What is so heavenly here is the utter peace. Very nice tradespeople, a retired couple from London at the end of our drive (who brought a tray of tea the day we moved in), and curious and amiable natives …
I am going to a pre-natal clinic at the doctor’s up the street to get myself on his panel. This is a wonderful place to have babies in.
… We can’t wait for you to see it. Wish you could come in the spring. We have piles of lilac bushes (which I hadn’t noticed before), daffodils, laburnum, cherry, apple, honeysuckle, and the place must be legendarily charming then. Ted has a superb attic study under the thatched eaves. I have chosen the best front bedroom for my study….
x x x Sivvy
SEPTEMBER 15, 1961
Dear Mother,
It seems strange to think that Warren will reach you before this letter does, though both depart on the same day. We saw him off at the little … station this morning at 11:30 after a breakfast of orange juice, fried egg and crispy potatoes and apple cake, and the house seems very lonesome without him. He has been really a wonderful part of the family—sanding an immense elm plank which will make me my first real capacious writing table, discovering a set of wooden blocks in the cottage attic and cleaning them up for Frieda, chopping wood, mowing the lawn, and, in general, making himself useful.
We’ve had a lot of fun while he was here—explored the Exeter Cathedral, took a picnic to Tintagel (very commercial) and found a high cowfield nearby, overlooking the sea, to eat it in. Drove to an auction at which we bought a little (4’ × 6’) Indian rug for Frieda’s room, and ate out at our local inn, the Burton Hall Arms (a roast beef dinner for just over $1 a person), which gave me a welcome respite from cooking …
After a Saturday-Sunday visit this week from a very sweet young Portuguese couple we knew in London, things should quiet down. Ted has the most wonderful attic study, very warm under the peak of the thatch and over the hot water boiler. He looks happier and better every day. I never have known such satisfaction just seeing him revel in this place and leading, at last, exactly the life he wants.
I adore my own study, and after I get my great plank table, paint the woodwork white, get a rug and maybe an upholstered armchair, it will be heavenly …
Oh, saw my doctor … whose surgery is three houses up across the street (!) and his marvelous midwife-nurse, whom I liked immediately. I look forward to my home delivery here now, these two people being very important in my life—I couldn’t be better pleased with them. I just love it here and look so forward to your coming over and enjoying it with us next summer. Much love from us 3.
Sivvy
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1961
Dearest Mother and Warren,
… The days have just flown since I last wrote, and we have established a very pleasant rhythm here. Right after breakfast I go up to my study to work at the marvelous 6-foot natural wood table (which you helped finish, Warren) while Ted carpenters or gardens in the back with Frieda along. He gives her lunch and puts her to bed about noon, and I come down and make our lunch and by the time I am through picking up the house and doing dishes, Frieda is up and out front with me, gardening, mending, or whatever, and Ted is in his study. Thus both of us get half a day out of doors and half a day writing (which is all either of us wants) and Frieda is out all the time….
My cleaning woman is a blessing. She does the upstairs Tuesday and the downstairs Thursday, plus almost all the ironing. She, Nancy Axworthy, is more accustomed to the house than I as she has worked here eleven years. Her husband is a carpenter and evidently a town figure—one of the church bellringers, assistant head of the fire brigade, woodworking teacher at a night class. Nancy is a sweet, fresh-faced, healthy person, and the midwife said that when the new baby comes, she’ll probably be happy to come for a few more hours a week and help with washing up and so on. I feel very lucky!
[UNDATED; END OF SEPT., 1961]
Friday: … Ted has planted winter lettuce and is digging a big strawberry bed. He has made my desk, a sewing table, a baby gate for the stair—is a natural carpenter! We are so happy. Seventy-two apple trees!
For Christmas do you think our American Santa might dig up some seeds for real American corn (I hear Country Gentleman is good—the Merwins have it in France) and Kentucky Wonder beans, or some good thin green pole bean. Nothing like that here—only thick, broad beans and corn for pigs.
Had a wonderful letter from Mrs. Prouty, enclosing a check as a housewarming gift … I had been feeling a bit blue because I just didn’t feel I could go out and get a really fine rug or two (bedroom and living room are the two places I need them for most) with our mountain of moving-in expenses, including a bill of close to $300 from our lawyers for a multitude of fees. But now I can add her check to grampy’s and get something really good.
Ted has been driving 35 miles to the BBC station at Plymouth to record four small programs for the “Woman’s Hour.” I am immensely relieved there are recording stations here, for we shall start some income again. He is finishing a radio play for the Third Programme, and Vogue wants a children’s poem for $50, and there is the series of the Times Children’s Pages, so no lack of assignments.
I am very encouraged by selling my first women’s magazine story; my second hasn’t sold yet, but the fiction editor of one of the two big women’s weeklies here wants to see me and talk over their requirements on the strength of it. So I shall push this. I’ll get into the Ladies’ Home Journal yet! …
Lots of love,
Sivvy
OCTOBER 6, 1961 (FRIDAY)
Dear Mother,
It is just past ten and I am sitting downstairs in the big kitchen this morning, with the Aga cooker (coal-burning) Ted stoked earlier warming the place cosily and Frieda running to and from her playroom with new toys to potter about my feet. Ted is off for most of the day to … shop in Exeter and join the libraries there, so I have a day to catch up on baking and mending. I have been working in my study till noon every morning … and will be seeing the Fiction Editor [of a women’s magazine] … when I go to London at the end of the month to pick up my 75 pounds poetry prize at the Guinness party and see my publisher.
