Letters From England - Summer 1942

Margaret Gulkin Banning LE TTERS FROM ENGLAND SUMMER 1942 Harper Brothers Publishers NEW YORK and LONDON LETTERS FROM ENGLAND Copyright, 2943, by Margaret Cnlkin Banning Printed in the United States of America All rights in this book are reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper Brothers. OBVIOUSLY FOR MARY LETTERS FROM ENGLAND LETTERS FROM ENGLAND SUMMER 1942, June 5 Dear Mary, I looked twice at the elate, for movement in the last two days has been incredibly swift and occasion ally blindfolded. But Friday, June fifth, it is, and here I am in London, where the big bath sheets hang as usual over hot towel racks in a hotel which miraculously stands intact in the middle of a well bombed district. Ill come to that later and now show what narrative skill I can muster up in not getting ahead of my story. The difficulty is that I want to begin both at the beginning and at the end. It was a beginning without place, because I dont know quite where I started from. IVe gone on strange journeys in these last twenty years, dreary ones and exciting ones, but this one rolls all the descriptions up together. 2 LETTERS FROM ENGLAND We were a day late in starting because of weather, and I wasnt sorry, because that gave me an extra nights sleep, which came in handy. It was an anonymous sort of sleep, taken dutifully in a bed that I cant remember feeling. The next day the hours dragged along, and less and less could I feel convinced that I was showing sense in coming over here. I was committed of course, and a great many people had takenpains to arrange the journey, but by this time I was looking darkly past all that and wondering why I had been asked at all and why Id said Id go. There is certainly plenty of usefulness in the project itself. Everyone knows that there could be far more sympathy and good will between the English-speaking allies, and that this must be an active, positive force that can swing into action when it is necessary to take a poke at prejudices which are hurting the war effort. And the virulence of anti-British feeling in some quarters already amounts to sabotage, the kind of sabotage that its hard to put under arrest. Prejudices and bitternesses against Great Britain are not news, of course. Ive always understood why many of them existed. The British have never been LETTERS FROM ENGLAND 3 cozy as far as their neighbors were concerned. They have always been important and strong, but as little lovable as the important usually are, outside of their own families anyway. When I traveled through Ireland two years ago, just before the war broke out, and saw that so many old wounds were not healed, I was greatly con cerned. For anyone could foresee even then the stubborn, almost pathological resistance that Eire would put up to becoming an ally of a country she could not forgive. Some of that feeling was imported to the United States not only years ago but fairly recently. It is being blown upon now by people who want dissen sion among the allies. But there are many other prejudices, which are not of Irish origin, against the British in the United States. Some come from a very spotty teaching of American history which dwells upon the Boston Tea Party and ignores maybe because the teachers are ignorantthe alliances and ocean treaties we have had with Great Britain to our mutual advantage and development. The feeling of defiance of England seems to start in the grade school, and later on it is pointed up by travelers who have gone to Great Britain and havent 4 LETTERS FROM ENGLAND liked the fogs, or the cold rooms, or the vegetable marrow, or the British reserve. And lecturers came over from England with pronunciations of our language which seemed comical to us, and yet gave us a sense of inferiority...