Mrs Mile’s Diary

The wireless has just said, speaking of football: ‘Let us hope the crisis will pass, and the grand old game be more popular than ever.’

I feel there is no hope left – and that we are in for the most terrible years.

A hot, fearfully sunny day. The news is vague. Aeroplanes roar over. Bey Hyde comes in to ask me if she can put through a trunk call to Leamington Spa. She tells me she has lost her job through all this, at her fashionable town school. She must find another pensionable job.

Later on in the bank a young cashier like a half-fledged sparrow advises a brand new customer: ‘If we close at the outbreak of war, it is only for, say, a day.’

I intervene to tell her that the moratorium before the last war was for four days and I advise her to get money now.

The maid Nancy’s wedding is postponed. Her Argyll and Sutherland⁷ can’t get leave from Fife. The wedding cake is finished and is iced, the pale blue dress ready. Poor Nancy.

I have forgotten what it is like to read a book. I am glad to work and to think; think hard of how to go through each day.

Nancy’s fiancé is guarding the Tay bridge. Her wedding cake, really a lovely one framed in sugar lilies, is being stored at the Guildford bakers till the wedding can take place.

Barbara⁸ writes: ‘I notice, talking to people here, that everyone seems very tired and sleepy in the daytime, and wakeful at night, and that seems to me to be the sort of natural adjustment in anticipation of things to come.’

She tells a story of an old maid in her village who was overheard talking to herself. ‘Hitler thinks he’ll get everything (stamps her foot) but he won’t. I’ll see he doesn’t.’

The little dark-eyed would-be bride is going about her work rather sadly today, with a wistful look. However, there seems a slightly hopeful pause in the Germans’ onslaught. Why does it not all begin?

I hear that a certain lady here is offering dachshund puppies for nothing. There was quite a serious letter in The Times yesterday from a famous author, begging people not to be unkind to German dogs!

I feel so exhausted I can hardly write this, and it is hot again. I can see on the allotments little groups of men talking interminably about Adolf.

Ella McR. writes that 1,600 children from Glasgow are being evacuated there, and she is to have four girls. But nobody in these factory towns is thinking much about it. The women of England are depressed to death over the idea of the shared kitchen, and the children unknown. I saw Miss B. this morning, who confessed she had agreed to nothing more than two teachers in her little, comfy square house with its Chippendale chairs and soft pink carpets, and her old brown and white cups. She ‘could never afford to get together such things again if the marauding mob broke them up’, and seems to see a vision of lonely old age ‘in a back attic room, if crowds come down and storm us’.

The sky is rosy, and pale brooding grey clouds are over Netley Park,⁹ where the mansion is being got ready for the refugee babies and mothers.

Just heard that the evacuation of children is to begin tomorrow. Seventy are to arrive by buses here about 10.30. The evacuation notices are most inappropriately given out by BBC young men, who know little what despair enters the hearts of various women expecting the strangers and afraid to have them. Men just haven’t the foggiest.

The Ministry of Health produced a series of emotive appeals in English and Welsh newspapers, asking for people to take in evacuees.

Photograph © IWM PST15108

All hope of peace seems gone tonight. The Reserves are called up – every category. Only my old man remains, a trained soldier of many years service, peacefully smoking his pipe, and bricklaying his dugout.

We have shrunk into three rooms now, and the bedrooms are all ready for the refugees who with admirable sangfroid refrain from coming.

A cordial invitation to come down to Picket Post, where the hundred windows of the school have all dark blinds.¹⁰ One longs for friends at this dreadful hour; dear friends to be close at hand.

Robin calls me. ‘Come and listen!’ I fly in, to hear a long set of Hitler’s conditions and terms for Poland. The first is the unconditional surrendering of Danzig. We are surprised, and there is no explanation. Go to sleep feeling that this is unsatisfactory.

The morning papers tell us that these terms were submitted to Poland very hurriedly, and without adequate time for the wretched country to cope with them. Robin strolls down the village at ten a.m. and returns to say that he hears that Germany has begun hostilities in Poland. I can hardly believe it. I sit at my writing-table trying to fill up income tax forms, and I accept the announcement with incredulity.

Later it dawns on me, and the first sensation is that of intense relief. Hitler must be shown that his policy is a menace. I think immediately of my sons, of Harry and Basil.

