My Dear Bessie Page 2
Oh, the Pyramids; yes, I have seen them, sat on them, and thought what a gigantic case for Trade Unionism they present. How many unwilling slaves died in the colossal toil involved in erecting these edifices? And how insignificant the erection compared with Nature’s own hills and mountains?
I visited the Cairo Zoo, happily in the company of two young Egyptians who were being educated at the American mission. They made the day a success. The cruelty of having a polar bear (noble creature) in this climate, and the effort to console him with a 10 second cold water dip!
Excuse the writing, and confusion of this effort. But it’s me, alright. I hope you are OK Nick. It’s a long way from our Lantern Lecture on Sunny Spain at Kingsway Hall!
All the best, Bessie.
Chris
14 December 1943
Dear Bessie,
I received yesterday your surface letter of 20th October. I read it avidly as from an old pal, noting that though time has chattanooga’ed along, your style remains pretty much as it was in the days when we had that terrifically intense and wonderfully sincere correspondence about Socialism and the Rest Of It, unlike the present time, when, hornswoggling old hypocrite that I am, the Rest Of It seems infinitely more attractive. Thanks for the letter, old-timer. I am sending this by Air Mail because it will have enough dull stuff in it to sink a Merchant ship.
Yes, I remember our discussions over ‘ACQUAINTANCE’ and my views are still as much ‘for’ as yours remain ‘against’. I have, perhaps, one hundred acquaintances (I write to fifty) yet I could number my friends on one hand. The dictionary:-
ACQUAINTANCE: a person known. FRIEND: one attached to another by affection and esteem.
You are known to me, and while I have affection for you it does not amount to an attachment.
I am sorry that Nick and you are ‘no longer’, as you put it, and that you should have wasted so much time because of his lack of courage. You must have had a rotten time of it, and I do sympathise with you – but are you writing to the right bloke? I’ll say you are! Joan gave me my ‘cards’ a couple of months back, though I had seen them coming since April, when I got my first letters.
I can quite believe your estimate of the way the London-leave soldier improves the shining-hour. You can understand chaps who get three or four days leave before a campaign opens, painting the town red, but unfortunately quite a large number who are in comfortable Base jobs have their regular unpleasant habits. When I was at Base our evening passes bore the injunction ‘Brothels Out of Bounds. Consorting with Prostitutes Forbidden.’ Where we collected the passes there was a large painted sign, ‘Don’t Take a Chance, Ask the Medical Orderly for a –’ doodah. The whole emphasis of Army Propaganda is ‘Be Careful’, even the wretched Padre at Thirsk, when he said a few words of farewell, said merely that most foreign women were diseased, and we should be careful.
At the Pyramids when I found a preventative on the place I had chosen to sit down on, I thought it was a nice combination of Ancient and Modern! Whoever told you Pyramids told the time was pulling your leg. No iron or steel was used, cranes or pulleys. Ropes and Levers only. Their erection was due to Superb Organisation, Flesh and Blood, Ho Heave Ho, and all the other paraphernalia of human effort.
I bumped back along the desert road, meeting my brother very easily and getting him successfully transferred into my Section. We share the same tent and this situation suits us fine. We discuss everything in common, and have a fine old time.
Much rain lately has made an ornamental lake of the wide flatness; but we have now got grass and some tiny flowers where before was merely sand. I have transplanted some of the flowers into a special patch we have made into a garden. Bert and I play chess most of our spare-time, on a set we made with wire and a broom-handle. There are some dogs about the camp, which is far from anywhere. No civilians. We have two pigs fattening for Xmas, poor blighters, though I believe the uxorious male has given the sow hope of temporary reprieve.
I hope you hear regularly from your brother and that your Dad and yourself are in good health.
