Transcript:
Court Green, North Tawton
Devonshire, England
March 27, 1962
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
It was wonderful to get your letter. I’ve thought of you so often & am so glad you are still there to talk to! We, too, have moved since I last wrote, & bought a house. I am still overwhelmed & very proud—it is not only big, it is huge, rooms we haven’t even used yet, plus two studies, a dusky attic one up a flight of stairs all to itself for Ted under the thatch (we have a thatch) & a big light sunny one on the 2nd floor for me with a lush red carpet & six foot elm plank table Ted sanded to velvet for me. Our finding Court Green was a fantastic stroke of luck. We almost went mad, or were mad, last summer when mother came over—in our narrow 2 rooms 2 steep flights up in London, with Frieda having learned to walk & bouncing from wall to wall & another baby due & rent flowing out morbidly with no returns. So we left mother with Frieda & took a weekend off to drive to Devon (Ted’s always wanted to live there; I’d never seen it) to find a house. In two days. We had a list we’d weeded out & our first night was hysterical—funny, but unhopeful. The places were something out of Charles Adams—a dying Great Dane met us at one door (the houses of our size are invariably ancient decayed rectories) & there were no lights, except via an engine loud as souls in Hades, the “ornamental lily pond” a sort of baby-trap sump & one of the “two capacious garages” was a pile of rotted boards. At the other house, hung on a cliff over the sea with nothing to do but fall off the porch into it, a desperate woman kept pouring us more & more tea & telling us what a fearsome place it was (but very nice when sunny); one place, uninhabited, had so many palpable spooks (the “oak paneling” in the diningroom peeled off like paper) Ted & I banged into each other in a panic to get out. The modern places (1930ish) were worst, mean, cramped, hideous British-respectable. Then we found Court Green. We had laughed about it, because it had a thatch (something we resolved never to touch) & was owned by a Sir, but it knocked us over. Very cheap, too, compared to the rest of the awful lot, because no-one wanted it—too big for a retired couple, too far from Exeter, the nearest main city, for commuting. It is white, with a storybook peaked thatch riddled with birds, an ancient cobbled courtyard surrounded on 3 sides by a thatched cottage, thatched barn (our garage) stables etc, with 2 1/2 acres, one of solid daffodils just now leaping to life, 70 apples trees, a large vegetable garden which we hope eventually to make pay for itself, laburnum, lilacs, cherry trees, all of which we’ve not seen in bloom & are dying for. We had them treat the place for woodworm (which it had) before buying it, with the aid of loans from both our parents. It even has an overgrown tennis court I hope to be rich enough to reclaim when the children are old enough. I have never felt the power of land before. I love owning bulbs & trees & all the happiness of my 17th summer on a farm comes back when I dig & prune & potter, very amateur. The town (we are in the middle of it, though when leaves are out it can’t be seen—our house is the Manor!) is described as an “ugly decayed market town” but it looks beautiful to me: a good young doctor, a fine midwife, chemist, banks, butchers & all sorts of odd colonials & kind, open locals whose Devon accent sounds indistinguishable to me from American. The winter has been grim—we heat by coal, & mushroom shaped electric fires in every room, & I got what thought was a Dickensian disease—chilblains, Sir Robert was born her, his ancestors all rectors (he is a Made Sir, Governor (ex) of the Bahamas. I think). We love it. 4 hours from London by express, so we later hope to make stays there. Nicholas Farrar Hughes was born January 17th, at home, a day-long labor, with the midwife coming in the evening to hold my hand on one side & Ted on the other, all 3 of us gossiping happily about the town, previous tenants of our house, etc. I had lost the baby that was supposed to be born on Ted’s birthday this summer at 4 months, which would have been more traumatic than it was if I hadn’t had Frieda to console & reassure me. No apparant reason to miscarry, but I had my appendix out 3 weeks after, so tend to relate the two. Nicholas is very different from Frieda—who is lively, hectic, & a comic. He is dark, quiet, smily & very much a Hughes. I love him & nursing him & have never got such fun out of anything as my babies. We have names for at least 2 more. I have a very nice ruddy Devon woman in 3 mornings a week (she’s cared for the house 11 years) to do all the work I hate—ironing, floor-scrubbing. She likes it & costs about 35¢ an hour. So I can spend my time doing what I like best—gardening, cooking (I am trying to do my own bread, but it won’t rise & is like a primitive black loaf, but Ted loves it) & playing with the babies. I write in my study mornings, which is all I need to make me feel professional & creative. I have actually done my first novel (after 10 years of wishful thinking): wrote it in under 2 months & it will come out here next year under a pseudonym, because I want to feel free to play around before I do something I really think seriously competent. Could I dedicate it to R.B.? It is a serio-comic (if that’s possible) book about my New York summer at Mademoiselle & breakdown, fictionalized, but not so much that doing it & coming back to life is due so much to you that you are the only person I could dedicate it to. It is an immense relief to me to feel I can write you every so often; it heartens me to no end to feel you are there, whether I talk to you or not.
Very much love,
Sylvia