Sunday, September 29th.
A bomb dropped so close I cursed L. for slamming the window. I was writing to Hugh, and the pen jumped from my finger.
Raid still on. It’s like a sheep dog, chasing a fox out of the fold. You see them yapping and biting and then the marauder, dropping a bone, a bomb towards Newhaven, flies. All clear. Bowls. Villagers at their doors. Cold. All now become familiar. I was thinking (among other things) that this is a lazy life. Breakfast in bed. Read in bed. Bath. Order dinner. Out to Lodge. After re-arranging my room (turning table to get the sun: church on right; window left: a new very lovely view) tune up, with cigarette: write till 12: stop: visit L.: look at papers; return; type till 1. Listen in: Lunch. Sore jaw: can’t bite. Read papers. Walk to Southease. Back 3. Gather and arrange apples. Tea. Write a letter. Bowls. Type again. Read Michelet or write here. Cook dinner. Music. Embroidery. 9.30 read (or sleep) till 11.30. Bed. Compare with the old London day. Three afternoons someone coming. One night, dinner party. Saturday a walk. Thursday shopping. Tuesday going to tea with Nessa. One City walk. Telephone ringing. L. to meetings. K. M. or Robson bothering. That was an average week: with Friday to Monday here. I think, now we’re marooned, I ought to cram in a little more reading. Yet why? A happy, a very free, and disengaged - a life that rings from one simple melody to another. Yes: why not enjoy this after all those years of the other? Yet I compare with Miss Perkins’ day.
Wednesday, October 2nd.
Ought I not to look at the sunset rather than write this? A flush of red in the blue; the haystack on the marsh catches the glow; behind me, the apples are red in the trees. L. is gathering them. Now a plume of smoke goes from the train under Caburn. And all the air a solemn stillness holds. Till 8.30 when the cadaverous twanging in the sky begins; the planes going to London. Well it’s an hour still to that. Cows feeding. The elm tree sprinkling its little leaves against the sky. Our pear tree swagged with pears; and the weathercock above the triangular church tower above it. Why try again to make the familiar catalogue, from which something escapes. Should I think of death? Last night a great heavy plunge of bomb under the window. So near we both started. A plane had passed dropping this fruit. We went on to the terrace. Trinkets of stars sprinkled and glittering. All quiet. The bombs dropped on Itford Hill.
There are two by the river, marked with white wooden crosses, still unburst. I said to L.: I don’t want to die yet. The chances are against it. But they’re aiming at the railway and the power works. They get closer every time. Caburn was crowned with what looked like a settled moth, wings extended - a Messerschmitt it was, shot down on Sunday. I had a nice gallop this morning with Coleridge - Sara. I’m to make £20 with two articles. Books still held up. And Spiras free, and Margot1 writes to say ‘I did it’ and adds ‘a long letter all about yourself and what you believe’. What do I? Can’t at the moment remember. Oh I try to imagine how one’s killed by a bomb. I’ve got it fairly vivid - the sensation: but can’t see anything but suffocating nonentity following after. I shall think - oh I wanted another 10 years - not this - and shan’t, for once, be able to describe it. It - I mean death; no, the scrunching and scrambling, the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain: the process of putting out the light - painful? Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so. Then a swoon; a drain; two or three gulps attempting consciousness - and then dot dot dot.
Sunday, October 6th.
I snatch this page with Anreps and Ruth Beresford imminent to say - what? Will it ever seem strange that L. and I walking on the marsh first look at a bomb crater: then listen to the German drone above: then I take two paces nearer L„ prudently deciding that two birds had better be killed with one stone? They got Lewes at last yesterday.
Saturday, October 12th.
