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Mrs Miles's Diary

Page 7

by S. V. Partington


  From a textbook of English phrases for the guidance of German troops, prepared by a German officer to use when they finally arrive as conquerors in England:

  Tell me, please, Mrs N.!

  Tell the truth or you will be killed. But quickly clergyman, write down on this paper the number of the English Army corps.

  I want thirty workmen tomorrow.

  Every driver that drives the wrong way will be shot.

  You will be paid now, later, after the war.

  Friday, 19 January

  Basil wired that he is coming for twenty-four hours tomorrow.

  Miss Beck and I walked in the black and white landscape shivering, and trying to avoid talking about the war.

  Saturday, 20 January

  Expecting Basil. The cold is paralysing.

  Dutch Ada writes at last from Doorn. She has many soldiers billeted in her great hostel, and is running musical evenings for them, and is very busy. She implores me to send her news. I can imagine the Dutchmen hurrying up the fine oak staircase of the great house with the long glossy black shutters by the well-proportioned windows, and the comfort dear Ada will dispense to them.

  Barbara has lost her gas mask, and thinks the ghost in her house may have taken it. You see hardly any in the streets of Guildford now.

  Monday, 22 January

  The iron frost continues. Everybody is feeling thoroughly put out. The newspapers seem to be full of bad news – the Germans obtaining a corridor through Russian Poland to Romania to get at the oil wells there, the Grenville sunk, and so on.64

  We can’t hear about Italy, from which I hoped much, without the wretched words, ‘increase of armament’.65 The world is raving mad, and bent on destroying itself.

  Tuesday, 23 January

  Entered London about eleven, sped to Piccadilly and dived into Swan and Edgar’s basement, only to find it was empty and made into an air raid shelter. The statue of Eros is now wholly concealed by a wooden cone and sandbags. Very small stock in the shop, I thought; a display of warm stockings which would normally be two shillings and elevenpence were four shillings and elevenpence. The girl in the coat and skirt department said that prices of materials go up every day, not every week.

  Lunch with Mildred in Fortnum and Masons, as in a fairy palace. Green gold walls, mauve curtains, sweetly pretty or finely discreet waitresses moving quietly about the thick carpet. I saw the piles of glittering sweets, and as I went out, the sprays of real white lilac and pink roses, and I could not for the life of me find any trace of war. But I heard later that the firm has closed down several departments, and is fighting for life like the rest.

  Piccadilly Circus, showing Eros boarded up and covered in war savings posters.

  Photograph © IWM D9785

  Wednesday 24 January

  Terrible news: The Exmouth has been sunk and all lost.66

  As a war-time companion Barbara has a small black kitten. It likes cheese straws and cabbage and it spends most of its time purring as mine does. It fitted itself into a blue glass vase the other morning and went whirling round and round. It was in an ecstasy. I should like to meet it even more than Goebbels.

  Thursday, 25 January

  Wireless news says that Lloyd George67 declared today in Parliament that we must dig up all the parks to plant food.

  Friday, 26 January

  Sir Neville Henderson, formerly British Ambassador in Berlin, last night said that the war might last a long time. There was not going to be any early collapse in Germany. This is beginning to soak into many minds in Britain.

  Sunday, 28 January

  A very strange day, so much ice after the thaw. The sprays of creeper leaves up the house are curiously encased in sparkling frost.68

  Monday, 29 January

  Snowstorm, and as I write at two p.m. more snow direct from the east. There are sixteen little icicles hanging from the dining-room window which do not vary. Spent the morning writing to Harry, and to Basil. Robin is very miserable, slowly knitting a khaki scarf with chilly fingers.

  ‘The shops here,’ writes Sara from Weymouth, ‘are bursting with bacon but none can afford to buy it.’

  Tuesday, 30 January

  Snow muffles the village. Some of it has washed through Nancy’s ceiling and made puddles of ice water all over her nice green carpeted floor. The men are brushing it off the roof with huge hand-brooms and heavy lumps of white are thrown onto the frozen yard.

