The Wimsey Papers by Dorothy Sayers

The Wimsey Papers pt. I
THE WIMSEY PAPERS

From : siriaeve Dorothy L. Sayers published in The Spectator in 1939 and 1940, purporting to be between characters from the Wimsey novels. Aside from their interest to fans of Sayers, who would like to know more about her characters and about her views on the war, they're also interesting pieces of social history - these must be one of the last few pieces of writing where the word 'propaganda' is used in a neutral meaning, for example.

Unfortunately, they've never been published, The Spectator's on-line archive goes no further back than 2000, and there doesn't seem to be another on-line copy of them. So I ordered up some back issues from the bowels of the Periodicals Library in college. Of course, getting them from there means that I could only photocopy them - and I'm afraid I don't get on well with photocopies at all. They inevitably get dog-eared, splashed with tea, or lost altogether - so I decided I might as well type them up.

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WIMSEY PAPERS
By DOROTHY L. SAYERS
(being war-time letters and documents of the Wimsey family)

Honoria Lucasta, Dowager Duchess of Denver, to her American friend, Cornelia, wife of Mr. Lambert B. Vanderhuysen, of New York.

BREDON HALL,
DUKE'S DENVER,
NORFOLK

November 12th, 1939.

Dear Cornelia,

I think I had better write you my usual Christmas letter now, because naturally the War has upset the posts a little, and one can't really expect ships to go quickly when they are convoyed about like a school crocodile, so tedious for them, or keep to Grand Geometry, or whatever the straight course is called when they have to keep darting about like snipe to avoid submarines, and anyway I like to get my correspondence in hand early and not do it at the last moment with one's mind full of Christmas trees - though I suppose there will be a shortage of those this year, but, as I said to Miss Bates, our village schoolmistress, so long as the children get their presents I don't suppose they'll mind whether you hang them on a conifer or the Siegfried Line, and as a matter of fact Denver is thinning a lot of little firs out of the plantation, and you'd better ask him for one before he sends them all to the hospitals.

And really, Cornelia, I think you must have been listening to Goering or Goebbels or that Haw-Haw man or something - the suburbs aren't in ruins and Oxford and Cambridge haven't been invaded by anything worse than a lot of undergraduates from other universities, so good for both sides, I think, though I'm told the plague of bicycles in the streets is quite a menace - still, it never was anything else - and we've got plenty of butter and guns, if it comes to that, though they keep on saying they're going to ration them, just as Hitler keeps on saying he's going to begin, only he doesn't go, like the people in the Pirates of Penzance, and Peter says if he waits much longer the audience will refuse to clap and perhaps the Munich bomb was in the nature of a cat-call, but what I say is, if little Adolf found anything nasty in that beer-cellar he must have brought it with him. And, talking of Peter, I can't really tell you where he is, because he's gone back to his old job, and everything comes without any proper address through the Foreign Office. I rather fancy he may have been in Turkey a little while ago, from something he said about the coffee being good; I can't think of any other place where that would be likely to happen, because he never really likes French coffee (too much chicory), and nobody else seems to have any, except us, and I know he's somewhere abroad, the letters take so long. Wherever it was, he isn't there now, and that makes me think it must have been Turkey, because they seem to have settled everything splendidly there. But of course this is only guess-work.

It's very hard on poor Harriet, his being sent off like that, but she is being very sensible - they've shut the London house and she's gone down to Talboys with the