My Dear Bessie. Chris Barker
is off. It is not easy to write when, at one point, a letter may be censored, and I hope you’ll make allowances. I think you will have gathered by now that I am like a raging torrent, and as you know there is no arguing with such things. I am impatient and intolerant of anything but you, and although I am bound to discuss nonentities and mediocrities, through it all I want you strongly.
Need I say I am waiting to get your next letter and the next, and the next? And that it is good to know you exist.
Chris
PS The other letter can be suitably produced if you get an enquiry – ‘Heard from Chris Barker lately?’ ‘Yes, typical letter’ the reply!
26 March 1944
Dear Bessie,
This war will delay many marriages as it will cause others. I shall either marry quickly (and take the consequences) or court for about ten years, by which time you’d know your future wife as well as your own mother.
Did I mention I’d seen Shadow of a Doubt during the week? It was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, ought to have been good, and for photography and direction, certainly was. (Do you hate or approve Orson Wells – Citizen Kane whirled me round a hundred times, but I believe I bit it, and I liked its different-ness.)
My brother was out on a run. As I walked along in the rapidly fading light I saw a familiar slip on the ground, and picked up – an Egyptian pound-note! I hope it came from an officer but I fear that the wind whisked it from a fellow-other-ranker. I was delighted to find it (‘Unto them that hath shall be given’) as my brother is always finding odd coins, notes, valuables. We share luck, and I happily preened myself as I handed him his 10s. just now. The last time I found any large amount was when I was taken as a 9 year old, by my brother, to the AA Sports at Stamford Bridge (I got separated from him in the Underground – those new automatic closing doors were just coming in – remember the guard at the old trellis-pattern gates?). I found a purse, containing 19s. 11d. and a visiting card. My Mother returned it, and with such a horrible ‘you ought to be thankful an honest person found it’ air, that the poor young girl remitted a 5s. reward to me, almost by return post. I always felt the small fortune was a little tainted.
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.