7.2.70 - Tiny Alice, books and shoes

7.2.70

Dear Mum, I’ve just received a couple of Tablets and that calendar (three newspapers indeed!) and then later on this morning two parcels of books, the ones that had appeared to vanish for a while. Thanks very much indeed, but can I ask you, is this the last lot of books you’ve sent? Because if it is, there are one or two things I’d thought I’d asked you for and perhaps haven’t. Did I ask for the Beethoven sonatas? They are in three books of the type that the Bach Preludes and Fugues are in, and should have been up on the shelf above the Jam. (!) And there were four books on Shakespeare by Granville Barker; the volume that hasn’t come is on Hamlet alone. Perhaps Marilyn has it ˗ if so don’t be worried, but I would be grateful if you’d have another ...wee...look, please.

The Dickens books too aren’t quite what I expected ˗ dear, dear, this does sound bloomin’ ungrateful of me, doesn’t it? Actually looking at what I have, and recalling what else was at home I’m inclined to think that perhaps you have sent another parcel. In case you haven’t, the other Dickens were Nicholas Nickleby (I’m sure I had a copy, but perhaps I’m mistaken there), Pickwick Papers ˗ definitely on the shelves! Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewitt (you’ve sent one copy of this ˗ there were two ˗ but this one is the old, old one that had been in the house since before I was born, and some darling child at some stage has scribbled all over it and torn out the last few pages!), Great Expectations (it was in that edition that I had some others from: small and red-covered and readable!) The only other one, as I think I’ve said before, that may not be there, because I don’t know if I ever got it back from Marilyn, is David Copperfield. Quite possibly if you have already sent these they’ll have arrived when you get this, or something silly. If you haven’t and have a couple of bob to spare some one of these days, can you forward them? Am I a blasted pest? Let me know please! [I imagine even my mother would have answered the question about being a pest with a definite Yes!]

After telling myself that I wouldn’t buy any more books this week, because I haven’t put anything in the bank for about three weeks or more, and because I keep paying out for necessary things, I went out and bought a much too expensive copy of Tiny Alice, a play by Edward Albee (who wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a play which you must have heard of), which Mike and I had seen on Wednesday night [like the Broadway production, it starred Gielgud and Irene Worth.] How great a play it is I don’t know, but it was so elliptical and so interesting and so difficult-quite-to-understand on one viewing that I decided that a reading was required. David had seen it too, and we spend the little time we see each other these days in figuring it out, and getting ourselves further into its apparently endless depths. It’s all (well, some of it) about losing one’s faith (two of the main characters are Catholics, and I suspect Albee is - or may have been - a Catholic too, because of the fact that so many of the lines have a ring of Catholic liturgy about them), and symbolises to a certain extent a variety of things like the Mass and the Trinity and perhaps Christ even in the character of another man ˗ at least it does to me! Other people apparently have found quite the opposite: that it is more about diabolism than the other. Anyway it’s worth a further look into it. [I was wrong about Albee having been a Catholic; and I’m not surprised that we struggled to understand the play. Even Albee himself seems to have wondered what it was all about at times!]

I’m also at present on the third part of The Divine Comedy (that you sent); what a fabulous story and allegory and all things in one! It makes one feel happy to be a Catholic, and that one is part of such a great scheme of Love, so to speak.

The Story of the Shoe. Remember those shoes I bought last week? Well, the first day I wore them they seemed fine until towards evening when my left foot started to ache and hasn’t stopped since. Right where the laces are tied. I couldn’t wear the left shoe, and finally took it back to try and get it stretched, thinking that would help. Well, after two days of this (which quite honestly didn’t really help the look of the shoe, and anyway, my foot seems to have got annoyed and just refuses to be comfortable in any shoe, old or new) I took it home again, and this morning quite by chance had a look at the size of it, because it said a 7 and I thought I’d bought a 7½. The right shoe is a 7½! I took them back with considerable speed and annoyance, and at first they weren’t too happy about doing anything, and haven’t yet; they’re got to wait for the Guv’nor (English Guv’nors are apparently never on the premises). So I’m to ring them on Monday. But I’m not backing down on it, which I think they thought I would, because the blessed things cost me over five pounds and I don’t feel like damaging me foot for life for their sake!

I received a reply from the CIB, with a photo and some details of a young lady, and now apparently we have to wait and see whether she will reply favourably to my ‘details!’ If it wasn’t so serious it would be funny, and if it wasn’t so funny it might be serious! We’ll survive, I guess, and at present I’m looking on it as something of an adventure ˗ like all adventures rather fraught with terrors, and overcomable in the end. Wish me luck and lend us a few spare prayers, and we’ll get by.  Love, Mike

14.9.68: managing to stay alive

14.9.68

[This letter starts off] (Read the other page first will you?  I knew I’d do this someday!) [I'd begun to type on the wrong page.]

Page 2...

