Letters in the attic
Frances Partridge
FIRST FRIENDS by Ronald Blythe Viking, £25, pp. 156 Ronald Blythe aroused a good deal of interest and approval by his first success, Akenfield, a careful social study of class dis- tinctions in a Suffolk village, notable if only for the way it described how the servant girls of the great house were made to stand facing the passage wall when they met `Master' or 'Mistress', until they had passed by. It is a detail, but one that is impossible to forget.
The next book of his which came my way was a luxuriously produced album of the letters and sketches of a few Slade students in the period before and during the first world war — notably John and Paul Nash, Dora Carrington and Christine Kuhlens. This was a limited, luxury edition costing £200.
First Friends is virtually the same text but comes in less sumptuous form. In its intro- duction I learn that I was myself largely responsible for its existence, since after Carrington's tragic death I rescued the let- ters from a tin box in the junk room, sorted them and despatched them when possible to their authors, after reading them with interest. For I had met and felt varying degrees of warmth towards all four.
The book is, as one would expect, a touching and interesting one. John Nash falls in love with Carrington. She likes him so much but says, 'I am no use. You must `Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood' by John Nash, 1918. marry Christine, and love!' But they write mainly about their work. The war is rum- bling in the background. They have a youthful desire to communicate. They are funny, they love nature and turn it into landscape, they want to get away some- where, preferably to the north.
It is a pity that Ronald Blythe has edited this book so ineptly. It is by no means always clear who 'I' is, the footnotes are poor and the index hopelessly inadequate. But for all that it is a moving and human book. Perhaps this is most apparent in the chapter towards the end entitled 'Painting the War'. The Nash brothers were both official war artists. Do read it.
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