BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 18 AUG. 1930
BRACERS 19785. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
Carn Voel
Porthcurno
Penzance.1
18.8.30

My dearest Colette

Thank you ever so much for the snap-shots.2 The one of sunset over Samson3 is lovely. And the others are very nice.

I read Escapade4 with great interest. She is a remarkably plucky woman, and the people she describes are very vivid. I am returning it today, as well as your Air Force Quarterly if John has done with it.

Dora and her baby5 are here, both flourishing. A man who had been staying with us,6 an American, was seized by the police at Plymouth and kept in prison 4 days on false suspicion of being a communist. We are making a row about it. Otherwise life here is uneventful but pleasant. I had thought of being away part of the time, but I don’t think I shall be.

I keep thinking of the time you were here, which was a very happy time for me. Love.

B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200791.

• 2

  snap-shots Colette pasted copies of some in a scrapbook. Photographs include the Scilly Isles, the sunset at Samson, Falmouth, as well as BR’s children, John and Kate.

• 3

  Samson in the Scilly Isles. Colette wrote to her mother: “We stayed at Tregarthen’s on St. Mary’s ... [we had] one unforgettable evening walk with the whole sky flaming above Samson” (“Letters to Bertrand Russell from Constance Malleson, 1916–1969”, 2, 29 July 1930). Colette had spent the latter half of July with BR and his children in Cornwall.

• 4

  Escapade Presumably the book by Evelyn Scott (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923). It concerns a young woman who flees to Brazil with an older man she loves; Scott described it as “creative autobiography” in a dust-jacket blurb of the 1930 edition (New York: J. Cape and Harrison Smith).

• 5

  Dora and her baby BR’s wife, Dora, and her daughter, Harriet, whose father was Griffin Barry. For information on Dora, see BRACERS 19506, n.3.

• 6

  A man who had been staying with us This is rather an odd way of referring to Griffin Barry, particularly since BR called him the baby’s father in his previous letter (BRACERS 19784). Barry, an American, had failed to register as an alien, and once arrested he was found to have Soviet visas, which the police found suspicious, despite the fact that he was a journalist. Dora describes Barry’s arrest in The Tamarisk Tree (New York: Putnam’s, 1975), pp. 226–8.