Darling Pol by Mary Wesley
Love to the little dogs,
E.
Authors’ Club – 25.3.49
… I am lunching with Rutherfordfn16 today, and perhaps a plan of campaign will emerge. I doubt if he thinks the case worth bringing at all, but Counsel may and we must get that opinion …
Harry came to lunch, and laid on his German expert whom I interviewed at the Bank; and they are providing me with important contacts, on the understanding that I provide them with intelligence. My only doubts are my technique in dealing with the cruder news … Everything has to be ‘human’! …
I am much taken with the idea of you as secretary-chauffeuse; seriously! … They are most excellent employers, on what Fleming calls an ‘adult’ basis of doing things …
Junior Army & Navy Club
Horse Guards Avenue, SW1 – 27.3.49
… My club is shut on Saturdays …
I am beginning to get worried. I gave Edwin Rutherford lunch on Friday, and he violently urges that I should do nothing which might bother Kemsley,fn17 say nothing about my private affairs and generally lie low until P.K.S. attacks – if she does. Then Edwin can help because he is a friend of one of my directors.
The implication of all this is that you and I should remain apart until the divorce, on the chance of winning it and getting married. This is all very well for Edwin, but I don’t like it …
Authors’ Club – 28.3.49
… I do not mean to leave you for six months. I can’t … So let us be very pliable and wise and resourceful and quick and cunning and discreet. I rely on you, because you can be all these …
You must write
c/o A. L. Hutchinson, Kemsley Newspapers Correspondent
British Press Centre, Press Services Section,
318 R/B Det., Mil. Gov. Dusseldorf
B.A.O.R. 4.
(Would you believe it?)
Peakswater – 31.3.49
My Love,
Especially at night I miss you, longing to lie close against you and fit my body to yours along its whole length. Physical loss and missing sets in later than the mental which begins even before you have left. It is the pain of loving which is all part of it …
The children are very happy. As we ate Lord Nelson [pet gander] (who was rather tough) Lady Hamilton [pet goose] was brought to bed. A rather long and difficult accouchement with Henny-Penny playing midwife. The first gosling wandered out and died. I helped two, partly out of their eggs, while Lady H. savagely bit my fingers. The mortality or survival rate may be known by tomorrow night. I hope some of them live, poor little things …
Toby consistently wins at chess which infuriates me. His smug smile of nonchalant triumph as he snitches my Queen is odious …
I long to hug you and lay my tongue on yours and press my breasts against you. Tu vois? Je suis randy après une semaine. What a frolic we will have.
I love you,
M.
Berlin – 31.3.49
… Stayed in billets where I write, and drinks at the press club … A typical Berlin quarter, trees … quiet roads, and the drone or roar of the Air Lift continuously to give a weird impression of abnormality and effort and war. Ruins are tidied up, and Germans well-dressed, but Berliners bothered by food e.g. no hot drink, tea or coffee, perhaps just bread before they go to work. The Allies utterly isolated and insulated, too comfortable or too neglected …
Dinner in the only place where Germans can go ‘out’, an incredibly dreary black market restaurant with a band … No choice at that hour. Berlin shuts at eight. Lights out, streets dark. All electricity off at 10. I borrowed a candle to go to bed …
There is no limit between sectors; you just walk in and out. In the Soviet sector you can eat cheaply and legally at plain non-ration restaurants …
The play [I see tonight] is said to be brilliant, about the 30 Years war … by Brecht, of pre-war fame, with his wife in it. I chose the Soviet sector because I want to see Germans and not British.
