care you take over your letters to Gershon – one would think that you were writing for future publication.” I looked at him Sternly, my dear love, & said: “Oh! no, I’m writing for a far more important reason than that.” But one day, he’ll learn, my love. Pan is the sort of person who will love a woman as I love you.’

Rather, her letters and her love for Gershon were her life: ‘I once thought that I had a genius for writing,’ she told him, ‘but I find instead I have a genius for love.’

As far as I’m concerned all my creative energies, all my critical & social faculties, all my moods and thoughts, and, above all, all the boundless sea of my love for you go into my letters to you … My letters are only a translation of my love, my darling. I can only give you my love itself when I’m with you, when I’m lying back in your arms – then, darling, I can give you my love with my voice & my eyes & my body. I am tired of being a translator, my darling. I want to be a creative genius again. If I have any creative genius, my dear love, it is in my love & not in my writing, which is insignificant & meaningless beside my love. What would the outside world know of my love for you, darling, if they were to read my letters? They would know what I know of the Odyssey when I read it in translation – but you are the only person, my darling, who has read the story of my love in the original and you are the only person who understands it fully & truly. That’s good, darling. It was a story which was written for you & only for you. I don’t want anyone else to understand it. It is not their story – it is only our story. I’m as arrogant & exclusive about our love as Ouspensky is about his Esoteric Knowledge.

This was ultimately the point: ‘I wonder what anyone would think if they suddenly came across my letters to you & started reading them in chronological order? I think they’d say “This girl never lived till she loved” – and it would be true, darling. Until I loved you, I was in the process of undergoing intellectual and emotional dry-rot. If I’d never known you – people, in later years, would have looked at me as though they’d taken a mouthful of vinegar – with the corners of their mouths screwed up, & said “Wormwood! Wormwood!” – but now they’ll say “While she lived she was a true lover & therefore she had a good end.”’

As she wrote these letters Eileen was surely thinking of the portrayal of courtly love in her favourite book by C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, published in 1936, which she described as ‘the finest piece of Medieval literary criticism of our time & perhaps of all time’. She seems to see herself half ‘in the precarious dream-world of medieval love poetry’, as the faithful damsel of troubadour tradition in her chastity belt, creating a romance as she writes to her beloved lord away on the Crusades about the strange deeds at home in their feudal castle. She moves between ‘the allegory of the Body and the Heart’. And she follows C. S. Lewis in believing in the continuity of courtly love into the English literary tradition of Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and John Donne. She is a supreme writer of modern literary prose, schooled by her love of English literature from Malory to Elizabethan and modern literature, yet with all the wickedness of a Stella Gibbons in her delight in ‘mollocking’. Compared to these, Eileen seems scarcely aware of Jewish antecedents, such as the Song of Songs or the books of Ruth and Esther, let alone the Jewish and Arabic love poetry of medieval Spain, still to be discovered. Yet she has written a masterpiece worthy to stand with these earlier writings in the Jewish tradition, alongside Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962); and perhaps her insistence on the virtues of chastity and faithfulness, so at odds with her contemporaries, owes much to her Jewish upbringing.

The experience of love is both unique and universal, but it changes almost imperceptibly in each generation. Too often it is reflected in recollection, when, for whatever reason it is lost, its intensity dispersed or transformed by memory, as in Proust or the late poems of Thomas Hardy. There are many accounts of love from the two world wars, beginning with Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) and Helen Thomas’s memoirs (1926 and 1931). Diana Athill – Eileen’s exact contemporary, who graduated from Oxford in the same year – may have experienced some of the same emotional highs and lows as Eileen as she corresponded with her fiancé, also in Egypt, but their relationship failed: he betrayed her (Instead of a Letter, 1963) and the letters themselves are lost. One of the nearest accounts in both time and place is Laurence Whistler’s numinous The Initials in the Heart (1964) about his love for the actress Jill Furse in the early years of the war, her death and his subsequent grieving for the rest of his life. But that too is about loss, and, like Athill’s account, is written twenty years after the event in an attempt to assuage his grief.

The one thing that such historical narratives lack, however personal they are, is ignorance of the future, and so they cannot capture the vividness of living in the present as this book does. This is what makes Eileen Alexander’s letters such an immense literary discovery. It is a description of love as it unfolds, ‘suspended between unborn tomorrow & dead yesterday’, as she wrote in the middle of war, an emotion as it is experienced by a young woman day by day, existing in a moment of history, unique to its time but universal in its meaning.

Historical Introduction by David Crane

On 19 July 1939, as Europe drifted towards war, a short report from the police courts under the mildly sardonic heading ‘DIFFERENT TYPE OF STUDENT HAD SIMILAR SORT OF ACCIDENT’ appeared in the inside pages of the Cambridge Daily News. ‘When a research student at Cambridge University,’ the piece began, ‘was summoned at the Maidenhead Borough Police Court on Monday for alleged dangerous driving and for failing to conform to a “Halt” sign at Braywick cross-roads on June 29th, he said to the magistrates, “I want to persuade you that I am not one of those reckless undergraduates about whom you have heard from time to time. I have already spent four years at Cambridge University, having gained a State Scholarship and two other scholarships and am now beginning my fifth year of study as a research student. During the four years I have been there, I have held various positions of responsibility in the life of the university, and have never come into contact with the Cambridge police or other authorities at all. I am not just a reckless undergraduate, but a research student of four years.”’

‘It was an accident that might happen to anyone,’ he told the court – the car roof was down, the sun was in his eyes, the road unfamiliar – but that was probably not a wise line to take. ‘It was alleged in evidence,’ the report went on, that he had driven over a major junction ‘at colossal speed’, smashed into a car coming from his right on the main Maidenhead to Windsor road, spinning his car over onto the far side of the road twenty-eight feet away and hurling his ‘lady passenger … herself a Cambridge student’ out of the passenger seat and onto the tarmac.

The ‘lady passenger … on her way to London to meet her parents who were coming home from Egypt the next day’ was Eileen Alexander, and the driver – banned from driving for a year, fined £3 and ordered to pay costs – was the Liverpool-born son of devoutly Jewish parents, with a double-first in classics and psychology, called Gershon Ellenbogen, the recipient of these letters. At the time the case came to court Eileen was in Maidenhead hospital, slowly and painfully recovering from her injuries, her nose and collarbone broken, her teeth and left eye-socket damaged, her face bruised and swollen.

If there was one event in her life, however, that Eileen would not have seen undone it was that car crash. She had first met Gershon Ellenbogen in the summer of 1938 but it was the accident that changed their lives, turning a friendship that might have naturally ended with their Cambridge days into the all-consuming love affair celebrated in these letters.

Eileen’s remarkably forgiving letter from her hospital bed, with which this volume opens, was just the first trickle in an unstoppable flood of words that passed between them over the long years of war. At some stage Gershon’s letters to her were either lost or destroyed, but he preserved hers to the end of his life, more than a thousand of them in all, written from air-raid shelters and office desks, on buses and station platforms, in hotel foyers and under hair-dryers, in that minuscule hand of hers that could have damaged stronger eyesights than Gershon’s.

Like the lovers in a poem of Donne’s – a God in her pantheon second only to Shakespeare – Eileen lived through Gershon, happy only when she was writing to him or when a letter from him arrived to obliterate the space between them. In many ways the letters are closer to a diary than love letters, and closer still to an uninhibited and unstoppable stream of consciousness than either – a ‘complete chronicle’ of her life, waking and sleeping, as she put it – with that ‘little room’ of Donne’s lovers that she inhabited, peopled with a wonderful array of characters and incident.

Even were these letters less brilliantly written they would still be of historical interest for the people Eileen knew, from wartime cabinet ministers, financiers, soldiers, philanthropists and art collectors to some of the major figures in the Zionist movement and the future State of Israel. She was lucky to have been part of a very bright Cambridge set, and yet it is just as much the London beyond her friends and family, the London of chance meetings in cinema queues and Lyons Corner Houses, of overheard snatches of conversations in restaurants and shelters – the London of the Blitz – that gives her letters their life and their colour.