Harry (standing) and Basil as schoolboys

Photograph courtesy of Mary Wetherell

I write at 9.30 at night on the most fateful evening. We are blacked out, seriously and properly tonight, and it’s very sultry, and hard to bear the closely-pulled curtains. The BBC is instructing Terriers to report immediately.

One hundred children arrived here at one, instead of ten a.m., and were duly sorted. Fancy, old Mrs C. takes ten in her large empty house at the top of the hill. The children are very popular – Nancy is delighted with three little brothers parked on her mother. They hailed a worm in the garden by a delighted and awed exclamation: ‘Coo! See that snake!’

Madge this morning went to the school at nine and filled the Girl Guides’ palliasses with straw from Netley barn, and motored round, distributing blankets to cottages that had not a supply. Then a consignment of mothers and babies arrived, and were carted about and dolloped quite correctly, according to plan.

This afternoon my boarders called from London to tell me that their Harley Street house is much disturbed, as all the specialists are getting attached to hospitals and will not be using their consulting rooms in the West End. One great man said he just couldn’t pay his quarter’s rent as his patients wouldn’t pay up. I fear Joan will lose very heavily on this house of hers, which she has on lease from the Crown and pays for through specialists’ rents.¹¹

A peaceful hush lies over all England. It seems incredible that we should have to leave our gardens, full of the dying fires of red phlox and yellow rudbeckia, to listen to this string of injunctions from the BBC about lighting restrictions, conscription and so on.

Dr S. came to see Edie last night, and said: ‘Oh, I’ve had a jolly day, finishing up with sacking the cook. I found that she had been calling the Austrian housemaid “You dirty German”, so I said “You’ll pack up your things NOW and go.”’

Basil wrote that he could not get away from Netley, and asked us to send his gas mask.

The Prime Minister, in the most delightfully English voice, told us just after eleven that we were at war.

It seems incredible! As I write, the sad day has gone by. The evening sun is glowing on the garden, and Edie’s border shows her marigolds still beautifully fresh and golden. The low voices of the tenants, one of them the exhausted billeter, float up.¹² Robin is round at a cottage getting quarters for Hoffman’s car. Our visitors arrive tomorrow. For how long?

Early this morning Madge reported that news had come from London that a great increase in the billeting lists was expected, and that compulsory billeting must begin at once. She asked me to go and watch over a tearful neighbour, an old widow, solitary in a large house, frightened of what might be coming to her.

Robin and I went in a hurry over to the loft; he said that ten soldiers might be billeted there comfortably. Who was to move the billiard table? ‘Easily done,’ was his calm reply.

How one longs for all this NOT to have happened at this deceiving time of year! In no time the autumn winds will be howling and sobbing and moaning about, and we shall be darkening windows early. I wish this whole house were let to some reliable people, that the tenants were safe in Grantown, that Robin and I were safe in Rhynie, he tilling the land, and I with Mildred¹³ and the twins, brushing up my knowledge in a calmer air.

My neighbour, Mrs F., says a blazing light comes from my window. This is terrible! I thought it was perfectly screened. Robin is going round to gaze tonight. I have a baby bulb above my head, tiny, so that I can just read. I think it must be the moon on the glass.

The King spoke on the radio, curiously slow and sad and with much lack of vitality. Better far that the Queen had spoken.

I dread tomorrow, with all its guests and adjustments. How I wish I were near some friend I really love just now. The children from town are not coming till late, so the village hall is rapidly prepared. I go past, and see mattresses and blankets airing outside. Many Londonish figures go by pushing prams, and the cottagers are well pleased with their guests, and reckon to make money out of the eight-and-sixpence each. One of our greatest women authorities on Africa sits checking in allowances at the school. What this war is going to cost the country! Mothers get five shillings a week allowance and three shillings for each child, and free billets.

H. and M. arrived hot and tired about teatime. They had been up two hours last night owing to an air raid signal; it was a false alarm. No raids here yet, and the village is dreaming in quiet apparently. But inside Drydown House Mrs C. must be contending with her ten children. ‘I took too much on, Mrs Miles,’ said the gallant old lady, pounding up the long sunny hill today.

Sara writes that the billeting arrangements in Weymouth have been very faulty. Children alone were expected. As they sat assembling gas masks in the schoolroom, about one hundred mothers laden with children, infants and impedimenta were suddenly thrust upon them. In dark and rain they took them round, begging and imploring people to have them. Much misery.

