To the Letter - Simon Garfield

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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 un-ashamed 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 affairés 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. 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. 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.

      I do not share your views about the ‘waste of time’ involved in a crashed courtship.

      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.

      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 [small sketch], 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, and 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.

      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. Directly it got up there, it went very quiet and then started snuffling around for something to eat. 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.

      Here am I, nominally a soldier, feeling tender hearted about a pig. And there, a couple of weeks ago, were four of our chaps deputed to shoot three of the camp dogs, no more than puppies, laughing, bright, happy, who had somehow got canker of the ear necessitating their destruction. The stomachs of these chaps were really affected, and they were thoroughly miserable.

      My eye on post-war arguments when I shall be accused of disloyalty and lack of patriotism because of my desire for changes, 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. Once, my Mother was not able to get any soda, and my Dad went out and ordered 56lbs, which actually arrived the same afternoon, to my Mother’s mixed joy and regret! 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 saw a suggestion for a new house to have a built-in bookcase, or place for it, and thought this a rather good idea, especially as my three or four hundred nondescripts are shoved, wedged, packed tight at the top of a cupboard at the moment. 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.

      We all try to carry on as though we were at home, and where we act differently we are doing things we would have liked to have done at home, if the chance had arisen. The Army turns very few saints into devils, though it may be easier than the reverse process. 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.

      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 ground-sheet 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. Only occasionally does a weakling leave the huddled concourse. We take our fun seriously, and when we can get it, though I

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