Letter 9

Read by Delia Corrie

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13.03.32 – Personzug Anhalter Bahnhof

Here I am, rattling off to Dresden for a week or so. What for? I am going to meet a Very Famous Accompanist! You and I have never heard of him before, but for all that Herr Michael Raucheisen yields the palm to none…..

That American girl is just about to leave, so we went on the spree together in Berlin I bought a large bag of powdered chalk for 10pf for the teeth. I wanted a little box full, but that was scented, and no said I, scented teeth I couldn’t abide. Then we had tea, and then we wandered round a picture store, and I gloated over a lot of Durer engravings – and then we decided to go to a theatre. We chose der Kleine Theater in Unter den Linden, and there we ate Wurstchen and Butterbrotchen and a whole packet of chocolate. Then the play began. I came out in a howling tearing bubbling seething rage. The whole thing was Communist propaganda and if there’s one thing I am more unreasonable and violent about than another it is Communism. My word, I was blind! I refused to go to a Cabaret or Café Vaterland with Jeaneette but rushed off to Potsdam in a blaze of sparks and dynamite. Next morning I had recovered, and the net result is I am an ardent Hitlerite, so there! Ma takes my conversion desperately seriously and every letter from her tries to lure me, bully me, frighten me back into the fold. But M. can be obstinate as a ton of lead sometimes.

Such a time as I have been having lately. Jeanette said my hair looked neglected and she would cut it for me. It did rather look as though the rats had been at it, because I cut off the side bits with a pair of curved nail scissors (very difficult) and the back bits fell into the gas (only too easy). So she draped me in a clean towel, and stood me on a sheet or two of the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, kissed me several times with more than oriental fervour, and set to. The result was amazing. I looked almost civilized. It shall be washed, cried I in a burst of rash enthusiasm – and it was so …….It took me two days with a wet comb to tame it!

The Mozart Concerto is slipping into the background again, because the only place where I can play it by heart is in my room. And there isn’t room from an orchestra and an audience there, even if one removed the bed and the desk. What a fool the girl is – oh dear, I am afraid I must retire squashed to the ranks of the beauties. But I really have done something silly. I have two pairs of shoes, and I left them to be mended, and forgot ‘em. So I have to go to Dresden in a pair of slippers and snowboots and ask Tante D. to send them after me.

Such a nice article in my Musical Times on Haydn. What do you think of this passage? “The Masses, which contain some of his finest and most mature work, have lost place by an incongruous gaiety of temper which he could not exclude even from the services of the Church. Mendelssohn describes one of them as ‘scandalously merry’: and though this was due not to lack of religious feeling….but to a naiveté which saw no harm in ‘praising God with a cheerful heart’, it explains why they were – debarred – “

After Dresden, I am going to Stettin for Easter and then I must return, pack my trunk and find me a room in der Nahe vonder Hochschule. And I’m damn well going to over-work. I will! I will!