Transcript:
3 Chalcot Square, London N.W.1
Thursday morning
February 18, 1960
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
I waited to write you until we had a London address & I a London doctor, which took a lot longer than we expected. After Christmas & New Year’s in Yorkshire with Ted’s parents, sister, assorted & continuous aunts, uncles & cousins, we came to a cold, bleak & utterly inhospitable London to look for (at first) a furnished apartment near one of the big parks & central to plays, shops, bookstores etc. We started out living in a grisly unheated bed & breakfast hotel which had the surprising advantage of being clean (very rare here) & applied at all the main agencies, starting what amounted to a 2-week trek by bus, tube, foot, & in occasional desperation, taxi, to the far-flung & dirty corners of the great city, finding flats, with 2 exceptions, dark, dank, full of coal dust & of expense that would have been laughable had the agents not kept straight faces. I felt miserable & ponderous in my 7th month, without anything resembling a nest to feather, & Ted felt equally badly & grim. We moved in with a German(she)-Welsh(he) couple & their 2-year old daughter in a condemned slum which was amazingly cosy in spite of no bathroom, where we could cook our meals, & the only other couple we knew in London, the American poet W.S. Merwin & his energetic, middle-aged, thrice-married British wife, began having us to heartening dinners, calling influential friends, agencies, etc. & ended up in introducing me to my (their) doctor, whom I like immediately, so we limited our search to the Regent’s Park area. Against all our first resolves, we took on an unfurnished flat to be “ready” on Feb.1st (no walls, no floors when we first saw it) & the Merwins promised to set us up in most necessary furnishings out of their capacious Victorian attic.
So here we are, 18 days after moving in, with the builders still cementing foundations, reinforcing the roof & whistling cheerfully. We are on the 3rd floor in a newly renovated house, airy, light, overlooking a green square with benches ‘Chalcot Square Gardens’, 2 minutes from my doctor’s house & office, 2 minutes from Primrose Hill (which overlooks all flat-heeled London) & Regent’s Park with its superb zoo (we can hear the lions, they say, on hot summer nights), bird sanctuary, formal gardens—play areas for children &, I feel, the ideal place for the baby. We have been painting floors, walls, making bookcases, stripping old painted cupboards & sandpapering chairs & are this weekend in sight of a halt. Have invested in a superb gas stove, refrigerator & enormous bed & are borrowing chairs, tables etc. from the Merwins attic until we can pick up things we like gradually at 2nd hand shops. My great wish now is a London house of our own, with its own garden. It’s only a few minutes from here by subway or bus to Piccadilly, Charing Cross & Trafalgar Square. Now things are settling down, I can’t think of anywhere else in the world I’d rather live & have no desire to return to America at all.
The obstetrician-half of my 2-doctor team is a young, kind & very good fellow (who trained at University College Hospital) who I am seeing free, on the System. As I am too late to register at a hospital, I am having the baby at home & very happy about it—I think hospital labor wards bothered me as much as anything, & I will have all the care here (analgesia, whiffs of gas & air etc.) I’d get in a hospital (immediate emergency squads if anything goes wrong) plus the privacy of my home, Ted’s presence, & the continued care of my midwife—a wiry, golden-haired, tough & kindly ^[Irish] woman of 40 or so, who came to see me last week at home & assessed my caketins for afterbirth receptacles etc. Over here it is all “natural” childbirth—making the mother do the work, with limited analgesia, in the ordinary cases, & breast-feeding for ages—
I get, by the way, a half-price pink of milk (2 ½ cups here) a day on the System, plus no expense at all for the baby. I don’t have any GrantlyDickRead illusions, but feel I have made the best arrangements for my own odd psychic setup—the doctor’s promised to be there at the delivery in addition to the midwife & she’ll come twice a day for 2 weeks to help me learn how the baby is bathed, nursed etc. Do let me know what you think about this!
Another nice thing: I just heard from the British publishes Wm. Heinemann (they do Somerset Maugham, Erskine Caldwell, DHLawrence ^[etc.] an enthusiastic acceptance of my 1st book of poems (THE COLOSSUS), a third of which I wrote this fall: 50 poems in all. They’ll be bringing it out next autumn & sending it about to publishes in America. So baby & 1st book are well on the way. I’d love to hear Nicholas or Rebecca is due March 27th. With Ted’s 2nd book of poems LUPERCAL (Harper’s will import copies later this year).
Love, Sylvia