My Dear Bessie (6 page)

How do you get on in the Air Raids? I hope you continue to have good luck. If we were together I guarantee we could ignore them, just as I want to ignore everything now, so that I may touch you. And I want to do that badly.

Is your Dad in the PO? Mine retired a month after the war was declared. Pension £1 5s. weekly. Gets about £2 a week for two days' work in a bakehouse. His trade was baking before he came in the PO, and when he applied for a job in 1940 they asked him how long since he had been in the trade. He said ‘27 years'. They said ‘OK – start tonight.' One good thing is that he is entitled to bread and cakes, and can bring home bunmen, studded with currants, for his grandson!

Tonight Churchill is speaking from London, and I hope to be amongst those who gather round the wireless to hear his latest estimate of the war's duration. We all take it very good-humouredly but the language is sometimes lurid.

I hope you are well. I am thinking of you.

Chris

At the back of my mind I have some idea of selling books at a later stage in my life. I would, I think, like to start a second-hand bookshop mainly. It's not for the money one might make, but only on the basis that books are good things whose circulation must assist reasonableness and progress. What do you think?

13 April 1944

Dear Bessie,

I think we are so near to each other that our reactions to similar occurrences are very much, if not exactly, the same. So that you know the excitement I felt when I saw your handwriting on the LC my brother handed me. There was one from Deb and another from Mum; and, of course, I had to read these first. And I could read yours only once, and then had to put it in my pocket, while my poor old head tried to cope with its contents as far as I could
remember. You have come at me with such a terrific rush of warmth, and I am so very much in need of you.

Well, I washed and made my bed (it was six o'clock before I received your letter) and fidgeted around. Then I thought, ‘I must read it again before I sleep' – so I pushed off to the latrine (where the humblest may be sure of privacy) and read your words again. The comic expression ‘It shakes me' is true in a serious sense about this deeply thrilling state of well-being that you have caused or created.

How impossible to sleep with thought and wonder of you hot within me! As I toss and turn and wriggle and writhe I think of you, probably doing the same. Isn't it blooming awful? I know that if I think of you, I will not sleep; yet I keep on thinking of you, and get hotter and hotter. Phew! I could do with a couple of ice-blocks around me. Finally, to sleep. Up in the morning, my first thoughts, of your nearness and your distance from me.

Unfortunately there is no likelihood of my early return. I must be another year, I may be another three or four. Relax, my girl, or you'll be a physical wreck in no time. Regard me as what you will, but don't altogether forget circumstance, distance, environment.

Since tiffin I have played a game of softball; had a haircut from a chap brought in specially to lighten us; five games of chess; dinner, a game of netball – scoring a goal though my side lost 5-3 (a lucky goal), then pictures (
Three Stooges
and Andrew Sisters in
How's About It?
)

As I was saying, relax. Take it easier. In the film tonight there was a crack, that the state of being in love was the happiest way of being miserable. So be miserable happily, don't look over your
shoulder too much; enjoy what is, so far as you can. I am a born worry-er myself, but feel I could be all that you wanted me to be. Probably more important, I know that you are what I want, not in any limited sense, but in all. I want to confide in you. I want to creep into you. I want to protect you.

You spoke of yourself being ‘guilty of slobbering' – it's no crime, I'm proud of it! If your incoherent babblings mean what mine do, it's jolly good. Regard me as a promise rather than a threat, and pick holes in me where you can – so that I seem less regal! Remember we are both in this together, and that it has somehow occurred undesignedly, unrehearsed, because we had it in us. During the day I simply lap you up and cause trouble at night. ‘Engulfed' describes my state, too, a rather floundering, uncertain one. I am sorry I cannot relieve your ache.

I wonder what you look like (don't have a special photograph taken). I know you haven't a bus-back face but I have never looked at you as now I would. I wonder how many times I have seen you, and how many we have been alone. Now my foolish pulse races at the thought that you even have a figure. I want, very much, to touch you, to feel you, to see you as you naturally are, to hear you. I want to sleep and awaken with you.

Let me know if you think I'm mad. When my signature dries I am going to kiss it. If you do the same, that will be a complete (unhygienic) circuit!

Yours,

Chris

*
Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes; a social club and general store.

*
The Post Office training course in south-east London where Chris and Bessie had their first opportunity to get to know each other.

*
Entertainments National Service Association; the troops soon renamed it Every Night Something Awful.

*
Sixpence.

2

More Than Is Good For Me

15 April 1944

Dear Bessie,

I received today your letter dated 1st March. It has taken such a long time to come and I have felt so disappointed and unsettled at its repeated failure to arrive during the last fortnight, that this may explain my dis-satisfaction as I reached the end. I am puzzled by some of the things you say. Perhaps I should amend dis-satisfaction to ‘unsatisfaction'. I hope you understand the feeling.