I would like to pack my day rather fuller: most reading must be munching. If it were not treasonable to say so, a day like this is almost too - I won’t say happy: but amenable. The tune varies, from one nice melody to another. All is played (today) in such a theatre. Hills and fields; I can’t stop looking; October blooms; brown plough; and the fading and freshening of the marsh. Now the mist comes up. And one thing’s ‘pleasant’ after another: breakfast, writing, walking, tea, bowls, reading, sweets, bed. A letter from Rose about her day. I let it almost break mine. Mine recovers. The globe rounds again. Behind it - oh yes. But I was thinking I must intensify. Partly Rose. Partly I’m terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity. In London, now, or two years ago, I’d be owling through the streets. More pack and thrill than here. So I must supply that - how? I think book inventing. And there’s always the chance of a rough wave: no, I won’t once more turn my magnifying glass on that. Scraps of memoirs come so coolingly to my mind. Wound up by those three little articles (one sent today) I unwound a page about Thoby. Fish forgotten. I must invent a dinner. But it’s all so heavenly free and easy - L. and I alone. I’ve my rug on hand too. Another pleasure. And all the clothes drudgery, Sybil drudgery, society drudgery obliterated. But I want to look back on these war years as years of positive something or other. L. gathering apples. Sally barks. I imagine a village invasion. Queer the contraction of life to the village radius. Wood bought enough to stock many winters. All our friends are isolated over winter fires. Chance of interruption small now. No cars. No petrol. Trains uncertain. And we on our lovely free autumn island. But I will read Dante, and for my trip through English literature book. I was glad to see the C.R. all spotted with readers at the Free Library to which I think of belonging.
Thursday, October 17th.
Our private luck has turned. John says Tavistock Square is no more. If that’s so, I need no longer wake in the night thinking the Wolves luck has taken a downward turn. For the first time they were rash and foolish. Second, an urgent request from Harpers Bazaar for an article or story. So that tree, far from being barren, as I thought, is fruit bearing. And I’ve spent I don’t know how much brain nerve earning 30 gns. with three little articles. But I say, the effort has its reward; for I’m worth, owing to that insect like conscience and diligence, £120 to the U.S.A. A perfect day - a red admiral feasting on an apple day. A red rotten apple lying on the grass; butterfly on it, beyond a soft blue warm coloured down and field. Everything dropping through soft air to rest on the earth. The light is now fading. Soon the siren: then the twang of plucked strings... But it’s almost forgettable still; the nightly operation on the tortured London. Mabel wants to leave it. L. sawing wood. The funny little cross on the church shows against the downs. We go up tomorrow. A mist is rising; a long fleece of white on the marshes. I must black out. I had so much to say. I am filling my mind slowly with Elizabethans: that is to say letting my mind feed like the Red Admiral - the siren, just as I had drawn the curtains. Now the unpleasant part begins. Who’ll be killed tonight? Not us, I suppose. One doesn’t think of that - save as a quickener. Indeed I often think our Indian summer was deserved: after all those London years. I mean, this quickens it. Every day seen against a very faint shade of bodily risk. And I returned to V.H. today; and am to transfer my habitual note taking I think - what I do on odd days - to random reading. The idea is, accumulate notes. Oh and I’ve mastered the iron curtain for my brain. Down I shut when I’m tied tight. No reading, no writing. No claims, no ‘must’ I walk - yesterday in the rain over the Piddinghoe down - a new line.
Sunday, October 20th.
The most - what? - impressive, no, that’s not it - sight in London on Friday was the queue, mostly children with suitcases, outside Warren Street tube. This was about 11.30. We thought they were evacuees waiting for a bus. But there they were, in a much longer line, with women, men, more bags, blankets, sitting still at 3. Lining up for the shelter in the night’s raid - which came of course. Thus, if they left the tube at 6 (a bad raid on Thursday) they were back again at 11. So to Tavistock Square. With a sigh of relief saw a heap of ruins. Three houses, I should say, gone. Basement all rubble. Only relics an old basket chair (bought in Fitzroy Square da
ys) and Penman’s board To Let. Otherwise bricks and wood splinters. One glass door in the next house hanging. I could just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties. The hotel not touched. So to Meek. All again. Litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster powder. Miss T. and Miss E. in trousers, overalls and turbans, sweeping. I noted the flutter of Miss T.’s hands: the same as Miss Perkins’. Of course friendly and hospitable in the extreme. Jaunty jerky talk. Repetitions. So sorry we hadn’t had her card... to save you the shock. It’s awful... Upstairs she propped a leaning bookcase for us. Books all over dining room floor. In my sitting room glass all over Mrs Hunter’s cabinet - and so on. Only the drawing room with windows almost whole. A wind blowing though. I began to hunt out diaries. What could we salvage in this little car? Darwin and the silver, and some glass and china.
