BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 10 JUNE 1963
BRACERS 19909. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<London>
<letterhead>
Plas Penrhyn,
Penrhyndeudraeth,
Merioneth.1^, 2
10 June 1963

Dearest Colette

Thank you very much for your birthday letter. I do think your nephew is a horror.3 It is dreadful the way one bit of beauty after another is being destroyed.

It is good that your sister’s book4 is to be published. I look forward eagerly to seeing it. I don’t know anything about Ottoline’s book5 that you mention.

We are terribly busy with anti-war work. It is all rather like 1914–1918, but we have friends, especially abroad, who are a help; and our work is largely international.6 We spend hours with Chinese and recently liberated negro patriots and Greeks7 who have been 15 years in prison for not being Nazis.

I wish you knew our Welsh countryside;8 it is very beautiful.

Very much love, now and always —
B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200913.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | Sundborn | Sweden. Pmk: CHELSEA | 8.30 PM | 10 JNE | 1963 | S.W.3.

• 3

  your nephew is a horror Gerald Francis (Sowerby) Annesley (1904–1992), the son of Colette’s half-sister Mabel and her husband, Gerald Sowerby. Colette had written on 15 May 1963 (BRACERS 98465) that her nephew was planning on selling the family home, Castlewellan, for £1,000,000 — it would be turned into a luxury hotel with the stable block becoming a motel.

• 4

  your sister’s book Colette had found a publisher, Museum Press, for As the Sight Is Bent.

• 5

  Ottoline’s book  Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, edited and with an introduction by Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). The book was not published until October 1963 so Colette must have heard that the book was forthcoming.

• 6

  our work is largely international Throughout the 1960’s BR made representations on behalf of political prisoners held in many countries.

• 7

  hours with Chinese and recently liberated negro patriots and Greeks Edith Russell’s pocket diary records the following appointments: 5 June, black man from Swaziland; 27 May, Greek M.P. and interpreter. No Chinese visitors were listed in the pocket diary until 13 June, after this letter was written, but at the time of the Sino-Indian Crisis (November 1962) BR spent much time with Chinese diplomats.

• 8

  our Welsh countryside Colette did know it, from having lived nearby in Llan Ffestiniog in 1948–49; but perhaps BR meant the close neighbourhood of Plas Penrhyn with its panoramic view of the estuary and Mt. Snowden.