Free Letters From an Unknown Woman by Gerard Woodward

wrestling with a lion. On the whole, though, it seemed clear that his children, in his eyes, were not quite good enough.
    She thought of Donald’s oft-repeated remark that she was too good for him as she waited for his response to her letter. It came quickly, the usual blue envelope covered with stamps and the imprints of military officials. This was what appalled her most about the correspondence that had begun between them – that it was conducted through so many different levels of officialdom, from the bullet-dodging couriers (so she imagined) to the border guards, the censors. Great pains and, risks had been taken to negotiate the exchange of mail between prisoners of war and the outside world, and all Private Donald Pace and his wife could think to do was exchange indecent thoughts.
    When she opened this latest communication she was puzzled. Even without reading it she could see that the envelope contained her own letter, the one she had sent to her husband two weeks earlier. She thought for a moment that perhaps the censor had not allowed it through. Surely her postscript was not strong enough to earn that degree of censure. Perhaps there had been some mistake. When she looked through the letter her eyes were immediately drawn to the bold red letters that had been scrawled in the margin. Not the censor’s hand, but her husband’s. In harsh, angry block capitals he had written ‘ NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!! ’ And several arrows pointing to the offendingly inadequate sentence.
    How the officials on both sides of the border must have laughed. The jackbooted guards who had previously leered and chuckled over the letter on its way in must have laughed even louder on its way out. Her humiliation was official and international. The frigid, inadequate wife unable to satisfy her husband’s simple demands for sexual satisfaction – all he’d wanted was a few dirty words and the best she could come up with was ‘behind’.
    If it wasn’t bad enough to have her erotic writing so closely examined, it seemed even worse to have it deemed inadequate. What he meant, of course, was that she was not bad enough.
    In her next letter she tried pleading with her husband:
Dearest, I must ask you to stop making these requests. I know you do not mean anything serious by them, but you must know that anything – how shall I say? – ‘earthy’ will be blacked out by the English censor …
    He replied:
Do you not think the English censor might be a wee bit more sympathetic to my needs than you yourself seem to be? Do you think he will really run his pencil through lines of passionate love between an estranged wife and her husband? Other men here have wives who oblige – I haven’t seen their letters, of course, they are always private, but I know they are full of lovely things. I shall not cease from asking you for this, Tory, no matter how many months or years this war lasts or how many years I am a prisoner of it. I need it as much as I need food and drink, and I am a starving man, Tory. I have precious memories of our many nights of passion, when you were as energetic and as lustful as I. They are my only sustenance at this time, but they are fading fast.
Love to the weans, and your ma,
Donald
PS if you are stuck for what to write, why don’t you ask some of the girls at your factory? You know what they say about factory girls.

CHAPTER SIX
    Tory didn’t know what they said about factory girls, and she didn’t like the implications. Whatever they said, she was a factory girl now. Did that mean they said it about her?
    She also wondered what sort of nights Donald remembered, and why they seemed so different from the ones that had stuck in her own mind. Energy was not something she associated with them, at least from her viewpoint: it was Donald who had done all the work, striving away above her in the darkness, as busy as a picador. She lay in bed one night trying her best to recall the occasions when Donald had done the deed, and the