You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dearest,
I am waiting for the telephone to ring and for the sound of your
dear voice. So you must not expect a letter from me; it is just not possible in these circumstances: I shall fall back on a dreary recital of the history of the Bion family in order to kill time and provide me with a soporific. Indeed it may serve a useful purpose by acting as a soporific for you too. To begin then I shall introduce you to the senior branch – the Walter Bions.
My Aunt Helen was a formidable woman, by nature kind but shrill and embittered by being married to my Uncle Walter. She had I think natural ability and must have been a very beautiful girl as she was handsome to the end. My Uncle Walter was the eldest of the Bion brothers and was described as a saintly and learned man reported to be able to read the New Testament in Greek. Actually he was a horrid little man who was happily as incompetent in his meanness as he was in his work. His incompetence at his work led my Aunt Helen to call him unworldly and from that it was but a short step to canonization as a saint. His temper was made no better by the manifest superiority of his two younger brothers, Uncle Rupert and my father, who were in their respective spheres brilliant and, it goes without saying when talking of Bions, impossible. Uncle Walter ultimately got a job in the Meteorological Department of the Indian government. In spite of the fact that for nine months of the year the sun beats down on the entire peninsula with pitiless heat, and the heavens open for the remaining three to drench the land with rain; in spite of the fact that the department refused resolutely to give my uncle any promotion whatsoever; so powerful was the effect of his mere presence on the pay-roll of the department that the predictions of the meteorological office were suffused with the glow of his incompetence and were hailed as masterpieces of comic mis-statement until he was forcibly retired to live in Upper Norwood where he devoted his energ