Today at Hoe Benham Kittie received George’s last two letters (1 and 3 June 1915 — see my posts of those dates 2015), redirected from Hampstead at 5.45 p.m. yesterday.
The Field Post marks are clearly 1 and 3 June respectively, so she may have opened them in that order. If so, she must have been delighted, amused, even reassured (‘Dearest Mrs P., Nothing in your letters need make you anxious’), by the first.
But the message of the first line of George’s second letter would have been crystal clear to her. Other, younger men’s letters from the 1st KOSB written on this date are quite unequivocally written in the knowledge that they might not survive the next day. George had deliberately written his ‘last’ letter as though it was not his last. He never intimated that he was afraid or that Kittie should be; on the contrary, the phrase ‘I’m always a fortnight behind the newspapers’ probably meant ‘don’t believe anything you read about us, you won’t hear the true situation from me until a fortnight later’.
This last remark may have given Kittie hope. But the contrast between reading his words of over a fortnight ago, being told by the War Office nine days ago that he was ‘wounded’, and knowing nothing more since, must have been too much for her.
Some of Nina’s affectionate names for Kittie were ‘Dina’ (possibly from its rhyme or from the popular music hall song ‘Villikins and his Dinah’), ‘Quinckee’, ‘Swan’ (from her very white skin), and ‘White Raven’ (contrasting with the Corbets’ heraldic black raven).
Next entry: ‘Things fall apart’
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Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George Calderon c.1901
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Captain of the 11
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George Calderon, 1912
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
20 June 1915
Today at Hoe Benham Kittie received George’s last two letters (1 and 3 June 1915 — see my posts of those dates 2015), redirected from Hampstead at 5.45 p.m. yesterday.
The Field Post marks are clearly 1 and 3 June respectively, so she may have opened them in that order. If so, she must have been delighted, amused, even reassured (‘Dearest Mrs P., Nothing in your letters need make you anxious’), by the first.
But the message of the first line of George’s second letter would have been crystal clear to her. Other, younger men’s letters from the 1st KOSB written on this date are quite unequivocally written in the knowledge that they might not survive the next day. George had deliberately written his ‘last’ letter as though it was not his last. He never intimated that he was afraid or that Kittie should be; on the contrary, the phrase ‘I’m always a fortnight behind the newspapers’ probably meant ‘don’t believe anything you read about us, you won’t hear the true situation from me until a fortnight later’.
This last remark may have given Kittie hope. But the contrast between reading his words of over a fortnight ago, being told by the War Office nine days ago that he was ‘wounded’, and knowing nothing more since, must have been too much for her.
Some of Nina’s affectionate names for Kittie were ‘Dina’ (possibly from its rhyme or from the popular music hall song ‘Villikins and his Dinah’), ‘Quinckee’, ‘Swan’ (from her very white skin), and ‘White Raven’ (contrasting with the Corbets’ heraldic black raven).
Next entry: ‘Things fall apart’
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