The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Elizabeth. I am thankful she had you, Mr. Ramsey, Isola, and Dawsey to help her when she had her baby.

Spring is nearly here. I’m almost warm in my puddle of sunshine. And down the street—I’m not averting my eyes now—a man in a patched jumper is painting the door to his house sky blue. Two small boys, who have been walloping one another with sticks, are begging him to let them help. He is giving them a tiny brush apiece. So— perhaps there is an end to war.

Yours,

Juliet Ashton

From Mark to Juliet

April 5, 1946

Dear Juliet—

You’re being elusive and I don’t like it. I don’t want to see the play with someone else—I want to go with you. In fact, I don’t give a damn about the play. I’m only trying to rout you out of that apartment. Dinner? Tea? Cocktails? Boating? Dancing? You choose, and I’ll obey. I’m rarely so docile—don’t throw away this opportunity to improve my character.

Yours,

Mark

From Juliet to Mark

Dear Mark,

Do you want to come to the British Museum with me? I’ve got an appointment in the Reading Room at two o’clock. We can look at the mummies afterward.

Juliet

From Mark to Juliet

To hell with the Reading Room and the mummies. Come have lunch with me.

Mark

From Juliet to Mark

You consider that docile?

Juliet

From Mark to Juliet

To hell with docile.

M.

From Will Thisbee to Juliet

7th April, 1946

Dear Miss Ashton,

I am a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I am an antiquarian ironmonger, though it pleases some to call me a rag-and-bone man. I also invent labor-saving devices—my latest being an electric clothes-pin that wafts the laundry gently on the breeze, saving the laundress’s wrists.

Did I find solace in reading? Yes, but not at first. I’d just go and eat my pie in quietude in a corner. Then Isola got ahold of me and said I had to read a book and talk about it like the others did. She gave me a book called Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle, and a tedious thing he was—he gave me shooting pains in my head—until I came to a bit on religion. I was not a religious man, though not for want of trying.

Off I’d go, like a bee among blossoms, from church to chapel to church again. But I was never able to get a grip on Faith—till Mr. Carlyle posed religion to me in a different way. He was walking among the ruins of the Abbey at Bury St. Edmunds, when a thought came to him, and he wrote it down thus:

Does it ever give thee pause, that men used to have a soul—not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech; but as a truth that they knew, and acted upon! Verily it was another world then . . . but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls. . . we shall have to go in search of them again, or worse in all ways shall befall us.

Isn’t that something—to know your own soul by hearsay, instead of its own tidings? Why should I let a preacher tell me if I had one or not? If I could believe I had a soul, all by myself, then I could listen to its tidings all by myself.

I gave my talk on Mr. Carlyle to the Society, and it stirred up a great argument about the soul. Yes? No? Maybe? Dr. Stubbins yelled the loudest, and soon everyone stopped arguing and listened to him.

Thompson Stubbins is a man of long, deep thoughts. He was a psychiatrist in London until he ran amok at the annual dinner of the Friends of Sigmund Freud Society in 1934. He told me the whole tale once. The Friends were