Army recruits poured past their windows. ‘Italy is calling up class after class in an alarming way.’ John commended Hitler for ‘keeping order’ in Czechoslovakia and Chamberlain for taking the news calmly. Little nations, she wrote to Evguenia, were an ‘awful menace and as such cannot be allowed an existance’. Fascists, like pedigree griffons and upper-class congenital sexual inverts, were genetically superior. ‘Jews’, she wrote:
Yes, I am beginning to be really afraid of them, not of the one or two really dear Jewish friends that I have in England, no, but of Jews as a whole. I believe they hate us and want to bring about a European war and then a world revolution in order to destroy us utterly … And what of Jew-ridden France, England & Russia? There will soon be no room for us Christians.
She and Una subscribed to an English-language lending library. It was run by Lillian Baird-Douglas who thought people should be free to read what they chose, not just Fascist propaganda. She stocked literature banned by the regime. Una told her she should not keep books like Inside Europe on her shelves. Lillian said she did not understand how Radclyffe Hall could have written The Well of Loneliness and suffered its destruction and yet make propaganda for Fascism.
Una withdrew their subscription, returned their library books via a friend, Maria Carolina, then lodged a formal complaint with the authorities about Lillian circulating Inside Europe. ‘We are clear of any complicity if there is any trouble’, she said. She then helped foster a rumour that Lillian was a drug addict and an alcoholic.
John thought Hitler only wanted justice. ‘I don’t feel I care what he takes’, she wrote to Evguenia after he invaded Bohemia and Moravia. ‘I am too tired to react to anything.’ Una said the one hope for Europe lay with the Duce ‘who is both a genius and a good man’.
In April Italy invaded Albania. Five thousand German troops passed through Florence for an unknown destination. Evguenia and Lysa arrived and John met their evening train. They all went to Fiesole and Siena. John wanted time alone with Evguenia. She booked a hotel room for a night at Montecatini, just for the two of them, and arranged a car. Evguenia saw it as an intended seduction. She thought the trip a bad idea and warned they would quarrel.
John cancelled the room and the car, sat on the town wall at Volterra and cried. Lysa asked Una why John did not let Evguenia go. Evguenia, she said, had no other romantic involvement, but felt she had become like a drug to John. She loved her but wanted to be free to live life for herself. When Evguenia left for Paris she sent John a card, ‘Why quarrel when the sun is shining and the sky is blue? I am still of the same opinion, but I love you.’
John had headaches and a pain that ran down her left arm. Dr Lapiccirella diagnosed high blood pressure, an underactive thyroid and ‘toxic poisoning of the aorta caused by nicotine’. X-rays revealed scars from childhood tuberculosis. He advised no cigarettes and a warm climate for winter. John became ‘skinless with nerves’ as she tried to stop smoking. Una blamed all her maladies on ‘that slug of a female who battens on her and cannot even write without bullying or distressing her. If she did not exist all other troubles could be overcome.’
Evguenia asked Una’s cousin, Sandra Tealdi, to speak to Lapiccirella and let her know what was wrong with John. Sandra wrote to her in Paris:
He told me to tell you that John is very ill with nerves and that she is in constant need of care. And would you believe it, Una phoned me the next day and Lapiccirella had told her that I had telephoned in order to know the news of John. I felt the blood freeze in my veins, but thank goodness he hadn’t spoken to you and Una interpreted it as just a kind thing on my part. I beg you never to disclose a thing.
Una’s tyrannical hold on John was common knowledge. John’s only escape was her obsession with Evguenia. It invaded her like a cancer. Her health broke down and her life spiralled out of control. As did Europe. There were rumours of German attacks on Corfu, Malta, Gibraltar, Egypt, Kenya. It was said that Hitler planned to invade Poland on his birthday. On 28 April John and Una listened on the wireless to a two-and-a-half-hour speech by him. He had broken agreements with Britain and Poland. He wanted control of Danzig and a German corridor through Poland. Una went to the British Consul to find out whether Fido could go with them if they had to leave Italy in a hurry. John made Tito their chauffeur get a Swiss visa.
Evguenia returned the lottery ticket Una sent her as an Easter present. ‘I refuse in advance to participate in it’, she said. She wondered about starting a craft shop. ‘As I am getting older there is nothing else for me to do but to have something of my own.’
John planned to go to Rye and sell the Forecastle. In four years she had spent little time there. It had proved to be, Una said, ‘the melancholy little house we built to be so gay in’. Andrea wrote that her son Nicholas was in an isolation hospital with diphtheria and had had two mastoid operations. Viola asked Una at least to write to Minna who was so very ill.
John did not now read the newspapers. ‘What’s the good? Anyhow I am sick of it all.’ Her letters to Evguenia became unconfident and stripped of hope. ‘The sense of failiour is heavy upon me all too often these days.’ She felt lost and thought perhaps her broken health might lead to a path that must
