So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. Penelope Fitzgerald

was affected by drink, and finally a parent gave them a lift – it was in Tooting – Ria drank Dubonnet – I feel it is all beyond me, and I am old and grey and full of sleep.

      Well, I did enjoy it yesterday, I really did – If you decide to come up, which wd. be nice, just send a P.C. won’t you

      Love Mum

      

       Miss Freeston’s

       [Westminster Tutors]

      18 November [1968]

      Dearest Tina,

      Yes I was worried about your headache and felt I was being tiresome asking about it, but I did enjoy the week-end and felt very much better on the Sunday (but this also made me feel worse because you weren’t) – I would love to stay the night again, another time. When I was up at Somerville I was always extravagantly worried about something – now it soothes me, particularly when it’s damp, dripping and cosy.

      I hope you got P.C. I tried to persuade the V&A slides dept. (now in charge of amateurish lady in cardigan, and still behind piles of masonry and bits of statues) to send the slides off at once – but she said they couldn’t be assembled till Friday.

      I told Mrs Macintyre how much we’d enjoyed Donald’s performance – she said anxiously Didn’t you think he gabbled? I at once replied no I thought that was an interesting part of the interpretation. Mrs M. very pleased.

      Just received the copy of Grandpa’s book on the Church school – very nicely done in offset type, but no illustration or photograph of the school, which I think a pity. A bit of a shadow, because grandpa declares that this is the last thing he’ll write, after 70 years writing! – but satisfactory to see it finished properly. I’m going to read it all carefully as soon as I’ve got a civilized time to do so.

      Thankyou again darling, it was lovely to see you,

      much love Ma

      

       Miss Freeston’s

       [Westminster Tutors]

      [early 1969]

      Dearest Tina,

      Still wondering how the play is going and whether the ladies will squeeze or half squeeze into their low-necked costumes obtained from Dorchester-on-Thames. Donald Macintyre and company are returning at end of Feb to do special Twelfth Night in front of the unfortunate Middle Temple who are expecting a nice evening of Shakespeare with nice music; more dirt and filth is specially being sprayed on the costumes.

      I felt very encouraged when in spite of my poor reading I got through to the finals of the Poetry Festival with the ‘Kitchen Drawer’ poem^* – I was much helped by Daddy’s loud applause from where he was sitting with the Sunday Times in the back row, and by a decent young poet with a thick head of hair and beard who came after me and said ‘I did like the poem about kitchen drawers.’ In the evening I had to read after Roger McGough who was very funny, and before a compassionate coloured poet, so didn’t really feel at ease, and Daddy had gone home, after sitting through the whole read-in – (many of the contestants cheated and read very long poems about priests and sex and oppression and snow-queens), and tea at Lyons and a visit to Westminster Cathedral (where I was frightened by a new reliquaire, a martyr lying down wearing a surplice with black shoes and polished silver face and hands) so I had no-one to support me and missed you very much. That dreadful Glasgow man Leo Edlon was there trying to sell his tattily printed poems – he was at the reading you took me to in Oxford – he was accompanied this time by an unwholesome youth in a tiny blue corduroy outfit – however it all went off quite well as St John’s has been done over very well by the inevitable BBC and the crypt has become a large bar with red wine and coffee. Yesterday, Monday, I took my VI form – Ted Hughes strangely mumbling with his eyes close to the paper read some animal poems and then lengthy extracts from this ‘autobiography of the crow’ he’s doing, of himself really I suppose. (It seems so violent and not quite nice – better than the animals though). I took 2 Indians on the staff who drove me down in a mini and seemed to enjoy it. Well enough of this. – A further embarrassment this week, one of my pupils is the grand-daughter of the old lady in Suffolk to whom (as they say) Helen is cook! She tells me that her Granny is ‘quite afraid of your brother because he is so clever’. I can’t imagine what Rawle can have said, but I can see that the girl feels it’s all awkward; if I go to see them should I sit above or below stairs?

      Poor Ria very depressed (though delighted by the socks &c) but has gone to the Packers today and I hope this will cheer her up. I’ll go now and cook a large dinner, in the hope that someone eventually comes in for it.

      much love always and longing to hear all about everything

      Mum x

      

      (Valpy is still in Portugal, in luxury suite with bed which gives you a massage if you press a button)

      

       St Deiniol’s Library

       Hawarden

       Chester

      10 July [1969]

      Dearest Tina,

      I have arrived here sneezing loudly, and shrunk from by everyone, but safely – it is very queer here – very – as strange, musty, smell about everything – I was only just in time (taking a taxi with a lady taxi-driver) for lunch – this was quite nice, with boiled chicken and ice-cream eagerly devoured, as by hospital patients – the guests, with the sub-warden, who seems to be in a coma, were seated round an imitation mediaeval oak table – of good quality – only the sub-warden had a silver napkin ring, we had paper ones – the guests are all men, and all decayed clergy-men – I’m the only lady, and I do think my skirts are too short – when I arrived at table they were discussing Austrian Baroque architecture, and the writings of Professor Asa Briggs – there is nothing spiritual in them – afterwards you go into a mouldering Gothic oak drawing-room for coffee – but everyone stays standing up, to show they don’t intend to have a second cup – it turns out the place is really a theological college and everything is geared to the ordinands – but they were all away for the week-end – will be back in October, clearly a big event – I was offered a glass of cider at lunch – it was left behind by the ordinands – no TV in the ‘common room’ so as not to distract the ordinands – the croquet-lawn behind the library is to give a little recreation to the ordinands – After tea, which came into the common room on a trolley, with sandwiches and Battenberg cake, and teapots of that mysterious metal – some of the clerics helped themselves liberally, but I didn’t like to – the sub-warden showed me the library – a wonderful wood-panelled Gothic library, but smelling frightfully of must – impossible, it seems, to work there during the winter because of the cold – what about these pipes? – they haven’t worked since 1912 – the sub-warden explained our library system – you write your name on half of a ticket, then put the other half on the shelf where the missing book is – clearly nobody ever does this – clerics were tottering dangerously up and down the stairs and ladders. The latest Who’s Who is 1927 – but there are quite a few dusty English Lit: books, and the sub-warden proudly showed me the files of The Victorian magazine – these may interest you – the chair I sat on collapsed instantly. My room is just like a Somerville first-year room, with a pink basketwork chair. It overlooks a gloomy churchyard, where a few ladies in hats are arranging flowers in jam-jars. However the church is pretty and the headstones look romantic in the bright evening sun. – The dinner bell has just interrupted me – I went down five minutes late, which I thought was about right, but they were half way through dinner already, the sub-warden absurdly presiding in a gown – a new, ancient deaf, cleric has arrived from the Canary Islands – he says that in 3 weeks he is going back to the Canary Islands – q. Why did he come at all? – another cleric said to me – I saw you soaking up the sun on the back lawn – I shall sit on the front lawn tomorrow – another cleric who seems to be wearing a wig (they’ve all got