My Dear Bessie

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Chris Barker. My Dear Bessie

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Also by Simon Garfield

Expensive Habits

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If I had the chance, I might do a lot of things, or nothing. As it is I shall remain very polite and become as friendly as I dare without undertaking obligations I have no intention of fulfilling. I am safe from physical indiscretion for a long while, but I am also wanting you seriously to see that while we might have fun (certainly I could laugh heartily at the moment!) at a later date, it would not be so funny for you ultimately. I can’t help being your hero – and I breathe heavily and exultingly at your clear, bare admittance; but please don’t let me make you break your heart in 1946 or 47, when I scurry off with ‘one, two, three, or more.’ If I was a wise guy I would not write you and thus encourage your racing thoughts. I admit to a state of gleaming, dangerous excitement as I read again and again your written words. You fascinate and weaken me, and make me feel strong. Presumably you wrote the same in the old days (in an earlier letter I said I was hazy even about any letters), have I become so much more susceptible to flattery, or is the change due to the fact that I have been away from home fourteen months, and haven’t seen a woman (other than about four on a stage) in the last six?

I believe and I deplore that too many people with Left views think they must free-love, be vegetarians, atheists, walk on the wrong side of the road, and so on. I think I have mentioned that one chap of 18 who I met in hospital told me he had ‘had’ 35 girls, several on the first day of meeting. This ‘loyalty’ of the woman has been blown sky-high during this war – one of the chaps here asked his girl why she hadn’t written for six weeks, and she replied she had been busy, didn’t he know there was a war on?! You say that men have a ‘much more powerful nervous force’ – I’m not sure I know what this means, but I am quite sure that a chap in love (while he is in that happy state) feels it as deeply as his lady. Perhaps it doesn’t last so long, but while it does it is pretty potent.

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