TO RAYMOND GREENE

C/O Bank of B. W. A. | Freetown,| Sierra Leone |
July 23 [1942]

Dear Raymond,

It was extremely pleasant hearing from you. No, this isn’t an ideal spot, but in some ways it’s a good deal better than Lagos, and I have a house of a kind to myself and can close the door when I want to and be as morose as I like. The water difficulty of course is solved now by nature. So far I’ve rather liked the rains except on the occasions when it rains continually for three days and nights.

Life was helped at the beginning by an excellent cook, but he’s gone off his head and my steward who is acting as cook has a rather horrifying range of dull dishes not too well done.

I suppose one never enjoys what one is doing at the moment – even writing books, and I rather envy you the sense of a useful job. I’m not in the least convinced that I would not be far more useful in a munitions factory, and certainly one would prefer any factory town to this colonial slum. I shall probably rebel eventually and find myself at home again.

[…]

I heard of your commando activity.⁸It must have been fun. I wish they would take me on as a kind of war historian-observer. With honorary rank and no dull regimental duties. These are the idle dreams of an exile.

I get away from this place up-country when I can and have revisited a few old spots and met ghosts of the past, but it’s difficult to get away and when I do I pay for it by several 12 hour days getting through the arrears of dull routine stuff that has stacked up for me.

Well you know the S.P. has quite a function even in the tropics – security.⁹Of which there is never very much when more than three Englishmen are together. The ideal of security I suppose is one man in an igloo surrounded by 500 miles of snow.

Do write again and let me know more about your nurses’ constipation. I’ve been very well so far; the irritating thing about this climate is that you can’t scratch yourself without going septic.

The rain is drenching down and I must back to work. My love to Eleanor.

Yours,
Graham

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 658