[No surviving envelope]
Letter 20
I found your letter of the 28th October waiting for me; and though I shall hope to see your handwriting return to nearer normal (I think this letter is a bit more like your usual handwriting than the previous) I was very happy to get it.1 Of course I should not have let a fortnight pass without writing: but the illness was only due to last a week at most. Andtravels, trips and plansTSE's abortive 1942 Iceland mission;e7;a1 if I had not been ill I should have gone to Iceland, which would probably have meant a gap of the same length – though this time, and the next time if I go abroad again (but not in the winter) I shall not be so conscientiously secretive about it, in view of the fact that the news reached America in a letter from somebody else, as well as appearing in the press.
BeforeNason, Margaret ('Meg') Geraldine;a5 anything else, ISunderland-Taylor, Alice Maud Maryher death and memory;a8 must tell you that I have had a letter from Meg Nason to tell me of the death of Miss Sunderland-Taylor, and sending me a cutting which I enclose in the hope that it will reach you.2 IPerkinses, the;k5 know that you, and the Perkins’s, will grieve over this, but I might as well tell you at once and direct. Of course, I hardly remember her except during that feverish period when we worked like niggers to help her blackout her house; and at the time I had other things to think about! but I remember her as a sterling sort of person, with plenty of energy and public spirit: I remember that she was instantly taking in evacuated children, and I imagine that she took a very active part in organising this relief, later, in Campden. ButEnglandChipping Campden, Gloucestershire;e1Stamford House passes into new hands;b5, on such slight acquaintance, I cannot help thinking first of the house passing into other hands, and the garden becoming a garden enclosed with us outside it. I clung to the thought of a return to Campden – and perhaps there may be other gardens – and only by accepting the past as past is there hope of a future,3 with, perhaps, different blessings, or in a different guise, from what any anticipation could present.
Your second letter confirmed the first; and you will know at once, I hope that if I had foreseen them I might have written differently, and in less acute torment, than I did, so I hope you will only retain from mine what still matters, for [sc. and] forget what does not. IndeedHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3particularly constrained by EH's letter of 1939;h4, I feel closer to you than I have for these past three years, with that feeling of a misunderstanding, too puzzling and disturbing to speak about, worrying me the whole time. And although I am, in a way, more sad, I feel rather more at peace – though this will always fluctuate, and the several pains that have gnawed will return from time to time. Anyway, my sense of dependence upon [you] is reaffirmed; and my sense of the permanent, of what always has been there and is unique and which always will abide.
This may reach you before Christmas. My thought and love will be with you more than ever at that time.
I thought too that she was an understanding person: I shall remember her with gratitude.
1.TSE to Meg Nason, 7 Dec. 1942: ‘I think that Emily is better, but I notice that her writing is much scrawlier than ever; and as no one seems to be able to say just what her illness was, except vaguely an “infection”, I am not yet happy about her. I do not think that she will be able to work for some time; and idleness, especially at this time, will be hard for her to bear.’
2.Alice Maud Mary Sunderland-Taylor (b. 1872), retired schoolteacher and owner of Stamford House, Chipping Campden, died at Imperial Nursing Home, Cheltenham, on 28 Oct. 1942. An obituary appeared in the Evesham Journal, 7 Nov. 1942.
TSE to Meg Nason, 7 Dec. 1942: ‘I am distressed by the death of Miss Sunderland-Taylor, and I know that Emily and the Perkins’s will be still more so. They were very fond of her; and also I fear that this will seem like the breaking of a link. I know they have clung to the hope of returning to Campden; though I have doubted whether, by the time the war is over, the Perkins’s will be strong enough to go to and fro; and certainly it will seem more formidable if they cannot return to the same house and garden. I have spent so many happy times there, that I cannot bear to think that I shall never, probably, enter it again.’
3.Burnt Norton:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
1.MargaretNason, Margaret ('Meg') Geraldine (Meg) Geraldine Nason (1900–86), proprietor of the Bindery tea rooms, Broadway, Worcestershire, whom TSE and EH befriended on visits to Chipping Campden.
6.AliceSunderland-Taylor, Alice Maud Mary Maud Mary Sunderland-Taylor (1872–1942), owner of Stamford House, Chipping Campden, which the Perkinses were renting for the season. (Sunderland-Taylor, a spinster and retired schoolteacher from Stamford, Lincolnshire, liked to spend her summers in Yugoslavia.) Edith Perkins wrote from Aban Court Hotel, Harrington Gardens, South Kensington, London, to invite TSE to meet Sunderland-Taylor at dinner on Mon. 29 Nov.