P023 19370413
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Please note these are transcribed by software,so there WILL be mistakes.
Please tell us which page of which Portmanteua.
PORTMANTEAU 023
Sesheke,
N. Rhodesia.
13th April, 1937.
Darling Everybody,
By the time you get this we will be 50! There, Mum, it's all very well for you to count your grey hairs and say you're so old and haggard, but we've beaten new by two whole years, and where only 30 years younger than Dad so we must be getting on.
And shall I tell you what letters we got in our birthday mail?
1). One page from Mummy enclosing photographs of Abbotswood which we have seen already.
2). A letter from Dad telling us to stop producing twins "Mrs Noah, stop it – bringing the animals into the world to buy two!" – So we have obediently stopped.
3). A letter from Mum which was practically all to Peter and she didn't EVEN send us her love!
4). Nothing from Peter.
5). Nothing from Ralph.
6). Nothing from Heather.
7). A nice letter from Daddy without mention of birthdays! Poor you, having that awful skin trouble again, and I do hope it isn't being too bad. It sounds such a beastly thing, but we hope it won't last long.
And I'm going to address this portmanteau to Abbotswood for the first time – ain't that exciting. You will be old inhabitants by the time this arrives I expect, and what jolly good fun you must be having arranging all the rooms and sticking up all the pictures on getting new curtains and things. You're lucky being only a few miles away so that you can just go back for anything you've forgotten, and can take so many small things loose in the car.
We've just begun packing, and are going to do about an hour a day so as not to tire us. Yesterday we did three early morning tea sets, pink Baden Powell tea set, the lovely green Copeland tea set, which we very much regret that we've got out here as it seems such a shame to lug it round the country with us every time you move and probably not use it for centuries. I sat in a deck chair and sewed while the boys did the packing, and I think it will all get done very easily.
But were not so lucky as you, because every single thing has got to be packed up, and packed well to so as not to mind being carried on people's heads, and not to mind the rain or the damp of being left out at nights, and we can't just pop back and fetch anything we forgotten.
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Oh, by the way, we also got a letter from Phibbs by this mail, and he said that they are due in Livingstone on May 2nd. "...I think we will follow your example and fly up… I suppose we will be a day or two in Livingstone, and get out to Sesheke about the 7th." So that all fits in beautifully, and I will go down to Livingstone in their returning plane, so that I only need pay half fare instead of a whole one!
Mrs Fitzhenry has asked me to stay with her in Lusaka, but she can't have me before the 15th because of all the people coming in for the coronation, so I have booked rooms for myself and Miss Griffin at the Fairmount in Livingstone till then, so that we can go up to Lusaka together and go straight to Mrs F's, without having the bother of moving from the Fairmount to the ground in Lusaka, and from the ground to Mrs F's. I don't think Mrs F. will be able to put Miss Griffin up, but it makes one less hotel fare if I am staying with her!
We also heard from the Dr in Lusaka, whom I wrote to last week asking her to fix the hospital for me and asking her if she had Undertake My Case. She said she would and has fixed the hospital, but she says that while I am in hospital it would be better just to let the hospital nurse look after me, but that I will find my own very useful in lots of other ways beforehand. She says I shouldn't be in more than 10 days or so, and it will be six shillings a day. It's a good plan Miss Griffin being there to as we want her to learn about malaria, as people at home no so very little about it and don't come in contact with it at all, and Robin is very likely indeed to get it.
Talking of that, that was one of the reasons why G. did not like the idea of me coming home for it, because the only woman he knew did get malaria just before and both she and the baby died. There has been another one since – Mrs Stevens from Livingstone, whom we met while we were there – she went home last October and produced in March, but all she could produce was a daughter! (G. says the best I could possibly produce is a ball of string, that's beside the point.) There is very little actual news this week, as we've just been pottering on, doing absolutely nothing and never having enough time to do it in. You know, it IS amazing how the time flies. Here am I, sitting flatly in my house all day being a good Hussif, and all I've done this week is: paint the sitting room mantelpiece brown; G. promptly put his great flat feet up on it again and made filthy again, the brute.
Make some cheese scones for tea on Wednesday, when the Montes and the Lanz and the Hippo came up. They were all rather nervous of them but none of them has been ill since, I'm glad to report.