These letters – vibrant, intimate, joyous, dark, angry, obsessive, neurotic, generous, scurrilous and very, very funny by turns – can speak for themselves, but something needs to be said of the remarkable woman who wrote them.

Eileen Helen Alexander was born in Cairo on 13 April 1917, the oldest of three children of Vicky Mosseri and Alec Alexander, a much-loved and highly successful South African-born and Cambridge-educated Cairo barrister of impoverished Polish Jewish parents. While it was from her father that Eileen inherited her intellectual rigour and fierce attachment to Cambridge, her Italian Jewish mother’s influence was equally marked. Each summer the Alexanders would escape the Cairo heat for the Highlands of Scotland and London’s Mayfair Hotel, but it was as ‘a poor little rich girl’, surrounded by the uncles, aunts and cousins of her mother’s sprawling, immensely wealthy, and interrelated Mosseri family that she spent her cosseted and unhappy childhood. ‘I think I should inform you that she is a very brilliant daughter of a very brilliant father,’ Eileen’s headmaster at the Cairo English School began a letter in support of her application to Girton in the summer of 1934 – a reference that tellingly says more about her parents than it does Eileen:

Mr Alexander is a Jew and Mrs Alexander is a member of the Mosseri family, one of the principal Jewish families in Central Europe and the Near East. She also is a woman of very great ability and the widest education … Mrs Alexander is extremely particular, not to say old-fashioned, in the upbringing of her daughter and until the time comes for her to go to Cambridge she would, I know, hesitate to send her to England alone or leave her there after her own departure … Eileen, herself … hopes to be called to the Bar and it is her ambition eventually to enter Parliament.

If ever one heard the voice and ambitions of the parent rather than the child it is in that last sentence, but if Alec Alexander had already mapped out the future for his daughter, Eileen had other ideas. When ‘I was about sixteen,’ she wrote later,

my father hauled me off to Cambridge to see the Mistress & the Director of Studies in Law (I knew I was going to read English but Dad refused to believe anything so revolutionary – so, in spite of my protests, he arranged that I should be interviewed as a prospective law-student). It was a grilling day in August, I remember. I dressed very carefully in my best clothes to give myself confidence. (I was very frightened) Dad took one look at me & said that he wasn’t going to be a party to the prejudicing of my chances – by letting me appear before women of High Living & Thinking, with short-sleeves (it was, as I have said before, a grilling day in August) and looking as though I were an associate of the doubtful revels of Brighter Mayfair. He ransacked my wardrobe, while I stood by, crying – and drew forth a knitted jersey which I kept for fishing in Scotland – a very old skirt and a pair of hearty shoes – and said ‘wear those’. I did – and cried all the way to Cambridge … We had an uneventful interview with the Mistress – but I recovered my self-respect with the D of S in Law. She and Dad were obviously twin souls. They discussed highly technical points of International Law for a long time – while I sat languidly staring out of the window. Then she turned to me & asked where my particular interest in the Law lay … I said – nowhere – I was going to read English. She drew herself up to her full height, turned a cold eye on my father & asked him why we were seeing her if that was the position. He had nothing to say in answer to that & we withdrew hastily.

It would be another two years before Eileen finally escaped parents, siblings and a Cairo she had grown to hate, but in the October of 1936 she finally had her wish and left to study English at Cambridge. The official college photograph of the Girton entrants for that year shows the young woman whom Gershon would have first met, uncomfortably perched second from the right in the third row from the back, a nineteen-year-old who looks little more than half that age, a schoolgirl ‘bent on celibacy’, as she put it, and still recognisably the same physically awkward, emotionally uncertain adolescent her father had dragged to the Girton interview two years before.

If this is nothing like the whole story – in a college full of ‘Amazonian clergyman’s daughters with bulging, scrawny legs’ she was happy enough to play the ‘Mosseri card’ when it suited – it is worth keeping in mind this Eileen because for all the brilliance and intellectual swagger of the letters this is the young woman who wrote them. She had come up to Cambridge, too, with every hope of emulating her father’s dazzling record, but if a ‘second’ in ‘Prelims’ was not disgrace enough for an Alexander, she had spent the summer of 1938 – ‘ill with anxiety’ from her father’s ‘intellectual demands’ – recovering in the Evelyn Nursing Home from a duodenal ulcer which had stopped her even sitting the Part I of her English Tripos.

It was a low period in her life, brightened only by her first meeting with Gershon, but a year later redemption had come. As she set off to meet her parents with Gershon driving her car, ‘Semiramis’, it was to give her father the news that she had gained one of only three firsts awarded that year to women in the English Tripos. She had also won a college prize, and with a place at Cambridge to begin research with the promise of some teaching, her academic future seemed assured. All she had ever wanted as she grew up, she said, was to be a Cambridge don, and now there seemed nothing to stop her.

We first meet Eileen in July 1939, recovering in hospital, her hopes for the future still alive in spite of a worsening situation in Europe. When she is well enough to travel she goes for the summer to the family’s holiday house near Drumnadrochit, high above Loch Ness, and it is not until 23 August, the same day that the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact is signed, that the first half-fearful, half-comic references to the outside world break in on her letters. From this point, as it becomes clear that there is to be no second Munich, the fragile quiet that had held since Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in the spring unravels at frightening speed. On 24 August, Parliament passes an Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, giving the government control over virtually every aspect of national life. On the 25th, Britain and France reaffirm their commitment to Polish independence and territorial integrity and, six days later, in the early hours of 1 September, German troops cross the border into Poland. By 6 a.m. that same day Warsaw will be under air attack and Britain and France left facing the consequences of their Polish alliance.

1
Drumnadrochit, summer 1939

Monday 17 July Gershon – what everyone seems to have forgotten is that if I hadn’t asked you to drive me to London that Tuesday, you would never have had your arm broken & your life thoroughly disorganized for a considerable period of time – Furthermore if I had directed you rightly we’d never have got into that damned death trap of a side-road.

I have been brooding on this for a very long time Gershon, and at nights I have lain trying & trying to recall something about the accident but I simply can’t remember a word, so I shall not even be able to help you by corroborating your evidence.

Whichever way the verdict goes, please remember that I feel, absolutely certainly and sincerely, that the accident was not down to your carelessness but to pure chance, and that I owe you nothing but profound gratitude for the friendship and loyalty you have shown me during all these weeks of illness.

The very best of luck Gershon – I am looking forward to seeing you after this irksome business is all over, today.

Wednesday 19 July Talking of my appearance – assuming (rather dangerously – for I never can tell with you whether what you say is what you mean & vice versa – as I think I’ve said before) that you were serious when you asked me to give you a photograph of me – I asked my mother whether we had any copies of the Family Features still in our possession – but, no, it seems that all 24 are scattered among Alexander’s and Mosseri’s over an area stretching from Cape Town to Vancouver – so, alas, I cannot send you one of those, but must wait until my transitory (as opposed to permanent) blemishes have gone, & then have one done especially for you at one of those kind misty photographers who define one’s eyelash, a shoulder curve, & the tip of an ear, and have the rest enveloped in a kindly greyish haze. (I mean that you shall have a photograph of me if, though I can hardly credit it, you really want such a useless commodity.)

Friday 21 July My face is now fully exposed to the world & it looks like the rear elevation of a baboon. This is very disconcerting, as it gets no better & I am going to be driven very slowly to London on Monday for X-ray treatment. I’m so glad I didn’t show it to you on Monday – it is perfectly horrible & I don’t want anyone to see me while it’s like this. I do hope they’ll find something to cure it – it looks like bright pink – and – yellow leprosy to me but the Doctors will never listen to a lay-diagnosis.

