Letter by Edith to her aunt. (Meant to post this on the day).

[Saturday] December 23, 1922

Dear Auntie – It was good of you to send me in the book; it will help to pass a good many weary hours away, when my mind is more settled.

At present I can’t think – I can’t even feel. When I was told the result of the appeal yesterday, it seemed the end of everything.

In Life, Death seems too awful to contemplate, especially when Death is the punishment for something I have not done, did not know of, either at the time or previously.

I have been looking back over my life, & wondering what it has brought me – I once said “Only ashes and dust and bitterness”, and today it seems even less than this. – if there can be less.

This last ordeal seems to be the ultimate end of that gradual drifting through Life, passing each event, each disappointment, so many of which I have encountered and met with a smiling face and an aching heart. [for these two paragraphs, see inset]

Auntie dear, I have learnt the lesson that it is not wise to meet and try to overcome all your trials alone – when the end comes, as it has to me, nobody understands.

If only I had been able to forfeit my pride, that pride that resents pity, and talk to someone, I can see now how different things might have been, but it’s too late now to rake over ashes in the hope of finding some live coal.

When I first came into this world, and you stood to me as godmother, I am sure you never anticipated such an end as this for me. Do you know, people have told me from time to time that to be born on Christmas Day was unlucky, and my answer has always been, “Superstition is only good for ignorant people”, but now I am beginning to believe that they are right; it is unlucky.

However, what is to be will be. Somewhere I read “The fate of every man hath he bound about his neck”, and this, I suppose, I must accept as mine.

I’m glad I’ve talked to you for a little while. I feel better – it seems to lift me out of this abyss of depression into which I have fallen, and I know you will understand, not only what I have said, but all my thoughts that are not collected enough to put on paper.

Thank Leonard for me for his letter. It made me laugh, and it’s good to laugh just for five minutes. I’ll write to him another day. I can’t now – but I know he will understand.

EDITH

The quote: “The fate of every man hath he bound about his neck” is from the Koran, and Edith had read it in Robert Hichens’ Bella Donna (1909).

She told Freddy about it in a letter of 23rd May 1922, as Laura Thompson puts it in Rex V Edith Thompson:

‘’I daren’t think…’ she wrote, as if in trepidation, like a child half-relishing a distant lurid thrill.’

She wrote of such things, such was her romantic imagination. Dreams and reality blurred for her. Had they not done so to so great an extent, she may have lived to experience such things as the music of Vera Lynn, or the film Brief Encounter (1945), both of which I think would have appealed to her.

Kathryn Altman, wife of film director Robert Altman, interviewed for a documentary, told of how he had gone to the cinema and seen Brief Encounter with no great intention:

‘He said the main character [Laura Jesson] was not glamorous. Not a babe, and at first he wondered why he was even watching it. But twenty minutes later he was in tears and had fallen in love with her.’

That struck me, and is my hope for my book: that the reader will come to love Edith rather than simply pitying her.

That was one of Freddy’s last requests, that people should remember and cherish Edith, and that’s what I try to do, and it’s why I keep writing about her, and will continue to do so.

Thank you for listening ❤️