Good wishes,
Chris
21 February 1944
Dear Bessie,
I received your letter of 1st January on 7.2.44, since when I have been busting to send you a smashing reply, yet feeling clumsy as a ballerina in Army boots, who knows that her faithful followers will applaud, however she pirouettes. I could hug you till you dropped! The unashamed flattery that you ladled out was very acceptable – I lapped it up gladly and can do with more! Yes, I could hug you – an action unconnected with the acute shortage of women in these parts, and mostly symbolic of my pleasure at your appreciation of qualities so very few others see, and which really I do not possess. I must confess that your outrageous enthusiasm banishes ‘acquaintance’ from my mind, and that I recognise the coming of a new-kind-of-atmosphere into our interchanges, and one which you will need to watch.
To be honest, rather than discreet: letters from home sometimes contain curious statements. ‘Paddling’ one of my own, I had told them of my first letter from you. Back came a weather forecast: ‘Perhaps she will catch you on the rebound.’ I, of course, have no such wish, yet I certainly haven’t told anyone of your latest letter, and was glad I was able to conceal it from my brother. I find myself engaged on the secretive, denying dodge that has marked the opening stages of all my little affaires since the first Girl Probationer crossed my path. I can see that willy-nilly I am having a quiet philander, and I want to warn you it’ll end in a noisy flounder unless you watch out. I haven’t a ’aporth of ‘rebound’ in me. I warm to you as a friend and I hope that remains our mutual rendezvous, although I feel that the more I write you, the less content you will be.
I hope you will not think I regarded your letter as purely a back-pat for me. As I read yours I wha-rooped too, and gentle tintinnabulations commenced. You’ll find this effort somewhat forced. I believe it is true that when you want to be natural, you aren’t. If you understand me, you have made me a bit ‘conscious’. I’m blowed if I am not trying to impress you.
You say your mind is a rambling rubbish box, and your youthful desires for improvement remain unfulfilled. Congratulations on getting the rubbish in a box, mine spreads in a heap. I don’t remember having many youthful desires (except that I do recall Madeline Carroll featuring in one of them). I am glad you accept my view on others not being informed of the contents of our letters. It will be much more satisfactory, we shall know each other much better through an ‘in confidence’ understanding, which is implicit in our different relationship.
Your comments on Abbey Wood* etcetera rather puzzle me, and if you feel like enlightening me, please do so (‘I remember also the day, when I found that you never understood why I cut my losses, you returned those letters, a very black day,’ is what you say). I am more than hazy on the subject. What letters did I return? I like your observation that you can never dramatise for long, and ‘humour wins the day’, it is my own view, too.
You say it is odd that I can be so ignorant about women, but apart from the important omission of never having slept with one, I regard myself as capable of detecting a wile when I see one, and I do not think women are so very different from men in any important aspect. If I were really plonking down what I did know, I should have to admit that I am puzzled very often by the behaviour of many of my own sex, and not a little quizzical about my own at times. Certainly I am no quidnunc in the labyrinth of sex matters. How bored I should be if I was, my mysterious Bessie!
I am sorry you felt the least bit ‘weepy’ at my chess, garden, pigs. The things your tears are best reserved for are beetles this size, and fleas whose size is much less horribly impressive, but whose powers of annoyance are far greater. I exult in the possession of a sleeping sheet, which is very nice to have next to the skin compared with the rough Army blankets. At night, if the fleas are active and I cannot subdue them with my fevered curses, I take my sheet and my naked body into the open, an
d turn and shake the sheet in the very cold night air. Then I get back into bed and hold the ends of the sheet tight around my neck, to keep out my nuisance raiders. The last few months have been very pleasant as regards heat, and fleas have been few. I am not looking forward to the summer.
A Sergeant Major is usually a curt, barking, more-in-anger-than-in- sorrow, kind of chap. Yet the one we have here couldn’t treat us better if he was our Father. He does more fatigues than anyone else in the Camp, asks you to do things, never orders. When he came here three months ago, we had one dirty old tent to eat our meals in, and that was all. Since then, we have added several more tents; plenty of forms and tables; a Rest Tent with a concrete floor; dozens of games, a regular weekly Whist Drive, a small library. Once we could only bathe in our tent, petrol tin fashion. Now, we use the showers in town, doing some forty miles in the process. If this is the Army – well, it’s not bad.