  Rather too cold to think well. I’m listening in as I write to a furious hissing, screaming shout from Hitler on the German wireless. I can translate a bit, and know that the speech is full of hatred and lies against England.

  Every day brings dreadful stories of torpedoed and mined ships, of ships bombed from the air. And many perish in the waves, making for a shore they are never to see again. A strange destiny indeed for the neutral sailors who are at war with nobody; to be caught by the hand of grim Fate and to find it a death-grip, without time for a word of explanation, expostulation, or message of farewell.

  Food is scare in Russia, scarcer in Moscow and Leningrad69 than for many years. Bread queues everywhere. ‘The bread queues are due,’ says the irrepressible Soviet, ‘to irresponsible elements in the transport and bakery services.’

  Wednesday, 31 January

  Water is now rushing into the coal cellar and scullery. Miss McF., unable to get back to London as the trains are irregular still, shows me the white helmet she has completed for a Finn, with a tiny window for the face; it is very delicate and warm. Fog covers Catherine’s Field, and the broken oak tree.

  The paper seems to be full of pathetic single sentences such as ‘The London ship Eston (1,487 tons) is missing, with her crew of eighteen.’

  Thursday, 1 February

  This is the day we should have been leaving Hôtel des Thermes in Aix-en-Provence after coffee and rolls; lunching out of doors in the sunshine at our own special restaurant at Fréjus, on the village square perched high above the neighbouring villas and the slope to the turquoise-coloured Mediterranean. Then on to our hotel at Mentone. But for Germany!70

  Ajax has arrived at Plymouth. A great welcome from thousands.71

  Basil writes that his men in unwarmed billets shave with snow and melted water. He asks for bedroom slippers for the patients, and roller towels.

  Friday, 2 February

  Telegraphed to Pam and Prue for their fourteenth birthday72 and did up a mixed parcel of books for them, including The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s by Talbot Baines Reed, as it is good for even fourteen-year-olds to forget the war atmosphere in a wonderful story.

  Sickness is everywhere. The many FANYs at Aldershot having the fashionable German measles are only allowed two days’ sick leave now, instead of the customary four days.

  To Guildford, where I saw that the usual shilling layer cake bought at Lyons had much shrunk.

  As I write, I hear:

  Twenty places in Southern Finland were bombed today.

  The Russians are using armoured sledges.

  All the world seems to be sending money to Finland.

  Phyllis Hazeldine asks me to start saving all my halfpennies for War Saving Certificates.73 Yes, I will.

  Saturday, 3 February

  Too cold to venture forth.

  Winston’s motto, written in his own hand for Harry just entering Sandhurst, stands forward on the mantleshelf:

  ‘In War, Resolution, in Defeat, Defiance, in Victory, Magnanimity, in Peace, Goodwill.’ (Chartwell House, Westerham, Kent, April 1931).

  In this village of mine nobody talks of enlistment – nobody expects to volunteer. The place is stiff with men between twenty-five and forty-five, all without any idea of adventure, one supposes. ‘When I have time, I may have to go and give ’em an ’iding, certainly,’ remarked our news-agent.

  Here is a sad little notice from the front page of The Times. What a world of suffering lies behind it:

  NEUMANN – At Warsaw, driven to death by German cruelties. Aleksan
der Neumann, barrister. Funeral service at Polish Catholic Church, Devonia Road, London N1 (Angel). Feb. 3, at 11 a.m.

  Sunday, 4 February

  ‘And where is Victor now?’ I asked a cottage friend. Her son joined the Army some time ago.

  She stood in her garden in the fierce north wind gathering her scanty jacket around her. She is nearly seventy. She spoke with a great sense of the dramatic:

  ‘He’s on the water!’

  It was as if, coming from her innocent country lips, Victor had gone to his execution. The water holds every sort of terror for her. The dull grey sky, the general atmosphere of fog, gloom and ice were all in keeping with the mournful news; the poor grey hair of the mother brushed back over a brow with yet one more wrinkle of care, for Victor is her darling, her favourite, ‘what always brought me a cup of tea when I felt bad’.

