Zelda and her friends in Frome, Somerset, where she was evacuated at the beginning of the second world war
Zelda wrote scores of letters home to her parents during 1939/40 and I am posting some of the most interesting here, which certainly give a pointer towards Zelda's later political development.Beloved Papa,
I'm so ecstatically happy at school, and I'm working so very hard, but it's all great fun. We don't have much games, nor such recreational lessons as singing or art in our form, because we have to work hard. In this school we don't have physics, but we have chemistry instead, which I like much better than physics, or perhaps it's the master that makes me like it better. We have the headmaster for chemistry and we all call him "Chips" for he is so much like James Hilton's Mr. Chips. He makes us roar with his silly little jokes, which are silly but they are chemical jokes. The other day we were working with acid, and he was trying to impress upon us that we must use the very minimum of acid, so to stress the point he told us to be like the Maypole Dairy, which is noted for giving underweight of butter.
For maths we have a master who is a conscientious objector, and gives us five minutes at the end of one geometry lesson a week, to read his newspaper "Peace News". He likes his lessons to be lighthearted, and funnily enough, we don't take advantage of that and play him up. Instead we have a very interesting lesson. Whenever he mentions that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points there is one boy who argues this, for he says that a straight line is a curve, because we are on a globe. He loves us to argue with him and we do.
We have a mistress who loves to argue too. She is the English mistress and we have marvellous debates in her lessons, as to whether we should learn grammar or not, because the modern writers seem to dispense with grammar and punctuation completely. She is very fond of Shaw and till this year they have always acted a Shaw play if possible. Last year they acted "Devil's Disciple" and they wanted to do "Geneva" this year, but the local vicar, who is a governor of the school objected to it, because he felt that Shaw made fun of religion in "Geneva". We have had to fall back on Shakespeare and are doing "As you like it", and even though I am a new girl, she is giving me a part. Aren't I lucky?
Our prose book for English lesson is "A Modern Prose" consisting of extracts from books by modern authors, like H.G Wells, Sackville-West, Hardy, Shaw, Lytton Strachey and several others.
Our history master is frightfully keen on Lytton Strachey, and keeps on recommending us to read several books of his. I'm afraid he is not like Miss Sharmann for history, because he doesn't make it half so interesting. He teaches us all about the Parliamentary Affairs in a completely manly way.
Our geography master, for five minutes at the end of every lesson, reads us from a certain magazine, the autobiography of "Weston Martyr", which shows us life in the raw. I should say so too! Ugh! You should see how Weston Martyr describes the pains of that awful disease miners get, and all his adventures on a boat.
Anyway, it's a lovely school, and I've tons of friends, but I have so much homework that it is dark before I have finished, and I can't go out to see them then. Mummy is still nervous of the dark! Though I suppose even if she let me go out in the dark, I wouldn't, because it gets so cold at night here. Just the same we have fun with Mr and Mrs. Lapham in the evening, in front of the roaring log fire, with the wireless.
Owing to the war, the school is short of paper and books and I am not fully equipped with suchlike, so I was wondering if you would be so very kind as to post on to me all those portfolios with paper, atlas and various books I have in the top drawer of the bureau and in the desk. They would be so useful. Especially all those notes in portfolios, because they are such a help for the exam. I hope you will send them soon. I'd be awfully grateful.
Well, there is not much news for all I do is go to school in the morning, come home in the evening, do my homework and go to bed, so I'll say goodbye now.
Votre fille aimante
Zelda
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