Christmas Day was quite happily spent, as I haven’t been away from home long enough to feel bad about separation. True that last night I dreamt of my Mother, and as she called me in my sleep, I awoke to hear my brother calling ‘Holl!’ (my family name), as, in a vague kind of way it was my turn to first brave the morning air and put on – what do you think? – the shaving water.
We have been doing very well lately for evening entertainments. On five successive evenings we had an Accordion Band and Concert Party, which was very good and clean; an RAF Concert Party, which dripped muck and innuendo; and an ENSA* show, ‘Music Makers’, who rendered popular classics, and gave a thoroughly good evening, though the audience thinned out when ‘legs’ did not show. We get a Film Show every Saturday; whatever the weather, it is held in the open air, the audience (stalls) sitting on petrol tins, while those in the gallery sit on top of the vehicles, many of which come several miles for what is usually the only event of the week. I have sat in the pouring rain with a groundsheet over me. I have sat with a gale bowling me over literally while Barbara Stanwyck (in The Great Man’s Lady – she was a brunette) bowled me over figuratively. We take our fun seriously, and when we can get it, though I always think of the Open Air Theatre at Regent’s Park, seeing Midsummer Night’s Dream on a brilliantly lit sward, with a pre-war searchlight dancing in the sky above us.
I did not go to the commercial cinemas in Cairo – I was a bit horrified by the prospect of being solicited as I sat in the 15 piastre seats (as not infrequently happens, I am told).
George Formby has done a lot of talking since his trip here, but not a word (publicly) about losing ten bottles of beer from the back of his charabanc. Some chaps I was with at the time did the pinching and subsequent drinking, so I know!
Have just been on my first ‘charge’ (crime), having been caught, with eight others including my brother, for dirty rifles. This is usually a serious offence, and is very easily framed. We were lucky and got ‘admonished’, which is like a ‘minor offence’ in the PO and is wiped out after three months. Being ‘tried’ was just like a Court of Law, without the wigs. I have been very fortunate in my Army misdemeanours which have been ingenious rather than numerous.
Our OC is not a bad chap as such, but is very ‘La-de-dah’; he has a race-stick and the other day he was seated on it watching a football match when – it broke. Our side all wanted to stop the match and laugh.
Consider my earlier comments upon ‘rebounds’, but let me have you full and frank and enjoyable. Keep away from an anatomical examination of me. Tell me what you think. I’ll revert to blustery Barkerisms at your request.
Best wishes, Friend (The Lord Forgive Me),
Chris.
27 February 1944
Dear Bessie,
Letters take such a long time, and I am so keen on remaining in good touch with you that I have decided to write you fairly regularly, irrespective of the replies received, until such time as I detect that you are disinterested, or it appears that our present happy association is not so happy.
So on to our pigs – yesterday came the day for the male (boar) to be sent away for slaughter. Half a dozen of us were detailed to hold various parts of the massive, dirty, unfortunate creature, while the man who knows all about pigs got a bucket firmly wedged over the poor thing’s head and snout. I was originally deputed to take hold of the right ear, but in the opening melee found myself grasping the right leg, which I held on to firmly as it lumbered out of the sty, and heaved on heavily as, somehow, despite a terrific struggle and the most heartrending screams, we got it on the lorry, which was to be its hearse. In the afternoon it met its man-determined fate, and this morning as I came away from dinner, I saw its tongue, its heart, liver and a leg, hanging from the cookhouse roof. I had my doubts about eating it in the days when it was half the eighteen stone it weighed at death. But now I have none. I certainly can’t help eat the poor old bloke. The sow lives on, she has a large and sore looking undercarriage, and will be a Mother in three weeks. I suppose we shall eat her progeny in due course.
I recently made application for ‘The Africa Star,’ which most chaps here are wearing. I have first heard that I am to get it. When you know that I arrived out on April 16th and the hostilities ceased May 12th, you can see how very easily medals are gained. It is the same very often with awards supposedly for gallantry.
