Letters to a Sister (14 page)

The extreme inefficiency and lack of brains in most Portuguese is put down by scientists to their negro blood; a census of 50 years ago showed 43% of negro descent. It seems that the chromosomes which cause
physical
racial characteristics are recessive in negroes, and give way before white ones, so that their skins whiten and their hair untwists gradually; but the mental chromosomes remain dominant; so, since the great influx from Africa began, in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Portuguese have been backward mentally—discovered and invented nothing, created nothing, and been unable to organise the country intelligently. This is what the intelligent Portuguese themselves say. But they are amiable and cheerful people, & enjoy life, even when very poor.
Nothing
is done by the government for the poor. But this seems a feature of the Latin countries. Foreigners in Portugal organise relief societies; Ann Bridge, when ambassadress, was president of one. What a humiliation, if foreigners in England had to organise relief for our poor! We are sinking fast, but at least we see to the poor still—in fact, more than ever.

I am reading an interesting novel about Russian life during the war, by an American who lived there. It is amusing and informing, though disjointed. Some of it is very like Kravchenko's account.
¹¹
The author likes Russians and knows them well.

Later.
A mechanic from the Embassy garage has arrived with a new tube and fitted it in—what a relief! Now I can go to Estoril for lunch with the Marques's
¹²
as I had planned. It is on the coast, and good bathing, but I rather despise Atlantic bathing after Mediterranean, it is never really warm.

I am busy running round from one office to another to get a visa for entering Spain again and a police permit for leaving
Portugal.
What
a fuss the world has become! To think of the old days when one simply took a ticket and crossed frontiers without passports or visas or any fuss except customs. I feel they will never return. The young can't believe they ever were like that; they think we must have had passports and have forgotten….

Parliament seems to be taking extra long holidays, which seems wrong. I see the Lords propose to hold the fort.
¹³

Very much love.   
E.R.M.

Hotel Internacional, Madrid 25 August, 1947

Dearest Jeanie,

... I hustled round this morning from one place to another—
Turismo
for photographs, Consulate, British Institute, shops to replace the essentials in my stolen bag,
¹⁴
but of course couldn't get everything done. At 1.0 all Spanish towns shut down, some things opening for a few hours again at 4, some not. I see in old guide books that the Prado picture gallery used some years ago to be open from 10-6 every day; now it shuts at one. I dashed round it from 11-1 yesterday morning, and saw most, but should have liked longer; it is a wonderful collection of course. The same with churches. What has happened to the human race, that it does less & less work every year? You would say that in England it is the present [Labour] government, but I think that doesn't account for the great psychological blight that has descended on the world, though they make bad mistakes. I wonder what Churchill
would, do? I noticed when I read his speech that he didn't say. He said ‘I would pass the necessary decrees'.
¹⁵
But anyone could say that. Still, no doubt a non-Labour gov: would be more sensible & experienced, and avoid many of the present mistakes. I don't think we
shall
change the government, as the majority think they are getting a better time out of it than they would under another. Apparently the miners think the crisis is all fancy. Their free coal should be stopped, that would wake them up.

I liked the
Observer
‘Portrait of a Spiv'.
¹⁶
At last now we shall recognise them when we meet them.

Yes,
I Chose Freedom
is a nightmare indeed.... It must be much the same also in the Soviet-dominated countries, where people are continually seized and arrested for having been seen with a foreigner, particularly British. An awful atmosphere of suspicion & espionage & intrigue. Spain is
much
less bad, but still rather bad; in Barcelona I was shown the police station where prisoners are beaten to make them talk. I hear that the Spanish Blue Legion, who were sent to the Russian front to fight with the German army,
¹⁷
came home much disgusted with the Nazis; the Russian soldiers they got on with all right, as they were plain men like themselves, who went with women; the Nazis, they complained, were sexual perverts, many of them, and they were much shocked at this....

