Summerhill School
Leiston, SuffolkMy dear Reich,March 18, 1950Ena and I are in a mesh of care. Finance gets worse each day
and I am in the horrid position of being the rat that left the sinking ship.
The cry is : Neill and S'hill must be kept going, but no one seems to
know how. We can't get new teachers because they won't come for the
miserable pay we give. All private schools here are in the same boat;
taxation of parents and high prices are killing all those that are not
endowed with trust funds. Part of me longs to run away to you and
U.S.A.; part of me is bound by the many parents and old pupils who
implore me not to give S'hill up unless it fails completely. la, Reich, I
am in a hole and lie awake worrying, a thing I have never done in my
life before-worrying about money and the future.
A committee of parents wanted me to allow them to ask for money
in a letter to the New Statesman & Nation. I refused to beg. But in this
week's issue is a letter begging for another "progressive" school which
they call a pioneer school. The comic side is that in the winter this
school asked me to come and tell the staff and parents what pioneering
was, which I did, telling them that they were not real pioneers, only
moralists playing with a kind of freedom.
We have looked forward gladly to a break-our visit to you this
summer but even that may not come off. Marika wrote that she would
not do the lectures and suggested that my publisher get a lecture agency
to handle them. My fear there is that they would get me the wrong
audiences and wear me out with travel and hotels (which I hate). So
that the prospect there isn't so rosy either. I don't want to come alone,
for Ena needs the change more than I do. Also I'd love to bring Zoe
over. She is the bright star in a rather cloudy sky at this time.
We have put our Easter Self-Regno Conference off. Only a few wanted
to come, and Ena has had such a heavy term and I also am so tired that
we didn't think we could do justice to it.
Sorry to write you such pessimistic letters these days.
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