Letter 12

Read by Delia Corrie

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20.5.32 Berlin-Charlottenburg

Well, old friend, we don’t get any younger! I have just quietly and unobtrusively attained the venerable age of 24, no flowers or mourning by request and you can stop purring in that grandfatherly fashion and exclaiming “How young! How young! A la Frau Wolffburg, because it’s absurd and inconsistent. If I were a horse now or a pet dove (perhaps you don’t read ‘Points from Letters’?) you would be writing to the Times exclaiming in high excitement “known her since 1908! Still shows no signs of at ant rate physical dissolution. Surely this is a record?” I spent most of the great day on my hands and knees in the strawberry bed grubbing up scratch grass (In Potsdam) and watering the plants with honest sweat. Possibly you have never tried weeding out scratch grass with the naked hands? Possibly you don’t know scratch grass when you see it? Then let me tell you that here is an instance when Ignorance is Bliss. The garden, however, looks a different place.

It has turned amazingly hot all in a moment. I spent Whitsun in Potsdam (not in Pommern as before suggested) careering about the place in a long red dress like a nightgown, to the tune of a chorus of frogs. The Grafin gave me a white straw hat and the Graf a box of cheese. This latter tickled my fancy very much. He is afraid that I starve in Berlin – although I show no outward and visible signs of so doing. The frogs sit in the rushes round the lakes and gargle and chuckle in a hilarious chorus, louder and louder, vivacity animato, then Bumps! They are all silent and for a short space it’s possible to hear oneself speak. I love ‘em. They are so hot and comfortable. Besides they are heralding fine weather.

Next day:

I should think they are! I am at present cooling down like a cod in a fish shop on the marble seats in the Hoshschule before wielding the flute once more.

Frau Wolffberg drives me crazy. Not only does she interrupt my practising but she strokes my face while doing so till I writhe like a worm on a pin. She’ll get the shock of her life when I bite her hand with a scream of exasperation. I suspect her of opening a letter I got from the police. It takes the devil of a lot of understanding, but I’m damned it I’ll ask her to read it to me! Oh temper! Temper!

I’ve just finished a most amazing book (‘Die vor den by Clara Viebig) very long, about the rich peasants that used to live outside Berlin. One person commits suicide, one person drinks himself insane because his mother harried his adored wife to death, a little girl disappears out of fear and unhappiness, another person marries an unfaithful husband, and in fact the only pleasant people in the whole book are a rich widow, a doctor and an old woman who dies. And yet it is a book I shall read again.

Tomorrow, breakfast at 7.15 in order to be at the Police station at 8. I wonder what on earth I’ve done? I am going determined to be either truculent or flippant. Damned if I’ll lick a Prussian bobby’s boots!