Wednesday
Home
Dearest,
I never want to see a curtain or a hook or a curtain ring again! The whole of today has been occupied with curtains and their etceteras in some shape or form. It started this morning when I took our bedroom curtains down and put them in soak so that I would have to wash them today. Then after breakfast I thought I’d better get the screws in the window frames before doing the shopping. I thought this would take about half an hour but actually it took nearly all the morning because I discovered I would have to put in 16 screws – one in each corner of each frame and as they had to go in as far in the corner as possible and there was scarcely any room for your finger and thumb (I mean mine not yours) it was a fiddling job. The sun was quite warm outside but working in the window all that time I began to feel like a tomato in a greenhouse. Then there was a last minute rush to the shops, then dinner to cook and eat – and still you notice no work done and the curtains still in soak. After dinner I washed the curtains. My fist went straight through the first one so I treated the others with great reverence! Fortunately it was a perfect washing day and they dried beautifully. While they were on the line I took Wendy’s old curtains down and unpicked the Rufflette tapes on them as I didn’t see why they should be wasted. Then I sewed these on to her new curtains, made the frill, put the hooks in and hung them up. They look lovely and fresh but they will have to be washed very regularly.
This brought us to tea-time. After tea I ironed and hooked our curtains (they look lovely now – I hope they haven’t got mucky again by the time you come home) washed the dishes and bathed the children, who had been out all day and were just as filthy as the curtains! With them in bed I hung our curtains up again and then started, while there was still some daylight, to sew rings on our new blackout. I had to do this on the window to be sure that each ring was in exactly the right spot, so this was just as fiddling as putting the screws in. Anyway it’s done now, thank heaven and looks quite neat. I haven’t been out to test its efficiency as a blackout yet. If I find the light showing after all the trouble I’ve had I’ll go completely mad!
The whole thing is taken down quite quickly and it’s made from those two pieces of curtain that used to cover the two centre windows. I re-dyed them and they are quite a good black now. This leaves only the two side windows permanently papered and just now they are going to stay like that. I refuse to even consider another black-out problem. And that’s quite enough of that – three and a half pages of curtains! I’ll have you so sick of them as I am myself. I sometimes wonder if I bore you with all these tedious domestic details, but my day never seems complete if I haven’t told you exactly what I’ve done with it.
Your letter arrived by the midday post. I can never make up my mind when I want your letters to arrive. I like them first thing in the morning, of course, but when one doesn’t come it means that there are still the other two posts to look forward to.
Yes, I can quite understand how unsettled you will be feeling this week. Actually you have never had a chance to settle down in Skegness, knowing that you would be there such a short time. If you are going to be at Aberdeen for six months there will be some point in trying to get settled there. Is the Commodore who kept you waiting while your dinner went cold the same bloke who didn’t come to see your nice clean chalet? He seems a regular pest!
Michael’s behaviour is not such a worry as it was because in this weather I bundle them out right after breakfast so see very little of him all day. Meal times are the bogey. How he gets enough energy to play around all day I don’t know. He is eating absolutely nothing. Today, for instance, he had no more than two forkfuls of dinner, then at four o’clock came in pleading for a biscuit and I told him he was hungry because he hadn’t eaten his dinner and would have to stay hungry till tea-time. He yelled the place down of course, but, as he really did seem hungry, I thought there would be no trouble over tea. There being a sudden rush of new-laid eggs (they had so many today that they were making everyone take next week’s rations as well as this week’s – I had to take 18!) I made omelettes with apricot jam. Michael ate about a third of his, said he liked it, then deliberately played with the rest and didn’t have another scrap! This performance at every meal is most nerve-racking. I never enjoy my own meals. The baby-theorists say you should never show that it matters to you if a child doesn’t eat, but these days it is very hard to show no emotion when you see good food wasted. I hope Rees will give him something that will make him ravenous. Michael’s cough seems to be improving and Wendy is a mystery to me still. She looks fine, eats wonderfully well, and scarcely coughed at all during the day. Then each night round about eleven she starts this really terrible coughing. Last night she went on till she was sick. I gave her an extra dose of medicine during the night and it seemed to help a lot. There is always something to worry about, isn’t there? All day I’m expecting Michael to faint with malnutrition and half the night I’m sitting on Wendy’s bed while she coughs her insides out. Then next morning she seems so bright and energetic that you feel you must have dreamt it all.
I was wondering how you got on about your feet and I’m sorry you had to pay for new boots. How much did they ream you for them? You certainly have made very good use of the naval health services so far. It’s a wonder you didn’t have a baby there while you were at it!
Your mother was fishing for an invitation to stay over Easter yesterday. I hadn’t realised that Will was going away or I would have raised the matter myself. Anyway I thought I’d better clarify the situation right away so I told her that if I had definite news that you would not be home during the Easter weekend she would be very welcome, but while there was the faintest chance of you coming I was not inviting anyone to stay overnight and was not going to stay a night anywhere myself. With Thelma going away these weekends alone will become a very real problem for her, and she is quite welcome to come here at any time when there is no chance of a surprise visit from you, but no one under the sun is going to spoil that precious first moment, my sweet!