Friday 28 July Yesterday my parents went to Cambridge to choose lodgings for me, and I had a lovely evening when they came back, listening to their accounts of all the people they met, (while calling on Miss Bradbrook in Girton) who told them how clever I was – D’you think I shall ever get used to the idea of being clever, Gershon, or believe that I really am? (The odd thing is that though I don’t feel in the least convinced of it myself, I love other people thinking it.) Apparently they have found magnificent rooms for me – and quite near the Evelyn too, just in case!

Aubrey sent me the Cambridge Daily News with its beastly little mean-spirited lead-line & account of the accident. I think it would be a good idea if you had a Medieval Shivering of Lances with the Editor while I hid beneath a bush – prodding him in the behind with a two-handed sword – but this is as you please, of course.

Yesterday afternoon Joan Aubertin and her fiancé came to see me – what with seeing Ian for the first time since the end of term & having someone at last to whom she could expand about her first (how well I knew that feeling before I. & May’s party!) Joan hopped about like an electric wire, & I was simply prickling with nerves – so we wore each other out – with poor Ian acting as a passive buffer state – you’d have laughed at us, I think, but he found us a little wearing – though he was the soul of good-nature. We talked about our Firsts first (of course) and then gossiped as nastily as could be about our friends at Girton – and we both felt young again – which was refreshing after all this time.

I am getting more & more active every day & Dad peers at me heartily every morning & says how much better I look – which is discouraging – because I don’t feel really robust yet, and I like a little tender sympathy – not a brisk satisfaction with my excellent progress. Ah! Parents!

Dicky is in our midst once more. At present he is concealing his fiendlike personality beneath a well-bred and charm-dripping exterior, for some reason known only to his Machiavellian self. My parents have swelled several inches with pride in his ‘reformed’ self. He has further won their hearts by being second in his form for the term – which is an improvement on a steady record of last place. Personally I feel he is brewing something perfectly awful & is waiting to get to Drumnadrochit to spring it on us all. However, perhaps I am wrong after all – I hope so. If an explosion occurs in Scotland I’ll send you an expurgated account of it. Dicky’s language, on the occasions when his brow is blackened with wrath, is not repeatable.

Wednesday 2 August The train journey from Edinburgh to Inverness (180 miles) took longer than the journey from London to Edinburgh (410 miles) & we arrived an hour late. And the jolting was phenomenal, even for a branch line Scottish train.

But all this was nothing to the 15-mile drive from Inverness to Drumnadrochit. We have an old Ford 8 here which Dad uses for fishing & which has no springs at all, to mention. The road from Inverness to the village of Drumnadrochit is very good, but no surface can soothe the vibrations of our old Ford – and as for the last three miles – from the village to our house – Christina Rossetti’s poem, ‘Does the Road wind uphill all the way?’ was inspired by this very stretch of squelching mud – to call it a road would be forever to debase the word.

So I arrived thinking my head was cracked in two & I looked around at the familiar drawing-room furniture with a jaundiced eye – & thought with loathing of five weeks here without electric light – the shrill voices of my family converging on me from every angle – and the eternal gurglings of drain-pipes in the bathroom next door. This is a squat, grey little house – & looks solid enough – but it must be built of twigs because every sound made anywhere in the house can be heard everywhere else. It reminds me of Chaucer’s House of Rumour.1

But, for all this, I feel better this morning – & I look better too.

Thursday 3 August Oh! dear, Gershon, (observe the comma – I am not being forward!) I wish you weren’t so much cleverer than I am. When I first knew you, I was always in a state of waiting breathlessly for you to find out that I wasn’t clever, & erase me from the tables of your brain for ever – then I thought oh: well you must have found out by this time & were kindly overlooking it – but the more I saw of you, the more things I discovered you could do that I couldn’t – you could understand music, and pass your driving test at the second attempt, and play games, & follow the Hebrew in the prayer book without using your finger, & be forward without being impertinent, & sing in the street without being foolish – & all kinds of other things too – but this last display of versatility is too much – you can type as well – and in two colours – and two different sizes! What can I do but say humbly that it’s been an honour to know you?

Are you going to be at Ismay’s wedding or will you be travelling home on that day? (Surely if you wait until the 13th you will be using a public conveyance on the New Year which would be horribly un-kosher of you and put you out of Beth Din2 spitting range for ever!) I shall have a new tooth for that day – (my dentist has promised me most solemnly to have it ready) & it will be my first public appearance since the accident. So if you aren’t there I shall probably cry – but no matter! I was very perturbed to hear that Ismay had chosen a Rabbi not labelled by Beth Din either – How awful! But I feel sure that she’ll give such an air of respectability to her life of sin, that we’ll all be shaking our heads and declaring, in about a year’s time, that we must have made a mistake, after all.

Saturday 5 August On Friday I had a beautiful surprise. The front-door bell rang – in itself an exciting event here – because our nearest neighbour lives three miles away – and few people will venture their lives or cars on the up-winding mud track which is the only means of getting at us. It was Hamish! The fact that Charlotte was with him daunted me for a moment, (he is not at his enchanting best with others, when Charlotte is there) but we got onto a Higher Plane at once, whither Charlotte could not follow us – so she just stood & gaped & put my conversational style down to concussion & Hamish’s to humouring the patient. He was very concerned for you & sent you his regards.

Tuesday 8 August It is charming of you to look forward to my letters with ‘unreasonable impatience’ – that is exactly how I look forward to yours – though I’d never have been able to express it so aptly myself – nor so prettily! There is nothing more to tell you about my collar bone. You knew it was dislocated, didn’t you? If not I can’t think how I forgot to tell you – you must have distracted my attention!

Your suggestion about our being seen together at Ismay’s wedding did not surprise me much, after your startling revelations about Mr Zeigler, D. Machonochie and the Prosecuting Solicitor – but I was mildly shocked to realize that things had gone so far, that we wouldn’t be able to go to a huge reception – and there nod to one another in friendly greeting & perhaps exchange a casual word, without giving rise to whisperings & head-waggings of the kind you suggest. I see that it is going to take us a long time to Live This Down! This is, in its way, a pity, but I think we’ll survive it, don’t you?

I was relieved to read your delicately worded confession that you would be in Cambridge next year – (this is an understatement – but I feel I must learn to be a little more formal and less forward with you, before we meet at Ismay’s wedding, in view of all the inquisitive eyes that will be upon us there).

Saturday 12 August On Monday the family circle will be widened by the inclusion of my cousin Jean & Aunt Teddy, & from then, onwards, we shall have visitors the whole time, which will break the monotony of purely rural occupations a little, I hope. We expect to be in London on September 6th – & on the 15th my parents are going to Paris. They are trying to persuade me to go with them – but I loathe the Channel – hateful, bulging, oily, green horror – and feel disinclined for the French, at present – so I hope to be able to persuade them to let me go & stay in the country with friends until the beginning of term. Pray for me. I am so tired of la vie de famille.

Please write and laugh at me for thinking you are cross with me, Gershon – (if you are angry you can laugh satirically, or sardonically if you prefer it – and if you are not, you can laugh comfortingly – but please laugh!).

Monday 14 August You know, it is a strange thing, but everyone has suddenly started to say kind things about my appearance since the accident. It is rather like the kind of thing which is raked up about the character of the deceased in an obituary notice. Joan Aubertin was in Girton the other day, & she met Maureen Stack & Jo Manton – (d’you know either of them? No? Neither do I – but we know one another by sight). They gossiped about this & that & apparently my injuries were mentioned – and they said they hoped my face wasn’t spoilt. It was such a lovely serene face & reminded them of the Monna Lisa!!! (No, Gershon, they were not mistaking me for someone else – they know me very well by sight.) Joan retailed this in a letter to my father with a sardonic chuckle behind every word – but he lapped it all up & was simply delighted, & came & waved the letter at me.

