August 11 1952

11th Aug. 1952.

Dearest Mummy, 

I have just had one of my famous age-long conversations with Connie – probably the last as they leave for Montreal a week on Wed. & sail the Friday after. We have invited them over on Monday evening- we didn’t want any visitors this week as Cec begins to attack the sitting room tomorrow, so we made it Mon. & even if the Pems. are still here it doesn’t matter. I had a letter from Milly by the way, – telling me that the dog is coming too!

Thank you very much for both your long letters- we were certainly surprised to get the 2nd one from Miami & until I read it I couldn’t believe it wasn’t just some swanky paper you’d pinched from somewhere! I hope the rest of the journey was placid & uneventful & that you arrived safely in Trinidad with no more excitement. I am so sorry that you were disliking the thought of Trinidad so much & hope that when you got there that things weren’t so bad as you expected & that at least you have a nice visit with Janie & Bill. I am afraid that you have left us feeling very badly over not staying for Algy & I feel that we should have tried to straighten things out before you left. Both Cec & I hate to have you feel that we have being mean & ungrateful for all your help. When we refused your offer to stay you immediately were convinced we didn’t want you & didn’t see any other reason, but if we hadn’t wanted you, we would never have asked you in the first place & we loved having you while you were here & you certainly helped us tremendously in all ways. However, we both felt that we were getting very dependent on you & to a certain extent were not shouldering our own responsibilities- as yet, we’ve had no experience with managing the family & house on our own & the longer you were with us, the more apt we both were to let things slide & let you do them. Because of this, we thought we should learn to be on our own & manage by ourselves before the other baby came, because if you had stayed over that time, I know we would have found it 10 times harder. As it is both of us are having to get adjusted now to doing a lot of things around the house which you did before & it is hard work but we should do it. I know that the wrench of leaving Linda is the worst thing, but that would have been just as bad or worse in Feb. or March & it would just have been putting off the time. I don’t know if this has made our attitude any clearer – it is difficult to explain & doesn’t really do much good to hash it over, but you say in your letter you wonder where you failed & we just want to tell you that as far as we are concerned you didn’t fail at all – you were wonderful to us all & we had a lovely year together.

I haven’t answered your letters at all, but will write soon again! We seem to have such a busy time last week – to the Douglas’s on Wed. – to Dr. & Mrs. Petrie’s on Friday & we actually went to the Spectroscopy picnic on Sat. afternoon! Linda didn’t care for all the people much, but was good, but we were all tired yesterday. I slept till 12 & it poured all day long! Today I washed etc. & Cec finished the room upstairs & it looks lovely. Your baby is as sweet & good as ever – full of fun. When you ask her to kiss you she giggles & gets all embarrassed! XXX Linda 

Lots of love from us all- Cyn.