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The Townend Family Letters

Correspondence from the 1930s - 1940s between members of the Townend family
HPV + LJT Letters 1933 to 1935

1934 January

From LJT to Annette

14/1 Rowland Road
Calcutta
Jan 4th 1933 (should have been 1934?)

My darling Annette,

I wonder how you got on with your essay on “The League and Slavery”. I read a good article in the Statesman the other day on that subject. I wish I had cut it out to keep for you. It interests me very much. I hope you do well at it.

Is the Lowe Settlement in Camberwell? I have been down several times to the U.G.S.M. place there, and ran a Christmas tree party for the children the second Christmas we were in Chelsea.

We had rather an important meeting of the Guide Commissioners for Calcutta here yesterday morning. We were trying to fix up officers for all the Guide Companies in Calcutta. So many people go home in the spring, and if one does not think well ahead, one is completely landed. It is one of the great complications in India that we have so many people away during a good part of the year.

I have been doing a lot of work in connection with the Himalayan club. The secretary for the past two years, has really been far too busy a man to give the time he should have to the Clubs affairs, which consequently have got very behindhand. I do really like the work, and the re-editing of the Sikkim book has been a splendid preparation for it.

You must forgive me for writing such short letters these days. I still have a lot of Christmas letters to deal with

Best love, my darling
Mum

From HPV to Annette

Calcutta
Jan 4th 1934

My dear Annette.

Why didn’t I tell Rosemary about the splendid balloon spectacle? however I shall use it on you. At the New Year’s parade. Men selling gasfilled balloons. They strained into the air. Some let up long strings of them – one at least with 20 balloons on it, the highest a couple of hundred feet maybe. Others less. All more or less in one corner of the maidan. Sun shone on them through the mist: I devoted my whole attention to the gleam and the pleasure of them. In the slight breeze the strings of balloons bent stiffly this way and that, all together : very smart. And what rapture when a bunch of twelve (maybe) got away together and sailed up out of sight.

The airplanes swooping round disappeared in the haze and reappeared with the sun shining on them in a manner equally alluring. So it was a good parade. – There were also troops. One of the bodyguard (that word is ‘body guard’) horses kicked out and pranced as the line went past the Viceroy. Alas for its rider! Ten minutes later the horse threw him and he was taken off in a stretcher. It must be difficult to ride a ferocious horse, when clad in ceremonial uniform, carrying a lance, and at attention.

What more? I have told others of my nose-cold: not of my gargling with Lysol: on the principle of treating it rough. Also of the Garden Party to which I go today: wearing gloves.

A cold in the nose tends to make one speak queerly. But judge of my amazement to see that I had written to someone about not my pet scheme but my bed scheme: which was absurd.

Other items as usual – (i) (ii) and (iii)

Much love
Daddie

From HPV to Annette

Calcutta
Jan 10th 1934

My dear Annette.

Perhaps the best thing in the Circus was the horse which danced. (though I confess to liking the trapeze work best). All done by directions conveyed to the horse by the girl riding it – partly through one heel and partly through shifting of weight on the saddle. Clever work.

It is a long time since I saw a circus. Omitting that at Barisal (where you went out and rolled on the ground and where Richard laughed till we became afraid for him) and that at Midnapore in 1914 (where there was a man who was going to stop a car in full career but it pulled him over the first time and broke down the second), the last circus that I saw was Barnum and Baileys in the far distant days. Before that, what? one at Halifax I think in 1895 and before that one at Ramsgate which I have forgotten. And so we get back to the first and most magnificent of all, which I saw when I was four, at Gibraltar: spoilt for me because Brother Frank kept saying that there would be no tight rope performance because it only came on at the evening shows and we went in the afternoon. – all quite untrue and a fantasy on his part. If there were circuses before that, I know nothing of them. This circus here was consistently good: and it had no Japanese in it.

The other day, on advice received. I asked at a shop if it had “Basic French”. Have you heard of it – or Basic German – or Basic English – or Basic any other language? The idea is to give you the 600 words which will enable you to express any idea that you wish to utter in any of these languages. And the advice, at lunch at the club, was that the idea is clever and well worked out. Now the gramophone book has 2000 words in it and there are hundreds of others which in a way I know: yet I am not able to express myself. Hence my curiosity.

Your marks seem good. (Having reflected I can only explain them by supposing that you make them up in order to deceive us.) Very pleased. Beware of intellectual arrogance – a remedy is to reflect on stick work at lacrosse on which the report comments. However, bless you: I’m glad you’re no dullard.

