I DID not realise for quite some time that she had had a kind of relapse, a return of symptoms she got from a fall a year ago, when, as she explained to me, she “dislocated several vertebrae”. She described the original fall vividly, how she got up on night to open a window, could not find it, and then missed her way back to bed, fell over a chair and was not found until the next morning. She said she was accident-prone as a result of having been kept in iron braces by her parents when she was a child: “They finally even tried to put my nose in irons” . . . It is quite difficult to believe that Edith is in great pain and ill a lot of the time, though it is equally obvious that she really is.
But everything she says seems to be on the same plane on unreality and almost all of it is said in exactly the same tone of voice. She said she had had one of the most terrible weeks of her life because the Sunday Times had sent round an interviewer who asked her whether she liked being 75, was afraid of dying, etc. Another thing — the papers had announced that the sale at Christie’s of her manuscripts had brought in £3,000 when it was really £15,000. This she considered libellous . . . Finally, Marilyn Monroe died today and the papers keep ringing Edith about this.
With her, one never knows who is in favour, or out. It is safe to assume that all catty remarks about women writers will be well received. But knowing she greatly liked L. who, I read, has been imprisoned in Portugal, I asked tenderly after him. She replied that he had a terribly swollen head before he went and that she hoped that prison would deflate it a bit . . .
She was genuinely upset by a paragraph in the Sunday Express about two boys who tortured a cat and gouged out its eyes. All that had happened was that they were fined £5. She said she wanted to write . . . suggesting that people who were cruel to animals should be pilloried, the police standing by to make sure that onlookers did not attack them. It was Osbert’s idea — Osbert is a magistrate — that this would be a suitable punishment. Natasha said she thought the onlookers would take no notice of those put in the stocks, I tried to discourage her from writing such a letter.