We have had our adventures too. Bombs at Burnham and Farnham Royal. Cows killed and property damaged. German planes are over every night. The cottage has been shaken by explosions. Shrapnel has fallen over the village.
Life goes on. That is what amazes and thrills me. In spite of this increasing terror and destruction over London and the constant rumours of invasion, we get our food, our papers and letters. Buses and trains run fairly well to time. Work in factories and offices and shops continues. I have a great feeling that this is the death and birth of ages … the old order passing … and life in fire from the sky descending.
Thursday, 12 September
Raids on London every night. Homes destroyed, death to hundreds. The city in flames. One can not imagine it. Joan writes that the fires seen from Parliament Hill ‘have been terrible but oh so beautiful. Bombs have fallen near Haverstock Hill, noise has been shattering, but somehow I don’t mind half so much as I thought I would before it all began, and there is something almost exhilarating about people’s new comradelyness.’
It makes me wish I could be with them. There is something in the Britisher when his life, his heritage or whatever is threatened which refuses to be beaten. That’s my feeling now. Damn those arrogant Germans who think they can destroy our beloved city and cripple our spirit! We are not as effete and inefficient and rotten as Nazi propaganda has made out. I think the Nazis have miscalculated – they do not understand British psychology. I don’t think anyone does, least of all ourselves. Are we downhearted? Never! I am thrilled to be here, a Britisher in England. I am willing, ready and waiting to take my place in the fighting line.
9 p.m. News: Bombs have fallen on Mme Tussauds, Regent Street and on some newspaper offices.
10.30 p.m. Local sirens have just wailed their dread warning. Usually when that happens a deep silence follows. But a thought: German resources must be great, perhaps greater than we are being led to believe. Suppose the Nazis do go on and on attacking – really, how long can our little island stand it? My thoughts touch on these things repeatedly, particularly when the sirens wail at night. When all communications with the capital are broken and war civil defence services worked to exhaustion (I in my place with the Red Cross) – then and only then shall I grow a little discouraged and afraid.
Bless me, if that isn’t the all-clear!
Monday, 23 September (War Diary)
How endless this war seems. On neither side are resources or courage exhausted or full force of attack released. Destruction in London terrible: churches, hospitals, schools, Buckingham Palace, big stores in Oxford Street, Regent Street and the Strand have been hit. Raiders creep through singly at night and do this damage. Mass raids in the daytime are a conspicuous failure. 187 enemy planes shot down a week ago.
I have heard of several cases of lynching of fallen Nazi airmen. This seems to me barbaric, horrible in the extreme. Last week a ship carrying evacuee children to Canada was torpedoed and many children and adults drowned in a stormy sea at night.
Wednesday, 2 October
Constance Oliver was killed when a bomb hit a house she was visiting in Adelaide Road in Swiss Cottage a fortnight ago.104 She was visiting friends two doors from her own house. A direct hit. Her own house was untouched. This news brought the war into sharper perspective.
London, one hears, is a shambles. A friend of Lady Spicer’s is driving an ambulance there. At night it is terrible, bomb craters in the road which they cannot see. No time to pick up the dead or give first aid to the wounded – all they can do is to move the living away from dangerous places as quickly as possible.
Tuesday, 8 October (War Diary)
Red Cross activities in abeyance, and I have withdrawn from duty at the Slough centre. There is never anything to do there, we never get any practice and the people bore me. Jean MacFarlane has just called to say the local Point is closed for the time being. There is infantile paralysis [polio] in the neighbourhood and the headmaster of the prep school where we had our Point has put the school in quarantine.
The sirens are going again. Wail upon wail. How agonising not to know can be.
Wednesday, 16 October
How quickly the year passes. October. Rain. Long nights. On Friday I shall be 31.