More about the dreadful sinking of the Athenia in the papers, and the survivors’ own stories on the wireless. Women baling out water from the lifeboats with their shoes. Terrible!

Into Guildford, where a noticeable air of strain and excitement could be seen in the sad faces of the shoppers. Odd, in the library, to see that masses of the books on ‘Will Hitler March?’ are standing unread and unopened. That is all over now. But there is an ominous lull.

Where are our men going from Aldershot? The FANYs¹⁵ are in great demand there, worked to death by the Army Service Corps, and proud to be so worked.

Helen’s tiny London refugee, aged two, was in the car with her in Guildford today. She bought it some new underclothes, as its trousseau was infinitesimal. When her husband returned this evening, the babe picked up its new pantaloons and said in a tone of great self-complacency, ‘Mine’, and then, waving its vest, ‘Mine’.

In Guildford, about a third of the people were carrying gas masks. Mrs F. at the Shetland Shop says her business has completely ceased.

Half our scheduled children have not arrived yet and probably never will. The mothers billeted at the Rectory want to use the Aga stove, and are driven out of the kitchen, so some have gone home.

Madge has gone night-driving – a rehearsal I suppose for ARP.¹⁶ People are having their cars edged with white paint along the footboards and mudguards.

A hot, glorious night. There were silver wheels of spiders’ webs on the mauve daisies and white roses this morning.

Mrs M. (an alien)¹⁷ went to the police station in Guildford to register, and was told that she must not go further than five miles from Shere without getting a permit EACH time from this office. As she had to have her photo taken, she can’t go to London tomorrow to see a solicitor about her doctors in Harley Street leaving their practices.

Apples keep falling, rosy and green ones, and the London children are asked in to pick them up.

I went to buy some fish for dinner, and was told that there was none, so am opening a tin of tongue.

Greatly cheered and fortified by a letter from Harry, all kindness and sympathy for us.

After breakfast a sobbing sound rent the air, and we thought it was a warning of an air raid, but apparently it was an All Clear. The milkman explained that there had been two raids at Aldershot. I gather, however, that we shall not be told much by the authorities, who are studiously vague about it in tonight’s report.

Mother writes inviting us to come to Scotland.¹⁸ I wish I could, but it is not possible at present.

The brother of a woman here rang up from Blackdown to say he was going to France tomorrow, and must see a relative before going. It is all over the village – very wrong of him to give it away.

We have sent for a petrol licensing book. Cars are not about Guildford now so much. The shelves of the local grocers are emptying fast. There seems no authentic news in the paper; it is to be a hush-hush war.

My guest (American) enquires blandly if I am not leading my normal life just now? If not, why not? With the whole of life darkened and apprehensive! But she has no sons – or ties.

The newspapers are almost all smaller today. I think the British Weekly¹⁹ may die.

Fetched Basil at about three-thirty. A Queen’s man²⁰ told Robin at the crowded station that they were off to France next day. Basil looked pale but smiling; it was just three weeks since we had left him at Netley, when no war had started and peace still brooded (though very uneasily) on Southampton Water.

Basil dislikes the red tape and bad organisation of the Army hospital – so many forms, such lack of co-ordination – yet he enjoys the work of his wards. He is very anxious now about his future, where he will go, where he will be sent – so long as he can get some work of a medical nature. Ambulances, field hospitals, trains and so on are all being assembled at Netley; many doctors gathering under canvas.

The brilliant heat continues. ‘There is nothing to look forward to, and nothing to talk about save war,’ says Madge disconsolately.

Gosh, how nervous we all feel at this intolerable thing! The government has announced that they will prepare for a three-year war. I should say the nerves of our fliers would not stand it for so long as that.

‘Do not listen to too much news,’ says Basil. ‘No evening paper for me.’

Today I went to London by car with Joan, the loveliest drive in sunshine. As we came up to the top of Putney Hill I caught sight of the most attractive lot of silver balloons floating above London.²¹ I was extremely struck by them, there were so many against the serene sky of September blue. It seemed all day, as I went about town, that they were on active guard, like silvery birds of friendliness.

At first we went to the police station in Battersea, which was so heavily sandbagged it was hard to squeeze into the doorway. There Joan tried to get a permit for her housekeeper to come back to London. In vain: regulations for the unnaturalised²² are very stiff in this war.