Look out for photos of the Archbishop of York. I was photographed with him as we left the plane …
Peakswater – 1.4.49
… An East wind for April and poor Bassett [local handyman] here to mend the pump which he found had something broken inside but he was able to solder it. I hope to have no more trouble. He is very kind …
Poor Lady Hamilton’s hatching has been a disaster, only one hatched out and died, the others died in their shells because the dry weather has made them so hard they can’t get out. Everyone else is having the same trouble … We are all very disappointed. Meanwhile we chew away at Lord Nelson in the most heartless fashion …
When I wake in the morning a feathery softness waves gently across my face. It is the plumy tail of the terrier asleep beside me, head downwards on his back beneath the counterpane with only his tail and sometimes his feet exposed …
I am going to bed with Mirabeau. I am still reading him. In the latter half there is less fucking and more politics so I go to sleep sooner. In the beginning his skips from bed to bed left me breathless and admiring! …
Berlin – 1.4.49: 9am
… I have had my ride round Berlin, which is just like the City of the Dead outside Cairo, where empty houses are kept as a memorial to the departed. Only here the empty houses are tidy shells …
We went to a film, Berliner Ballade … very good humoured about the grotesque city which greets the returning soldier, guying both the Allies – east and west – but the west-end audience laughed most at the anti-Russian jokes. Then to supper at Intourist, in the Soviet Zone. Only there is a separate room for Russians, and another separate room for Germans, so you sit among Czechs … Shabby people, smoky room, tango band. But I had caviar and vodka … No ill effects …
The German girl friend of my host was dour, offered me English cigarettes, and told me that she didn’t like the English. Why? Oh, she likes them more than the Germans, of course! … But … we have lost India etc. This reminded me of the German in London who warned me that they dislike the Americans, but ‘despise’ the English!
Berlin – 1.4.49: 6.30pm
It is a heavenly evening, blue sky going mauve, birds chirping, even the airlift is momentarily still … This street in the Grunewald is quiet, villas among trees; and I have a huge desk in the large sitting-room, with double windows … The bare wooden floors, and the large centrally-heated room … have a strange atmosphere. Once a German businessman lived here with his family, or perhaps an artist. Voices echo under the pine trees, and children shout; but one wonders how – having been conceived among horrors, and grown up among ruins – they will turn out …
I am giving a dinner party tonight at the Club for the Howes … Ted Howes is a dear, slow chap and ‘Robin’ his wife is red-headed and of the Raj … She spent the war in Jamaica, and so knows how to treat German servants …
They gave me a fabulous lunch yesterday and I must be polite. So I have greased my hair, and put on my grey shirt, and off I go. I would like to do things to you … which would surprise the military censor and even you …
I love you.
E.
Peakswater – 3.4.49
… I have been reading Alan Moorehead’s second article on Berlin in the Observer. I pray you are now safely away from that hopeless place …
I had a visit from an agent from Looe to whom I had written, who on hearing that I could not give him sole agency said, ‘Then I won’t bother. Then I won’t bother!’ Detestable Keltic Fringe! I have written to fourteen so some of them are bound to bother …
Poor Lady Hamilton still sits hissing on two addled eggs and there is nothing left of Lord Nelson but soup. The passage of time blurs memory. I can now look at the bacon and ham on the kitchen racks without thinking of Bentham and Hooker [two pet pigs] …fn18
Hotel Reichshof, Hamburg – 3.4.49
… After Berlin, Hamburg is like an old fairy-tale book’s picture of a clean, busy, gemuctlich [gemütlich] German city … But I am going today to see some 5 mi
Ricardofn19 rang up promptly … My first impression was that he was Jewish, but I don’t think so. A German business-man, going bald, with the family double-bend of the nose, but in a little German piggy nose. Light blue aggressive eyes, self-assured manners.