Ted had a day in London this Tuesday, leaving the house at 5:30 a.m., catching the 6:30 express from Exeter and getting in in time for a long day of recording at the BBC, with a posh lunch in Soho with the head of the Arts Council, for whom he will be co-judge of the next two years’ Poetry Book Society Selections [for about $150 a year). Ted is almost through with his new radio play, and we feel we are really beginning to produce things….
Frieda responds more and more to her life here. She is delighted with her big playroom, the bay window of which I use for my sewing table. Ted is going to build some shelves in an alcove for her toys so she can have them all arranged in full view instead of jumbled together. She is incredibly neat—picks up every little crumb she drops and gives it to us and tries to sweep up anything spilt with a dustpan or sponge.
Lots of love from all of us.
Sivvy
OCTOBER 13, 1961
Dear Mother,
… I’ve decided the best way to grow into the community here is to go to our local Anglican church and maybe belong to its monthly mothers’ group. I wrote the rector—a Protestant Irishman with a very broad background (Chicago, Africa)—about this, and he came and said he’d go through the creed and order of service with me, but that I’d be welcome (I’m afraid I could never stomach the Trinity and all that!) to come in the spirit of my own Unitarian beliefs.
I like the idea of Frieda going to Sunday School next door. The church is “low” (like our Episcopal Church, I guess) and has a champion crew of eight bellringers who delight us every Sunday …
I’m having Mrs. Hamilton, the wife of the dead coffee plantation owner and local power, to tea today. She is old, booming, half-deaf, with a dachshund named Pixie. I’m having Ted come to help me out! He’s just finished the radio play he’s been working on, and I’ve a c
ouple of good poems.
Lots of love,
Sivvy
OCTOBER 22, 1961
Dear Mother,
… I have delayed my usual Friday letter because I, too, have been feeling tired this last week or so … It seems impossible one can get tired doing something one loves to do, but I suppose writing is strenuous, and I should consider my mornings at my desk as work, rather than play. We do go to bed in good time—lights out by 10:30, and Frieda generally lets us sleep till 8-ish. I guess the baby is getting perceptibly heavy now, too….
Frieda is sweeter and more winsome than ever. She gets the best of each of us, I think—neither of us having to mind her when we want to write, but while we’re doing things she can watch and participate in. I went out to see the two of them in the garden this morning, and Ted was planting strawberries, and Frieda was following him with her little shovel, religiously imitating his every gesture, looking like an elf in that wonderful cotton red coat and hood you sent….
So glad you liked “Snow.” I haven’t seen Harper’s Bazaar yet. Hope they send us a copy. Actually, I think you’re closest to Ted’s meaning—it’s not a philosophical equation so much as just the feeling of being lost and struggling against terrific unknowns and odds, something most people feel at one time or another. I find it the most compelling of Ted’s stories because it fits one’s own experience so beautifully. It’s incredible how moving it is, with just one character, the snow and the chair, but I feel it has a deep psychic insight into the soul’s battles.
If you happen to think of it, could you pack me off a Ladies’ Home Journal or two? I get homesick for it; it has an Americanness which I feel a need to dip into, now I’m in exile, and especially as I’m writing for women’s magazines in a small way now. I shall have fulfilled a very long-time ambition if a story of mine ever makes the LHJ.
*
Later: A wild blowy night, with gusts of rain. Went to my first Anglican service with the lively retired London couple down the lane. It’s a sweet little church, and I found the service so strange. I suppose it would be very familiar to you, like a sort of watered-down Catholic service. The choir and congregation singing is amazingly strong and good for the small number of people there, and I do like hymn singing. I think I will probably go to Evensong off and on and then send Frieda to Sunday School. I’m sure as she starts thinking for herself, she will drift away from the church, but I know how incredibly powerful the words of that little Christian prayer, “God is my help in every need,” which you taught us has been at odd moments of my life, so think it will do her good to feel part of this spiritual community. I must say I think I am a pagan-Unitarian at best! The songs, psalms, responses and prayers are fine, but the sermon! … It’s a pity there aren’t more fiery intellectuals in the ministry. It seems to draw meek, safe, platitudinous souls who I am sure would not face the lions in the Roman arena at any cost …
Love,
x x x Sivvy
OCTOBER 26, 1961
Dear Mother,
… Ted has written a lovely poem about the Loch Ness Monster for Vogue (a children’s poem) over here, the British edition, and has got a pile of children’s books on animals coming from the New Statesman for him to review. They are sending me a pile of bright children’s picture books to review as well (since I modestly said that was my level at present)—all free and to keep. I am quite pleased, because I think I can judge the art work pretty well and am delighted to tuck these away to bring out later for Frieda—about $15 worth.