Because I feel full of the milk of human kindness, I’ll concur in your judgement of Nachman. He bores me & always will – but that, as I think I told you, is because he never laughs at me – it casts no slur upon his character or intelligence. Lois is another matter altogether.

Thursday 17 August I had a letter from Sir Robert Waley Cohen, asking me to spend a week with him at Honeymead, from Sept 15th–21st. He says, graciously, that if I am not well enough to ride I can follow the hunt in the car. (what? what?) (Note the delicate manner in which he assumes that I can ride (as a matter of fact I can – but he has no reason to know that). Obviously all the Best People do ride, & if he didn’t think I was one of the Best People, he wouldn’t have asked me to stay – which makes me laugh a lot – but I think I shall go – it will spare me the threatened visit to Paris – and I shall love writing and telling you all about it. It will be a new experience. I have known Sir Robert and his two sons for many years (they have filled the ground floor of the Great Portland Street Synagogue on Yom Kippur while Mummy & Sophie Tucker & I have been filling the gallery, ever since I can remember) but I never suspected him of this pukkah strain. I shall never be quite the same again.

Saturday 19 August It was nice of you not to be sceptical about the Monna Lisa comparison. (Monna was a 13thC. Florentine abbreviation for Madonna – in fact an exact translation of m’lady – and so although I know all about how the vulgar herd spell this (conjectural) name for Leonardo’s Gioconda, I stick to Monna which is pedantic but Right.)

Tuesday 22 August Hamish came to see me on Sunday – (Charlotte is back in Edinburgh). I told him politely, but with a subtle inflection of enquiry in my voice, that Charlotte had written to me. He gave me a long and involved explanation of this phenomenon – (his story is that she got so tired of the sound of my name (!) that she got quite nasty about me. Hamish explained to her, with dignity, that he and I were on a Higher Plane – and finally brought her to see me – whereupon she was immediately reassured – one look at me was enough to convince her that here was no rival for her charms – and her letter was a subtle (?) tribute to her restored faith in Hamish – and her Absolute Confidence in me). It was a good story, told in Hamish’s inimitable voice & enlivened by Hamish’s inimitable mannerisms but I doubt if we’ve got to the core of the matter, even now.

Wednesday 23 August I wish I were a Cabinet Minister, Gershon – I’d have been so clever – nothing like this could ever have happened.3 When Italy attacked Abyssinia, I’d have put two nasty, bristling battle cruisers across the Suez Canal (strictly illegal, of course – but oh! what a gesture) and then I’d have cocked a snook at Mussolini (I never liked his face anyway) and I’d have written a rude note to Hitler saying that I knew all about why he was holding Mussolini’s hand – so as to keep his mind off Austria.

And now look what a nasty mess we’re in – all because no-one thought of including me in the Cabinet. It gives rise to ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’.4 Ah! well, let’s eat, drink & be merry for tomorrow we die – tis a maxim tremendous but trite.

As a matter of fact, I’m frightened. I just wanted to tell someone I was. Let’s not mention it again. You’re not thinking of sprouting into a handsome territorial, or anything, are you? don’t – darling – (not that I really think you would – but I’m being Forward and, (I hope) appealing, just in case you had considered it).

My aunt is clucking helplessly. Jean keeps on expecting a wire announcing her instant mobilization. My father prophecies a cataclysmic collapse in Germany, after which everything will be All Right. (He believes the Russo-German pact to be a wild clutch at a swirling-away straw by a drowning Fuhrer.) I go out & stir up rabbits – I prefer rabbits to political arguments. What’s done is done. She wept because she had no more to say.

Dear me, this is a very unsatisfactory letter. The truth is that I want to be comforted.

Friday 25 August In case of war I think my mother and the children will stay here. Dad will go to London to see in what way he can be of use, and I have written to Leslie HB’s5 secretary asking her advice as to what kind of job I’m fitted for. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to offend the aesthetic sensibilities of my friends or the nation by blossoming forth as a WAT Or a WREN Or a WAAF or even a land-worker.

My father doesn’t think there’ll be a war. He bases his belief on that old saw about right triumphing in the end – and also on a conviction that the Führer is played out.

Dicky is getting more and more insufferably insolent. I’d like to beat him hard. I wish you were here to do it for me – as a matter of fact I wish you were here – (but that is a forward admission, & quite by the way). There’s a sort of heat-vapour of suppressed hysteria in the house – which makes me feel I want to scream & scream. It is no-body’s fault – but it’s Hellish. Your letters are the only things that happen, to make me smile.

I blush, Gershon, I really do, to think of the number of letters from me which will await you on your return from Liverpool. (Though I am forward, I am not brazen – yet.)

Saturday 26 August Old Sir Robert, my-host-that-was-to-have-been, thinks that his house party on Exmoor will probably have to be cancelled – so it looks as though I shall not follow the hunt in a car – with the dowagers – after all. I shall, by then, probably be immured in some ‘destination unknown’ with the War Office.

And what of Ismay’s wedding? I fancy that in the event of War, she will be gathered to her Charles’ manly bosom sooner than either of them expected. But I’m not going to talk about war any longer – I’m tired of it – and you must be too, by now.

I’ve just been downstairs listening to the news. I think the suppression of Neville Henderson’s6 message from Hitler is very sinister. I hope we’re not going to have another Munich – but I don’t think so. Chamberlain (silly old cockerel) wouldn’t dare do it again – but you know the old saw: ‘If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly, fly again.’ (This is not original. I shouldn’t like you to think I am cleverer than I am.)

A heartening sight met me in the drawing room. Lionel – plunged deep in knitting. He offers no explanation of this phenomenon. He just sits, all wrapped up in yarn – knitting frenziedly – only coming out of his reverie occasionally to make trenchant comments on the news. Dicky is now not on speaking terms with anyone in the house except Lionel. He refuses to wash or brush his hair or change his clothes – or wear the requisite amount of undergarments. He goes about in a navy polo-jersey & navy shorts and Wellingtons – in & out of the house – his hair standing on end in wiry tangles. Occasionally he tramps about intoning a tuneless trill of sound – or murmuring ‘What the bloody Hell’ to himself in an aggressive manner. Otherwise he holds no communication with man or beast. Yes, Gershon, we are an odd household.

Dad is certain that there will be peace with honour. Well! if he’s right, we shall meet again at Ismay’s wedding in just over a fortnight, sha’n’t we? If he’s wrong – ‘Quoth the raven “Nevermore” –’7 or quite possibly, at any rate – but this is vapouring. Take no notice of it.

Monday 28 August I had an agitated letter from Joyce by the same post as your two. If there is a rent in the clouds – she is coming up here at once – otherwise she will be evacuating school-children for her Country.

I liked the fatherly touch about ‘one oughtn’t really to worry about individual skins’. Of course one oughtn’t, mon cher, but one does – and the more shocked one is by the unethicalness of worrying, the more one worries, because in addition to worrying, one worries about one’s own shortcomings which make one worry – if you see what I mean – and I shouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. Anyway, (and I say this defiantly, though firmly) I’m glad you’re not a Territorial – though I don’t suppose that will prevent the War Office (damn it lustily) from sending you off to prod Germans in the rear from the Maginot Line, while they are busy trying to squeeze into the corridor, if & when war breaks out.

Of course, I was saddened to hear that you had had my blood cleaned off your suit – but I do see the position. It would have been a fine gesture to arrive at Ismay’s wedding all spattered with it – but it might have caused Comment or even Gossip – and then – Reputation, Reputation, we’d have lost our Reputation – which would have been a pity – but it was uncommonly civil of you to say you wouldn’t let anyone else bleed on it. If anyone tries, just push her onto the ground, and let her bleed on that!

