Cooper, Ethel – November 1916
5.11.16
My dear Emmie,
I am staying again for a few days at Frau Jaeger’s and we are picnicking without a servant. We cook all sorts of delicacies that can be had from the jolly little estate they have near here – half farm and half short – pigeons and pheasants, and do without flour, sugar, milk and so on… We brought up champagne from the cellar but not for love nor money could we get even black bread nor biscuits that day, and we had beautiful pate do fois gras, and nothing to eat it with, so we left it for the next day when the new bread rations began…
I have begun teaching again – it is quite strange after so long…
Poor Frau von Bose is in despair – her eldest boy, Edward, has been called in for service and goes into camp next week… I am so frightfully sorry for Englishwomen here who have sons – they are in a miserable position…
12.11.16
My dear Emmie,
… I have meant to tell you, but always forgotten, why I don’t answer your questions as to why I wear wooden shoes, and what we eat and so on. I can’t in the open letters – nothing about food or such things is allowed by the censor. If I said that I wear wooden shoes because leather is unobtainable, you would never get the card… even my letters from Leipzig are often opened before they are delivered – of course I am very much on the black lists here.
Now I am going to make a salad out of the remains of my whale – it is beastly, and tastes only of train oil, but I daren’t throw it away, so I am making a strongly-flavoured mustard dressing to disguise it…
19.11.16
My dear Emmie,
I have had a pleasant surprise today… a cheque for £25, which brings me as many Marks as if it had been for £35 in former times…
This afternoon I went to see a new apparatus that Dr Knopf has got – an artificial sun. There is a sort of lamp from which ultra-violet rays pour out, and at the same time ozone is generated. You get quite sunburnt from the rays, and they are using the treatment here both for nervous troubles and for tuberculosis…
Tobacco is beginning to run out – rather a tragedy, for in these days of bad food, we all smoke like chimneys…
26.11.16
My dear Emmie,
… I must go and clean a pail full of mussels, which Frau Lewicka tells me are quite good eating – she says you clean them out first, then put them in boiling water, whereupon you take them out and stew the insides with a little onion and vinegar. Walrus, whale, porpoise and the like have rather put us off experiments, but I must give it a try…
