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If ever one heard the voice and ambitions of the parent rather than the child it is in that last sentence, but if Alec Alexander had already mapped out the future for his daughter, Eileen had other ideas. When ‘I was about sixteen,’ she wrote later,
my father hauled me off to Cambridge to see the Mistress & the Director of Studies in Law (I knew I was going to read English but Dad refused to believe anything so revolutionary – so, in spite of my protests, he arranged that I should be interviewed as a prospective law-student). It was a grilling day in August, I remember. I dressed very carefully in my best clothes to give myself confidence. (I was very frightened) Dad took one look at me & said that he wasn’t going to be a party to the prejudicing of my chances – by letting me appear before women of High Living & Thinking, with short-sleeves (it was, as I have said before, a grilling day in August) and looking as though I were an associate of the doubtful revels of Brighter Mayfair. He ransacked my wardrobe, while I stood by, crying – and drew forth a knitted jersey which I kept for fishing in Scotland – a very old skirt and a pair of hearty shoes – and said ‘wear those’. I did – and cried all the way to Cambridge … We had an uneventful interview with the Mistress – but I recovered my self-respect with the D of S in Law. She and Dad were obviously twin souls. They discussed highly technical points of International Law for a long time – while I sat languidly staring out of the window. Then she turned to me & asked where my particular interest in the Law lay … I said – nowhere – I was going to read English. She drew herself up to her full height, turned a cold eye on my father & asked him why we were seeing her if that was the position. He had nothing to say in answer to that & we withdrew hastily.
It would be another two years before Eileen finally escaped parents, siblings and a Cairo she had grown to hate, but in the October of 1936 she finally had her wish and left to study English at Cambridge. The official college photograph of the Girton entrants for that year shows the young woman whom Gershon would have first met, uncomfortably perched second from the right in the third row from the back, a nineteen-year-old who looks little more than half that age, a schoolgirl ‘bent on celibacy’, as she put it, and still recognisably the same physically awkward, emotionally uncertain adolescent her father had dragged to the Girton interview two years before.
If this is nothing like the whole story – in a college full of ‘Amazonian clergyman’s daughters with bulging, scrawny legs’ she was happy enough to play the ‘Mosseri card’ when it suited – it is worth keeping in mind this Eileen because for all the brilliance and intellectual swagger of the letters this is the young woman who wrote them. She had come up to Cambridge, too, with every hope of emulating her father’s dazzling record, but if a ‘second’ in ‘Prelims’ was not disgrace enough for an Alexander, she had spent the summer of 1938 – ‘ill with anxiety’ from her father’s ‘intellectual demands’ – recovering in the Evelyn Nursing Home from a duodenal ulcer which had stopped her even sitting the Part I of her English Tripos.
It was a low period in her life, brightened only by her first meeting with Gershon, but a year later redemption had come. As she set off to meet her parents with Gershon driving her car, ‘Semiramis’, it was to give her father the news that she had gained one of only three firsts awarded that year to women in the English Tripos. She had also won a college prize, and with a place at Cambridge to begin research with the promise of some teaching, her academic future seemed assured. All she had ever wanted as she grew up, she said, was to be a Cambridge don, and now there seemed nothing to stop her.
We first meet Eileen in July 1939, recovering in hospital, her hopes for the future still alive in spite of a worsening situation in Europe. When she is well enough to travel she goes for the summer to the family’s holiday house near Drumnadrochit, high above Loch Ness, and it is not until 23 August, the same day that the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact is signed, that the first half-fearful, half-comic references to the outside world break in on her letters. From this point, as it becomes clear that there is to be no second Munich, the fragile quiet that had held since Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in the spring unravels at frightening speed. On 24 August, Parliament passes an Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, giving the government control over virtually every aspect of national life. On the 25th, Britain and France reaffirm their commitment to Polish independence and territorial integrity and, six days later, in the early hours of 1 September, German troops cross the border into Poland. By 6 a.m. that same day Warsaw will be under air attack and Britain and France left facing the consequences of their Polish alliance.
