My Dear Bessie (42 page)

I am glad the carpet arrived at last, and that you think it jolly good. What I would like you to tell me is could you get one like it in England, and if so, how much?

I note you have done a lot of paint washing, stair washing, etc. I cannot say you are doing too much, but I rely on your good sense not to be scared of allowing even yourself to think ‘I ought to do more, but I won't'.

A good idea to chop the bedspread up. You are a genius! Can I send a bedspread from here? Really, I am dying to do so, but I want instructions re colour and quality. There are grand ones available at a little more than a £1, but specially fine ones at around £2.

I deplore the sliding episode on the Italian rug. I can assure you that unless I feel safe when I tread around at 55, polishing will cease forthwith.

I hope you find a dentist alright. Most desirable that you get these jobs done while you are feeling fairly normal, isn't it?

I do not want you to write more than you have done of things of the flesh. Generally I too have avoided thinking along those lines. It has not been so difficult as before – I don't know why –but occasionally I get my fits of wanting YOU, the whole of YOU, the everything of YOU, and your letter must have arrived at the same time as one of my fits. Please don't use any words that don't come from your heart. Please carry on as you have so well done
up to the present. It will only make it worse if you feel you have to write like that. We so much, so fully, understand what we are missing in mutual support. For me, it is completely, revealingly, warmingly, devastatingly lovely and wonderful to be loved by you. I know you feel all that I feel about YOU. I cannot really say I long to do anything. I just want to be with you. And if I cannot, then I am happy only when I am writing to you and reading your lovely writing, or when I am posting parcels which will feed you or please you.

I hope the crawfish suits you. The salmon was 2s. 8d., a tin, and I should like you to tell me if it was any good, when you open a tin. Glad you are laying in stores for a siege.

My darling, I love you.

Chris

*
A gas water boiler.

*
Their new home at 55 Ellesmere Drive, Sanderstead, near Croydon in south London.

12

In My Arms

3 March 1946

Dear Bessie,

Today has been very bad. It has rained heavily and the wind has blown violently. It stopped for a little while as we were leaving Naples, and it was lovely to see daffodils on sale from stalls, and, as we came along the Autostrada, the white and pink of the almond blossoms, a grand sight. When we came back (there was no air mail) we had orders to move down into the last billet remaining to the unit, and so we had to bring everything on board the truck in a hurry and come here.

And NOW, another chap and I have our beds in a passage 14 feet long by 3 feet wide. (As I write I have my back to one wall and my feet on the opposite one.) You can imagine how it is perhaps. I dunno. You are a civilian, after all, and the ways of the Army are (thank goodness) hardly civilised. When we got here, no one had any plans for us. In the Sergeants' and Officers' quarters there are many spare rooms. Here, in this position of a Fascist
millionaire's villa, there is nothing but this passage. When we first set eyes on it, it was filled with about two hundred half-pint beer bottles. I cleared those out, moved a lot of old bric-a-brac, and then discovered that a dog had used the place as a lavatory.

And now our anxiety is whether we are on guard tonight. The RSM was going to tell us dinner time, but they have the usual civvy-dressed ATS
*
girls as guests of sergeants, etc., and he hasn't shown up; ‘Blow the men' is the almost invariable motto of our superiors. The other night, a Capt. Lockett here brought a woman into the billet at 11 o'clock and she hadn't gone by 7 a.m., when the guard went away. It is all done so brazenly. How can chaps like that (and there are many amongst the Other Ranks as well) want to get home? I was amused by one of our cooks (he looks a harmless paternal type). He used to have a woman sleep with him nightly at the old billet. Last night she slept with him here. He said: ‘If the Colonel can have his wife here, I can have mine'! If a man got caught, he would get about 3–6 months.

I am afraid this is not a very personal letter. But I am very disturbed and upside-down and balancing on the edge of a ha'penny. When I get somewhere settled, I hope I shall be able to write better.

I love you.

Chris

The weather may change, my billets may change, but there never is or will be anything variable about my affection for you. You are
everything to me, everything, and I can never have enough of you. I don't know how ever I should have felt had you not found yourself willing to accept me.

6 March 1946

My Dear Bessie,

The hours of work here [at the Army Post Office, redirecting letters] are very easy, 8.30–12.15 one day, and 2–4.45 the next. We look after the mail of our own unit, but also help with that for other units who have not got representatives. It is quite a rest cure; there is a break for tea in both morning and afternoon. The food is much less and far inferior to the type I have been getting. But I shall not starve, and that is the main thing.

I have been thinking: what do you think your chances are of convincing your doctor that I am necessary to your health within a short time? If you could plead successfully, I feel that I might get a compassionate posting to UK; and I'd like you to consider whether you could act the distraught wife before the doctor. Your age, the war, the Greek business, might help the case. If it came off, I should have no bad conscience. Hundreds are getting out with far less reason. And having done three years abroad, I do not feel I am shirking anything.

Yes, we will have wallpaper one day. It can be bought out here, too. I'll try to enquire prices.

I love you.

Chris

9 March 1946

My Darling Bessie,

I feel like a weary traveller who plods on knowing that if he stops for a rest he will find it hard to get going again. That is a strange thing to feel, I know. But I am so fed up with this writing business, it is such a hopeless method of expressing anything at all. I think I am beginning to understand something of the mentality of people who write once a month. I am really very cynical, disgusted and bitter about what is happening to the Army in this demobilisation racket. I have the most immoderate and passion-full thoughts, and writing to you regularly at least keeps me on the rails and forces my expressions into civilised jargon.

I am ‘down', very far down about this. I despise those running this demob affair, I despise myself because I am cowed by the circumstances. I hate the people around me, so much of an Army pattern. I hate horrible lavatories which smell and get blocked up and no one cares. I hate being in a room with five other men, none
of whom want the window open at night. I hate myself for being ‘touchy', being susceptible. For me, my darling, I am afraid, these are not ‘struggling days', I have ceased struggling. I have succumbed. There is no need to refer to this in reply. I shall have been pushed by the pendulum, before your letter arrives, into an easy acceptance of another five months in the Army, another five months without you.

I am sorry about the peaches. What did they look like? Mildew or black, or what?

Was very interested to read about the trouble you are now having in doing your corset belt up. If only I was with you to help, to watch and take an interested hand in things.

I have written this in about half-a-dozen places and in a dozen pieces. Sorry, but will try to do better tomorrow. Forgive my anti-Army observations. I feel better now! Already!

I love you.

Chris

10 March 1946

My Darling Bessie,

Glad you enjoyed
Brief Encounter
. I expect the tear-shedding was good for you. It's all this bottling-up which is half of everyone's troubles nowadays.

Regarding curtaining, I want you to do a little thinking and let me have a list of the things still required, as I suggested in my miserable letter yesterday.

Re. decorating, I expect it will be years before we can have wallpaper for all rooms. The Paper Control is still strict. Shall I do the cream-distempering the first or the second week of my leave?

If nightgowns, or anything, were surplus to your needs, I would not mind you selling them, you know. No need to get cluttered up with things you don't want. But I feel that you will be leaving our warm bed more than once, to do a bit of child-pacifying, and that you'll need two nightgowns.

Your mention of ‘thickening up, losing my waist, beginning to bulge', about which I commented earlier, made me wish, so much, that I could be with you, to eye you, to estimate with you, to consider how things are going with you. Perhaps to suggest that you walk a slower walk, and do not run for buses.

I appreciate that you have to go out to post letters. Is it very far? It's a good idea to keep in as much as possible. You must have done a lot of knitting to produce a cardigan.

I love you.

Chris

17 March 1946