His wife Dindi (‘Dietelinde’) is beautiful and distinguished, and I proved to have a delicious little niece of 15, with merry eyes and good manners, most pretty …
Ricardo has a large, rather tasteless flat, while other Germans live in one room, because he is on such good terms with the British. His Control Company is agent for the Marshall Plan! …
He offered me five kinds of drink before dinner, and some brandy afterwards. It was marked ‘Naafi’ and he said that he had paid a very high price to a British officer for it. We had a merry little family meal with Moselle, and discussed money and Anouilh and money …
Ricardo bullied his wife in the German manner, and although she stands up to him I thought she was a little frightened. He has the arrogant violence of the German without a gleam of humour, and all my father’s violence without his charm; but all this is latent because he is well brought up (his mother, my Tanta Gisela, was an aristocrat as well as a snob) so that one can enjoy oneself, or even join Dindi in teasing him. He looks like a pig, and I believe is one …
But he can do everything for one. He has an office and friends at Dusseldorf, and he is arranging for me to go round the harbour here in a boat. But the great thing is that they assure me that Dusseldorf is with Hamburg the most civilised of the bigger cities, with an intelligentsia and an especially good theatre with Gustav Grundgens (a homosexual actor of genius whom Erika Mann once married).fn20 With introductions from them … life should be alright, and I plump for Dusseldorf.
After dinner they had invited a German film actor and his wife, both elegant and speaking perfect English, and the actor being temporarily debarred from work having been a Nazi. He was exquisitely good-looking and polite and worldly. (When Ricardo heard I’d been in the war, he said: ‘We didn’t think it worthwhile to fight for the Nazis, so we stayed at home.) And I smoked a whacking cigar and enjoyed myself thoroughly and made up my mind to exploit my cousin to the utmost. Today he fetches me at noon …
All my love,
E.
Peakswater – 4.4.49
… I am longing for news. I hope my letters are reaching you.
Crocksford, the agent from Fowey, visited me this morning. A nice old bozo – no ‘fringe’ about him. He liked the house very much, said he thought we would get £4000 for it and that he had several people asking for a place like this whom he would inform at once …
I am only going to deal with people who know the wants of the upper classes who are the only people likely to want this house. The others are waste of stamps.
Dunstan appeared on the doorstep with Mrs Goetzfn21 just before tea. We gave them a huge tea with poached eggs and what Roger calls ‘poor piggy’. Mrs Goetz is a slightly faded blonde quite pretty and shakes hands limply … I quite liked her. She has teeth, large slightly drooping breasts, is Australian and a sociologist, whatever that is …
Darling, this will never do. I had an erotic dream last night about Rutherford clasping me consolingly in his arms and wearing pin striped trousers! You must hasten home ou bien je me soulage moi-même …
Toby takes on all the long words he can. He asked at lunch ‘Is this lemonade paralysed?’ meaning I found ‘diluted’ …
I have finished Mirabeau and sent La Nausée back unread. I cannot read Sartre without you being within hugging distance …
Hamburg – 4.4.49
… I have provisionally agreed to ‘take over’ at Dusseldorf on May 1st; and I shall have to begin without you, that must be faced. Even correspondents’ wives cannot get out here (it means months of red tape and delay) … anyway it takes several months to get a flat …
Ricardo makes me feel that the ‘assignment in hell’ phrase has its full moral significance! (He is, I think, the worst kind of German, and I am studying him. We are great friends.)
Peakswater – 5.4.49
Two letters from you to break the silence. I needed them after a bad night fretting over some remarks of Dunstan’s as to the near-ness of war this summer …
The only thing I am afraid of is being parted from you …
Your cousin Ricardo sounds revolting! … I am jealous of your good talk … especially so since I have no one but the children to talk to …
The bloody pump has gone wrong again and I have had to appeal to Bassett. He is so nice about it but I feel a fool …
Hamburg – 5.4.49
… We dined and wined again, this time at an old-fashioned restaurant and at a night-club. The word has gone round, and I was repeatedly assured that this was not characteristic, and only available to the ‘upper hundred’. The girls in the party were excessively pretty, and one wore a dress cut so that you saw her breasts, which were also pretty and made me want you badly. It has all been rather gross but quite interesting: and I am looking forward to a good dose of politics and economics in the next 2 towns …
Dusseldorf – 6.4.49
Darling,
This is the end! We motored for seven hours across dull country to find the worst kind of transit hotel in which a bare small room with a bed in it is supposed to be bedroom, sitting-room and office. The taps fall off, the food is foul, the view is ruins …
I have hired a woman (thrice married) who belongs to one of the Dusseldorf ‘families’ to help me through the first days … I (must) short circuit the British billeting system, whose aim is to keep me in this hell-house – a typical brothel, minus les girls – for 6 months or so … Her father was one of the big magnates, and she knows all the theatre people and so on; but above all she can translate my newspapers for me! Everyone by the way understands my German and says that I speak with a French-Swiss accent. Alas I don’t understand theirs …
The Germans in the offices across the road have been at work for an hour and a half, and the English around me are waking up or breakfasting …
Eric returned to England, arriving at Northolt Airport on 13 April. In May he was advised to abandon his divorce action against Phyllis and accept the fact that he had wasted thousands of pounds in a legal wild goose chase. Phyllis was now free to resume her persecution.