I haven’t had an answer to my letter to Miss Sloane (Leslie’s Secretary) yet – but I pressed obligingly but firmly for a job either with the War Office or the Censorship, on the outbreak of War – (if such there be). I could not possibly spend the illimitable duration of a modern war in the family bosom – we would worry one another around in circles all the time, until one, or all of us, dropped down dead, from nervous exhaustion. If I have a paid job in the government, I shall have to go where I’m told, and no-one will be able to do anything about it, which sounds incredibly selfish – but actually will be better for all of us.

(By the way, I hope our Aubrey is safely back from Geneva.8 Joyce has had two post-cards from him since he left England. I have had one letter – which of us is better off? It is hard to day. I wrote him a very silly letter, to which I have not, as yet, had any answer – but I hate to think of him perishing in a mined Swiss Mountain Pass – or being drowned by conquering Nazis in Le Lac Léman. Oh! dear, what a woeful thought.)

Wednesday 29 August If there is no war, we leave here next Tuesday evening and hope to arrive in London on Wednesday morning – (bless we the Lord. Let’s praise & magnify him for ever, if we are able to proceed according to plan). Excavations on my tooth are scheduled to begin on Thursday 7th – but I don’t think my chin will be quite itself again in time for Ismay’s wedding. It is getting paler – but slowly. Eventually I think it will disappear altogether (I mean the redness – not (I hope) the chin!) but not for some time, yet.

Friday 31 August Your letter has just arrived, Gershon. Your reprimand was more than justified and, in the circumstances most kindly expressed. From now onward, the expression ‘I shall never be the same again’ will be wiped from my epistolary slate for ever, though it is only fair to warn you that, after taking this drastic step, I shall never be quite the same again! And there is a condition attached. ‘Sweet-darling’ must be immediately erased from your vocabulary. It does not suit you – or me – and it is not funny.

I thought, like you, that we had the Führer in a corner – but now I don’t know. I don’t understand anything, & I want to say – I’m glad you only feel a healthy glow. My inside is now minced as well as mashed. Thank you for your solicitous advice about what I should do in the event of war – (in this, you and my parents are at one – we have established an armed neutrality on the subject – there’s no point in arguing with them until I hear from Miss Sloane). I could not possibly stay here more than a week or two if there was a war. I am perfectly healthy now – but in a very dangerous state of restlessness because I have nothing to do. When I say dangerous, I mean that I haven’t forgotten that nine weeks ago I was sure I was going mad, (this state of mind was only indirectly due to the accident – ever since I was eleven or twelve, at all times when my mind was not fully occupied with work which was tough & impersonal, I have watched myself fearfully for signs of a lack of mental equilibrium – I don’t know why – I just did) and unless I have some very definite and absorbing work to do, soon – I shall get worse.

I had a letter from Jean this morning. She has been mobilized – at which she is not amused – nor am I, for that matter. As a member of the auxiliary air force, she will spend the entire duration of any war training recruits at humming aerodromes all over the country. She is the only one of my 52 first cousins (except Victor, whose face I slapped, but with whom I am very friendly for all that – which, on the whole is magnanimous of him) of whom I am really fond. Victor is in Corsica – no-one quite knows why – but he’s like that. I fancy, if there’s a war he’ll have to stay there. As he has literary aspirations, he will probably write a book – after all Boswell did.

Now that Ismay’s wedding is post-poned, (sorry – wrong word – I mean now that it is a ‘fait accompli’) I presume that we shall not leave Clunemore on the 5th, unless something absolutely definite happens one way or another before then – but I don’t know. If the status quo is maintained, during the next few days, perhaps you would very graciously go on writing to this address – also, if war breaks out. If anything unexpected happens in the way of a Peace conference or the like – then I expect my address as from Tuesday, 5th will be ‘The Mayfair Hotel, Berkeley Square, London W1’ (Note the forward manner in which I now just take it for granted that you are going to write to me! Oh! Indubitably, I am not what I was! Hubris again, Eileen – oh! Nemesis is close at hand – beware).

Oh! by the way, to revert to this photograph question. When we last met, you asked me for a photograph of my countenance, if and when it returned to its old ‘chubby’ symmetry. (Ill as I was, I was touched at your choosing the word ‘chubby’ in preference to ‘fat’. These are actions that a king might show.) On the strength of this request, I bullied you into having your photograph taken for me. Now I feel in duty bound to ‘fulfil my obligations’ if you wish to hold me to them. (It most certainly is not too late to withdraw – negotiations have hardly started. I can’t even have proofs taken, until my broken tooth is restored – but let me know, and I shall, in all my best, obey you, sir.)

1 A reference to ‘The House of Fame’, a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400).

2 Beth Din or ‘house of judgement’ is a rabbinical court of Judaism.

3 In 1935 Mussolini had brutally invaded Abyssinia in defiance of the League of Nations, driven the Emperor Haile Selassie into exile and proclaimed a new Roman Empire. Fearful of war with Italy at a time of the growing German threat, Britain, like France, had shied away from effective sanctions and allowed Italian warships unhindered access to the Suez Canal.

4 From ‘Intimations of Immortality’ by William Wordsworth (1770–1850).

5 Leslie Hore-Belisha, Secretary of State for War. An old friend of the Alexanders, he had holidayed with them at Drumnadrochit.

6 Neville Henderson, British ambassador to Germany 1937–39 and a supporter of appeasement. The telegrams reported Hitler’s determination to invade Poland and blame England for any consequences.

7 From The Raven, a narrative poem by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49).

8 On the outbreak of war, Aubrey Eban was at the 21st Zionist Congress in Geneva.

September 1939–April 1940

With the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, war had become all but inevitable. On the same day that German planes bombed Warsaw, Britain’s army was mobilised, and as the evacuation of mothers and children from major cities began, and London sank into the darkness of the first blackout, the country waited every hour for the declaration of war that still did not come.

At 9 a.m. on Sunday 3 September, after another two days prevaricating, Chamberlain finally bowed to Cabinet and parliamentary pressure, and an ultimatum was delivered to the German government. At 11 a.m. it expired unanswered, and the country finally, and unheroically, stumbled into war. Six hours later, an even tardier France followed suit. The long ‘half-time’ of peace was over.

This would be the last summer the whole Alexander family would spend together at Drumnadrochit. That Sunday morning they sat around the wireless and listened to the prime minister’s broadcast to the nation, and as their holiday neighbour, Mrs Ironmonger – an aspiring Lady Novelist who had tormented Eileen with her unpublished manuscript – hurried back to Liverpool and ambulance duties, and her son to his Territorial unit, a frustrated Eileen was left in her Highlands limbo, with her parents, brothers, family nurse and the Alexanders’ customary gaggle of hangers-on, wondering what she was going to do.

In these first weeks of the ‘Phoney War’, when no German bombers came, and the RAF dropped leaflets on Germany, and city evacuees drifted back to their homes, a curious sense of anti-climax settled over Britain. On 4 September the first advance units of the British Expeditionary Force had sailed for France, but the only real fighting was taking place a thousand miles to the east, where a doomed Poland fought on alone.

When more than a month later Eileen finally returned with her mother to London, before going on to Cambridge to begin her research on Arthurian Romance, it was certainly the normality of home-front life rather than its strangeness, that would have struck her. The Emergency Powers Act (Defence) had given the government dictatorial powers over the whole gamut of national life, and yet while barrage balloons floated above London, air-raid wardens patrolled the blacked-out streets and everyone now carried ration books, identity cards and gas masks, the cinemas were again open, rationing – except for petrol – had not yet begun, the gas and bomb attacks had not materialised, and ‘everything that was supposed to collapse’, as Eileen’s great friend Aubrey Eban recalled, ‘went on exactly as before’.

It was the same when Eileen moved into her rooms at ‘Girton Corner’ in the middle of October, with Cambridge very much the Cambridge she knew and many of her old friends still up. On the outbreak of war, Parliament had brought in conscription for all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one, but Gershon’s age group had not yet been called up and he was back at King’s, studying law, starring in union debates alongside Aubrey, and exchanging notes and letters with Eileen, just three miles down the road, as if the war did not exist.