Much love
Daddy

From LJT to Annette

14.1 Rowland Road
Calcutta
Jan 11th 1934

My darling Annette,

It is always rather exciting when the school reports come. Yours is really very good. I am glad that you have made such a good beginning in German. I am glad that you general report from Miss Capstick is better. I see she wants you to be more “forceful”. I find it just a little difficult to grasp what she means by that. Do you understand? I suppose as you go up the school, she wants you to take more initiative about things. Funnily enough we were talking on that subject at our Guide Commissioner’s meeting the other day. We find so many of our officers will do just what they are told, or what is laid down in a book, but never go beyond it, - - never exert their own personality, so to speak. I believe that is what makes people forceful, in the best sense of the word. It is not brains that does it, though of course an intelligent mind, helps. There are so many people who are rather shadowy personalities. One asks them to parties and does not mind or scarcely notice if they don’t come. One does not see them for a time and when one meets them again, one cant remember who they are. So my child, don’t be afraid of your own personality, at the same time remember the wisdom of being able to keep your thoughts to yourself at times, and not forceing your own opinions down the throats of older people, uninvited – a fault which Peg suffered from very badly when she first left school.

Dad was very pleased with your report. I think it would have been a grief to him if you had been stupid or dull. He does like people to have quick minds.

You must be a big brat for your age. How do you compare with other girls? I don’t think I was as tall as you are at your age, but I did an enormous spurt of growing when I was fourteen, and then slowed down again.

You have chosen nice useful presents from us. The Parker pens are awfully nice, are’nt they? I love mine.

Thank you so much for making me a blotter for Christmas. You are very wise to keep it till I come home, for one does have to pay such heavy duty on everything sent out, except books.

So glad the holidays promised to be gay and amusing. I hope they lived up to their promise.

News is all in the family letter, so my dear, I shall now bid you farewell.

Best love, darling
From
Mum


From LJT to Annette

14/1 Rowland Road
Calcutta
Jan 18th 1934

My darling Annette

I have only time for a tiny little personal scribble to you this week as there have been constant interruptions all morning. I was great fun hearing about the Christmas doings and the pantomime – Really Great Leighs seems a gay enough place – for all that it looks so quiet. Mrs. Marr – Miss Hida Cameron that was – and one time at St. Monica’s has been having lunch with me and we had a great St Monica’s talk and discussed Vera Brittain’s book on the War. Its taking me ages to read it because I have so little time.

I hope school is going well I wish I could gaze down unbeknownst at you working in my old aunts and the new ones that have been built – since! It would interest me very much –

Best love, darling, from Mum

From HPV to Annette

Calcutta
Jan 18th 1934

My dear Annette

I am glad that you were likely to have a gay time after Christmas. How you must have grown. By all means waggle your tummy and get firm muscles round it: but not in public.

I find that sitting up late makes the eyes tired. Contrary to my custom I was up late last night. Tempted out to dinner to look at some films of a trip across the Donkia where we went last year. But why do people get behind time. Dinner a quarter of an hour late: and the showing of the pictures didn’t even start till nearly eleven by which time I had hoped to be home and in bed. It was a quarter to one before I got to bed.

The great earthquake hardly came to my notice. I was in the car at the time and after I had got out there were merely some small tremors. Not that I liked them. I felt as if I might feel sickish soon. Every body in Calcutta ran out of doors: except those out already. I wonder what people in hospital felt like.

Two attempts at tennis: neither very successful. The one was after the Viceroy’s ball: which was a fine show but I became very weary. We had guests and they took ages to turn up after the show: so we were nearly the last people to leave.

Good luck and much love
Daddy.


From LJT to Annette

14/1 Rowland Road
Calcutta

undated

My darling Annette

Capt. Kingdon Ward arrived unexpectedly this morning – and I have been incredibly busy and have really no time to write

Forgive me –
Best love
Mum

From HPV to Annette

Calcutta
Jan 24th 1934

My dear Annette.

Cold these days I am sitting in front of an electric stove: one of those big-candle things: two of the candles red and one white – handsome, but not particularly warming. Your mother is out to dinner. My refusal to go out at all is a great convenience to bachelor hosts giving dinner parties: it allows the numbers to be even. She was out last night too. But, were she here, I should not be the livelier, having had acute tummy-ache for three days and being somewhat disgruntled.

If I had the energy I should look up the dictionary to see if there is a word gruntled and what it means.

The weekend was almost vigorous. Tennis on Saturday – merely family singles: then people in before dinner. On Sunday, to the Saturday Club before lunch to listen to music – but I didn’t listen. People to lunch. Then out to Dum Dum to the flying club to see an air circus. (Pretty dull: half an hour of it would have been interesting) And finally your Uncle Harry and Aunt Winsome in to dinner. It was about that time that my tummy went back on me.

Council has been on. A tiring thing always. No work keeping me in the actual council chamber – but anyhow it is tiring.

No French for some days. The fact that one can hear through the doors of this flat (all the rooms are connected with all the others by doors) puts me off using the gramophone unless I’m alone – as I am now but even so I’m not using it. Perhaps the real reason is not feeling full of life just now. There are still ten of the first lot of records which I do not know - - not that I could recite the first twenty but I learnt them all at one time or another – and there are 26 or maybe 27 of the second series – and 5 out of 6 of the Hugophone things Very slack.

Much love
Daddie