1
Drumnadrochit, summer 1939
Monday 17 July Gershon – what everyone seems to have forgotten is that if I hadn’t asked you to drive me to London that Tuesday, you would never have had your arm broken & your life thoroughly disorganized for a considerable period of time – Furthermore if I had directed you rightly we’d never have got into that damned death trap of a side-road.
I have been brooding on this for a very long time Gershon, and at nights I have lain trying & trying to recall something about the accident but I simply can’t remember a word, so I shall not even be able to help you by corroborating your evidence.
Whichever way the verdict goes, please remember that I feel, absolutely certainly and sincerely, that the accident was not down to your carelessness but to pure chance, and that I owe you nothing but profound gratitude for the friendship and loyalty you have shown me during all these weeks of illness.
The very best of luck Gershon – I am looking forward to seeing you after this irksome business is all over, today.
Wednesday 19 July Talking of my appearance – assuming (rather dangerously – for I never can tell with you whether what you say is what you mean & vice versa – as I think I’ve said before) that you were serious when you asked me to give you a photograph of me – I asked my mother whether we had any copies of the Family Features still in our possession – but, no, it seems that all 24 are scattered among Alexander’s and Mosseri’s over an area stretching from Cape Town to Vancouver – so, alas, I cannot send you one of those, but must wait until my transitory (as opposed to permanent) blemishes have gone, & then have one done especially for you at one of those kind misty photographers who define one’s eyelash, a shoulder curve, & the tip of an ear, and have the rest enveloped in a kindly greyish haze. (I mean that you shall have a photograph of me if, though I can hardly credit it, you really want such a useless commodity.)
Friday 21 July My face is now fully exposed to the world & it looks like the rear elevation of a baboon. This is very disconcerting, as it gets no better & I am going to be driven very slowly to London on Monday for X-ray treatment. I’m so glad I didn’t show it to you on Monday – it is perfectly horrible & I don’t want anyone to see me while it’s like this. I do hope they’ll find something to cure it – it looks like bright pink – and – yellow leprosy to me but the Doctors will never listen to a lay-diagnosis.
Friday 28 July Yesterday my parents went to Cambridge to choose lodgings for me, and I had a lovely evening when they came back, listening to their accounts of all the people they met, (while calling on Miss Bradbrook in Girton) who told them how clever I was – D’you think I shall ever get used to the idea of being clever, Gershon, or believe that I really am? (The odd thing is that though I don’t feel in the least convinced of it myself, I love other people thinking it.) Apparently they have found magnificent rooms for me – and quite near the Evelyn too, just in case!
Aubrey sent me the Cambridge Daily News with its beastly little mean-spirited lead-line & account of the accident. I think it would be a good idea if you had a Medieval Shivering of Lances with the Editor while I hid beneath a bush – prodding him in the behind with a two-handed sword – but this is as you please, of course.
Yesterday afternoon Joan Aubertin and her fiancé came to see me – what with seeing Ian for the first time since the end of term & having someone at last to whom she could expand about her first (how well I knew that feeling before I. & May’s party!) Joan hopped about like an electric wire, & I was simply prickling with nerves – so we wore each other out – with poor Ian acting as a passive buffer state – you’d have laughed at us, I think, but he found us a little wearing – though he was the soul of good-nature. We talked about our Firsts first (of course) and then gossiped as nastily as could be about our friends at Girton – and we both felt young again – which was refreshing after all this time.
I am getting more & more active every day & Dad peers at me heartily every morning & says how much better I look – which is discouraging – because I don’t feel really robust yet, and I like a little tender sympathy – not a brisk satisfaction with my excellent progress. Ah! Parents!
Dicky is in our midst once more. At present he is concealing his fiendlike personality beneath a well-bred and charm-dripping exterior, for some reason known only to his Machiavellian self. My parents have swelled several inches with pride in his ‘reformed’ self. He has further won their hearts by being second in his form for the term – which is an improvement on a steady record of last place. Personally I feel he is brewing something perfectly awful & is waiting to get to Drumnadrochit to spring it on us all. However, perhaps I am wrong after all – I hope so. If an explosion occurs in Scotland I’ll send you an expurgated account of it. Dicky’s language, on the occasions when his brow is blackened with wrath, is not repeatable.