Each time I go to London I am astonished at its indestructibility. One can walk down Regent Street in full October sunshine, buy a hat at Dickens and Jones, lunch at Lyons Corner House while sirens wail. Crowds throng the pavements, familiar traffic lines the roads. What is this talk of air raids, devastation, death, and crumbling empire? But we have heard of the massacre in the East End, people made homeless in a night, districts without water, gas rationed, and millions sleeping for safety in the stuffy bowels of London’s underground. Nor does London alone suffer. East, west, north and south the raiders pass over our country, Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool and Brighton. Last week a string of bombs fell across the Common, a land mine exploded in the Beeches not very far from the cottage, cracking one window pane. Our first war scar, of which we are very proud.
Monday, 28 October
We shall discover in time that history is made by people. It is not a series of reigns, battles, and party politics, but an unending story of events created by living people: people moved by emotions, ideals, passions …
We shall learn not that the Duke of Marlborough won the battle of Blenheim in 1704 and so saved Vienna from the Elector of Bavaria and the line of James II from being restored in England, but why this battle was fought. We shall ask questions back and back until we come to the motives that governed the actions of the people. We shall find them – the people, crippled with jealousy and greed and fear; we shall ask why and go seeking further.
I know that every record we now have – the treaties, the letters, the laws, the pictures, verse, books and songs, buildings, clothes, everything – each has its place in the pattern of time, and can be knit into one piece and solve many puzzles. A moving web leading always to tomorrow.
Thursday, 31 October
The winter is here. Yesterday I found the dahlia leaves blackened by frost. And I lifted and stored the tubers and cut the remaining flowers. What shall I be doing and feeling by the time those tubers bloom again? Shall I have a) found a husband, b) had a real love affair, c) written a book of fiction or a good short story for publication, or achieved all three? If I had a husband I could not be more content – only very surprised. I think I should die of astonishment.
Monday, 4 November
Heart of my heart! Six or seven bombs have just fallen it seemed outside my back door. I heard a plane and then zzzoom! … zzzoom! … zzzoom! … one after the other. I felt the ground shaking and dived for the table. We have had a land mine in the Beeches which cracked a sitting room window pane, and five or six bombs at Hedgerly Corner which destroyed two council houses. I heard the soldiers stationed in the woods shouting ‘Lights! These people aren’t blacked out at all!’ It is not easy to keep a slither of light from showing now and then. The times I have pulled and tacked and padded my blackout. God, the silence now … and the darkness. In this quiet, withdrawn spot it is the unexpectedness of such an event that is so terrifying. I would rather be in a city and hear the barrage guns.
Saturday, 16 November
Gus and I were hanging out of the window of a top floor flat in Marylebone High Street from 1 to 3 o’clock in the morning. Plane followed plane over our heads and we got to know almost to the second when they would release their bombs. ‘He’s due to lay!’ Jules would say. And down they would screech – to the right, to the left and far ahead of us. The awful noise of rent air: the scream of metal as it hit the waiting city: the explosion blast and shiver of the wounded earth – Heavens, what a night! Rooftops pallid in the light of a full moon, echoes of gunfire rolling along the still streets, shrapnel sweeping past our window like hailstones, and in the distance a carillon of fireballs, the horizon above the chimney pots coloured like the afterglow of sunset. We didn’t know whether the next
bomb would be ours but it didn’t seem to matter.
I am home again after an exhausting journey. It is night and the planes are once more overhead, the guns in action. Last Monday afternoon a plane swooped out of the clouds just over a bus I was in on the outskirts of Slough and machine-gunned the road. The nights are very long.
Tuesday, 26 November
Joan is on the verge of having an affair with a conscientious objector. He objects to fighting in this war though he went to Spain because he believed in the cause of the Spanish people. He thinks we shall have Fascism here whether we win or lose, financial interests have such a hold upon our country and its institutions. He is prepared to go to prison for his convictions.
Monday, 2 December
I have written so much about Ethel in the past – before Daddy died – that it is worth saying here how she has changed. I don’t know how deep it goes, but all her prickliness and hardness is much tempered. She is lost and unhappy but how much softer and more tolerant. The war has been making her think, ask questions, and want to discuss fundamentals she would never have considered as valid at one time. There no longer seems to be stiff disapproval in her of anything she doesn’t understand or hasn’t experienced. I must be more generous, and talk more and give more freely to Ethel.
Monday, 9 December
A pretty, fading widow serves at the Red Cross Canteen on Monday mornings. She came with the news that London had had another very bad night. ‘Another Coventry, the paper says … The screams of children under the debris … terrible! Hitler is a wicked man. There never has been a wickeder.
‘I would like to hang, draw and quarter him … Really, if only I could get my hands on some of these Germans that come murdering our women and children! We must go on with this war. Did you see that six men in parliament had the nerve to propose making peace terms?’
The village hall is being used as the Canteen. Gas radiators have been installed, a long counter in front of the platform, and a sink and a gas cooker. They have pinned posters on the walls, a bookshelf is nailed along one short wall, there are little tables and chairs round the sides of the room, a ping-pong table, a gramophone, notepaper and periodicals. Soldiers come and go in a fairly steady stream. I like to study them, but if they find you staring they think you are making eyes at them. Most of them are very young.
Saturday, 28 December
Xmas is over. Monica, Nockie and me all crowded into Wee Cottage somehow – a wonderfully elastic cottage. Discussion of Monica’s problems has been the principal topic.105 I find this drama vastly interesting, but I am a little tired of playing spectator to other people’s dramas.
Sunday, 12 January 1941
Nockie and I went to London on Friday – she to stay with Monica at Swiss Cottage and me to stay with Gus and Phyllis in their new flat in Gloucester Place. Jules and I worked most of the time on the novel, he as usual tearing my efforts to pieces.106 But on Saturday afternoon when we went to see Bette Davis and Charles Boyer in All this and Heaven Too at the Warner in Leicester Square. The blitz began in the middle of it. A bomb fell somewhere near and the building rocked.107 Not a soul stirred, there was scarcely even a murmur. When we came out Gus said, ‘I am not given to singing the praises of the British nation but when I see the way we can behave when something like that happens I begin to think we are not such a bad race after all. Abroad there would have been pandemonium.’ Perhaps Londoners are used to these shocks by now and anyway only the type who can stick it are in town now, the rabbits have long since fled, as we in the country know. The excitable, panicky type of foreigner has left too. A visit to London is a tonic.
Gus and I walked back from Leicester Square to Gloucester Place. Guns were going at intervals but no shrapnel was falling in our direction. Fires lit the dusk to East and West of us. We could see one raging at the end of Bond Street from where we stood in Oxford Street.
Nockie and I were delighted to discover, quite by chance, Graham Howe beginning a series of broadcast talks under the name Blueprint. This seems to me very significant – I wonder how they will be received. Priestley’s Postscripts have been published too. The world is stirring. There is hope for the future.
Monday, 13 January
Nockie and I have had an orgy of reading. John Hampden’s Great English Short Stories. Maugham’s Altogether and extracts from his Gentlemen in the Parlour. Some Hazlitt essays. John Steinbeck’s Red Pony. Richard II. Around me now I have Clough Williams-Ellis’ Pleasure of Architecture, J.M. Richards’ Introduction to Modern Architecture, Ramsay Muir’s Future for Democracy. Have finished Idiot’s Delight and Shaw’s Major Barbara and begun John Bull’s Other Island. So much and so much. And so much more to read. One gets mental dyspepsia with it all.
Friday, 23 January
I want, I need a husband. That is so obvious it requires no more comment. Not any man: not any man that I now know; but a Chris or a Colin whom I’ve yet to meet. Thousands of other lonely frustrated females must be feeling the same way – why should I think that I am to be luckier? Because I intend to try to find one. One must tackle the problem positively, gather together one’s assets, accept one’s debits and go forth booted and spurred.
Assets: A fair share of good looks, physical attraction, generous nature and more poise than I once had. Subjects about which I know something and can use in work and conversation: architecture, literature, drama, people and certain places.
Debits: an agonising, thwarting knowledge of my deficiencies and general unworthiness; a confused, badly trained porous mind, a tendency to bolt into silence at the first advance of difficulty.
I must take them, my debits and assets, out into the world, into the battlefield … and there must I learn to fight. I may lose, but at least I shall know I have tried while there is still a chance of winning.
Saturday, 31 January (War Diary)
There has been a sinister lull in enemy attacks on this country since Xmas. Except for the fire blitz on London and short concentrated raids on Cardiff, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Southampton, our nights have been so quiet ‘you could hear a bomb drop’ as David Low told America.108
We are not starving, we are not even underfed, but our usually well-stocked food shops have an empty and anxious air. Cheese, eggs, onions, oranges, luxury fruits and vegetables are practically unobtainable. The fruit shops fill their windows with tinned goods and expensive spring flowers. Housewives are having to queue for essential foods. We live on potatoes, carrots, sprouts, swedes, turnips, artichokes and watercress. We are encouraged to use oatmeal to help out the meat ration which was cut at the beginning of the month and now includes all the offal we could once buy without coupons. Cigarettes and sweets are difficult to get though not impossible if one has time and patience to search the shops. We are warned by statesmen repeatedly that Hitler intends to invade us if he can when the weather improves. Our men are still called up in large numbers. Those under 19 and over 36 and women from 18 to 23 are to register soon.
J.B. Priestley is our spokesman. He has become the representative of British Everyman. I am continually astonished at his popularity. He has even impressed some of my most conservative relatives. He voices the opinions and hope of millions – plainly and with understanding, as one thoughtful man to another. It will come, our better world, though through how much more pain it is impossible to say.
18.
The Big Moment Passionate
Tuesday, 11 February 1941
Re-reading Katharine Mansfield’s journal. Did all artists and intellectuals ignore the last war as she seems to? According to her journal it means nothing to her. She stands aloof from it, accepting it as she might an earthquake that affects her only indirectly, something in which she has no responsibility and no part although she suffers because of it. This was the dangerous attitude to politics we inherited, and is partly why we are at war again. When feeling came to be regarded as improper, the artist was ostracised from society, being forced to live in such unhappy isolation – a
lthough his vision might have saved it had it listened.
Churchill made his most heartening broadcast of the war on Sunday.109 Even the weather cheered up. He is a magnificent war leader. He spoke of invasion as still a grave possibility for which we must all be prepared. I could endure invasion, parachute troops, more bombardment, even mild gas attacks, so long as I do not get caught and detained in London, or am ordered to leave the cottage. Dreadful pictures of a sudden evacuation haunt me. The cottage desolate, the cats crying for good and affection, or gasping their poor last under gas with no one by to help. What is one to do for animals in a gas attack? Instructions for ourselves are vague enough.
I will try to write a description of this house I love so much. There is a road that runs from Farnham Common parallel to the main Beaconsfield–Slough route. It runs through an avenue of old spread beech trees, birch and some sapling oak, and is, roughly, the east boundary to a carefully tended stretch of woodland known as Burnham Beeches. Half way along, as it runs from the Common, it curves round a triangular clearing and there stands a group of redbrick farm cottages converted with restraint into clean, comfortable middle-class homes.
When the cottages were the homes of farm labourers, Wee Cottage was a stable. In Wee Cottage a young woman lives alone, except for a couple of cats to whom she may often be heard talking in tones of deepest affection. Her neighbours see and know little of her. She has frequent women visitors to stay with her for long intervals; men have been seen to come and go during the day, but not many and not often. The sound of a typewriter can be heard when alone. She is seen sometimes going off on her bicycle to the village and returning with the basket laden. She doesn’t dress particularly well or carefully and nearly always wears rather shabby trousers, except when she goes off with a small suitcase for a few days when she puts on a skirt and high heels and appears to have taken a little more trouble with her toilet.
A Notable Woman Page 21