Mr Alexander is a Jew and Mrs Alexander is a member of the Mosseri family, one of the principal Jewish families in Central Europe and the Near East. She also is a woman of very great ability and the widest education … Mrs Alexander is extremely particular, not to say old-fashioned, in the upbringing of her daughter and until the time comes for her to go to Cambridge she would, I know, hesitate to send her to England alone or leave her there after her own departure … Eileen, herself … hopes to be called to the Bar and it is her ambition eventually to enter Parliament.
If ever one heard the voice and ambitions of the parent rather than the child it is in that last sentence, but if Alec Alexander had already mapped out the future for his daughter, Eileen had other ideas. When ‘I was about sixteen,’ she wrote later,
my father hauled me off to Cambridge to see the Mistress & the Director of Studies in Law (I knew I was going to read English but Dad refused to believe anything so revolutionary – so, in spite of my protests, he arranged that I should be interviewed as a prospective law-student). It was a grilling day in August, I remember. I dressed very carefully in my best clothes to give myself confidence. (I was very frightened) Dad took one look at me & said that he wasn’t going to be a party to the prejudicing of my chances – by letting me appear before women of High Living & Thinking, with short-sleeves (it was, as I have said before, a grilling day in August) and looking as though I were an associate of the doubtful revels of Brighter Mayfair. He ransacked my wardrobe, while I stood by, crying – and drew forth a knitted jersey which I kept for fishing in Scotland – a very old skirt and a pair of hearty shoes – and said ‘wear those’. I did – and cried all the way to Cambridge … We had an uneventful interview with the Mistress – but I recovered my self-respect with the D of S in Law. She and Dad were obviously twin souls. They discussed highly technical points of International Law for a long time – while I sat languidly staring out of the window. Then she turned to me & asked where my particular interest in the Law lay … I said – nowhere – I was going to read English. She drew herself up to her full height, turned a cold eye on my father & asked him why we were seeing her if that was the position. He had nothing to say in answer to that & we withdrew hastily.
It would be another two years before Eileen finally escaped parents, siblings and a Cairo she had grown to hate, but in the October of 1936 she finally had her wish and left to study English at Cambridge. The official college photograph of the Girton entrants for that year shows the young woman whom Gershon would have first met, uncomfortably perched second from the right in the third row from the back, a nineteen-year-old who looks little more than half that age, a schoolgirl ‘bent on celibacy’, as she put it, and still recognisably the same physically awkward, emotionally uncertain adolescent her father had dragged to the Girton interview two years before.
If this is nothing like the whole story – in a college full of ‘Amazonian clergyman’s daughters with bulging, scrawny legs’ she was happy enough to play the ‘Mosseri card’ when it suited – it is worth keeping in mind this Eileen because for all the brilliance and intellectual swagger of the letters this is the young woman who wrote them. She had come up to Cambridge, too, with every hope of emulating her father’s dazzling record, but if a ‘second’ in ‘Prelims’ was not disgrace enough for an Alexander, she had spent the summer of 1938 – ‘ill with anxiety’ from her father’s ‘intellectual demands’ – recovering in the Evelyn Nursing Home from a duodenal ulcer which had stopped her even sitting the Part I of her English Tripos.
It was a low period in her life, brightened only by her first meeting with Gershon, but a year later redemption had come. As she set off to meet her parents with Gershon driving her car, ‘Semiramis’, it was to give her father the news that she had gained one of only three firsts awarded that year to women in the English Tripos. She had also won a college prize, and with a place at Cambridge to begin research with the promise of some teaching, her academic future seemed assured. All she had ever wanted as she grew up, she said, was to be a Cambridge don, and now there seemed nothing to stop her.
We first meet Eileen in July 1939, recovering in hospital, her hopes for the future still alive in spite of a worsening situation in Europe. When she is well enough to travel she goes for the summer to the family’s holiday house near Drumnadrochit, high above Loch Ness, and it is not until 23 August, the same day that the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact is signed, that the first half-fearful, half-comic references to the outside world break in on her letters. From this point, as it becomes clear that there is to be no second Munich, the fragile quiet that had held since Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in the spring unravels at frightening speed. On 24 August, Parliament passes an Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, giving the government control over virtually every aspect of national life. On the 25th, Britain and France reaffirm their commitment to Polish independence and territorial integrity and, six days later, in the early hours of 1 September, German troops cross the border into Poland. By 6 a.m. that same day Warsaw will be under air attack and Britain and France left facing the consequences of their Polish alliance.
1
Monday 17 July Gershon – what everyone seems to have forgotten is that if I hadn’t asked you to drive me to London that Tuesday, you would never have had your arm broken & your life thoroughly disorganized for a considerable period of time – Furthermore if I had directed you rightly we’d never have got into that damned death trap of a side-road.
I have been brooding on this for a very long time Gershon, and at nights I have lain trying & trying to recall something about the accident but I simply can’t remember a word, so I shall not even be able to help you by corroborating your evidence.
Whichever way the verdict goes, please remember that I feel, absolutely certainly and sincerely, that the accident was not down to your carelessness but to pure chance, and that I owe you nothing but profound gratitude for the friendship and loyalty you have shown me during all these weeks of illness.
The very best of luck Gershon – I am looking forward to seeing you after this irksome business is all over, today.
Wednesday 19 July Talking of my appearance – assuming (rather dangerously – for I never can tell with you whether what you say is what you mean & vice versa – as I think I’ve said before) that you were serious when you asked me to give you a photograph of me – I asked my mother whether we had any copies of the Family Features still in our possession – but, no, it seems that all 24 are scattered among Alexander’s and Mosseri’s over an area stretching from Cape Town to Vancouver – so, alas, I cannot send you one of those, but must wait until my transitory (as opposed to permanent) blemishes have gone, & then have one done especially for you at one of those kind misty photographers who define one’s eyelash, a shoulder curve, & the tip of an ear, and have the rest enveloped in a kindly greyish haze. (I mean that you shall have a photograph of me if, though I can hardly credit it, you really want such a useless commodity.)
Friday 21 July My face is now fully exposed to the world & it looks like the rear elevation of a baboon. This is very disconcerting, as it gets no better & I am going to be driven very slowly to London on Monday for X-ray treatment. I’m so glad I didn’t show it to you on Monday – it is perfectly horrible & I don’t want anyone to see me while it’s like this. I do hope they’ll find something to cure it – it looks like bright pink – and – yellow leprosy to me but the Doctors will never listen to a lay-diagnosis.
Friday 28 July Yesterday my parents went to Cambridge to choose