So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. Penelope Fitzgerald
in the paper every morning, and he leads me to look on the brighter side of things. ‘It is no good’ he says ‘being pessimistic.’ With that, and a piece of chocolate, I am able to face the morning.
Please forgive this odious piece of paper. I love apologising for the quality of the paper and ink when writing a letter, as it is so perfectly pointless.
love,
Mops.
‘PUNCH’
10 Bouverie Street
London, EC4
1 January 1940
My dear Ham,
Happy new year (the Sergeant Major here actually says ‘the compliments of the season’, but I never met anyone else who did). I think the gramophone records are wonderful, I didn’t know either of them before, due to my ignorance, but I took to them like a duck to water and play them all day, and even try to sing them in the bath, which is disastrous of course, and it was better when I stuck to ‘Run, rabbit, run’ with my own variations; only I do love the records and it is now one of my premier ambitions to go to hear Otello in the flesh.
I went to an alarming dinner party at the Hoods the other night. For want of other conversation I told Mrs H. (quite accurately) that I couldn’t abide bulldogs, and insulted the horrid but apparently precious specimen which she keeps. Now she is stalking up and down and saying that intelligence is all very well but other things are more important. I was terrified of Sinclair too. He looks so dry I want to wash him; but this may be my feline instincts coming to the top. Oliver was kind and covered up my social errors as well as he could. Jean is up in London today and we are all going to the Toy Symphony with Kenneth Clark conducting.
I gather a lot of rum was issued to the troops at Christmas, so I hope that if you didn’t get leave you at least passed the time in a vaguely pleasurable daze. I was at Oundle, where I had to appear in a charade as a British slave dressed in a bathing suit and Mrs Fisher’s fur coat, which, it seems, disgusted and appalled the audience. I am back at the office now and have made the room so hot, by the simple process of shutting all the windows, that Mallet has fallen fast asleep,
love, Mops.
Ministry of Food
Great Westminster House
Horseferry Road
London, sw1
11 June 1940
My dear Ham,
Thankyou very much for writing – I wish I could have come down last Sunday but I had to stay here and draft a message for the Minister to send to the National Association of Bee-Keepers – and though I have applied all the brains and training I have to the question I am unable to think of anything, though I am very fond of honey in the comb. I’ve got a new straw hat, such a one, with red roses, which seems vaguely connected with the subject somehow.
My ideas of Officers’ Messes are based on lurid films and novels by P. C. Wren which I read under the bedclothes at school. They include quarrels of honour, with cards and glasses all over the floor, and horses jumping on, and off, the table, and also jackboots and being roasted alive by Roundheads. I do hope you are enjoying yourself. I suppose, however good and broadminded you are, there is some satisfaction in being an officer and superior by profession to so many people. Have you a comic batman, I wonder?
You will be pleased to hear that I haven’t been to any films at all lately as I have a vague feeling that it is wicked, and I expect I shall gradually lose the habit and be able to despise films as you do, though I suppose not with the same fine scornful profile.
Rawle* is coming up to London on Saturday to get made into an officer – then we shall have to go through this saluting trouble all over again – but I believe I am a 2nd lieutenant now too as we have our own tasteless rifle corps to defend the Ministry against assaults and I seem to be embodied in it,
much love,
Mops.
Ministry of Food
Great Westminster House
Horseferry Road
London, sw1
29 June [1940]
My dear Ham,
How dare you resent anything to do with the rustics of Herefordshire? Little do you realise that my grandfather, the bishop, was curate of Kington in Herefordshire and I have spent my holidays there ever since I can remember, and it is in fact the only part of the country I can bear and the only part that makes me placid, with fat horses, fat haystacks, fat rustics and a happy lack of anything famous or distinguished. It is odd that you say that there are some trees that you take to be limes, there are some just outside our cottage, a kind of avenue, green as you say and charming, and one of our few discussions there – there aren’t many subjects of conversation, you see is the great question of whether they are limes or not. Somebody always suggests hornbeams towards the end of supper. Well, everyone here says
1. That Liverpool docks have been reduced to ashes.
2. That Chamberlain, Col. Lindbergh and Laval have got together and are arranging peace terms.
3. That the Germans are arriving in motor launches and amphibious tanks on July 2nd.
4. That Halifax is to be dismissed and replaced by Lord Strabolgin. I want a dog more and more. I suppose the price of Pomeranians has gone up as all the dogs have been shot in Germany, but after the war I shall save up and buy one nevertheless. I have got into the frame of mind, you see – I don’t know why – when I think the war will possibly come to an end one day.
I hope you come to London soon, through the agency of Cyril Falls or any other way,
love,
Mops.
Ministry of Food
Great Westminster House
Horseferry Road
London, sw1
8 July [1940]
My dear Ham,
Thankyou very much for your letter, and I would have answered your first one before if I hadn’t thought you wanted me not to – and I am very nervous of saying anything where people’s feelings and sensibilities are concerned, which often makes me appear even stupider than I am.
I don’t know exactly what you feel about me. I have always been very fond of you and very proud on the occasions when you broke your three silences and spoke to me, and I have always looked forward to seeing you when you come up to London. I hope I shall again. I don’t know whether Oliver ever told you that ever since I broke my engagement* I have been mixed up in a rather stupid and unsatisfactory way, I suppose, but it is the only thing I can do, it goes on and on and it makes me appreciate my friends all the more.
Oliver has left the flat to go and stay with Kate, and in the meantime Mrs B. gave an amazing party at which your sister was a tower of strength with the coffee, wine and cutlets and there was a strange babel of languages – Mrs B. pre-eminent in a torrent of mixed French and English, easily drowning the harassed player at the piano. Jouky was present, but did not sing.
I had a dreadful time at Guildford on Sunday with the L.D.V’s.* The colonel lent me his very large horse to ‘see the fun’ – i.e. 50 men crawling about on a parachute scheme in the height of misunderstanding and confusion – but it bolted and scattered the people