My Dear Bessie by Chris Barker Page A

there is to know about your past, so that I can better gather you. Just at this moment, I want to rummage around you, run my hands over you, your hair, your breasts, your arms, your loins, your legs.
    I love you.
    Chris

    2 May 1944
    Dear Bessie,
    What more elevating thought, what more useful can this page serve, than to contain a list of the books I have read since I have been out here. I should very much like you to tell me what books you happen also to have read on the list.
    Science in Everyday Life – Haldane
    While Rome Burns – Woolcott
    How Russia Prepared – Mr Edelman Dachau
    For Those Few Minutes – Eric Gill
    Carry On, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
    Lord Jim – Conrad
    De Valera – Penguin
    Victoria the Great – Edith Sitwell
    Literary Lapses – Steph. Leacock
    A Life of Shakespeare – Hesketh Pearson
    Black Mischief – E. Waugh
    Mr Moto is So Sorry – J.P. Marquand
    Sherston’s Progress – Siegfried Sassoon
    Confessions of a Capitalist – Sir E. Benson
    I have read plenty of other stuff, not worthwhile recording as it was unexceptional. If you have not read them, I should like you to get [these] from the library (not buy) as I should like to know that you had read them.
    I hope I used up the public part of this letter card in a useful fashion. I did not like using another of these LCs so soon after the last, but it is about the only way I can rush to tell you what a lovely silly thing you are.
    I have to end this now in order to catch the post (it goes daily here of course), but I hope that you are getting to realise and appreciate that you and I are ‘us’ and ‘we’. Maybe we are only just beginning to feel that vital identity of interest, that significant attachment to the other’s person that will enlighten and enliven us in the days ahead. But everything has to have a beginning. Don’t you worry about any end. Sigh for me, want, desire and need me, as I need you, my dear.
    My love,
    Chris
    9 May 1944
    Dear Bessie,
    I sent you a LC in reply to your near-lament at the absence of mail. If you must have ‘nagging worries’ as you call them, please let them be around the prospects of my return by Christmas (oh, oh, oh, what a chance!), the chances of a house, the helluva job getting things will be. Please don’t conceal your ‘naggings’, please do tell me everything about you (oh, Bessie, I love you!), please continue to trust me.
    Yes, I agree that the body-beautiful is overrated, but that doesn’t stop me wanting to see you in puris naturalibus (I bet you have to look that up. I did!), to drink in your glory, to put my hands on your non-flat bottom, (Bessie, I love you!), to forage around you, to rove over you, to subdue you, to possess you.
    I’ve never had a Turkish bath. I should think that the sun out here has a similar cumulative effect. Will be glad to get your account of the process; will you go again?
    Deb had told me you would be visiting her again, and seeing the American Communist. (I am afraid I have written Deb very little and somewhat forcedly since her refusal to reply to my arguments about my Mother-fixation.) My first reaction is – thank Goodness you haven’t fallen in love with him! It would shake me considerably to think you were bound for Alabama or Tennessee. Please don’t fall in love with anyone else, my dear. Please let me be the future recipient of your favours, and maybe, the future target for your rolling pin.
    The other night we had a very amusing 12-a-side ‘Spelling Bee’, Signals versus RAF, won by the latter 64–38, as the RAF have a different if not better type of chap as a rule. I was very successful with the words I was asked and ‘I don’t want to swank’ (an expression made famous by myself in the Junior Section days) and scored 7 of our points, the most of any. Like an ass, I spelt the flower CHRYSTANTHEUM. I must have been thinking