rushed. The file in which she kept these notes also contained several letters, although many of these were drafts and incomplete.
7.
All His Honeyed Deceit
Thursday, 23 June 1932
Nearly two months have slipped by and the exams are over. The passion that rules my life at the moment is to get to know David A., that tall, nervous intense young man with the slender hands and white sensitive face. Last year he wore spats until Joan teased him out of it. Spats! I want to understand that mixture of wistfulness and superficial conceit and I want to win his confidence. It is going to be difficult, for if I force myself on him in the least he will leap back into that shell out of which he is beginning to creep. I think I am suffering a little from the hell others have suffered – being interested in someone who cannot give you back all your passion and desires. I want him to care – terribly. No one has ever fallen in love with me to any intense and palpitating degree. Mon ami, what a lot I could give you if you would only let me.35
Friday, 24 June
Perhaps I shall be able to indulge in some passionate affair while touring Russia during the summer vacc.
Tuesday, 5 July
What a fool I was to give David A. The Conquest of Happiness (Bertrand Russell). I underestimated his intelligence. It was written for the average man who cannot think very acutely for himself, and he is anything but average. I’m definitely losing ground there. He thinks I’m a half-wit.
Monday, 11 July
Ten days before the end of term and up heaves my tutor. ‘Now, Miss P., I am in a position to discuss your case. We have got all the results through. You have failed in Construction, Hygiene and Engineering, and I am afraid it will mean you will have to do the 2nd Year again.’
It was so ridiculous. Everyone was very kind and sympathetic, particularly David A., at which I felt gratified. ‘I mean, isn’t it silly,’ said David, ‘just for the sake of 6 hours to be put back a whole year …’ Perhaps after all it would be better to chuck Architecture completely and go in wholeheartedly for Interior Decoration. Gus of course was delighted when I told him this.
So I went and explained it all to Pop, who was kind as he always is but I know terribly disappointed to discover his precious little daughter was not the brilliant young undergrad he had given everyone to imagine. But it is a miracle to me how I got through my History exams, having produced a beautiful plan-section of Rheims Cathedral and firmly called it Notre Dame.
However Pop was not satisfied and came up to see my tutor. The next morning my tutor strongly advised me to continue with the course and could he give me his special course of coaching in Engineering? ‘I suppose at the time something was distracting your attention,’ he went on. ‘I don’t know what it was of course, but I might make one or two guesses. I’m no psychologist – the men students are bad enough, but the women completely baffle me. It might have been books or an interest in higher art, or theatre or men. You know it’s a very terrible thing when the students fall in love with one another. We can’t do anything about it, but it’s most distracting, most distracting …’
I could have smacked his face. I have chosen to do Decoration.
Mid-July
[Draft of letter]
Pooh darling,
Ethel has been frightening me into fits by the wildest suggestions for the reason of your rather strange silence. She firmly believes something has gone wrong and conjures up pictures of you sitting haggard-eyed before the good old gin bottle contemplating suicide because the girl has let you down. I don’t believe it.
No Pooh, if things have gone wrong for you I know that however difficult a time you are having now you will pull through. Naturally I think Pop is a bit anxious, but nevertheless he has faith in you also: your life has not been saved for you to tear to pieces within two years of its salvation.
Although we have not written we are thinking about you. We keep hoping for a letter from you first. In all your troubles Piglet prays for you.
Thursday, 28 July
I lay awake the other night in a sudden state of panic wondering why I had even contemplated joining the Student Tour to Russia on my own. I was visualising those five days at sea travelling tourist class on a Soviet ship with people I have never met nor know in the least. Accommodation may be cramped and uncomfortable, the North Sea may be very rough and I shall be ill. Conditions I am told in Russia are appalling.
We shall travel everywhere ‘hard’ class and sleep two or three to a room at the hotels of the cities we visit. Why was I then so rash to pay down my £25 I can so ill afford for three weeks that may be torture?
‘You are brave!’ people have said in awed tones. And, ‘Russia? Are you sure it’s quite safe?’ ‘Of course you will only be shown what they choose to show you.’ ‘I think you’re making a great mistake. Some women I know who were on a party that went to Moscow broke down at the sight of the squalor in which they were expected to exist while there.’
But Soviet Russia is a force that may not be ignored.
Mid-August
[Fragments of a copy of a letter to ‘Chris’36]
We accomplished the journey from Kiev without mishap and were only one-and-a-half hours late. Something contrived to bite me 13 times on the left arm and I am very glad to be at sea again. The ship is at least comparatively clean, and so far the Baltic is behaving itself admirably. I sought in vain among the letters at Leningrad and was more depressed (than ever) with that decayed city when I failed to find one from you. But perhaps it will be waiting for me at home.
I’ve missed you terribly. Were you beginning to be a bit disappointed with me, to think I was a flirt and merely after all the admiration and attention I could get? I’m sorry if I seemed cheap, but please, please believe me when I tell you I am not in the habit of allowing my male acquaintances to make love to me as you did. And you do do that divinely!37 Whether from experience or instinct I wouldn’t like to say, but I don’t think it matters much. The fact remains. Dear Passing Ship, please linger a little longer within my sight that I may grow to know and understand you better. You were marvellously kind to me, and that I shall never forget.
And now I will try to pull my scattered thoughts together and endeavour to tell you something about Russia. We were not there long enough to receive more than the briefest of impressions. Everyone told me before I went, we ‘were shown only what they wanted to show us,’ which nearly drives me epileptic with rage, as if they covered up their decaying buildings with dust sheets, screened off the food queues and chained off all undesirable parts of the city and prepared special places for tourists. Heavens, as if every city in the world has not backstreets and ugly buildings and bad factories they don’t wish foreigners to see.
But certainly to anyone used to the average luxuries of modern Western Europe, living in Russia is not exactly exciting at the moment. Many of the people are physically splendid to look upon, the younger generation particularly, but they are all clothed in garments that are shoddy and badly made. That no amount of propaganda even attempts to deny it is a sign of the poverty of the race. Imagine
