My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes

The effect her Letters had in Washington pre-December 1941 can only have been useful. She presented the difficulties not just in terms of losses of ships or of Libyan territory but, when rubber-growing Malaya fell and January 1942 was pipe-bursting cold, in terms of no more hot-water bottles. Although prescient about Churchill's gift for leadership, she was later caustic about his hostility to criticism and failure to get rid of dead wood in his team. She didn't skimp the bad news - in her piece of, she wrote: 'It is now clear to the man in the street, reading his paper as he goes home to the neat suburban villa which may soon be matchwood, like the villas near Rotterdam and Brussels, that Hitler is out to win in the next six or eight weeks by any means he can, several of which will be bad for the population of this island.' In 1940 she foresaw a four-year war. They read of the notable plum crop of 1939, the evacuation of pets as well as children, the introduction of the wheatmeal loaf. So the readers of the New Yorker learnt about the war in England, from the Dad's Army days to rockets. But then the evacuees were cancelled - Roppelegh's was in the backwoods, too far from the local school - and Panter-Downes cabled again: yes, she'd have a go. Panter-Downes cabled back: sorry, evacuees were being billeted on her, no time for writing.

On 2 September, a cable arrived at Roppelegh's, the old house where she, her husband Clare Robinson, and their two small daughters lived in the Surrey countryside near Haslemere, asking her to try doing a regular 'Letter from London'. In 1939, with war approaching, Harold Ross, the editor, was desperate to find a London correspndent, and his fiction editor, the redoubtable Katherine White, suggested Panter- Downes. In the 1930s she sold the magazine a few poems, some short stories, and a piece about Jewish refugee children coming to England. A Londoner by birth, Mollie Panter-Downes was a New Yorker writer for 50 years.

My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes