Norman Pearson returned towards the end of January, after an absence in Spain and Portugal, bearing two bananas, two oranges and a pineapple. The bananas and oranges were simple, Hilda and I had one each. Apart from a few green apples and some berries in Cornwall, it was the first fruit that we had tasted for two years. It seemed so unreal that we hardly liked to touch it. The pineapple was different. Even Hilda, the recluse, agreed that we could not eat it alone and that, wartime or not, it called for a party.- Bryher, The Day of Mars: A memoir 1940-1946

Bryher – the pen name of Winifred Ellerman – moved back to London in September 1940, just in time for the worst of the Blitz. She left her home in Switzerland in order to be with her friends – and particularly her lover, the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle.)

She moved into H.D.’s flat at 49, Lowndes Square, Belgravia and together they weathered the war.

In addition to her memoir Bryher wrote a novel closely based on her first few months back in London during the Blitz in 1940 – Beowulf.

The Walls do not Fall (1944), first part-of Trilogy  H.D. that explores the themes of war and details her reactions to living through the London Blitz and World War II. She dedicated it to Bryher with whom she had visited Egypt and seen the ancient ruins of Karnak. 

But back to the pineapple.

In her memoir Bryher does not hold back on her frustrations with wartime privations and especially not on the bungling, incompetent, uncaring inefficiency of bureaucracy and relentless government propaganda. She rails at the appeasers of the 1930s who failed to heed the warnings about the rise of fascism. 

A gift of a pineapple was a big deal and they celebrate accordingly.

By the time that I had telephoned, written notes or gone round in person with the invitations, we managed to collect about twenty people and how we all got into our little sitting room at Lowndes remains a mystery.

First we looked respectfully at the pineapple, then with infinite solemnity it was sliced into tiny mouthfuls. We could now boast for a week afterwards, “Oh, the powder in the rations tastes so much better if you mix it with a little fruit.” Norman seemed startled by the result of his generosity but swallowing our separate morsels, they were a symbol that one day the war might end.

Our pineapple belonged to the real world of sun and sea with no Government directives and all of us felt the better for our inch of it. It was people who mattered in the war and how much more work the officials would have got out of them if moments of relaxation had been considered as important as their daily tasks.

We were willing to face conditions of extreme discomfort but not an endless flow of propaganda that eventually nobody believed. So many difficulties, so much despair, could have been avoided if we had only had psychologists in the upper ranks instead of clerks.

Poets and Pineapples

Several poets have written about pineapples – Wallace Stevens, Marge Piercey and Sylvia Plath among them.  But this one poem from Paul Muldoon seems appropriate for today and for the theme of this post. 

Pineapples And Pomegranates
In Memory of Yehuda Amichai
To think that, as a boy of thirteen, I would grapple
with my first pineapple,
its exposed breast
setting itself as another test
of my will-power, knowing in my bones
that it stood for something other than itself alone
while having absolutely no sense
of its being a world-wide symbol of munificence.
Munificence – right? Not munitions, if you understand
where I’m coming from. As if the open hand
might, for once, put paid
to the hand-grenade
in one corner of the planet.
I’m talking about pineapples – right? – not pomegranates.

Paul Mudoon, from his collection Moy Sand and Gravel (2002)

And the artists too have given us some memorable pineapples – Georgia O’Keefe, Fernando Botero, Andy Warhol and an official portrait painter of King Charles II among them – but here’s Henri Matisse.

The featured image is a crop of Still Life with a Pineapple c.1886  by George Walter Harris (1835–1912)

And finally – a Staffordshire teapot c.1750-1770, from The Met.  a small model of which sits on my shelf.