He next returned to Germany, this time as a staff reporter for the Kemsley Press news agency, most of his work still appearing in the Sunday Times. As was frequently the case, his first letter to Mary referred to his recovery from the fear he almost always experienced when flying.
Dusseldorf – 2.5.49
… I rather like my room, which is austere with two solid desks and sun coming through the window with birds chirping among the ruins outside. A good journey … and I am quite recovered.
It rather looks as if Western Germany was losing its importance. Interest has already switched to Berlin. Moorehead, though pompous, was well-balanced yesterday. If the political parties play for ‘a united Germany’ and postpone a West German election, that may lead to a quieter time here, and make a move elsewhere in the autumn more likely …
Dusseldorf – 5.5.49
… I have got into a panic … Hannah [the woman hired in Dusseldorf] turned out to be quite, quite hopeless; and my German even worse than I feared!
So I am rushing up to Frankfurt, to find Frau von Heydebrecht, the really efficient secretary whom I’d reserved up there …
They want me to drive into the blockade when it’s lifted (I mean across the road into the Soviet sector, the moment they let us) … What a bore!
Frankfurt – 5.5.49: 9pm
My darling,
A letter arrived from you at lunch time and I feel less lost. I dashed up here with Hannah’s lover in his Buick station waggon which looks like a Zeppelin … He knew Ronnie Emmanuel … and has a 150 acre farm in Somerset … He has little red tufts over his c
I must, tomorrow, pick up some news to send. I haven’t sent a word yet … What a life. My German is so bad!
The airlift drones by, the beggar picks up a fag-end, and the US military police sergeant makes fun of his prisoner as he parades him up the street handcuffed …
My call comes through. I am to write a ‘colourful story’ when the Russians lift the blockade! Well, well …
You give no news about the Nicholsons.fn22 I hope they haven’t fallen through, as they seemed such promising customers …
Dusseldorf – 8.5.49
… I feel much better now that I’ve sent my first messages: one on Friday, and three last night including a gruesome murder. I wonder if you’ll see anything in the Sunday Times; I made a mistake about Bavaria, but it doesn’t matter.
And I feel much, much better for a very fine letter from you here on my return. You lay naked and will grow brown. Which reminds me, oh but I found a house at Frankfurt! It may be awful but to find a house is miraculous … [and] you can transform it …
Just off to Bonn with Terence Prittie [Manchester Guardian], Mann of D.T. [Daily Telegraph] and Norman Clark of N-C [News Chronicle] …
Dusseldorf – 9.5.49
… I am in a rage, having had my first slip up. I rang the German news agency at midnight, and so did that ass Hannah and we were assured that there would be no vote on the German constitution until Tuesday. Actually, the vote was taken at midnight and everyone else will have it. The only consolation is that … our newspapers pay small attention to the details; all the same Germany’s new constitution went through, and I missed it! I am sacking Hannah this morning, and my war-horse from Frankfurt begins next Monday.
Actually, it was quite interesting and I’d written my message leaving a blank for the votes. (Curse her). I went to Bonn … learned quite a lot and saw the Germans at their organised politics for the first time. My colleagues seem to think that Frankfurt will be the capital; in which case I am the only one to have captured a house … But the chief likelihood is of some compromise, and they all expect to go back to Berlin by September.fn23 That would bring my job here to an end.