Letters to a Sister (9 page)

Later.
I heard the
Times
correspondent who was in Addis Ababa just now, giving an account of things. He is very interesting. He said the Eritrean troops were the only good soldiers with the Italians. He thinks Abyssinia will be made very uncomfortable for the Italians, for many years. If only we could keep them from trying to colonise it!…

Did you see A. P. Herbert's little verse
¹³⁰
in to-day's
Times?
It is bad verse, but may have a popular appeal, I hope. I enclose Gilbert Murray on the hopes for the League. He is still hopeful, I see.

Very much love.
   
E.R.M.

7,
Luxborough House, Northumberland St, W.1
10 August, [1936]

Dearest Jeanie,

... I was sorry you missed Dick Sheppard on the wireless. We thought him excellent; quite the best wireless sermon I have ever heard, very stirring and keen. I wish more sermons were like that. He really did make goodness sound like an urgent and desperately important job to be tackled; his idea was that we should all tackle it for 24 hours, on Monday, just to try it. I wonder how many people did! And what were the results. Perhaps huge gifts of money to useful things; perhaps businesses ruined through a day of honesty, or quarrels made up, or crimes confessed. We shall never know. He said that if we most of us cared twopence about the wretched conditions so many of our fellow-creatures lived in, they could be ended. When the sermon is published in the
St Martin's Magazine
next month, I will get it and send it you. It was a great change from the usual conventional maunderings of the clergy….

Your loving
E.R.M.

I am asked to sign a petition for voluntary euthanasia. Is this right? No hurry; send a p.c. sometime, yes or no.

In the autumn of 1936 Jean went to South Africa as a missionary nurse, accompanied by her friend Nancy Willetts. Early in 1939, however, Jeans health gave way and they returned to England. By the summer she had taken a District Nursing appointment at Romford, Essex.

None of Rose's letters to Jean written during this period have survived; the correspondence now begins again during the week before Britain declared war on Germany. By this time Rose had already volunteered—with ‘Elk', her beloved Morris car—as an emergency driver for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service.

Flat
7,
8, Luxborough St,
¹
W.1
28 August, [1939]

… This suspense is very trying.
²
6 o'clock News just over, and Henderson just flown back to Hitler with reply—I suppose he'll fly back to-morrow with Hitler's. How long can they keep it up? The longer the better. But I can't feel much hope. Meanwhile, we are all blacking out, stuffing up cracks, laying in sand, etc. I think this is a good thing, as it gives people something they feel useful to do, and may actually diminish effects of raids, and therefore lessen fear and prevent collapse of nerves in crowded districts, and prevent a bad raid being a knock-out blow. Of course the front will be
far
worse, but there's nothing people in general can do about that, unfortunately. My ambulance shifts will be every night 10 p.m.-7 a.m. for a week, then day shifts for the next week. But, as I am only part-time, I shall suggest that I go home to bed at 3, not 7, when there's no raid on, so that I can get some
sleep and be fit for writing next day. The first 24 hours I am to spend evacuating patients in Elk
³
from St George-in-the-East, [the hospital] down by London Docks. The hospitals are very short of cars for this. The idea is to clear out beds for raid casualties. I expect the patients will be very cross & disgusted. I hope they'll all know where they live, and that I shall be able to find their homes easily. I'm so glad you have found a nice flat—sorry it's ground floor, as it's not so good against burglars, and you'll have to bolt the windows when out. I feel we are living in a very bad dream, and still hope to wake before too late. But I fear Hitler daren't recede now from his claims, he would be afraid of losing face…. Yes, I will carry my
carte de visite
about with me always.

Perfect weather: how we are wasting it. What a shame to carry all those 40 English and Americans who wanted to land at Southampton to Germany !
⁴
If war breaks, they'll be interned there and may never get home at all. I'm sure steamers have no right to do that to fare-payers….

Very much love.

E.R.M.

