In the morning, George and Kittie left Ringwood and travelled to Southampton. Here they said goodbye for the time being and Kittie returned to Hampstead. After lunch George caught the train to Ludgershall and walked to the vast Windmill Hill Camp above the village. Presumably his luggage was still at Ludgershall station.
He wrote to her at six o’clock this evening:
The plain begins here, hill after hill of dried grass, broken only by the railway line and a road here and there, and clumps of trees, and camp after camp on every side; here simply masses of horses in line, with the little tents between. Life Guards on both sides and the R[oyal]H[orse]G[uards] in the middle. The brigadier just behind a little wood at the top, with a row of tents for his staff. Little groups of motor cars in sheltered spots. Down on the lines, here and there a saddler, or an armourer’s tent, and Gipsy smithies, where chargers are being reshod between an anvil and a pile of wooden boxes.
I went to a big tent which I was told was the RHG mess and a group of very big men came out, and one of them took me to a little tent and produced the Colonel; who then introduced me to the group and took me inside the mess tent and introduced me to everyone else in there. All very big and robust; one young man with a charming face; I didn’t catch their names, except one or two. ‘Dick’ (I think his surname), a sharp-faced man of 35 with 10 inches of medal ribbons on his left chest, called his motorcar and chauffeur out of the wood for me and sent me down (nice man) to fetch my luggage up in it. They all seem to know each other well and have short names, like ‘Beefy’ or ‘Chips’.
One resolute bald robust fellow was very busy between the tents with a new range finder, and they all followed him and watched and helped over that. And I and the particularly pleasant-faced young man chatted about ranges and judgment of distance.
Inside the mess-tent, another big fellow (the Duke of Roxburghe, I think he was) exhibited and explained a new pocket cooking apparatus, which he had had put together, with collapsible drinking cup, and everything inside everything else; and they all considered that with the same grave attention as they did the range finder.
I left them as soon as I had my tent, and have spent the rest of the time alone in my tent and on a long walk round the brigade and the neighbouring hill, to take the stiffness out. I was attached by the Colonel to C squadron […] and the Quartermaster fetched up a soldier who is to be my servant. He told me, with what sounded uncommonly like a break in the voice, that he had no duties henceforth but to look after me; but I couldn’t think of anything to tell him to do. His name is Paterson. I must look into this. If there is nothing for him to do for me, except fetch a little water, surely I could ‘double-up’ with someone else on half a man.
Reveille at 5.30, parade at 7. I know nothing as yet, as to whether to fall in or not; but I shall go in case. Anyway no more tonight. I must go to the mess tent and find what change of clothes to make for dinner.
I kept clear of them today a little out of policy; to get them used to the sight of me, without worrying them. But when it’s dark I’m bound to go as I can’t sit by the light of a dull dip. Heaps of love. P.
It is interesting how detachedly, almost anthropologically, Calderon observes ‘them’. A ‘dip’ is a night-light, and P stands for ‘Peter’, or ‘Peety’.
Next entry: A possible penny drops
A possible penny drops
Yesterday Calderon sent his wife three large closely written pages of letter, today he sends her four. He describes tents, ‘messing’, people, clothes, furniture, military equipment, horses, exercises, soldiers, officers, all in vivid detail and thick with names.
His back was still painful and he would usually have to be heaved into the saddle. At dinner on the 17th, however, he had made a surprising and useful acquaintance:
In 1909 George had been instrumental in setting up the Liverpool School of Russian Studies, to which Bernard Pares was Professor (later he became Director of London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies).
Although nominally only an interpreter, Calderon got up at 5.15 reveille today and reported for duty:
And so Calderon writes on. He closes today’s letter to Kittie: ‘I have written at length to give you the first impressions. After this, I shall not write so fully; for I must be using the time I am awake in study, of a hundred things.’ Yet through the next six weeks he does continue to write to her at length!
Along with other reasons that I have touched on, it begins to dawn on me that he wanted to join up and become ‘combatant’ for writerly reasons, although this is not once alluded to. Perhaps at this stage he was not even aware of it himself. He thought he was ‘odd man out’ in the Blues — although warmly accepted — because he was an ‘interpreter’ and ‘a private’, but actually his position approximates more to that of a war correspondent. Perhaps Colonel Wilson, whose wife had been a war correspondent during the Boer War, foresaw that, since he must have been aware that George was a professional writer.
These letters, which I have never read closely before, resemble those that he wrote Kittie whenever he was abroad: detailed descriptions, wry observations, thoughts, records, sometimes ink sketches. Although his letters to her from Tahiti have been lost, they must have been like this, because he used them to invoke the spirit and facts of his 1906 stay on the island when he came to write his book in the winter of 1913/14. Perhaps he would have done the same for a book about the Great War.
To write his early short stories, his two novels, his articles, his plays, and the letters that he used for Tahiti, he had had to have Kittie to write to and to bounce his writing off. She was the exclusive ‘other’ of his life. All the time he could write to her, he was in ‘touch’ with her. ‘When he was at home’, she wrote later, ‘I hardly ever went away even for a day. He at once seemed to feel left and lost. He absolutely needed one.’
Next entry: Kittie’s Feelings