War, however, was closing in. On the day that Eileen and her mother had left Drumnadrochit for the Mayfair Hotel in Berkeley Square, Poland finally succumbed, and German armies began their move from east to west. In December the Battle of the River Plate gave the British public a rare victory but the New Year brought little else to cheer. Abortive plans to help Finland and simultaneously deny Germany Sweden’s iron ore would lead to the chaos and humiliation of the Norway campaign. Merchant losses at sea prefigured the long and desperate fight against the U-boat that lay ahead and by January the first food rationing – sugar, butter, bacon – was introduced. Before the New Year was a week old, too, the Alexanders’ much-loved old friend, Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Secretary of State for War, bitterly at odds with his own generals, had been sacked.

As Eileen prepared to return to Cambridge after the Christmas vacation, across the Channel the BEF dug in along the Belgian border next to their French allies, and waited for an attack they were ill-equipped to resist.

2
‘No time to sit on brood’

Friday 1 September 1939 On hearing Hitler’s ‘peace’ proposals over the wireless last night, I begin to feel a warm glow at the idea of punishing the insolent brute, as well! The beautiful impertinence of the suggestion that – (given twelve months for the dissemination of Nazi propaganda & terrorism in the Corridor) he would like another of those now-notorious cooked plebiscites – is really almost inspired! I don’t think even our simple-minded Neville would fall for that one again, somehow. Do you?

I have now heard from Miss Sloane. There is nothing but clerical work at the War Office for the present – but she advises the Censorship. I should apply immediately, she says & I shall probably have to take an exam, soon. Thank God for that. Can’t you see, Gershon, how I come to life again, at the very prospect of something to do?

I had a pathetic card from Ismay this morning. She is staying in Sussex with Charles. He can’t be far away from London, as he expects to be called up any day.

I have written to the Censorship office, telling them how clever & useful I am, and how silly they’d be not to have me. I intended to write the letter myself, but I turned all bashful at the last minute & couldn’t take the responsibility for such a lot of lies, on my own shoulder – so Dad dictated a gem of a document. If you only knew what a mine of precious ore you’d held, bleeding down the front of your suit, ten weeks ago – you’d never have sent the suit to the cleaners.

I presume that owing to the outbreak of hostilities between Germany & Poland this morning – the declaration that we are at war, will be put before the House this evening.

You are likely to have a great deal to do, and worry about during the next few weeks. Please darling, if you are bothered or busy, don’t attempt to write me long letters. I’d be glad of post-cards – to know how you are, and letters if and when you have time – but I’m no longer an invalid who has to be humoured – and all men who are likely to be conscripted will have to think primarily of themselves now, and not of spoilt & idle women to whom they have already been over-indulgent.

Saturday 2 September We shall not be leaving here on the fifth, and I shall stay here until I have definite work to do – which I hope to God will be soon.

Sunday 3 September We have just been listening to Chamberlain’s announcement that we are at war. There is nothing more to be said except God bless you and keep you, and everyone else who is going to help in blotting out slavery & brutality, from too much sorrow and pain. I’m afraid this sounds banal – but I mean it, Gershon.

Let me have news when you can – because I shall be worrying and wondering, at all times, about the whereabouts and safety of all my friends in vulnerable areas – but once again let me reiterate that a post-card will be enough if you haven’t the time or the inclination for letter-writing.

You must be worrying a great deal about your parents. Has your younger brother been sent away to a place of safety?

Under the new Conscription Act1 – I suppose you will soon have to start training for a commission.

This declaration of war has had an astonishingly Cathartic effect upon me. ‘I have not youth nor age – but, as it were, an after dinner sleep, dreaming of both.’ The rain is coming down in a thin drizzle and there are wisps of fog crossing the tops of the hills. It is very dark.

We are as safe here as we could hope to be anywhere. Don’t worry about me, please. I am getting better astonishingly quickly, and soon, I hope – I shall be perfectly fit to do useful work wherever I can be of help.

I hope you are less thin & tired than when I saw you last. Forgive my clucking (nature will out) but do take a tonic if you’re not – an army marches on its stomach, after all – & people with concave tummies have to crawl along on their ribs – which is uncomfortable.

Good luck, Gershon darling, and (as Miss Sloane said) may we soon meet again in Peace.

Don’t be alarmed at the solemn, not to say sententious, tone of the last part of this letter. I can & shall smile still, but I did want to say just once, quite seriously, what I was thinking. It won’t happen again.

Monday 4 September I hope you weren’t disturbed by the Air Raid Sirens last night. I hope you never will be.

I hear the Government urgently wants Graduate University students (men) urgently for all kinds of work. Mum says they broadcast a request for volunteers, while I was having my walk.

I have a premonition that you were born to be the Brains behind this war – be guided by it, Gershon.

Wednesday 6 September I had another letter from Joyce this morning. She is definitely going back to Girton next term. I think she’s wise. I would do the same, were it not that I feel compelled to try & be as useful as possible – and I shan’t do that by digging myself deeper & deeper into the middle-ages. I simply cannot go on living on my parents any longer – though they would, not only willingly, but gladly, go on supporting me in luxury forever. I have, however, written to the Mistress of Girton,2 asking her if there’s any work I can usefully do in Cambridge – and to Miss Bradbrook. I’d be happier there, than in a strange sea-port, prying into other people’s private letters. But if neither the Censorship nor Girton can make use of me, then I think I’ll write to Dr Weizmann & see if he can include me in his scheme for organizing Jewish brain power!! The old boy is about as fond of me as the Chief Rabbi is (I have found it necessary at times to use the same methods of intimidation upon him – when he comes over the heavy leader and martinet) but surely he won’t allow personal prejudice to interfere with the Public Weal – what d’you think?

I shall only apply to Leslie in the very last resort – if no one else will have me at all – but I’m determined to get some work to do, somewhere – soon.

Now about your air-raid adventure. How damnable! But I really don’t see why you, and millions of other people (many of them a lot more uncontrolled than I am), should be submitted to this kind of experience, while I sit snugly in the North feeling safe. It simply isn’t good enough, Gershon. I’m a physical coward of the first magnitude – but so are thousands of others – it is not customary to pander to fear. No doubt I, like everyone else, would soon get used to the sound of Air Raid Sirens, and the dazzle of incendiary bombs. If being a nice girl entails being regarded by one’s friends as on a mental level with an evacuated schoolchild of tender years & snivelling habits – I wish I weren’t a nice girl. I know I’m not ‘self-composed in crises’ – but it’s about time I learnt to be, & this seems to me a good opportunity to begin.

Sir Robert has now definitely cancelled Exmoor. I am relieved. I don’t think it would have been quite my milieu. Where Joyce would shed grace on the county – I would spread disgrace. She has poise & charm & savoir-faire. Pertness, clucking and tactlessness are very poor substitutes for these – and anyway Old Bob never bothered much about me until I got a first. (As a matter of fact, that’s very unkind, not to say unjust. I withdraw it all.)

Friday 8 September It’s funny that you should refer in your letter to the myriads of first cousins who have a claim on the Alexander hospitality – because only yesterday we had a wire from Jean’s mother to say that we may expect her, (Aunt Teddy), Jean’s sister & Jean’s niece (aged two – Ye Gods!) on Sunday morning. So the family circle is due for expansion soon.

My future was the subject of much discussion yesterday between my parents and myself. They lean towards the suggestion that I should stay here until term begins & then go back to Cambridge for Research as long as they can afford to keep me there. The cultural work of the Nation, says my father with a wide arm-swing, must go on. How I wish my conscience would allow me to believe that they’re right. Other suggestions were that we should all go back to Egypt together as soon as it’s practicable – but I’d see myself dead before submitting to that.