Wednesday 2 August The train journey from Edinburgh to Inverness (180 miles) took longer than the journey from London to Edinburgh (410 miles) & we arrived an hour late. And the jolting was phenomenal, even for a branch line Scottish train.
But all this was nothing to the 15-mile drive from Inverness to Drumnadrochit. We have an old Ford 8 here which Dad uses for fishing & which has no springs at all, to mention. The road from Inverness to the village of Drumnadrochit is very good, but no surface can soothe the vibrations of our old Ford – and as for the last three miles – from the village to our house – Christina Rossetti’s poem, ‘Does the Road wind uphill all the way?’ was inspired by this very stretch of squelching mud – to call it a road would be forever to debase the word.
So I arrived thinking my head was cracked in two & I looked around at the familiar drawing-room furniture with a jaundiced eye – & thought with loathing of five weeks here without electric light – the shrill voices of my family converging on me from every angle – and the eternal gurglings of drain-pipes in the bathroom next door. This is a squat, grey little house – & looks solid enough – but it must be built of twigs because every sound made anywhere in the house can be heard everywhere else. It reminds me of Chaucer’s House of Rumour.1
But, for all this, I feel better this morning – & I look better too.
Thursday 3 August Oh! dear, Gershon, (observe the comma – I am not being forward!) I wish you weren’t so much cleverer than I am. When I first knew you, I was always in a state of waiting breathlessly for you to find out that I wasn’t clever, & erase me from the tables of your brain for ever – then I thought oh: well you must have found out by this time & were kindly overlooking it – but the more I saw of you, the more things I discovered you could do that I couldn’t – you could understand music, and pass your driving test at the second attempt, and play games, & follow the Hebrew in the prayer book without using your finger, & be forward without being impertinent, & sing in the street without being foolish – & all kinds of other things too – but this last display of versatility is too much – you can type as well – and in two colours – and two different sizes! What can I do but say humbly that it’s been an honour to know you?
Are you going to be at Ismay’s wedding or will you be travelling home on that day? (Surely if you wait until the 13th you will be using a public conveyance on the New Year which would be horribly un-kosher of you and put you out of Beth Din2 spitting range for ever!) I shall have a new tooth for that day – (my dentist has promised me most solemnly to have it ready) & it will be my first public appearance since the accident. So if you aren’t there I shall probably cry – but no matter! I was very perturbed to hear that Ismay had chosen a Rabbi not labelled by Beth Din either – How awful! But I feel sure that she’ll give such an air of respectability to her life of sin, that we’ll all be shaking our heads and declaring, in about a year’s time, that we must have made a mistake, after all.
Saturday 5 August On Friday I had a beautiful surprise. The front-door bell rang – in itself an exciting event here – because our nearest neighbour lives three miles away – and few people will venture their lives or cars on the up-winding mud track which is the only means of getting at us. It was Hamish! The fact that Charlotte was with him daunted me for a moment, (he is not at his enchanting best with others, when Charlotte is there) but we got onto a Higher Plane at once, whither Charlotte could not follow us – so she just stood & gaped & put my conversational style down to concussion & Hamish’s to humouring the patient. He was very concerned for you & sent you his regards.
Tuesday 8 August It is charming of you to look forward to my letters with ‘unreasonable impatience’ – that is exactly how I look forward to yours – though I’d never have been able to express it so aptly myself – nor so prettily! There is nothing more to tell you about my collar bone. You knew it was dislocated, didn’t you? If not I can’t think how I forgot to tell you – you must have distracted my attention!
Your suggestion about our being seen together at Ismay’s wedding did not surprise me much, after your startling revelations about Mr Zeigler, D. Machonochie and the Prosecuting Solicitor – but I was mildly shocked to realize that things had gone so far, that we wouldn’t be able to go to a huge reception – and there nod to one another in friendly greeting & perhaps exchange a casual word, without giving rise to whisperings & head-waggings of the kind you suggest. I see that it is going to take us a long time to Live This Down! This is, in its way, a pity, but I think we’ll survive it, don’t you?
I was relieved to read your delicately worded confession that you would be in Cambridge next year – (this is an understatement – but I feel I must learn to be a little more formal and less forward with you, before we meet at Ismay’s wedding, in view of all the inquisitive eyes that will be upon us there).
