The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Wednesday — May 22, 1918

Wednesday
May 22, 1918

Another tropical morning: all the fishing boats out. I feel extraordinarily better, grâce à cod liver oil and iron. (You've got to take it, you know, or I shall stop.)

The people here, the ‘management,’ are awfully decent to me. I mean far more than they need be. I give a lot of trouble—well, it's true, I pay for it—but still that don't account for their thoughtfulness. Coming in every morning at about 7 to open my windows wide, and heating my last glass of milk at night, and always leaving me biscuits. The old'un made me feel about four last night, when she said, as she put my hot water down and I was going to bed, “Come here while I unbutton eë.”

A. and I have been sitting outside, she talking about the spring. She can't mention the flowers without her eyes just cry over, as she says. She brought me masses of pink lupins—terrifying flowers, but beautiful. This garden is so gay with real purple columbines and gillyflowers and marigolds and early roses. At night a procession passes along the coast road of fine old sailors, each with an enormous cabbage under his arm—It looks to be a sea cabbage—grown on their new allotments. They are beautiful, hale old men.

[A drawing of a boat.]

She has just come outside my window. I wish I could draw her. She's a little beauty. See that queer kite-shaped sail? Oh, God, how I love boats!

Everybody has a boat here. Little babies leap out of their mothers' arms into sail-boats instead of perambulators.