Then lunch off tongue, in the drawing room. John came. I forgot The Voyage of the Beagle. No raid the whole day. So about 2.30 drove home.
Exhilaration at losing possessions - save at times I want my books and chairs and carpets and beds. How I worked to buy them - one by one - and the pictures. But to be free of Meek., would now be a relief. Almost certainly it will be destroyed - and our queer tenancy of that sunny flat over... In spite of the move and the expense, no doubt, if we save our things we shall be cheaply quit - I mean, if we’d stayed at 52 and lost all our possessions. But it’s odd - the relief at losing possessions. I should like to start life, in peace, almost bare - free to go anywhere. Can we be rid of Meek, though?
Friday, November 1st.
A gloomy evening, spiritually: alone over the fire - and by way of conversation, apply to this too stout volume. My Times book for the week is E. F. Benson’s last autobiography - in which he tried to rasp himself clean of his barnacles. I learn there the perils of glibness. I too can flick phrases. He said, ‘One must discover new depths in oneself.’ Well I don’t bother about that here. I will note, though, the perils of glibness. And add, considering how I feel in my fingers the weight of every word, even of a review, need I feel guilty?
Sunday, November 3rd.
Yesterday the river burst its banks. The marsh is now a sea with gulls on it. L. and I walked down to the hanger. Water broken, white, roaring, pouring down through the gap by the pill-box. A bomb exploded last month; old Thompsett told me it took a month to mend. For some reason (bank weakened Everest says by pill-box) it burst again. Today the rain is tremendous. And gale. As if dear old nature were kicking up her heels. Down to the hanger again. Flood deeper and fuller. Bridge cut off. Water made road impassable by the farm. So all my marsh walks are gone - until? Another break in the bank. It comes over in a cascade: the sea is unfathomable. Yes, now it has crept up round Botten’s haystack - the haystack in the floods - and is at the bottom of our field. Lovely if the sun were out. Medieval in the mist tonight. I am happy, quit of my money-making; back at P.H. writing in spurts; covering, I’m glad to say, a small canvas. Oh the freedom
Tuesday, November 5th.
The haystack in the floods is of such incredible beauty... When I look up I see all the marsh water. In the sun deep blue, gulls caraway seeds: snowstorms: Atlantic floor: yellow islands: leafless trees: red cottage roofs. Oh may the flood last for ever. A virgin lip: no bungalows; as it was in the beginning. Now it’s lead grey with the red leaves in front. Our inland sea. Caburn is become a cliff. I was thinking: the University fills shells like H.A.L.F. and Trevelyan. They are their product. Also: Never have I been so fertile. Also: the old hunger for books is on me: the childish passion. So that I am very ‘happy’ as the saying is: and excited by P.H. This diary shorthand comes in useful. A new style - to mix.
Sunday, November 17th.
I observe, as a curious trifle in mental history - I should like to take naturalist’s notes - human naturalist’s notes - that it is the rhythm of a book that, by running in the head, winds one into a ball; and so jades one. The rhythm of P.H. (the last chapter) became so obsessive that I heard it, perhaps used it, in every sentence I spoke. By reading the notes for memoirs I broke this up. The rhythm of the notes is far freer and looser. Two days of writing in that rhythm has completely refreshed me. So I go back to P.H. tomorrow. This I think is rather profound.
Saturday, November 23rd.
Having this moment finished the Pageant - or Poyntz Hall? - (begun perhaps April 1938) my thoughts turn well up, to write the first chapter of the next book (nameless) Anon, it will be called. The exact narrative of this last morning should refer to Louie’s interruption, holding a glass jar, in whose thin milk was a pat of butter. Then I went in with her to skim the milk off: then I took the pat and showed it to Leonard. This was a moment of great household triumph.
I am a little triumphant about the book. I think if s an interesting attempt in a new method. I think it’s more quintessential than the others. More milk skimmed off. A richer pat, certainly a fresher than that misery The Years. I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page. This book was only (I must note) written at intervals when the pressure was at its highest, during the drudgery of Roger. I think I shall make this my scheme: if the new book can be made to serve as daily drudgery - only I hope to lessen that - anyhow it will be a supported on fact book - then I shall brew some moments of high pressure. I think of taking my mountain top - that persistent vision - as a starting point. Then see what comes. If nothing, it won’t matter.