By the way, while we are on the subject, if you do find out exactly what time you will be coming beforehand, it might be as well not to let your mother know as she might find some excuse to be here at that time. I’m not blaming her, love. It’s only natural that she should want to see you as soon as she possibly can – but that moment is yours and mine and I’m willing to make a life-long enemy out of anyone who makes it otherwise!
It has been really warm here today. These nice not-too-hot days, especially towards the evening, always remind me of those long-ago days when we used to go walks together, stopping now and again for a drink (and now and again for other things!) while you expounded your theories on marriage and the world in general. I shall tell Wendy to marry a confirmed batchelor – they make such excellent husbands! I remember you saying that no man on earth was faithful to his wife, to which I replied that I was thankful I was not going to marry you! Dear, dear, how sure of ourselves we were, and how very, very young! Changed your ideas about fidelity, my own? Or are you leaving someone behind in Skegness? Do you remember how, catering for any eventuality, you had it all settled that if I should become pregnant you would marry me to legalise the child and then divorce me as soon as possible? What a cold-blooded monster you were, and yet I came back for more, didn’t I? I probably stuck to you at that time chiefly because I was jumping mad that I hadn’t made you fall for me. It came as quite a shock when you said “Have you ever thought of marrying me?” – in that little lane in West Kirby. I’ve never yet been able to make up my mind whether you were in earnest or not and I don’t think you knew yourself, did you? How wild I used to get because you would never say you loved me. In lighter moments you would say “I hate the sight of you” and in more emotional moments you would just kiss me but you’d never say it, you bugger! You’ve said it enough since to fill all those gaps, haven’t you precious?
West Kirby reminds me of a letter I wrote to you from there in which somehow the shadow of war cropped up. I remembered writing “Please, never go to any wars, will you darling”. Remember? That must be several years ago. I wonder if a hint of today’s separation touched me when I wrote that, even when I didn’t know I would ever be married to you. Not to be married to you! Can you imagine what that would mean? I can’t. I can’t picture myself at all without you. All those years before you came and comparatively few years since you came and yet you’re the whole of my life. How horrible to think it might never have happened. I sometimes go over the crossroads and see how often, years ago, I might have missed you. When I neither knew nor cared about your existence I was deciding, or other people and events were deciding, whether or not I should ever meet you. Just to take one little example. When I sat for the scholarship it was settled that if I didn’t pass for Bellevue I could be sent to Mount Pleasant (that being £2 cheaper). Now if I’d gone there it is practically certain that the higher standard of all-round teaching would have made up just that slight difference between an ordinary H.S. Cert and a university scholarship. Which means that I would have been fancying my chances with some conceited student when I might have been seducing you on the sandhills! ’Orrible thought!!! And you can even trace our meeting to years before either of us were born. For instance, if my Aunt Annie had not had a girl friend called Celia (who afterwards married a Tom Greene) then a certain young woman – whose parents had not even met then – would never have heard of the ‘Bootle Times’. And that’s only my side of the picture. All that time you were somehow, through a maze of crossroads and decisions, moving towards me, until that moment when you walked (or should I say staggered?) into County Hall (blessed be it for ever) and in a drunken stupor decided that you had to shag someone and I just happened to be about. And the world was never quite the same afterwards because the fates that had been trying to get these two stupid people to see that they were incomplete without each other, leaned back and left the rest to us. And even then we were stupid enough to hold out against loving each other! So the fates got a bit anxious and had to dig up a silly man who lived somewhere near me, and make him win some silly competition so that you would have to come and see him – and in passing, put me in the family way! We did give those fates a lot of bother didn’t we? They’d been working so hard to make sure that we should meet and yet when they plonked us down in the same little office we were just polite to each other – “Miss Gregson, you made these errors in this sports proof”. “Oh, did I, I’m sorry Mr Johnson.” Why didn’t the earth turn upside down or the heavens open or something when I was introduced to you? That’s what I can never understand. Life’s Big Moment – and nothing happens.
Oh, my own, my precious, I could go on like this for ever – I am never tired of contemplating the miracle of our finding each other – and the hideous possibility that we might, somewhere along the road, have taken a wrong turning, and each spent an aimless life trying to find the other and never knowing what we had missed. And Wendy and Michael would have been lonely little unborn ghosts in the limbo where the babies live whose parents lost their way. My darling, we belong to each other, now and a million years hence.
My last letter to Skegness, angel. Tomorrow night I shall be writing to you and on Friday night when you are on the train. Perhaps for part of the time the train will bring you nearer to me and then up you’ll go out of England far away – but all the time you’ll be close in my arms. You are never far away from me, sweet. Even if you sail to the other side of the world so that we are, for a moment, just as far from each other as is physically possible, we shall be a million times nearer than most people who eat and live and sleep together.
I can see every line of your face so clearly now, that I can’t believe you are not here. I’ve only just noticed that my face is quite wet – but I’m not miserable, darling – how could I be when I’ve got you right by me at this moment?
I’ll say goodnight, now, dearest, before I come down to earth again. I haven’t the foggiest idea of the time but it must be darned late. Write from Aberdeen the first minute you can.
Always your very own,
Stella
Mar 241942