My Dad, a thorough going old Imperialist, will be delighted that he can talk about two sons with the medal, and mentally they will be dangling with his – EIGHT altogether, though his nearest point to danger was really the Siege of Ladysmith (in a war maybe you would have condemned?). Since the war, my Dad has had medal ribbons fitted on most of his jackets and waistcoats, and goes shopping with them all a’showing! My Mother comes in bemoaning the fact that there is no suet to be had. Dad comes in with a valuable half-a-pound he extracted from a medal-conscious shopkeeper. I can tell you plenty about my Dad, who has many faults and the one redeeming virtue that he is all for his family, right or wrong.
I have just seen a Penguin, Living in Cities, very attractively setting forth some principles of post-war building. I always think how well off we suburban dwellers are compared with the people who live in places like Roseberry Avenue or Bethnal Green Road, and die there, too, quite happily since they never knew what they missed.
I saw a suggestion for a new house to have a built-in bookcase, or place for it, and thought this a rather good idea. I have often sighed for some shabby volume in the short time I have been away from home. I carry with me now only an Atlas, a dictionary, Thoreau’s Walden (ever glanced at it – a philosophy), Selected Passages from R.L. Stevenson, and The Shropshire Lad, by Housman.
Do you remember when we did some electioneering? Was it at Putney? I would have enjoyed being at Acton lately, as I read in the local Gazette (sent to the other chap in our tent) that one of the candidates (later withdrew) was walking around with a steel helmet bearing slogans on it, and a big notice urgently advising electors to buy potatoes and store them under the bed. Did you vote in 1935 (I did) and with what result? Maybe we can get together for a bit of postwar canvassing?
Cheerio, friend.
Chris.
6 March 1944
Dear Bessie,
I hope I am not guilty of indecent haste if I commence another letter only a week after my last. I cannot claim that anything special has happened (in fact, thank Goodness it hasn’t) but I am brimming over with many things to tell you, my confidante, and it will be a long (and I hope a pleasurable for both of us) time before I have really unloaded my cargo of news, ideas, tales, things that have occurred since I left the country on February 24th last year, and also some of the things that occurred before then.
I have just come away from the pictures, the mobile van, screen at the bottom of a slope and projector at the top, with the audience seated in the dip. Not bad tonight; two news reels only six months old and Girl Trouble, Don Ameche and Joan Bennett, fair entertainment as films go, quite a little smart talk which I rather enjoy.
This afternoon I was just going of
f to sleep when my Sergeant woke me and (despite my protests that I was on night duty tonight) told me I must report at 3 o’clock for the ABCA (Army Bureau of Current Affairs) Spelling Bee. I went along there and suggested it be abandoned in favour of a discussion on ‘strikes in wartime’, and we did discuss strikes, fairly interestingly. The strange thing about most of these affairs is that so very few people can open their mouths to any effect in public. I am always congratulated on my contribution and looked at with greater respect afterwards by my companions – this ‘Gift of the Gab’ as it is called, is a dangerous thing for the welfare of the people. I am very suspicious of good talkers, very attentive to the stutterer.
From the pictures, I had intended going straight to the other farce out here, The Egyptian Mail, our daily newspaper, and The Egyptian Gazette, its Evening (which we do not get) and Sunday consort. I am sending you a few copies in order that you can see what a hotch-potch of old news and English newspaper rubbish it is. It has frequent typographical errors, and is very unreliable. It puts the wrong headlines to news items, and is more amusing than informative. Once it said the Aga Khan had come fourth in a horse race, another time that Somerset had declared at cricket 1301–7.
I am not sorry you did not join the WAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force], because most of the chaps seem to regard uniformed women as uniformly willing to be pawed about. One of the girls in my district used to push her breasts into my stomach (it seems that she was a little short! – anyhow, I used to feel it was like that) and hold my arm, every time she saw me. This was around 1937–39, not in the younger days, when I thought, like most youths, that I was handsome. Anyhow, this girl joined the WAAFs shortly after war was declared. And I don’t think it was patriotism.