The streets in London are distinctly better than they were, vastly relieved of traffic. No Lifeguards on duty in Whitehall. Charles I’s statue not sandbagged, nor Eros in the Circus, nor David at Hyde Park Corner. On I went, under the silver balloons, to buy a winter coat which was got very easily at Swan and Edgars, which was almost empty. Strange to glance in at the great evening dress department, all pretty models, with not one soul buying.

‘Silvery birds of friendliness . . .’ Barrage balloons being built at the Dunlop Balloon Factory, Manchester.

Photograph © IWM HU36241

I felt this afternoon that I was at last resting a bit. Since the war started there has been no rest at all, only misery and agitation and struggling to make things go right.

The women of the village seem keen on NOT sending their billeted children to a canteen proposed by the ladies of Shere, where sixpenny dinners may be served.²³

Went to tea with the Kennings; they have a little London school installed in their charming house. E., the artist, gives up her studio for children’s beds and sleeps fitfully above it on her balcony. Jean, the musician, gives up her music room as a classroom. Mrs K. finds the catering for about sixteen people very difficult.

Joy Annett told me of driving unexpected mothers and children to cottages on Albury Heath, of the tears, and the reluctance to stay, and the horrified London glance round a tiny cottage room: ‘Oh, I can never stop here.’ Joy regards the dirty condition of the children as most reprehensible, and thinks we must mould the world afresh.

In the evening Mr Struben, the South African, calls. He has withdrawn his house from the market: he, at about seventy-five, ‘cannot run away from England to my native land’. He is a warden and is short of ARP masks, and perplexed by the demands of visitors for them. It is a funny war: strange faces, people with their masks, often in very clumsy receptacles, walking about, the young women from town with prams looking very cross and worried.

Here is an extract from the evening paper about the terror going on every moment in Poland:

Behind the front, farm after farm, village after village, is in flames. Where shops are still intact long lines of Poles stand before them waiting for food . . . As the Army advances columns of Labour Service youths come up in the wake to repair roads and bridges. Hurriedly they impress all available labour, especially Jewish labour. Under their charge long rows of aged Jews with black beards and astrakhan hats are seen at work in the streets. Often they have no picks or shovels and have to dig with their bare hands.

The permit has come, and my visitor Minna can go back to her loved cooking stove in Battersea! There are great packings; the beds are left here with pillows and six blankets.

Basil came. We had gone to Guildford, a changed place; many soldiers, many refugee families turning into Woolworths, which had made itself ugly like the rest with strips of brown paper over its windows to guard against the Grand Assault.

Some hospital units have gone to France from Netley already, and troops carried past Basil’s window, on the broad river in the dark, without lights, slipping away from the land of comfort and home to the Unknown.

We think cars will become very cheap. All is so black at night, people won’t go out, or pay the motor tax to keep a car so severely rationed.

Rang up May Browne.²⁴ She says she is getting on well at her FANY work: ‘The officers are so civil to us all, they speak to me as if I were Queen of England.’ She thinks the war will last two-and-a-half years for certain.

Poland has collapsed, and the Soviet men are motoring across it freely, annexing it, I suppose, as they go. Jews are being executed in large numbers.

It’s the second day of the canteen in our village: cold beef and hot suet pudding for the children – so many tiny, who all, in the most distressing manner, carry the gas masks that seem almost as big as they are. This sight moves me more than any other in ‘Hitler’s War’; and also the sight of Clive Modin moved me yesterday, the young man nervously drinking sherry, and explaining to me that he had always had Liberal principles and disliked so utterly and entirely the idea of going into the Army. He is twenty-five, volunteered, and is a Royal Fusilier – to his own amazement – and about to be trained in camp.

Even small children, such as these evacuees, learned to carry their gas masks with them everywhere.

Photograph © IWM D824

Thrilled by stories of the bravery on the sinking aircraft carrier, Courageous, but how bad to lose over 500 lives!²⁶ Hitler says he will drop five bombs for every one of ours.

Bernard Shaw²⁷ writes an excellent letter on Russia invading Poland . . . he feels Hitler will quarrel with Stalin and lose all.

Lovely letter from Harry in Singapore this morning, by air mail. I have replied by air – long may this way last!

Felt rather happier today, everything is quiet, and though there were some noticeably worried faces in Guildford, the shops were cheerful.

Robin gave me a waterproof case for my gas mask to sling over my reluctant shoulder.