Flat
7,
8, Luxborough St, W.1
6 September, [1939]

Dearest Jeanie,

It was so nice meeting together to-day, in spite of the miserable circs.
⁵
Perhaps hell too will be broken by such little gatherings from time to time. I've just had two young Air Raid Wardens in, very polite, to say I had a window that ‘might be better masked'; we went round the flat to locate it,
and found it was the glass panel over a bedroom door, which I have now drawn the curtains across. What a life!… I hope your wireless arrived, in time for you to hear the 9 o'clock news, and Harold Nicolson after it; he was very good, comparing 1914 with now. As he says truly, there was much more excitement then, and less sad realisation of all it means. He said he didn't think, and he hoped not, that much anti-German feeling will rise this time, spy mania, alien-hunting, etc, as it is not ‘the Germans' that we are against, but the Nazi Government, which we know many Germans hate themselves. He says
all
his German friends do. I don't meet anti-German feeling, certainly. I'm afraid there may be some anti-us feeling among Germans, as it has been so worked up; but I hope all our great civility to their merchant ships will soothe them—or will they only think us smug? Or, more likely, they will be told we have sunk them without warning and saved none of the crew, as we did the
Athenia
⁶
.
… What an intense longing for peace everyone (except perhaps the Czechs, who want their independence back) must feel, with all… [the] minor hardships as well as the great hardship of war. The evacuated mothers are many of them complaining bitterly about country life—no gas or electricity often, coal fires, hard beds, too few shops, etc.—and their hosts and hostesses of course resent this. Some of them will probably return to London and face the bombs, I expect.

Very much love:

    Your loving
E.R.M.

Flat
7,
8, Luxborough St, W.1
14 September, [1939]

Dearest Jeanie,

... I enclose
K.H.
⁷
His ‘reasons for being at war' are sound, if one admits the legitimacy of general war at all.
⁸
I don't. If Nazism
really
can't be defeated except by war, I say, let it win (for a time) in spite of all its horrors & cruelties. It is less irrevocable than war. The war is pitiful in its side effects, quite apart from the fighting etc. Any number of small businesses and workmen are ruined by it already, and men being sacked all round because their employers are reducing staff. A very nice young garage hand at my garage said to me to-day ‘I suppose I shall be sacked soon, even if I'm not called up. It doesn't seem as if these people' (governments, he meant) ‘can be human, not to be able to think of some way to settle things except by ruining every one's lives.' I find that the less people know about public affairs and read the papers and understand world politics, the more they feel that—naturally. It is the informed ones who feel ‘anything to stop Hitlerism'. I don't know about the Quakers, but I think they would say, if you
have
promised to commit an awful crime, you must announce at once that you aren't going to—of course with
very
abject apologies for having promised and misled a small nation….

I like letters which don't refer to the war. I got a nice one yesterday, from an Oxford don, asking me for the date of a manuscript poem, and telling me what work he is doing,
editing Bishop Corbet's poems.
⁹
The more people who can be thus detached the better, I'm sure.

Very much love…

   Your loving
E.R.M.

I ride a bicycle now a lot.

Sunday [18 September, 1939]
¹⁰

I hope to come on Wed: afternoon—by road, as we have a week's respite before petrol rations. It was a great sight last Friday night to see the cars queuing up for miles round each garage to fill up before midnight. Lots of them were also filling containers, which was illegal as well as selfish. And then after all it was put off….

Germany is now obviously about to use gas on the Poles. And Russia invading their eastern frontier.
¹¹
They must be very nearly finished. Then the Great Temptation
¹²
will be offered us by H., we shall refuse to yield to it, and then our turn will begin.

Love,

E.R.M.

Wednesday [21 September, 1939]
¹³

I got back all right, tho' lost way 2 or 3 times. Am now listening to Greenwood explaining why we are at war.
¹⁴
… Best news was Czech revolt—they are being ruthlessly suppressed, but must be making themselves troublesome, and it may spread. Already it is in Slovakia as well as Bohemia, and is joined in by a lot of German residents there. Greenwood is telling us we are fighting against the ‘arbitrament of force'. Seems an odd way of doing it, using the methods we are fighting against. Also, he says, to restore Poland. What a hope! I feel
anything
may happen, and have decided, I think, for the present to store Elk at Liss
¹⁵
and be a part-time ambulance driver without a car. I called at the Ambulance Station on way home. They want more full-time drivers—but I don't think I shall be one: we discussed the war. A man (gent:) said he'd rather be shot through the head than ‘cave in' now. A woman (wife of doctor just going to front with R.A.M.C.) said she'd rather cave in for ever than risk her husband being killed. Another woman thought much as we do that this war would settle nothing, and that we shall have war after war, whether we lose or win….

