[No surviving envelope]
It seems a very long time since I have heard from you and a long time since I have written. IHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3post-war frequency;i3 have been a bad correspondent to everybody since I left Shamley, and shall be until I get settled. We19 Carlyle Mansions, London;a8 now hope to be in 19, Carlyle Mansions by the end of January. It is party [sc. partly] the concerns in connexion with the flat, and partly the unsatisfactory way of living in lodgings, and partly poor health, that has made me very tired in the evenings. ThenPound, Ezrahis legal situation;d2 there are various anxieties, like Ezra Pound, on one’s mind; and the gnawing feeling of wanting to get down to regular writing again, in a room with my books around me, every morning. This last weekend I had two days in bed with a kind of cold – the doctor came to see me – which was really the aftermath of a cold I got at the time when we were without gas. Now I have supplemented my gas fire by a small electric fire that works off the light circuit and really gives a good deal of heat. At times when the gas has been only half strength, the electric fire has just made up the difference. Now the weather is warmer, and the gas has been back to normal. AndSecond World Warand post-war European prospects;e9 I am very worried over the American loan to Britain, for it seems a kind of business in which the two countries talk a different language: but ‘The Tablet’ is right, we let Poland down, and Jugoslavia, and there is a kind of retribution in it.1 We are going to be a poor country, and we must expect privations. Howevertravels, trips and plansTSE's 1945 Christmas in Lee;f8;a2 I go off to Lee on Friday, I hope, for a fortnight’s rest, andMirrlees, Emily Lina ('Mappie', née Moncrieff)her aura;f4 I am sure that wherever Mrs. Mirrlees is there will be comfort, as well as her own most lovable personality. MrsMrs Millington (the blind masseuse)dies of stroke;b3. Millington, my masseuse, is dead of a stroke, so that the treatment for my hand and arm will never be completed.
IPerkinses, the;l5 wish I could be with you and the Perkins’s at Christmas. But I am hoping for my visit next year. I shall think of you on Christmas eve.
1.‘The World Week by Week’, The Tablet: A Weekly Newspaper and Review, 15 Dec. 1945, of the Polish Provisional Government: ‘It is perfectly understandable that the Communists should support them, but it is extraordinary that anybody not a Communist should do so, or should be so blindly convinced of the general benevolence of the Russians towards the West and so callously indifferent to the tragedy of the Polish nation. One very simple test of the unrepresentativeness of this Provisional Government is its predominantly anti-Catholic character in a predominantly Catholic nation […] it is a simple matter of history that Hitler tried for years to get the Polish Government, the Government of Colonel Beck, to join him against Russia, and was wholly unsuccessful. Hitler did, however, succeed in getting the Russian Government, Stalin and Molotov, to join him in invading and partitioning Poland […]
‘It is a great embarrassment for the Soviet case that the pre-war Polish Government became Britain’s ally in 1939 and not Hitler’s. For today’s propaganda is to try to pretend that Poland was a Fascist state, the natural ally of Fascist Germany, while the truth is that Poland accepted the British and refused the German alliance because Poland belongs to the West and is part of the civilized and Christian Europe, which Marx and Lenin not less than Hitler hated and sought to destroy.’
‘The World Week by Week’, The Tablet, 8 Dec. 1945: ‘There are two principal tests by which every Government may be judged to discover whether it comes into the category of an ideological tyranny or not: whether it permits the Christian education of children, and whether it respects the Christian view of the Sacrament of marriage. The present Governments of Poland and of Yugoslavia are alike in that in both countries recent measures have proclaimed the secularization of marriage and the elimination from the schools of Christian teachers.
‘It is a further disquieting circumstance that in both Poland and Yugoslavia hostility to Great Britain and the United States is constantly discernible in the Press, in the wireless, in public speeches, and in the behaviour of the rank and file of Government officials as it is described by returning Englishmen […]
‘Material conditions in Poland remain extremely bad; and one of the great retarding factors in material recovery is and will continue to be that the Poles are forced to live under a Government in which they have no confidence.’
3.HopeMirrlees, Emily Lina ('Mappie', née Moncrieff) Mirrlees’s mother was Emily Lina Mirrlees, née Moncrieff (1862–1948) – known as ‘Mappie’ or ‘Mappy’ – see Biographical Register.
3.Ezra PoundPound, Ezra (1885–1972), American poet and critic: see Biographical Register.