The bank cashier is nearly done in by hours of acting as fireman, watchman at headquarters in Guildford, and by masses of work. Grocer harassed – will I mind having only one pound of sugar today, very short – Heinz things likely to go short too. ‘All those books,’ said the newsagent, pointing to the usual conglomeration of magazines and weeklies in gay covers on his counter, ‘will stop at the end of the month. They will have to be ordered separately.’ Our neighbours with the viola fields wonder what to do, as their flowers are now not ordered by London. So it goes on.

Heard from Barbara this morning that she has been to London to meet several friends, all thrown out of work by this war and in a financial mess, specially authors. One is a famous children’s writer.

Little dark-eyed Nancy is to go up to be married in Scotland to her Argyll and Sutherland Highlander who is to be there another few weeks. Her fare is paid for by her kind employers downstairs.

Joy Annett came, and I told her about the FANYs. She is very keen on joining up, and is to go to Aldershot tomorrow to try. You have to sign on for the duration of the war and to promise to go anywhere they send you. She is so brave, charming and pretty. I do wish her well.

Mrs K. said on the phone that the West End is full of soldiers billeted: Cadogan Square is known as Barrack Square now, and it is not safe for a woman to walk there at night; the black-out is desperately difficult.

A lugubrious letter from Sara – no men to repair anything; broken glass stays broken glass.

Warsaw holds out but is being shot to pieces. German machine guns are even firing at the food queues. How lucky then are we to be here this fair afternoon of September going about our lawful occasions.

When will the Germans attack London by air? Oh when? Many offices are returning there full of hope.

Went to see Miss B. in bed ill. Mrs Coppinger was there; her husband, a naval officer long retired, is minesweeping off Harwich. She confessed she cried over the Russian down pillows on her beds ruined by the little billeting children. The woman’s husband, a painter from Fulham, came and stayed three days, smoking cigarettes in her drawing-room calmly, ‘and never getting up while I was standing’, cries the pretty, injured creature who had given her bathroom to the strangers.

The cottagers are only now discovering that there is no money in billeting and considerable unrest is reported.

I asked Robin last night why the Poles in Warsaw, now fallen, held out so long. He said ‘Hate.’

Met Margaret Bray, who is a land girl and was milking cows at four-thirty in moonlight this morning. Her hostess, who is chairman of a Sudeten refugee committee²⁸ was rung up today to be informed that a) they wanted more pillowcases, and b) some felt so miserable that they even contemplated suicide.

The papers reveal what a vast CHAOS this war is, people underpaid, overpaid, people demanding, people wailing, people out of work and likely to be; poets, authors, journalists, artists, actors; household women in vast demand, all cooks bright as rubies and as rare, gardeners longed-for. Meanwhile the Misses Drew, old and undaunted ladies here, have bought a tiny new Peke, who rolls round reproachful eyes at them, and at all cats.

We have filled in National Registration cards,²⁹ and I have called myself a journalist.

The second month of the War. Rang up May Browne to be told that her army of women soldiers at Aldershot were doing well. A good lot; but there are constantly casualties with girls finding the work too much, etc., so she thinks our friend Joy Annett may soon get in.

Churchill made a capital speech on the wireless, finely phrased. He remarked that Hitler had started the war when he wished, but he will not finish it when he wishes. The Germans are to march through Warsaw in triumph. What a march through desolation and dead bodies! They say the city is such a ghastly ruin that even the German airmen reconnoitering above are white-faced and silent.

Waited ages in the bank – and in the grocers. A man asking for a bottle of brandy was willing to pay the fantastic price asked – there is little left.

Illustrating American sympathy with us, here is a letter received from my best American friend at Nantucket:

‘Both B. and I had bad emotional effects from that awful week of uncertainty. We sat with our ears glued to our wireless snatching at any straw which might mean that war was not upon you. We neither ate nor slept and when the final news came, we both caved in.’

Everywhere the pace of life slackens in the country. We are going to buy pony traps and horses, we are going to stay at home every evening and get to know our neighbours better. What shall we be like at the end of the war? Poor, and possibly quarrelling among ourselves.

Yesterday evening listened to the German wireless in English. A good deal about the English and their queer insistence on war.

Tonight falls the first autumnal rain, bleak, ice-cold, and the ache for our men in France begins to be felt. Robin is telling me how he often lay out in his sleeping bag all night when they were moving, up at Ypres, ‘but took no harm’.

Madge found London much more lively than when I was up. A run on warm clothes. She could not get any vests at Lewis’s, and the overall department was besieged by war workers, all very matey while trying them on.