Very much love.

È.R.M.

28 September, [1939]

Dearest Jeanie,

... It was so nice seeing you yesterday. In the evening I dined with the Nicholsons
¹⁶
(Dorothy Brooke that was) and
met Sir William Beveridge, now Master of University College, Oxford. He was very depressed about the war, but thought it necessary, to get ‘a decent international order' and prevent weak countries being continually attacked and smashed like this. I said, was the war at all sure to lead to this result, even if we won; he thought it would, and that a world federation
must
follow. I don't see that it need, myself, or any evidence that this war won't be just another one in the long series. He says nearly all the undergraduates are either getting commissions or looking forward to soon, and all inspired by idealistic hopes of ‘smashing Hitlerism' and getting international decency. He said he finds
no
military spirit among them, or anything but distaste for war as such. But it is the ancient idea that you can drive out evil from the world by a war against it. He says they face dying, and don't seem to think about killing, which is, I suppose, the normal reaction of the young and inexperienced. It is all tragic and pathetic, and must be the same in Germany, only young Germans don't think they are fighting evil, or fighting for international decency, but fighting for Germany—a lower motive, but quite as strong. I feel sadder when I have been seeing all these informed & intelligent people, because they are quite sure we shall have the war, and that it will be pretty awful. They think we shall win it in the end, but after how long and after what waste of life! Sir W.B. said I couldn't really hate war as much as he does, because I want to stop this one, and he feels sure that would only lead to others, and he wants to stop the others by having this. Who hates war most is unimportant: I think we all hate it. But I feel more and more strongly that, if we really have this one, the whole world will be thrown back for years. How
can
our rulers take it on themselves, all this killing? I suppose they too think it will stop other wars and protect the world from Hitler methods in future. I see no hope now but in a German revolution, and I don't think we shall get it in time.

The Budget is alarming—
what
waste of money is going on!
¹⁷
We shall be a ruined country in about a month, at this rate. The big surtax payers will be left with only 3/- in every pound. How cross Uncle R. would have been!… And 7/6 is bad enough for us smaller incomes. Half the London shops are closing or closed, and their staffs sacked. And all this government-paid A.R.P. work etc. is taking men out of industry, and ruining the industries, and paying the men out of public money. The world seems to have gone quite crazy….

Very much love.

E.R.M.

Monday [3 October, 1939]
¹⁸

I think things move, and Peace with Ignominy is gaining in the country. Push on with the good work. I don't like all these stores of food and men
¹⁹
arriving in France, it will look so silly bringing them back. But we might pretend it is for manœeuvres. However, we must just make up our minds to look silly, of course. We have already run through a fortune over it. It is an interesting cleavage among people of goodwill. Virginia Woolf tells me the editor of the
New Statesman
²⁰
has gone over to Peace, and will come out with it in next number. She is for Peace, Leonard (her husband) for the war. The Communists and the Fascists both for Peace, to please Russia and the Nazis. The Church for War. And the Universities, and the House of Commons, and the Judges, Barristers, Clubmen, journalists (Vernon Bartlett, King-Hall, etc.) and nearly the whole press. My Mrs Browne
²¹
for Peace, on any terms. The war party are sure Hitler will make war on us
in a year or so if we let him get stronger now. The Communist
Daily Worker
is very funny just now, it makes out the Nazi attack on Poland as a Polish invasion of Germany and Russia, and Poland's being crushed by Gemany as a kind of spontaneous disintegration, a falling to pieces from internal weakness, from which Russia has delivered her and ‘established Peace in Europe'. What with these and the Mosley party, any one might be disgusted with the idea of peace on their terms. Just heard Ebor.
²²
Smug. His idea of our unanimity shows what limited circles he moves in. He should meet 'Ubby.
²³
And his Conference should come now, not after the war.
²⁴