We got our copy of Harper’s Bazaar today. Isn’t it amazing, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, and Ted in the middle of all those fancy corsets! Lucky for us they have piles of money. The “sophisticated” audience thus has fashion, plus cocktail-party-gossip talk and “name writers”—usually only a 2-page spread, you’ll notice, so it doesn’t strain the brain. The editors are generally very brainy women and the fashion blurbs written by Phi Beta Kappa English majors. Poor things.
Later: I am sitting in our “parlor” at the very little bureau-type desk Ted bought at an auction last week for $15. It’s rather like yours, with three drawers and a slant top that opens out to write on and pigeonholes for letters. I love it.
OCTOBER 30, 1961
I go to London tomorrow to collect my 75-pound prize and see the women’s magazine editor and leave my manuscripts with the book-dealer who bought Ted’s on the chance they might sell them. I am going to the theatre Wednesday on your birthday money and shall have a nice meal beforehand. I thought you’d be pleased at my spending it that way. I look forward to the treat, as I don’t imagine I’ll have another chance at a fling till you come next summer.
Had a lovely birthday. Ted bought me a lot of fancy cans of octopus and caviar at a delicatessen, two poetry books, a Parker pen, and a big wicker basket for my laundry … We’ve got about 50 children’s books to review in all now, a real gift, because we can’t review more than ten apiece-everything from The Cat in the Hat Comes Back to the story of Elsa, the lioness and her cubs. A good $50 to $60 worth. My acquisitive soul rejoices.
Well, I hope the Strontium 90 level doesn’t go up too high in milk. I’ve been very gloomy about the bomb news; of course, the Americans have contributed to the poisonous level. The fallout-shelter craze in America sounds mad. Well, I would rather be in Devon, where I am in the country, than anywhere else just now. Keep well!
x x x Sivvy
NOVEMBER 5, 1961
Dear Mother,
… I stayed two nights [in London] with our friends, the Sillitoes. The first night I went to the Guinness party and was, to my surprise, called on to read my poem with the regular Guinness winners, which included Robert Graves in the fabulous Goldsmiths hall in the City, although my prize was for another and much smaller contest. And I picked up my 75-pound check; then had a little supper with my publisher … The next day was all business. I typed my children’s book review at the Sillitoes’, saw the very encouraging women’s magazine editor, had lunch with another pregnant lady poet I met at the Guinness party, dropped some manuscripts at an agent’s in hopes of selling them at an American university, and had a bit of tea before the two plays by the young American playwright Edward Albee. London is very tiring when one doesn’t have a place of one’s own, and the getting about a Herculean task. I found myself criticizing the soot and the horrid suburbs and the exhaust, dying to get home to clear air and my own acres and two darlings. Ted and Frieda met me at the station, Thursday afternoon, my train exactly on time. None of us had been able to eat or sleep very well apart, and now we are all thriving again.
… The next five months are grim ones. I always feel sorry to have the summertime change, with the dark evenings closing in in midafternoon, and will try to lay in some physical comforts this month—the best insurance against gloominess for me. It’s incredible to think that carpets can create a state of mind, but I am so suggestible to colors and textures that I’m sure a red carpet would keep me forever optimistic….
… We have really done a great deal since we have come these last few months. I have to keep myself from asking that everything be done at once. The whole house, for example, needs replastering, as much of the plaster is dry and crumbly behind the paper, but except for one or two spots, we should be all right for several years yet. And I’ll be going to Exeter in the next week or ten days to price rugs and buy curtain material….
Went to the Anglican chapel evensong again tonight. It’s a peaceful little well on Sunday evenings, and I do love the organ, the bellringing and hymn singing, and muse on the stained-glass windows during the awful sermons. The three windows, lit up on Sunday evenings, look so pretty from our house through the silhouettes of the trees. You’ll have a real rest and holiday when you visit us this time, sitting out on our lilac-sheltered lawn in a deck chair with the babies playing, no steps or traffic, only country noises. Lots of love to you and Warren.
x x x Sivvy
NOVEMBER 9, 1961 (THURSDAY)
&n
bsp; Dear Mother,
I hardly know where to begin. Your good bonus letter came today, and all sorts of nice things have been happening. Ted woke up this morning and said, “I dreamed you had won a $25 prize for your story about ‘Johnny Panic’” Well, I went downstairs and found out I had won a Saxton grant for $2,000! I have been waiting for over half a year to hear from them, and as both Ted and I have been rejected by them (Ted because he was published by Harper’s and they give the grant) and I because I applied for poetry and they don’t like to give money for poetry, I had no hope. Well, I applied for a grant for prose this time and got the amount I asked for (I had it figured so I wouldn’t have to work and could have a nanny and household help, etc.). They pay in quarterly installments as parts of a project are completed, so I should get my first lot in a week or two! It is an absolute lifesaver….
Life in town has been more and more fun. They had a Hunt Meet in the square yesterday: all the local fox hunters in red jackets, brass buttons and velvet caps, drinking whisky on horseback, all sorts of fascinating faces, and a pack of spotted, sulphurous dogs. A toot of a horn and they galloped off. We took Frieda to watch and she loved it. Oddly moving, in spite of our sympathy for foxes.