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I have read and thrown away all my engagement-letters, which have been sitting in a drawer, cluttering it up and waiting to be dealt with for nearly 5 months.
I made an Egg Jelly which was very successful and which G. actually deigned to ask for some more of!
I've written to Rosie thanking her for her Christmas present!
And yesterday I made a very nice Logan Brewery ice.
I have also written lots of letters, read some of the vast bunches of papers that Mummy, Ralph etc. so very kindly sent us, and have sent them onto old Pa Cambell at Gwelo, I have also planted out a lot of pansies, and put mania on the garden, and looked at the Tiger Cats from a safe distance and tried to tame them, and I have watched aeroplanes going over and said Thank Goodness they didn't come down, and I have put iodine on the old horse every day, where he was badly bitten by the little horse, and I don't blame the little horse at all but he must've got a nasty mouthful.
I think that's all I've done. Merry takes up such a lot of time, as every five minutes he wishes to come and share my chair with me (he is at the moment and itIS so and comfortable for both of us, but he prefers it to his own) so he has to be carried to his own chair and smoothed to sleep again, and has to have bustling put between his toes to kill the fleas and then has to be booted off the chairs when he gets on them with greasy toes.
We went down to sundowners with Miss Breach and Mr Read the other evening. They are such a funny old couple and G. and I were saying as we walked down there that they ought to get married. Miss Breach is about 65 I think, and Mr Read is two years younger, but ever since Miss Breach first came to look after Mr Bennett's store, three years ago, they have had all their meals together and she does everything about his house for him and so on; now Miss Breach is leaving, as there are now four stores in the township and the competition has squeezed her out, so Mr Read says he will have to leave to see can't go on living there without Miss Breach to look after him.
Well, when I was talking to Miss Breach and saying how sorry we were she was going, she said that somebody had said she ought to marry Mr Read! She blushed very prettily and said it was "just a platonic friendship" and they weren't the marrying sort! Wasn't it sweet. She is a dear little person they know each other so well that there'd get on awfully well together, and then she needn't go and live with her sister Mrs Bennett (the vast fat one) at Mulobezi.
Yesterday we went down to tea at the mission, and the were there Mr and Mrs Jalla, who are in the headquarters of the parish's mission society at Sefula, beyond Mongu. They are
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just on their way on leave for the first time since 1930, and they only get six months! They ought really to get a whole year, but apparently they are rather short of people, and some of the others are due for leave to, so they are only getting six months, and then back here for five years again before their next leave.
But they are not quite so badly off as the White Fathers, who come out hereFOR GOOD, and don't go home ever in this their health breaks down – and they aren't allowed to get married either, so it is a veritable exile.
Well, rather them than me.
I'm sorry thisP. Is so boring, but I've got absolutely nothing to say that I can think of. Except that all the Lupin's except one have died, and most of the carrots. The peas are doing very well though, three whole beds of them about 2 inches high. There is one potato and a huge marrow and a lot of tomatoes that won't tomat and some onions that won't on, and some salvias that won't salve.
Oh, yes, Films.
Number 17 contains Me and Merry and Bill, the Watmore's Vast Bull Terrier puppy; also Mongu from the air, and the Sesheke aerodrome just as we were coming down onto it, which I expect will be a complete washout.
Number 18 is the baby Tiger Cats and Merry having pot-shots at their dinner; the heap of white ants'house that we got off the walls of the Veranda and dressing room, with Merry beside it for size; a young lechwe they brought in but which we didn't buy as we are going so soon; and the edge of the aerodrome where our path to the river goes, with G. walking and Merry swimming along it! I only had 5 feet left after that and it was almost dark, so I just took old chief bounding through the water across the aerodrome – he was almost swimming – to finish the film, so don't expect it will come out and you have to cut it off.
That's the worst of fifty-foot films – the last 5 feet of nearly every film has to be finished up on something and is probably wasted, whereas with a 100 foot film you waste half as much because you have to change a film half as often. I glad you we've got this box though, and WON'T it be marvellous when we get films of young Robin to send home to you! Oh, we thought of another name – Rosalie. But I think Gillian (Gill for short) has it. Is that all right? But we know it's going to be a Robin.
Buckets of love everybody,
from
US.