I am so sorry Nancy felt Mrs Whitton's death so badly; it must have been a bad shock.
¹⁸
Though a great relief to find it wasn't you. Perhaps always one should be made to expect something worse than the fact, to cause relief. Instead of which, people say ‘someone is ill; is very ill; may die;
is, in fact, dead'—which is the worst way, perhaps….

Very much love, and love to Nancy.   
Your loving
E.R.M.

Hotel Inglés, Valencia 27 August, [1947]

Dearest Jeanie,

I reached Valencia again to-day, a month exactly after being here before.
¹⁹
I had a much too eventful journey to-day—a tyre went, and I had a terrible job changing the wheel, as when I had it jacked up the car moved back, and upset the jack, and crashed down on its side, and I couldn't raise it without help, of course, but a kind Spaniard from a passing
camion
stopped and helped me; it took ages, as my jack-handle broke, and he had to get his own jack, which was too tall, but at last, after an hour's hard labour in a broiling sun, we jacked it up again and changed the wheel. I said, when he lifted the car up by hand, that he was very strong. ‘Not very', he answered, ‘We don't get enough to eat'; which was very sad and touching. Of course I gave him a large reward. I feel thankful that we all get the same amount in England, unlike here, where the rich get lots and the poor far too little, owing to
all
food being sold at black-market prices and no one stopping it: there is, so far as I know, no honest and good Senhor Barbosa in Spain,
²⁰
and Franco doesn't raise a finger against it because of the army. Then, just after I had started, my front bumper jerked off, a bolt having broken when the car fell on its side, and I had to tie it up with a strap till I reached Valencia.

My inner tube was hopelessly cut by the wheel-rim, as the tyre suddenly sprang off the wheel, instead of subsiding slowly as when punctured, so I had to abandon it; the garage luckily had another, at a ruinous price (170 pesetas) but I had to take it, of course, as I can't be without a spare wheel. So I didn't get here till late afternoon. It is rather a charming town, full of old houses and lovely things. I am trying to get leave to go inside the Palace of Dos Aguas but it seems no one can. It is quite worth while returning this way, filling up my experiences and seeing the things I missed before. Last night I had a charming night, in a little town in the country 70 or 80 miles from Valencia—a very clean old
fonda
,
²¹
and a nice Senora, and a huge kind of kitchen with earth floor, into which I brought Elk for the night, and sat and actually heard the B.B.C. while the Senora cooked my supper in an iron pot over a twig fire. I don't know why one can sometimes get the B.B.C. & sometimes not; perhaps, now it is darker in the evenings, I shall be able to oftener. I have just read a Spanish paper's complaints of the B.B.C.'s attacks on Spain, and its saying that the Cadiz explosion was caused by German mines
²²
—did they say that?…

Very much love.   
E.R.M.

Rose finished writing ‘Fabled Shore' in 1948 and then, recuperating from the strain of the war years, turned again to a novel. The devastation caused by the bombing still haunted her, however, and Barbary, the heroine of ‘The World my Wilderness', the child of a broken marriage, is shown among the bombed ruins of the City of London, as well as among the ruins of human lives.

This book by no means exhausted Rose's obsession with the theme of ruins—their history, their nostalgic evocations, their symbolism, and their beauty. In 1949 she was asked to write ‘a short book on the pleasures of looking at ruins', a subject which proved so fascinating that the book eventually took her three years and became the longest she ever wrote. The research for it involved many pilgrimages both at home and abroad, and in the summer of 1949 she went over to Ireland on one of these intriguing quests.

Eccles Hotel, Glengariff, Co. Cork
¹
16 July, [1949]

Got here at 4.0 this afternoon, after a night at Bowen's Court, 90 miles away.
²
This is a lovely little bay, with little islands scattered about it, and woody shores and rocks—lovely for bathing. Unfortunately the warm spell is over (as elsewhere) and it is cold and wet but they say will improve. Boats for hire; the boatmen say it would be ‘unfair' to them to
swim
to the islands. But I expect I shall. It was a lovely drive from Cork, and a nice crossing. Radio not much good here, as my set can't get London, but we can get Dublin, which gives some news, though mostly about Ireland….