I will attempt to reply to your paragraphs and tell you what I cannot fathom as I go along.

You ask ‘Where shall we end, Chris?' Well, I dunno, but I'm sure it won't be very dreadful. It might be a great adventure for both of us. I have an idea, but I am not wearing my planning trousers.

Emphatically, I agree that most of us want to love and be loved. Tell me, please, what your reaction is to a marriage where
one party is not imbued with one-hundred-per-cent enthusiasm for the other, but marries perhaps for companionship and the wish to avoid loneliness. Do you think she is playing the game?

If my brother asks me why I am getting letters from you, I shall tell him that we are engaged in an interesting correspondence about life. If he asks (and he won't – but your questioners might) if I am proposing to court you, I shall laughingly deny it, as you (I hope) will do the same.

So I may write as I feel – would that I could! These words would burn the paper and scorch you. (If you get ashes one day when you open the envelope, you'll know that's what has happened!) You'll recognise my tantrums as they occur. Trouble is that you'll forgive me before, during and after my stupidities. It will be wise for you to commence the development of (or acquire) a critical faculty regarding me, otherwise I am going to be one big unredeemed disappointment for you.

I cannot write you daily but I do think of you hourly. You set all my senses humming, and make me sweat. I want to feel you. I want to go with you to a quiet place and tell you with my body what I can only half say in words.

Yours,

Chris

16 April 1944

Dear Bessie,

There are a couple of points in your letter which I did not reply to, and will do so now. Dictionaries – although I am what people call ‘a good speller' I found when I came away from all my reference books that I was very shaky on some things. So when I was in Cairo I bought a small dictionary. I add to my vocabulary as I can, otherwise I should speedily relapse into baby talk. I have always investigated and made a note of unfamiliar words, and I also enjoy learning the exact shade of meaning of all words. It's no good me telling you anything about quidnunc; you will look it up in a dictionary one day and remember it the better. Perhaps when I give my delightful new-found words an airing I ought to mark 'em with a star?

This afternoon, with great speed, I received your wonderful Letter Card of April 8th. How I long to be what you think I am, and bring you all you desire. You can tell me no more than you have already done, yet I need you to keep on telling me that I am essential to you, as you, my dear, are indispensable to me. I thrill to you. You write about my ‘powers of self-expression' – I have none without you.

You will notice an improvement in my last two letters. It is becoming clearer to me that you are my life's work, and that I must see that I do hold onto you, and please, please, please, do hold me tight. 18–30 are different ages, but I am happier that you loved me first when you were nearer the former age. I know that
I am not the victim of a desperate, blind, unloving grasp. I shall keep on saying I want to feel you, and I want you to know that my desire is no less than yours, nor ever will be. My head is on your breasts, my hands are about you.

I love you.

Chris

18 April 1944

I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU

Dear Bessie,

I have just stuck down a Letter Card, and I must straightaway carry on writing to you, around the subject of yours of the 8th April.

Our association in the future depends on your ability to put up with me and my defects, not my ability to put up with yours. And that if we are spending much of our time regarding the other as a bed mate that is a very natural thing, since we are likely to be in that position before too long; I hope it doesn't mean we are very lustful, but if it does, it doesn't stop me wanting to tell you how I stiffen and ooze as I read your words and imagine you writing them. I am your servant and your master at once.
I will command you and be commanded by you. Your breasts are mine.

I do not feel very happy at the thought of the practical difficulties in the way of setting up house after the war. Every shark in the commercial world will be up and about.

Unfortunately I used to donate most of my money to various ‘good causes' and I did not start to save until the end of the war in Spain. I think I had about £75 when our own war started; I did not increase this until I joined the Army. At the end of last year I had (my Mother told me) a mere (for my purpose) £227. I think that I am adding to this at about £2 10s. a week. I do not know what will be required. I don't think there's much doubt that we will be old enough. Incidentally, I think that engagement rings are jewellers' rackets, and that marriage is more properly transacted at an office than mumbo-jumbo'd at a church. I am sorry you don't already know my views on this. You will have to be told sometime.

Can you see that it is gradually dawning on me that you are too good to be missed? Do you observe that I am refusing to bow to my own change-ability? Will you tell me that we may be together really one day, and you will hit me if I start wanting to go?

I am in the permanent state of hoping for letters from you, but I must have flushed my delight an hour ago, when I was handed your LC dated 1st, but postmarked the 3rd. The last three letters had come to me via my brother, and I have been annoyed. He has got an ‘idea', I feel sure. I had to eat tiffin and delay reading you until I went to work. But now I have done so four times so far. Oh, I do desire you! Oh, I am not really alive except in you, and through you.