Saturday 12 August On Monday the family circle will be widened by the inclusion of my cousin Jean & Aunt Teddy, & from then, onwards, we shall have visitors the whole time, which will break the monotony of purely rural occupations a little, I hope. We expect to be in London on September 6th – & on the 15th my parents are going to Paris. They are trying to persuade me to go with them – but I loathe the Channel – hateful, bulging, oily, green horror – and feel disinclined for the French, at present – so I hope to be able to persuade them to let me go & stay in the country with friends until the beginning of term. Pray for me. I am so tired of la vie de famille.
Please write and laugh at me for thinking you are cross with me, Gershon – (if you are angry you can laugh satirically, or sardonically if you prefer it – and if you are not, you can laugh comfortingly – but please laugh!).
Monday 14 August You know, it is a strange thing, but everyone has suddenly started to say kind things about my appearance since the accident. It is rather like the kind of thing which is raked up about the character of the deceased in an obituary notice. Joan Aubertin was in Girton the other day, & she met Maureen Stack & Jo Manton – (d’you know either of them? No? Neither do I – but we know one another by sight). They gossiped about this & that & apparently my injuries were mentioned – and they said they hoped my face wasn’t spoilt. It was such a lovely serene face & reminded them of the Monna Lisa!!! (No, Gershon, they were not mistaking me for someone else – they know me very well by sight.) Joan retailed this in a letter to my father with a sardonic chuckle behind every word – but he lapped it all up & was simply delighted, & came & waved the letter at me.
Because I feel full of the milk of human kindness, I’ll concur in your judgement of Nachman. He bores me & always will – but that, as I think I told you, is because he never laughs at me – it casts no slur upon his character or intelligence. Lois is another matter altogether.
Thursday 17 August I had a letter from Sir Robert Waley Cohen, asking me to spend a week with him at Honeymead, from Sept 15th–21st. He says, graciously, that if I am not well enough to ride I can follow the hunt in the car. (what? what?) (Note the delicate manner in which he assumes that I can ride (as a matter of fact I can – but he has no reason to know that). Obviously all the Best People do ride, & if he didn’t think I was one of the Best People, he wouldn’t have asked me to stay – which makes me laugh a lot – but I think I shall go – it will spare me the threatened visit to Paris – and I shall love writing and telling you all about it. It will be a new experience. I have known Sir Robert and his two sons for many years (they have filled the ground floor of the Great Portland Street Synagogue on Yom Kippur while Mummy & Sophie Tucker & I have been filling the gallery, ever since I can remember) but I never suspected him of this pukkah strain. I shall never be quite the same again.
Saturday 19 August It was nice of you not to be sceptical about the Monna Lisa comparison. (Monna was a 13thC. Florentine abbreviation for Madonna – in fact an exact translation of m’lady – and so although I know all about how the vulgar herd spell this (conjectural) name for Leonardo’s Gioconda, I stick to Monna which is pedantic but Right.)
Tuesday 22 August Hamish came to see me on Sunday – (Charlotte is back in Edinburgh). I told him politely, but with a subtle inflection of enquiry in my voice, that Charlotte had written to me. He gave me a long and involved explanation of this phenomenon – (his story is that she got so tired of the sound of my name (!) that she got quite nasty about me. Hamish explained to her, with dignity, that he and I were on a Higher Plane – and finally brought her to see me – whereupon she was immediately reassured – one look at me was enough to convince her that here was no rival for her charms – and her letter was a subtle (?) tribute to her restored faith in Hamish – and her Absolute Confidence in me). It was a good story, told in Hamish’s inimitable voice & enlivened by Hamish’s inimitable mannerisms but I doubt if we’ve got to the core of the matter, even now.
Wednesday 23 August I wish I were a Cabinet Minister, Gershon – I’d have been so clever – nothing like this could ever have happened.3 When Italy attacked Abyssinia, I’d have put two nasty, bristling battle cruisers across the Suez Canal (strictly illegal, of course – but oh! what a gesture) and then I’d have cocked a snook at Mussolini (I never liked his face anyway) and I’d have written a rude note to Hitler saying that I knew all about why he was holding Mussolini’s hand – so as to keep his mind off Austria.