I was very startled at your talking about conscription as though you thought a few months was the maximum length of time, you could hope to be left at liberty. I think it would be fantastic of the government to make a soldier of you – you’d be invaluable in all sorts of other ways – but unless you bring yourself to their notice – they’ll never find out. O mon dieu, quelle vie.

I had a long letter from Ismay yesterday. She had five days of honeymoon – then Charles wrested from her. He’s back again now, with ten days’ leave – then he’s due to go away again – she doesn’t know where or for how long. Poor Ismay – her sang-froid has completely deserted her. She almost clucked (but not quite, because, like Joyce, she’s too dignified ever to sink as low as that, even though she has just cause. I wish I were a little more like my friends).

Thursday 14 September The war has brought solace to one person of our acquaintance, anyway. Joan Friedman. Raphael Loewe has written to tell her that his country calls, but that he’s probably too short-sighted to be of much use. This, after a silence of several months (I suppose he had to work off his patriotic zeal on someone). Dear Joan – though she doesn’t know it, she’s got a Jocasta complex about Raphael (is there such a thing?) You see, she loves him like a mother – but unfortunately she doesn’t realize it – which, in its way, is a pity.

(By the way, darling, are you too short-sighted to be of much use to the British Army? It’s a beautiful thought anyway.)

Friday 15 September Did you ever meet Mrs Crews? She was famous for a number of things. She’s an authority on Judeo-Spanish and is adored by the Loewes, though she has a pretty poor opinion of them. Sidney Berkowitz says she has the nicest legs in Girton. (I’ve never noticed them myself – but I feel that in matters of this kind, Sidney would probably be competent to judge.) She has the worst sherry in Cambridge (3/6d a bottle, and proud of it) and she’s wireless-crazy, & gives as a reason for her separation from her husband that ‘he was a National & Regional man y’know’. She is in the Censorship now. (She was on the reserve staff last September.) So if I did become a censor, I shouldn’t be completely alone. I’m very fond of Mrs Crews.

Saturday 16 September I have just heard, from the mother of a friend of mine, who is a Cameron Highlander (one of the few regiments still to wear kilts, even in battle), that he has been issued with a pair of gas-proof pants to wear under his kilt. (The official army name is ‘proofed nether garments’.) The legs unroll to make protective gaiters which are buttoned under the instep! Let it not be said that England doesn’t look after her warrior sons.

Monday 18 September My future seems to be taking shape – but (as I may have said once or twice before) no man should be declared happy until he is dead. The censorship doesn’t want me at present – but if I’ll fill in a form all about the colour of my hair & my mother’s nationality and take their exam at my own convenience – they’ll put me on their waiting list. The Mistress of Girton says – come to our arms my beamish girl3 – there are, at present, no specialized war jobs for girls under 25 – so stick to Research. I’ve written back and said that if she’d arrange for me to live in college, I might consider it. My father expands & talks about the cultural work of the nation – a theme he’s expatiated on before. (Spare a prayer, in these Holy Days, Gershon, that the college will have a room for me. Your influence above, is more pronounced than mine, I feel sure. You don’t hare off to Prunier’s to eat curried crab as soon as you set foot in London – nor do you go hatless to synagogue – nor are you saucy to the Chief Rabbi. Any request from you would doubtless be listened to with courteous attention.)

Later I had a long and wholly delightful letter from Aubrey, and one from Miss Bradbrook saying – Come back. Aubrey, like the rest of us, has offered his services to the Government and is finding uncertainty wearing and discouraging. He asks nicely whether I know anything of you.

Offering my services as a sandbag is a very good idea. I felt sure that your fertile invention would produce some really helpful suggestions about my future – and it did! I shall set about it at once.

Aunt Teddy, her daughter and granddaughter are now in our midst. The child is surrounded all the time by hordes of clucking women, asking her if she loves them (poor little devil), but she likes me best, because I take no notice of her & she keeps asking me to go for walks with her!

Oh! Gershon, I want to Research in Cambridge – but there are grave difficulties. The college can’t house me – and my mother sends feathers flying with her clucking at the thought of my living in lodgings with bombs banging about. (The beautiful rooms she’d chosen for me are now out of the question on financial grounds – and I’d have to live where the College sent me – and like it.) My parents and I are going to have a session to consider the problem, this afternoon. I’ll let you know the results.

My parents and I have now sat down to this question of Cambridge or not Cambridge. It is damned difficult. My father says, ‘We cannot commit ourselves,’ (with term 2 weeks away!) My mother says, ‘If they’d have you in College, you could leave tomorrow if you liked,’ – and points out that I’d be as miserable as sin in strange lodgings – not being able to go out at night, and having to sit alone in a probably hideous room – going mad. Then she cries at having to oppose my dearest wish – at this point I cry too – at having to oppose her – and my father relents and says, ‘Well, write to the college and ask them what sort of lodgings are available – and where – and then we’ll see’, – and then the wireless announces the sinking of the air-craft carrier Courageous4 – and Dad says, ‘Look at those poor people,’ – and I do – and feel a cad, & cry a bit more.

Yesterday, I cured all my humours by cleaning my vinaigrettes.5 I haven’t had the heart to look at them since the war started. They are looking lovelier than ever – bless them. May they never be subjected to the ordeal of fire.

Thursday 21 September Today or tomorrow I expect to hear from Girton whether they will allow me to live in the gardener’s cottage in the grounds, until something more satisfactory can be arranged. I don’t expect, for a moment, that this will seem to them a practicable suggestion. A month ago, I was their blue-eyed darling, & the trouble they took over me, one way or another, was phenomenal. Now their sense of proportion has undergone a violent readjustment. They think I ought to go back (for my own sake) but they don’t care a damn if they never see me again – and the twitterings of me & my parents are a matter of superlative indifference to them (and I can’t say I blame them).

I’ve cried so much during the last week that I really begin to feel, as Shelley would say, like a cloud that has outwept its rain!6

Actually, of course, I am fussing disquietingly about very little – what on earth does it really matter whether I go back to Cambridge or not? At this moment I see it as a life or death question – but once a decision is made, I’ll get used to it. Oh! I shall get used to it shan’t I, Gershon? Instead of being secure & pampered, I might have been a Central European or German Jewess, mightn’t I?? – and then I’d have had something to cluck about. This happy thought, instead of restoring my sense of balance, only adds humiliating self-disgust to my other discomforts. I wish you were here – and you could shake me until my toothless gums rattled together – it’s the only fitting treatment for me.

I had a letter from Miss Bradbrook. All the double sets of rooms are being converted into single bed sitting rooms (poor Joyce!) – and Miss Bradbrook says they’re living like pigs. It must be pretty bad, for her to notice anything because, in the ordinary way, she has a Soul above Space – but there you are – the war has changed a lot of people.

I may say that this photograph business has caused a terrific stir in our ménage. ‘Why do you want to have your photograph taken?’ asks Aunt Teddy, rudely & inquisitively. ‘What on earth do you want a photograph of yourself for?’ says nurse – adding more kindly, ‘It’s not like you to want to be photographed.’ ‘Is this quite the moment to be photographed my dear?’ says Pa. ‘Of course you’re looking more like yourself, and we haven’t had one of you for some time – but …’

My mother, who is the only one who knows why I had it taken, smiles kindly, although she thinks it forward, if not improper of me to give a photograph of myself to a MAN (other than Pa, of course). She might be less kindly if she knew the shocking spirit of barter in which the whole transaction has been carried out – but she doesn’t. I tell my mother more than you tell yours, – but not everything.

Saturday 23 September I lay in bed alternately musing and reading the book of Job. (I do not like the Day of Atonement service. I always read the Bible instead.) The only diversion which occurred during the morning was a letter from the Mistress (in reply to my letter to the College Secretary). She has investigated the matter of lodgings herself. I am to live at 130 Huntingdon Road, in a smallish single room (but who cares?) and she personally guarantees my comfort and safety – and Dad, purified by starvation, and intimidated by her august and brisk intervention, says, ‘Yes’.