Sunday, December 22nd.
How beautiful they were, those old people - I mean father and mother - how simple, how clear, how untroubled. I have been dipping into old letters and father’s memoirs. He loved her: oh and was so candid and reasonable and transparent - and had such a fastidious delicate mind, educated, and transparent. How serene and gay even, their life reads to me: no mud; no whirlpools. And so human - with the children and the little hum and song of the nursery. But if I read as a contemporary I shall lose my child’s vision and so must stop. Nothing turbulent; nothing involved; no introspection.
Sunday, December 29th.
There are moments when the sail flaps. Then, being a great amateur of the art of life, determined to suck my orange, off, like a wasp if the blossom I’m on fades, as It did yesterday - I ride across the downs to the cliffs. A roll of barbed wire is hooped on the edge. I rubbed my mind brisk along the Newhaven road. Shabby old maids buying groceries, in that desert road with the villas; in the wet. And Newhaven gashed. But tire the body and the mind sleeps. All desire to write diary here has flagged. What is the right antidote? I must sniff round. I think Mme de Sévigné. Writing to be a daily pleasure. I detest the hardness of old age - I feel it. I rasp. I’m tart.
The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,
The heart less bounding at emotion new.
And hope, once crush’d, less quick to spring again.
I actually opened Matthew Arnold and copied these lines. While doing so, the idea came to me that why I dislike, and like, so many things idiosyncratically now, is because of my growing detachment from the hierarchy, the patriarchy. When Desmond praises East Coker, and I am jealous, I walk over the marsh saying, I am I: and must follow that furrow, not copy another. That is the only justification for my writing, living. How one enjoys food now: I make up imaginary meals.
1941.
Wednesday, January 1st.
On Sunday night, as I was reading about the Great fire, in a very accurate detailed book, London was burning. Eight of my city churches destroyed, and the Guildhall. This belongs to last year. This first day of the new year has a slice of wind like a circular saw. This book was salvaged from 37: I brought it down from the shop, with a handful of Elizabethans for my book, now called Turning a Page. A psychologist would see that the above was written with someone, and a dog, in the room. To add in private: I think I will be less verbose here perhaps - but what does it matter, writing too many pages. No printer to consider. No public.
Thursday, January 9th.<
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A blank. All frost. Still frost. Burning white. Burning blue. The elms red. I did not mean to describe, once more, the downs in snow; but it came. And I can’t help even now turning to look at Asheham down, red, purple, dove blue grey, with the cross so melodramatically against it. What is the phrase I always remember - or forget. Look your last on all things lovely. Yesterday Mrs X. was buried upside down. A mishap. Such a heavy woman, as Louie put it, feasting spontaneously upon the grave. Today she buries the Aunt whose husband saw the vision at Seaford. Their house was bombed by the bomb we heard early one morning last week. And L. is lecturing and arranging the room. Are these the things that are interesting? that recall: that say Stop, you are so fair? Well, all life is so fair, at my age. I mean, without much more of it I suppose to follow. And t’other side of the hill there’ll be no rosy blue red snow. I am copying P.H.
Wednesday, January 15th.
Parsimony may be the end of this book. Also shame at my own verbosity, which comes over me when I see the 20 it is - books shuffled together in my room. Who am I ashamed of? Myself reading them. Then Joyce is dead: Joyce about a fortnight younger than I am. I remember Miss Weaver, in wool gloves, bringing Ulysses in typescript to our tea table at Hogarth House. Roger I think sent her. Would we devote our lives to printing it? The indecent pages looked so incongruous: she was spinsterly, buttoned up. And the pages reeled with indecency. I put it in the drawer of the inlaid cabinet. One day Katherine Mansfield came, and I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then suddenly said, But there’s something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature. He was about the place, but I never saw him. Then I remember Tom in Ottoline’s room at Garsington saying - it was published then - how could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter? He was, for the first time in my knowledge, rapt, enthusiastic. I bought the blue paper book, and read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, and then again with long lapses of intense boredom. This goes back to a pre-historic world. And now all the gents are furbishing up their opinions, and the books, I suppose, take their place in the long procession.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 593