BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 11 DEC. 1918
BRACERS 19398. ALS. McMaster. SLBR 2: #326
Edited by S. Turcon and N. Griffin. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

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The Manor House
Garsington
Oxford1^, 2
11 December 1918

My dearest Darling

Your dear letter has come, but no telegram. I have spent these days listening to every bell, hoping it was a telegram — but now I suppose I must give up that hope, and think how heavenly it will be at Lynton.3 Dearest, your love is my most precious possession. I love you, not only or chiefly for what I get from you, but in yourself and for yourself, very tenderly and deeply. I do want your good, far more than you do yourself — I suppose this must be my last letter before you go to the nursing home.4 You haven’t told me the address. I don’t believe it will be at all a serious operation.5 And when you are well again we will be wonderfully happy —

Nothing whatever has happened to me — I eat and sleep and work — that is all.

You did make me feel your love these last days — I do wish the side of your nature that loves me and that I love could find some outlet in action. It must some day —

Saturday afternoon I will come to see you, if you are in the Home by then. But it is very likely you may still be at Bury Str.6 Let me know the address.

Goodbye my Beloved. All my loving thoughts are with you every moment.

B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200388.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | 34 Russell Chambers | Bury Street | W.C.1. Pmk: ORD

• 3

  Lynton BR, Colette and Clifford Allen spent Christmas at the Cottage Hotel in Lynton, Devon.

• 4

  the nursing home It was located in Endsleigh Gardens, London.

• 5

  a serious operation Her abortion. Before it was performed on 15 December, Colette referred to it as a “trivial operation”, writing that BR was not to worry about it (“Letters to Bertrand Russell from Constance Malleson, 1916–1969”, p. 301, extract from letter of 11 Dec. 1918; ts. in RA). Much later on, she remembered things differently. “I remember B.R. coming to visit me in my nursing home, after an abortion ... [and] being surprised that he didn’t seem upset by my (very painful) abortion” (letter to Kenneth Blackwell, 1 Feb. 1975; Rec. Acq. 1233). This procedure was illegal at the time. Colette, however, appears to have had no difficulty arranging for it.

• 6

  Bury Str. BR’s flat, 34 Russell Chambers, in London. Colette lived there from September 1918 to June 1919. BR did not live in his flat after he left prison in September 1918 because of his fractured relationship with Colette. He stayed briefly at a number of places — Telegraph House, the Studio, with Clifford Allen at Abinger, at Garsington — before beginning to share a flat with Clifford Allen in Battersea in February 1919.