And now look what a nasty mess we’re in – all because no-one thought of including me in the Cabinet. It gives rise to ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’.4 Ah! well, let’s eat, drink & be merry for tomorrow we die – tis a maxim tremendous but trite.
As a matter of fact, I’m frightened. I just wanted to tell someone I was. Let’s not mention it again. You’re not thinking of sprouting into a handsome territorial, or anything, are you? don’t – darling – (not that I really think you would – but I’m being Forward and, (I hope) appealing, just in case you had considered it).
My aunt is clucking helplessly. Jean keeps on expecting a wire announcing her instant mobilization. My father prophecies a cataclysmic collapse in Germany, after which everything will be All Right. (He believes the Russo-German pact to be a wild clutch at a swirling-away straw by a drowning Fuhrer.) I go out & stir up rabbits – I prefer rabbits to political arguments. What’s done is done. She wept because she had no more to say.
Dear me, this is a very unsatisfactory letter. The truth is that I want to be comforted.
Friday 25 August In case of war I think my mother and the children will stay here. Dad will go to London to see in what way he can be of use, and I have written to Leslie HB’s5 secretary asking her advice as to what kind of job I’m fitted for. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to offend the aesthetic sensibilities of my friends or the nation by blossoming forth as a WAT Or a WREN Or a WAAF or even a land-worker.
My father doesn’t think there’ll be a war. He bases his belief on that old saw about right triumphing in the end – and also on a conviction that the Führer is played out.
Dicky is getting more and more insufferably insolent. I’d like to beat him hard. I wish you were here to do it for me – as a matter of fact I wish you were here – (but that is a forward admission, & quite by the way). There’s a sort of heat-vapour of suppressed hysteria in the house – which makes me feel I want to scream & scream. It is no-body’s fault – but it’s Hellish. Your letters are the only things that happen, to make me smile.
I blush, Gershon, I really do, to think of the number of letters from me which will await you on your return from Liverpool. (Though I am forward, I am not brazen – yet.)
Saturday 26 August Old Sir Robert, my-host-that-was-to-have-been, thinks that his house party on Exmoor will probably have to be cancelled – so it looks as though I shall not follow the hunt in a car – with the dowagers – after all. I shall, by then, probably be immured in some ‘destination unknown’ with the War Office.
And what of Ismay’s wedding? I fancy that in the event of War, she will be gathered to her Charles’ manly bosom sooner than either of them expected. But I’m not going to talk about war any longer – I’m tired of it – and you must be too, by now.
I’ve just been downstairs listening to the news. I think the suppression of Neville Henderson’s6 message from Hitler is very sinister. I hope we’re not going to have another Munich – but I don’t think so. Chamberlain (silly old cockerel) wouldn’t dare do it again – but you know the old saw: ‘If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly, fly again.’ (This is not original. I shouldn’t like you to think I am cleverer than I am.)
A heartening sight met me in the drawing room. Lionel – plunged deep in knitting. He offers no explanation of this phenomenon. He just sits, all wrapped up in yarn – knitting frenziedly – only coming out of his reverie occasionally to make trenchant comments on the news. Dicky is now not on speaking terms with anyone in the house except Lionel. He refuses to wash or brush his hair or change his clothes – or wear the requisite amount of undergarments. He goes about in a navy polo-jersey & navy shorts and Wellingtons – in & out of the house – his hair standing on end in wiry tangles. Occasionally he tramps about intoning a tuneless trill of sound – or murmuring ‘What the bloody Hell’ to himself in an aggressive manner. Otherwise he holds no communication with man or beast. Yes, Gershon, we are an odd household.
Dad is certain that there will be peace with honour. Well! if he’s right, we shall meet again at Ismay’s wedding in just over a fortnight, sha’n’t we? If he’s wrong – ‘Quoth the raven “Nevermore” –’7 or quite possibly, at any rate – but this is vapouring. Take no notice of it.
Monday 28 August I had an agitated letter from Joyce by the same post as your two. If there is a rent in the clouds – she is coming up here at once – otherwise she will be evacuating school-children for her Country.