Cooper, Ethel – December 1917
2.12.17
My dear Emmie,
I had Sandor here from Thursday till Friday and we had a nice day or so. I wanted to ask him to write to you from Denmark, but decided not to. He would do it in a minute, but I find they are watched so that if a German spy chanced to see that he was corresponding with the enemy from there, he would certainly have difficulty. I have told Frau Jaeger that I have really been her guest for too long, and must not go on like this. She is very much against my leaving her, but this time I was firm, and have taken a room at Frl. Ludicke’s….Of course the food difficulties will begin again, but after having put on 9 lb in weight during the last two months, I can face them easily.
On the strength of the Russian Armistice the people here are deluded into the idea that we are on the brink of a German peace.
Frau Jaeger is suffering from qualms of conscience, having descended to the German level in the matter of corruption. Herr Jaeger has sent her a big box of ham and bacon, and a few days ago she went off to her grocer with a pound of bacon – result, the promise of a quart of methylated spirit every month! Then to the coalman, from whom we have been trying to get coal for months – she took two pounds of ham – result, the coals are to be delivered on Thursday!
9.12.17
My dear Emmie,
It is Sunday and we had breakfast as usual at 9 – then at 10 the hairdresser came as usual – (one’s life is a comic mixture of deprivation and luxury), and then we tied up our heads in handkerchiefs and stacked the coal!
We went to tea to a little French lady on Friday, and heard an amusing story. She and her husband, a doctor here, had gone to a well known hotel to supper – the ‘Thuringer Hof’ and saw large portions of beef-steak being passed round. They ordered it on the spot, so did everybody – for beef-steak is an unheard of delicacy now – and afterwards, getting a menu to see if there were any stewed fruit to be had, discovered that on the menus stood ‘Elephant-steak’! The acting director of the zoo is the son of the hotel-proprietor, and as the zoo elephant was fading away for want of proper food, he killed it and sold it to his father’s hotel!
16.12.17
My dear Emmie,
Yesterday came a letter from Aunt Alice telling me that Howard is killed – nothing more, just the bare fact, and I don’t seem to believe it yet. In all my attempts to get away, the great pleasure that I promised myself once over the frontier, was that I should be able to see the boys somewhere or other, and now for Howard it is too late.
Goodbye, my dear, I wish I could be with you, or see any of you even for a little while.
23.12.17
My dear Emmie,
I have been hoping all the week for a letter from somewhere or other that could tell me more of Howard, but nothing has come.
I moved here this morning, [Frl. Ludicke’s pension] and Sandor arrived early in the afternoon. I have brought a carpet and a few easy chairs down from my storing-room…..and this room looks quite nice and comfortable already.
30.12.171
My dear Emmie,
Another week has gone by, and I have had no letter from anywhere outside Germany….
I forgot to tell you in my last letters that I am making another attempt to get away. This time it is with a doctor’s certificate. I went to a military doctor here, whom the Jaegers know, and made up a long rigmarole about my nerves and my health in general. Whether he is quite a fool, or whether it was to oblige the Jaegers, I can’t say, but he wrote me a certificate to the police, saying that I was in an extremely bad nervous condition caused by serious anaemia, and that he urgently recommended my being sent at once to Switzerland! The only true word in the whole thing was my height and weight.
The lighting and heating question is getting more acute. There is practically no coal to be had, and I live in the house in my old fur coat.
The streets and the shops are unlighted and all shops close from 1 till 4, and are shut altogether at half past 6.
1For the first time, no mention of Christmas or marking the new year.
