managing my allotment. I am asking you to write about sex. How many times do I have to tell you?
This letter made Tory weep. She wept so copiously that afterwards she felt noticeably lighter. But it wasn’t just the weight of tears that had gone: her imagination had been drained as well. It was as if her letter had been written in blood – why had Donald not recognized the effort she had put into it? She, who’d never written from her imagination before, not since her pitiless schooldays at least, had managed to do something miraculous: write about sex in a way that she found charged with erotic delight, at the same time as containing nothing that would raise the eyebrow of a Nazi guard.
Perhaps, husband, you could provide me with some examples of the kind of smut you require. A list of appropriate words would be useful, along with some scenarios. I am not familiar with the genre of writing of which you seem to be such a connoisseur. If not, then I do not think I can help you, and I will ask that our correspondence should cease.
CHAPTER EIGHT
This brought a silence from the Stalag, and it was an immense relief for Tory to have this respite. For weeks now she had dreaded the blue envelopes with the prickly German writing that she found propped on the mantelpiece between the clock and the china spaniels nearly every week. There was something so relentlessly accurate and stealthy about them, the way they sought her out — dispatched from God knew where behind enemy lines, traversing a barbed and twisted European geography to land plumb in the centre of the mantelpiece at 17 Peter Street. Bombs by night, letters by day. More and more Tory began to feel that these two types of assault were linked. If the bombs didn’t wipe her out, the letters, landing in her heart, would bring a different kind of death.
It seemed that with one brief, curt letter she had dammed the flow of mail from Donald, yet the continuing silence soon became its own source of anxiety. The relentless surge of unsavouriness should not have been so easily stemmed. What had she done to Donald? She pictured him in the compound, the only one among the men without a letter from his wife, the only one emaciated and hollow-eyed in a camp full of satisfied, rosy-faced prisoners. Surely it was her wifely duty to sustain, by whatever means she could, her captive husband.
*
The continued silence, therefore, only made her task seem more urgent. She would have to write something to satisfy him before it was too late. One evening she came in from work and went straight to her writing desk, having thought, on the tram home, of the perfect solution. It had all seemed so simple. All she had to do was write a description of the sexual act, using conventional terminology. There was no special vocabulary. There were no exotic phrases that she had to know. She could treat the whole exercise in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, just as if she was describing two people having dinner or changing a wheel on a bicycle.
*
In some of the letters Donald had written to her, he had referred to the writings he desired as ‘bedroom thoughts’. Please share your bedroom thoughts with me . Perhaps he thought the term less off-putting than ‘dirty letter’. Please write to me your BEDROOM THOUGHTS!!!
Now the phrase played over and over in her mind, so that she became preoccupied by the notion of what exactly she did think about when she was in bed.
Dearest Donald,
You have asked me many times for my ‘bedroom thoughts’ and now I am at last able to tell you what they are. I am sorry to have kept you waiting for so long. I now sleep alone in my bedroom, so my thoughts tend to wander into unexpected places. Last night I was thinking that I haven’t seen the sea since I was seven years old. And we live on an island. How can that happen? And it is the fact that we are an island race that has saved us from invasion so far, more than anything. But most of the time I lie on my back
This letter made Tory weep. She wept so copiously that afterwards she felt noticeably lighter. But it wasn’t just the weight of tears that had gone: her imagination had been drained as well. It was as if her letter had been written in blood – why had Donald not recognized the effort she had put into it? She, who’d never written from her imagination before, not since her pitiless schooldays at least, had managed to do something miraculous: write about sex in a way that she found charged with erotic delight, at the same time as containing nothing that would raise the eyebrow of a Nazi guard.
Perhaps, husband, you could provide me with some examples of the kind of smut you require. A list of appropriate words would be useful, along with some scenarios. I am not familiar with the genre of writing of which you seem to be such a connoisseur. If not, then I do not think I can help you, and I will ask that our correspondence should cease.
CHAPTER EIGHT
This brought a silence from the Stalag, and it was an immense relief for Tory to have this respite. For weeks now she had dreaded the blue envelopes with the prickly German writing that she found propped on the mantelpiece between the clock and the china spaniels nearly every week. There was something so relentlessly accurate and stealthy about them, the way they sought her out — dispatched from God knew where behind enemy lines, traversing a barbed and twisted European geography to land plumb in the centre of the mantelpiece at 17 Peter Street. Bombs by night, letters by day. More and more Tory began to feel that these two types of assault were linked. If the bombs didn’t wipe her out, the letters, landing in her heart, would bring a different kind of death.
It seemed that with one brief, curt letter she had dammed the flow of mail from Donald, yet the continuing silence soon became its own source of anxiety. The relentless surge of unsavouriness should not have been so easily stemmed. What had she done to Donald? She pictured him in the compound, the only one among the men without a letter from his wife, the only one emaciated and hollow-eyed in a camp full of satisfied, rosy-faced prisoners. Surely it was her wifely duty to sustain, by whatever means she could, her captive husband.
*
The continued silence, therefore, only made her task seem more urgent. She would have to write something to satisfy him before it was too late. One evening she came in from work and went straight to her writing desk, having thought, on the tram home, of the perfect solution. It had all seemed so simple. All she had to do was write a description of the sexual act, using conventional terminology. There was no special vocabulary. There were no exotic phrases that she had to know. She could treat the whole exercise in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, just as if she was describing two people having dinner or changing a wheel on a bicycle.
*
In some of the letters Donald had written to her, he had referred to the writings he desired as ‘bedroom thoughts’. Please share your bedroom thoughts with me . Perhaps he thought the term less off-putting than ‘dirty letter’. Please write to me your BEDROOM THOUGHTS!!!
Now the phrase played over and over in her mind, so that she became preoccupied by the notion of what exactly she did think about when she was in bed.
Dearest Donald,
You have asked me many times for my ‘bedroom thoughts’ and now I am at last able to tell you what they are. I am sorry to have kept you waiting for so long. I now sleep alone in my bedroom, so my thoughts tend to wander into unexpected places. Last night I was thinking that I haven’t seen the sea since I was seven years old. And we live on an island. How can that happen? And it is the fact that we are an island race that has saved us from invasion so far, more than anything. But most of the time I lie on my back
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