  Many different posters were produced to promote the War Savings scheme.

  Photograph © IWM PST 15586

  The Hydes to tea. Bey, who teaches the local Czechoslovakians English, tells me four peasant boy weavers are going at last to be allowed to weave, and depart for Manchester immediately. Also one toolmaker has got his permit and travels off to Kent to a factory with his wife and children. It is to be hoped that all will one day be dispersed, of the sad little companies forbidden to work.74

  Monday, 5 February

  What a book of War Stories could be made! Here is one in a nutshell:

  Fraulein Christel Zimmerman, 26-year-old ‘learner’ in a Mayfair fashion house, fears that her own brothers may drop bombs on her.

  She is a Catholic refugee from Germany. The Aliens Tribunal here gave her full freedom.

  Three of her five brothers are in the Nazi Air Force, only because, she told me last night, ‘the penalty of refusing to fight for Hitler’s Reich is death’.

  Tuesday, 6 February

  The German propaganda speaker known everywhere as Lord Haw-Haw was acting in a dialogue last night aping an English lord with terrific and old-fashioned gusto, showing that he seriously fancied himself in this part! It is really very funny and interesting, this. He evidently regards our scornful British nickname as a compliment. What next?75

  I wrote all morning, and judged a big competition for an original short story to be called ‘The Emerald Ring’ this evening. I gave the prize to the writer of a sad little story about a man who went to the Front without proposing and without having a chance of giving the ring he had bought to his girl. He was shot, and she never knew about his plan, and the emerald ring was returned with his effects to his mother, who had never heard of the girl. Possibly I am influenced by my slight fever to select this melancholy effort as best. It’s so utterly possible.

  Thursday, 8 February

  I did not write yesterday as I spent the day in bed, but I took one or two things from the papers. Lloyd George, pleading for the draining of millions of British acres, said we must vote more money to it lest ‘through prejudice, stubbornness and lack of vision’ we neglected one indispensible contribution to winning the war, and found ourselves suddenly faced through hunger with inevitable doom or humiliating surrender.

  I glance through the window at the great neglected bit of land opposite us in this lane, Catherine’s Field, and wonder.

  How terrible it is to think that the Germans are doctoring their men up with injections of a certain vitamin to make them brave before they begin to fight. Are we doing it too?76

  Mickey says forty men have volunteered from the Guards Depot to go to Finland. ‘Thank you for your help,’ said a Finn, quoted in The Times, ‘but you cannot send us the gift of sleep.’

  My charwoman tells me of the return to London today of her evacuated children. Pat, aged fourteen, had trouble at school and came back saying that the teacher had slapped her face and that she was going home. The billeting officer, after consultation, said, ‘Don’t stop her.’ Her little brother Bernard, aged ten and beginning to enjoy feeding the chickens, etc., was to go home too. The other lodger in the cottage, a big nice lad aged seventeen, who works on the land, had got so upset and jealous with the presence at close quarters of the two evacuated children, that he had turned quarrelsome and has gone back to Wales. What an effect human beings have on one another!

  The fishman was very scornful when I asked if he had any fish below one and sixpence a pound today. Cod was two shillings a pound. Imagine being in his power! It was take it or leave it, and you’re damned lucky if you secure a piece of anything. Finally I got enough for one person for one-and-fourpence, fresh haddock, and also a little bit of cat’s fish as a tremendous favour.

  Rachel says her husband can get hold of no coal to sell, but only has raw green logs to offer.

  Friday, 9 February

  Robin’s birthday. I gave him a box of dates. We drove over in the dim winter day to Haslemere, where they had a lovely birthday lunch for Robin, pheasant with mince pies and delicious coffee in light gold lacquer cups from China. We drank his health before the meal in gin and lime.