Very much love.   
E.R.M.

20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 11 July, [1950]

Dearest Jeanie,

... Is it Miss K——who has proposed herself? People shouldn't do it. The only safeguard is not to have a spare room, like me. I suffered terribly when I used to have one. I hope one day to find an equally nice flat with one more room (some in Hinde [House] have) but shall use it as a work-room, and keep the spare bed under my own as I do now, to be
only
used by you. Nearly as tiresome as self-asked visitors are the people who invite you to some meal to meet someone else, and, when you say you can't go, press you as to which day you
can
go—a very low trick. Harold Nicolson told me of a worse one: a writer who asks him to review his book for
The Observer,
and, when he says he is sorry he can't because it has been sent to another reviewer, writes to the editor and asks him to get it back for H.N. I certainly shouldn't review it after that. But the writing world (like other worlds) is full of low ruses.

You may be right that Frank Swinnerton partly means a pessimistic answer by a lemon.
³
I think what
I
mean is mainly an uncertain answer. Sometimes, of course, an answer may be both.

I'm glad you were interested in re-reading
The World my Wilderness,
and found the people real. Some reviewers found them so unconvincing as to be little more than puppets—but people's points of view about characters in novels are quite incalculable, so all one can do is to convince oneself that they are real and write accordingly. Of course one may quite fail
to put them across, and I am always pleased when readers think I have—particularly, of course, you.

Korean news still bad.
⁴
Dreadful to think of all the American wounded and captured in the enemy's hands.

Did you read Ian Mackay on Russian Discoveries, which included America?
⁵
As he says, ‘they brought it on themselves'.

Very much love.   
E.R.M.

[Hotel Cappuccini, Amalfi]
⁶
17 August, [1950]

Spending 2 nights at Amalfi, in this old monastery-hotel, high above the sea, with cells turned into bedrooms, cloisters, magnificent views, water that only occasionally runs; inconvenient but wonderfully beautiful. No monks left, in spite of picture [on this postcard]: Garibaldi turned them out in 1865. They probably used little water. Bathing all along here is perfect. On 15th we went to a procession and fireworks for the Assumption. No one seemed interested in Mary, only in fireworks. Italy seems less devout than in our day….

V. much love.   
E.R.M.

PS. Little chapel off the cloisters has a wonderful
presepio.
⁷
Contadini
⁸
coming in from the hills with oxen & mules & wine-carts, the first I have seen.

20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 14 September, [1950]

Dearest Jeanie,

Many thanks for [the] King-Hall [news-letter], and UNESCO on Race,
⁹
which seems a very ignorant composition. Surely they should know that body & mind are mixed up together, and that the genes which transmit physical characteristics transmit mental ones too. And what a
dull
theory !
¹⁰
One of the most interesting things about the human race is its racial differences. In America, e.g., the differences between the immigrants of different stocks, however long their ancestors have been there, is said to be marked—Irish, Scotch, English, German, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Negro, Mexican, etc, all with different characteristics. And even in G.B., how different the Welsh are from the Anglo-Saxons, & the Scotch, & the Irish, & even the northern and southern English, descended from Danes, Saxons, Jutes, etc. And what a dull affair the world would be without different racial contributions to it! I wonder
why
they think that a Jew by race, though he inherits his nose, hair, and general look, doesn't inherit, say, his musical gifts, or his commercial cleverness, 01 his sense of God. On looking at the list of authors of the statement, however, I see that there are 3 Jews, one Mexican, one Brazilian, one Indian... all races which are self-conscious and fear the contempt of the races they live among, and have been despised and ill-treated in the past. This may account for it. I remember a Jew, Dr Singer,
¹¹
during the Nazi persecutions,
who was always trying to get me to sign statements about there being no such thing as race. I never did, as it seemed to me nonsense. They mix up racial sameness with ‘the social bond between men', as they put it, which exists among different races quite easily. It just shows the danger of grinding axes in scientific matters….