Oh! Gershon, I am so happy (always bearing in mind that no man should be declared happy until he is dead) that I’m even prepared to admit that (in a non-erotic way, of course) I love you better than my country. (Does it matter which country?)

I am sorry to have to tell you that Aubrey also seems to have noticed that I love you better than my country. (It pains me that my most intimate feelings, however non-erotic, should be so patent to you both – but, no matter, I shall learn resignation in time.) I am led to this conclusion by the fact that in an eleven-page letter, yesterday, he devotes four lines of verse to the war and five pages to you.

He did not owe me a letter, Gershon, – he just caught sight of a reproduction of the Monna Lisa on his wall, (he spells his ‘Mona’) detected a facial resemblance between us – and so wrote me eleven pages of profuse strains of carefully pre-meditated art. (In a post-script he says delightedly: ‘Something really wonderful has happened – Gershon came in while I was out, saw my Mona (sic) Lisa and stuck a label on saying “Eileen” I swear that we have never discussed it before. So you see how I am proved right by the highest authority available. Who better could distinguish a genuine Eileen from a fraudulent reproduction?’)

SUNDAY 24 September Pa is leaving us today with the children. Mum & I still don’t know what day we’ll be leaving for London – but I’m writing to the Mistress to say that (war-work permitting) I’ll be in Cambridge on Oct 7th.

Monday 25 September My mother looked at the enclosed photograph, shuddered, and said, ‘My dear’, in a voice charged with meaning, and then handed it back to me in the manner of one lifting an earwig out of the soup. This was not encouraging, so I showed it to Gerta. She smiled and said, ‘you do look a hap’. Aunt Teddy glanced at it and said, ‘It’s a good likeness – but not flattering’, and if ever a voice implied that a good likeness of me was a painful sight, it was hers.

I think that, insofar as it doesn’t show my scars, my pink chin, or the bump on the bridge of my nose, it’s not too bad, considering the material upon which the unfortunate photographer had to work.

Tuesday 26 September There is now a further hitch in regard to my proposed return to Cambridge. The rooms which the Mistress so kindly offered me, have been let to somebody else – so chaos is come again. I’ve wired to Girton for advice, and I’m waiting to see what happens. Pa is seeing everyone in London, and has suddenly woken up to the fact that Drumnadrochit is a backwater. I think he will send for us soon.

Wednesday 27 September Nurse has come back from London – oh! dear, our peace is shattered again. Of course the first thing she did was to demand to see my photograph and, when I showed it to her, she giggled noisily – slapped me heartily on my sore shoulder and said, ‘I think you’d better have another one taken – he photographed the uglier side of your face by mistake.’ Nurse has taken the place of Lois as Hate No. 1 on my (at present) narrow horizon.

My father phones my mother twice a day – and writes to her twice a day – and, when the telephone rings, or the postman comes, she goes all pink & kittenish! They really ought to know better at their age – and after 24 years of married life, too. Anyway, I’m hoping to cash in on all this love, by getting away from here, very soon – so love on, my girls & boys, love on – and don’t, on any account, mind me.

Thursday 28 September No letter from you by the first post, Gershon! Only nine pages from Aubrey, who is now an Intelligence Officer in embryo. I quote a vital passage from his letter below, to show how interviews with the recruiting board should be managed. Please learn it by heart & say it over to yourself every day before breakfast. Here it is: ‘… then there was the moment when a decrepit doctor with creaking joints asked me to take off my spectacles and read the letters on the board. “What board?” I asked innocently staring straight at it. This disability disqualified me from a Commission in the Observer’s Corps. Some capacity to distinguish an ally from an enemy is apparently regarded as an indispensable asset in war.’ Be as blind as you possibly can, Gershon, when your time comes. Aubrey’s account of his interview with the Recruiting Board has made me realize, (tardily perhaps) that there’s a war on, and that you may be called upon to go forth and get yourself killed in a dirty dug-out in France. I don’t mind telling you, that this is a possibility which I find singularly unpleasant to contemplate. It may be eccentric of me – but there it is.

Pa has just telephoned from London to say that he’s been appointed to a job in the Treasury as an expert in International Law. I gather that he starts work at once – so he probably won’t be coming back to fetch us after all. This means that he may be able to afford the rooms he and my mother originally chose for me in Cambridge – but everything is still very uncertain – he could give us no details over the phone as the appointment is still a secret – and I’ve no business to be telling you about it.

The three o’clock post has just come – with a letter from the Mistress saying that she’s cycled all round Cambridge trying to find me a home! She hasn’t succeeded yet – everyone is housing Bedford women & evacuees from the London School of Economics. She is writing to me again tomorrow. She is, with sympathy, mine sincerely … and I had the temerity to say that Girton wasn’t bothering about me any more. Bless her lily-white head. I hope all her cycling expeditions aren’t in vain!

Friday 29 September This morning I had a letter from Girton. They’ve taken rooms for me at Girton Corner. The main disadvantages are six children and high tea instead of dinner – but oh! if I could get back to Cambridge, I wouldn’t care if it were six boa-constrictors and no food at all! (You’re not the only one who’s willing to go without your meals in a Higher Cause!) Owing to sundry obstacles like clinging parents, and dentists who must be seen, I shall not return to my Alma Mater (if I ever get there at all – and I’m afraid to believe I shall) until Thursday, October 12th.

We leave here, inshallah, on Sunday 8th, and if you are moved to write to me in the intervening four days, my address (unless you hear to the contrary) will be ‘The Mayfair Hotel’, Berkeley Square, London W1.

Dad has started work at the Treasury. (It is therefore no longer a secret – when an Alexander is anywhere, it is difficult to look as though he’s not, and although all Government departments adore secrecy, and would have liked Pa to disguise himself as a puff of wind, they were reasonable, and saw his difficulty.) He is not coming back here, so Mum & I have arranged everything between us, (bless her!)

Sunday 1 October Your lyric outburst over my photograph was prettily written – but did you really like it? More and more people here seem to like it less & less – but, if it meets with your approval, I don’t give a damn. (I’m getting very independent in my declining years.)

Now let me sketch the evolution of my attitude to ‘darling’ for you. I think it will cause you to smile – but if perchance introspective anecdotes of this kind (and I am much given to them, I know) bore you – you have only to say so, and I shan’t tell you any more.

Go back a little in time to almost the eve of my Tripos, when I came out of retirement to go with Joyce and you & Aubrey to the Irish Plays. On the way home, as you may or may not remember, we had an altercation about the relative merits of the words ‘ostentatiously’ and ‘ostensibly’ in a given context. The altercation extended itself onto paper – and the last document in the case was a treatise by you on the subject, written on scribbling paper and handed to Joyce in Synagogue for delivering to me. Joyce gave me this erudite work, when I went to call upon her, the next morning – and, as she was interested in the controversy, I read her what you had to say. All went well, until I got to about the third page – and then I faltered and stopped – and then went on reading – omitting the word which had given me a shock. Joyce was quick to notice the pause, and wanted to know the cause. ‘How dare he,’ I answered obscurely, d’une voix mourante. It took her between 30 & 45 minutes to extract the reason of my distress from me – and when she did, her explanation of the phenomenon was not encouraging. ‘I expect it was just a slip of the pen,’ she said!! I must hasten to explain that at this time, I was living in a state of perpetual terror that my immoderate regard for you must be apparent to everybody – particularly you – and my interpretation of your use of ‘darling’, was that you had said to yourself, ‘Oh! well if it amuses her to be treated like a poppet, I don’t really mind one way or another,’ and had forthwith written it down. I couldn’t explain all this to Joyce – with whom I had spent hours, in the still watches of the night, protesting that I hadn’t any out-of-the-common preference for you at all – so I just sat at the bottom of her bed, crying piteously – and, of course, she was now more firmly convinced than ever, that I was quite mad.