  Our hosts’ three children are widely scattered – the elder boy in Tanganyika77, the second a Marine prowling round Australian seas, the daughter in Malta with her little girl. The Eustaces, old Hong-Kongians, are full of steadfast faith in Chiang Kai Shek.78 I am afraid their dividend from China slips lower and lower. Seventy pounds less the other day. We discuss economies. They have already arrived at the ‘little supper by the fire’. Kitty eats bread and butter then, so was very pleased with my gift of a half-pound of butter from Scotland.

  May writes that in Romsey, troops are lying on the floor in the local Town Hall having pneumonia, each with one blanket only.

  Recently the Germans stopped a train in Poland and shot one passenger out of every five, and at about the same time seventy-two Poles were hanged near the beloved city of Cracow.

  Monday, 12 February

  Shopped. No pork sausages in Sainsbury ‘because,’ eagerly exclaimed a shop girl, ‘pork is impossible to get.’ No rabbits. They have suddenly assumed greater dignity. I bought 1lb beef sausages for tenpence.

  From my letters:

  Diana, WAAF, to her mother, from Pembroke Dock:

  ‘It is marvellous here. I love it. I am on duty five till midnight, was also on last night, and two other evenings in the week, also we get one day off a week, so our hours are very pleasant. Occasionally we get a rush, taking down messages or sending them by telephone or teleprinter, entering them up or popping about the place with messages.’ Of a sixpenny hop, Diana says: ‘It was a tiny little hall and only an old piano, only airmen of course – having the Australians here adds variety. I struck some wonderful dancers: best I ever have . . . We have decided to go dancing mad.’

  From Margaret Dell, Princeton University, USA:

  ‘We are heartily ashamed of our Congress for its lack of action in helping Finland (or anyone). It seems degrading, just as though one’s good friend and neighbour were being robbed and one wrote a polite note of sympathy.’

  Florence Dell, the daughter (twenty-two) writes from New York that she finds ‘all ideas about the war over here are muddled. No one knows how we can keep out, but all think we should . . . We now hear no one wants us, anyway, which no one had thought of.’

  There is no hot water in Denmark owing to the fuel shortage, and you can walk on the ice over to Sweden! Here we have our little coal store freshly replenished, and sit by a fine red fire.

  Tuesday, 13 February

  The cold has come again with a vengeance. Snow and frost and shivers. We have just been laughing over a broadcast ridiculing German propaganda – nobody in this country can pay attention to Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler. This may be our great misfortune.

  How wonderful to think that one day the loathed Stalin and Hitler will be creatures of the past and other historians will arise and write of them intimately, and they will stay harmlessly enough within the pages of the diary, and even beguile the hours of some invalid, robbed forever of their thunder, which i
s uncommonly violent at present.

  Wednesday, St Valentine’s Day

  In the News Chronicle it describes our recruiting office in Smith Square as being besieged with volunteers, which is refreshing. A middle-aged man who had driven to London in an expensive car to volunteer was sitting beside a young man wearing down-at-heel shoes and a ragged suit. They were helping each other to answer the long list of questions on the form.

  A still day. Robin is actually up on a ladder sawing off the branch of a tree, thank goodness. All this weather has been disastrous for his activity.

  I wonder how Basil is getting on. His difficulty is in assembling the men for their innoculation. He gets hold of, say, seventy who are due for the second after an interval of ten days. Back they come, but thirty have not turned up because they have been spirited away, say, for a course at Chatham. He can do 300 innoculations an hour, which seems marvellous, assisted of course by orderlies with filled syringes.

  Thursday, 15 February

  A very evil, piercing day of cold. It reminded me of the peevishness of poor Mr Attlee, our Labour leader. The wind was querulous.

  How I long today for some fresh flowers. It is a flowerless winter.

  Friday, 16 February

  Received a rather miserable letter from Cis up in a grim little Scottish town waiting for the coal merchant. ‘I’ve only two lumps left.’ Ian hears that they are not employing officers of over fifty-five.

  Madge says their egg man has just told them there will soon be no eggs. Barbara says knuckle of veal makes soup for three times for her and Jack.

  The wind is howling round the house and my hands are red with cold even by the ample fire. The Spectator says that Germany is full of tinned stores which will keep them going for ages.

 

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