Dear Mum, Am writing this as I finish off my breakfast so don’t be surprised if there are a few crumbs and coffee stains on this letter.  Only hope they don’t send it at full rated as a result!  It’s my anniversary – the week since I had my FIRST breakfast here! And I’m still alive. Haven’t killed myself with my own cooking, I mean, nor been knifed in Commercial Road, nor squashed to little bits of matter in the Rush Hour.  I have the radio blaring in one ear and the tap dripping in the other, so things are a little noisy: the radio never does anything but blare – I’ve got it turned right down even now; it’s just that the morning programmes are all pop with screaming disc jockeys, etc. 

Well, what have I done since I last wrote?  I’ve done some more composing – don’t know how you feel about that, but I had to do something to occupy the old mind  - the cooking and ironing and washing, though a strain, wasn’t really using much brain!  I’s a similar thing to that last thing, the one that they did a bit of at the school.  It’s to be five songs this time, and I’m about half way through – quite pleased with the first and third, and so-so about the second.  [Can’t identify what these songs would be, though they probably still exist amongst my old manuscripts.]

I’ve been going into the Centre every day this week too, and doing some practice – still feel rather strange there, and guess I will until I get started.  Remember I said I met Ann Gordon the other day, again, and she apologised for not realising who I was the previous time, well, she also said that she and Kiri T.K [te Kanawa, of course] were to do a concert at the Overseas League or some such, and they wanted a NZ pianist.  Well, since at that stage nothing definite was done because she wasn’t sure whether Kiri hadn’t already got someone, but she said she’d get in touch, and finally, yesterday, I was given a note when I got to the C, from Ann, saying to ring K. that afternoon or Sunday evening.  Well, I tried on and off all afternoon, but couldn’t raise a whisper. So I’ll ring on Sunday.  Nice to be doing something already, wouldn't it?  I’ll let you know how it turns out.

On Thursday I’d decided to go to Dickens House, but by the time I’d got to the Centre and away it was about 3.30 – I was very late that day – and by the time I’d walked along C.Rd, another 20 minutes, and got a train going in the direction I was (I finished up getting on one that was going vaguely that way, but not quite; had to change my train plans entirely) and even then I had to walk from the Monument station to the Bank – you do this underground, and seem to go up and down steps, escalators, along corridors and tubes for ages, and just as you arrive you find the train just going out!  Still it’s fun!  Well, I got to Russell Square Station eventually – you see, the D. House was shutting at 5, and it was then 4.15 – and of course that particular part of London isn’t as well sign-posted as the rest (one thing about L, they expect you to get lost, but they also expect you to have an A to Z and a tube map!), and I spent several minutes figuring out which way to go.  However, by the time I’d reached the house, now just another amongst dozens of houses divided up for doctors, etc., it was 4.35, so I thought I’ll come back tomorrow, and did.   [I assume this is 48 Doughty St, but I don’t remember going there at all!  Certainly Doughty St is near the Russell Square Station. See photo.]  

It was well worth 2/6, but there is an aura of the celestial about everything: this is the knife-stand that he used, this is the feather-duster a maid who stayed for three days touched – it’s not quite that bad, but some of the stuff is a little ridiculous.  Other stuff is a little uncanny – the chairs that he sat in for such and such a portrait, and the portrait is hanging above it – oooh, it’s a little spooky!

But it really was interesting, particularly the letters and manuscripts – his writing was much worse than mine!  - the books and paintings and the very fact of the house itself. But some of the stuff, such as the window that Oliver Twist, for heaven’s sake, is supposed to have crawled through in some part of his story is just a load of old twaddle! But London in general is surrounded by this fascination with the places where things were supposed to have happened – in the books!  Mad, I call it.  He certainly made lots of parts of L. and England famous, for entirely fictional reasons.  It is interesting, however, to come down out of the house and walk into Greys Inn Road – where so many of his stories are set at certain times.  That is weird, because though so much of it has changed, much of it hasn't and if I could recall some of the incidents, I think I’d feel a little funny.  Perhaps this is what has got to the Londoners themselves.

Also went to see Madame Tussauds, but it was something ridiculous like 7/6 to get in, so I didn’t!  And so was Regent’s Park Zoo so I just wandered round the outside. Then promptly went off and went to this show that I couldn’t get into standing and paid 8/6 for a seat, where I had to lean forward so far I may as well have stood!  Still it was worth it: Richard Briers and Ronnie Barker are both in it, and though neither has much to do really it was quite intriguing to see them in the flesh.  And to see Briers in a rather nasty role for a change: they both get shot during the course of the play, but so do a couple of others – so! It’s a quite mad play within a play: they’re a couple of critics watching a play that eventually they become part of; quite mad, but very entertaining. [This will Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, I’d guess.]

There was shorter play before it about a composer and lyricist who with their leading lady act out a new musical in the hopes that a producer who is sitting in the audience with us will  put it on.  But the play wasn’t terribly good though they all acted madly. 

Mr and Mrs Marshall seem to be a very nice couple: they've now given me another hot plate, separate-like, which I nearly wrecked when I turned it on, as something started to burn: turned out to be a piece of cardboard that was sitting on top and which I’d thought was a part of it all!  I’ll burn the house down yet: the oven keeps smoking every time I cook in it, though Mrs M is going to have a look at it next time I cook something as she says it shouldn't!

Lots of luv, Mike XXXXXXX