Although there are many more letters I am just adding one more, so that I can carry on with more of the memoir. This is another letter from Zelda to her father.
Comrade!
I have started in this way to show you that I am already marching fearlessly down that rough and crooked road of communism. Well, let me not say Communism, for I would describe myself as merely pink, not red. At any rate, I hope I am not of the common herd, for Heaven help me if I am. But, why it is inevitable that I tread this road, I cannot see.
On Thursday at the WEA Mr Humphries spoke on the Panama Canal and South America. Did you know that when travelling through the Panama Canal you are actually travelling in an easterly direction and not westerly as one would imagine. Mrs. Coles, wife of the history master at Cooper's school, asked Mr. Humphries how Argentina was governed, and in answering Mr. Humphries said that the President was anti-fascist yet governed in a fascist way. At that, Mr. Coles said "Would you say then, he was a Communist?" Mr. Coles himself is a true communist, and looks it too, for he wears his hair long, wears London tan coloured plus-fours with brown linen shirt and canary yellow tie, and smokes one of those old-fashioned pipes. For all that, he is very nice, and is Mr. Barnard's best friend, though Mr. Barnard is only just pink not red too.
Mr. Barnard took me home from the meeting, and we began to talk about teaching. I told him that I wanted to be a teacher, and he told me that I had picked uon the wrong vocation for myself. He said that I am of a rebellious spirit, and that if I keep up that spirit, which he says I should strive to do, I should not become a teacher. He said he'd been reading Neill's Problem Teachers, and that there it says that an enquiry was made in a school to see what the children wanted to be when they grew up, and only one child said "a teacher", and later it was found that this one child was mentally deficient. But, I still want to be a teacher. So he said that he hopes I get some "rebellious spirits" to teach, and then I'll know what it is to teach.
I must remember though that I have to answe your numbers of questions. First, it is your tit-bits of intellectual peculiarities that really do interest me. It wouldn't seem like a letter from you, if there were no such tit=bits in it. Perhaps because of my inflated mental impression, as you call it, but I certainly don't think that they are above me, those tit=bits.
You also asked me if the vicar had allowed "Judgement Day". Well, if you knew the Cooper's School, you wouldn't ask that question, for you would know that Cooper's School takes no notice of such people as vicars etc. They have a marvellous set of masters at Cooper's school for even the Headmaster is socialist, and the sixth formers are real revolutionaries, even worse than communists.
Unfortunately, not only are they revolutionary, but they think themselves 2nd Don Juans and they flirt like the dickens with some of our girls. So, now Miss Bartlett has given us a lecture, telling us that we are not to make ourselves "cheap" with the Cooper's boys. She, an English mistress, actually used the word "cheap"!
Well, I'll say adieu now mon pere
Ton fille affectioneuse
Zelda
OK - oone more!
Dearest Daddy
I hope this awful weather is not affecting your health. Isn't it dreadful, it hasn't stopped raining for a whole week. This was commented on by our geography teacher who told us that the reason for Frome's extraordinarily bad weather is that the Bristol Channel area is an area from which cyclones come over England, and being near the channel Frome gets the whole brunt of the cyclone, and gets bad weather in spells for weeks on end.
In history we have just finished doing the repeal of the corn laws, the main cause being the famine in Ireland in 1845 owing to diseased potato crop. To impress the dreadfulness of the famine in our minds, our history master read us an excerpt from a book called "Famine" by liam O'Flaherty. it is a very vivid book and certainly showed us the horrors of the Irish famine. Our history master is fond of readiing excerpts from books to impress facts in our minds. We'v been doing the Factory Acts, and to show us the struggle between the Industrialists and the workers, he read us excerpts from various books, incuding Charlotte Bronte's "Shirley". He also impressed us by reading various old authentic documents, showing us how awful life in the factories was, for children and for woen. When learning about the Poor Law amendments Act he read us Dickens' Oliver Twist, showing us how terrible the workhouses were. This master has been all over America, studying her government and her people, and he has lately been giving some remarkable speeches at the WEA meetings about America's government. Everyone in Frome thinks he's a remarkable man.
In English lessons we've been reading some poems by young moderns as our mistress calls them, and we have been criticising their styles. Their poems are full of realism, such as describing the countryside, not as the poets usually do, but planting gasometers in the fields, and things like that. They are all very realistic and also they don't care about the uniformity of rhythm, they chop and change it about. This led her to talk about jazz and modern unrealistic art and we have had extremely interesting debates upon modern art.
One modern poem interested me very much. The poet tried to combine sight and sound, in trying to describe scenes to us. I can remember pieces of the poem, which I will tell you. In one part the poet says "The morning light creaks down again" The poem is about a kitchen maid, of bucolic stupidity, getting up in the morning, and that's a modern enough subject for you. The poet, to show you how low her mind has sunk, says that when she looks on the garden as she gets up, she immediately thinks of the carrots and turnips for dinner, and from that her weak mind turns to milk out on the step etc. That's modern poetry!
Since I wrote last I have read several books, Lady Windermere's Fan by oscar Wilde, Wisdom of Father Brown, by Chesterton, Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. These books I got fro the public library, where there is an awfully nice old librarian. He always talks to you about the books you take out, and delights in good books. He told me the other day that I was the best-read girl he had met for my age and always helps me choose my books.
In this school they don't learn trigonometry but the maths teacher thought it was a shame for me to drop it after starting it, and so he goes on teaching me it. You see I'm better than the others at maths and so I finish my work ages before them, and it is in those moments that he teaches me trigonometry.
Wouldn't you think that in the country the boys and girls would be less grown-up than town children, who are supposed to have seen life? Well, they are not! Definitely! The girls and boys here are very grown-up in their outlook and their ways, and we're all very sensible in class, having lots of debates and arguments in various subjects. None of them are frightfully brainy, like Shizuko or Alice were, but they've all got a good deal of common sense and a little knowledge of everything rather than a wide knowledge in special things. We all have fun together and we're carefree, but there's only one thing that I hate about Frome, and that is the gossip. You see, everybody knows everybody else in Frome and its such a small place that if anybody has done anything in the least ill-mannered or naughty, it is all over Frome in no time. Do you know, if I go to the pictures with mr. and Mrs. Lapham they sometimes say to me "Look, see that person in the 2nd row from the back, well he's not a Frome boy". that shows you that peope know everybody in Frome, and when I first came to Frome, within a week, everybody knew there was a stranger in Frome and by the time I went to school they all knew me as that London girl who's staying with the Laphams.
Well, there's no more news, so I'll bid you adieu, mon cher pere
Your adoring daughter,
Zelda
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