As I write I hear that ‘ten newsreel cinemas will keep open until ten o’clock in London now’.

I heard Hitler’s speech at two o’clock. I was not in the least impressed; the only thing that really was of profound interest was his peevishness, and the absence of any exultation in his words. His gabbled offer of peace I feel we cannot entertain. I wonder if we shall put forward any counter-proposals.³⁰

How terrible this pause is. Hitler’s speech has made everybody very miserable. A shadow moves nearer. Old Mr Struben is actually roofing in his rafters with a layer of corrugated iron, as a protection against bombs.

Basil came yesterday, from Netley. He thinks his orders will arrive this week, owing to a note he had from the War Office.

May B. spoke of the marching away of the troops. Hundreds have left Aldershot. The strange thing is that they don’t march away with song and band, waving of flags and hands, flowers flung at them or tears shed. Not a bit of it! Quietly they slog down the ugly streets of this most hideous of towns, and the maidens in khaki, thick in the streets, often turn to look in at the shop windows, even before the boys have swung past. No excitement. Nothing inspired. May observes the lack of vitality common in the new generation, fed on the wireless and cinema.

I hear Captain C., well known in the village as a shabbily-dressed retired naval man, is now at work again on the North Sea, and very dashing and young in his uniform . . . a resurrection.³¹

As we go to sleep, of a night, in this peaceful, beautiful red-roofed village, more wanderers are about in Europe, homeless, threatened, cold, and full of terror. Children and old people, babies and young wives alone, without a refuge. Women who loved their pretty things at home as much as I do, and the evening stroll in the summer dusk with their dear ones. The imagination boggles before the picture, shrinks away from the tears, the perplexity, the obstacles and the poverty. Thousands are starving in Warsaw. Heil Hitler!

Now all Europe is wondering about the fate of Finland. Fearful regret that one has not been to these Northern countries now threatened, to see them when they were yet happy and free and full of a fine independence.

Lunched with General Montgomery’s sister. He is in command of our Third Corps, just going out to France. She said her brother had foretold accurately how things would go, so far; especially he had forseen the friendship ’twixt Germany and Russia.

The gas ration card has arrived, and is too wonderful and mysterious, reminding me of some of the sealed sacred books of the East, whose meaning none – even the wisest – can decipher. Madge says she can understand it, but when I ask if she can tell the difference between her meter and ours in the cellar, she quails. I shall leave it all alone, wear a coat when I can instead of lighting my fire, and have a few extra colds. The kitchen cooking cannot in any way be controlled, at a distance.

It poured and poured with rain. The Sunday papers were full of a curious optimism, and seem to take for granted that Hitler’s game is up. It seems stupid to me. It has scarcely begun.

Nobody can understand what will happen re Russia v. Finland.³² The Kings Gustav, of Sweden, Christian of Denmark and Haakon of Norway call a meeting. Their thrones must seem to them to be trembling and shaking. I hope they will wear their lovely jewelled crowns, while they still may.

A not-too-young lady with scarlet lips, pale face and ugly trousers has called to ask Madge if a house-to-house collection could be made of onions and carrots, to help a refugee nursing home at Shalford. Even one carrot from each household would help!

Ernest Brown, Minister of Labour³⁴, un-eloquent usually, talks on the wireless about calling up the new conscripts. England expects . . . Scotland expects . . . Wales expects . . . we hear.

Muff the Puss is now exalted when he gets a herring and is dropping all his fancy ways. The butcher tells Robin that he only gets twenty per cent of his usual ration of imported meat.

To the cinema: a tragic film with a tragic end, Bette Davis in Dark Victory. Very fine, and singular. There was news. Photos of our Tommies behind the lines, grinning under Glengarry caps at the camera, just as bright as we want to feel they are.

Madge runs upstairs to tell us there will be no gas or electricity ration after all, so that will make a great difference to the good spirits of our winter.

Basil could not get back from Netley, telephoning to say he must stay by a very sick patient, to whom he was giving blood transfusions. He said that a convoy of 180 soldiers had arrived from France, the very first. Not wounded, but ill.

May B. and John Sinclair came. J. S. had noticed a tiny procession of King’s College Choir boys going in to evensong in the chapel, in their top hats, Eton jackets, and alas, gas masks slung on! It struck him as horrible.

Went to the ten o’clock service. Virginia Shrapnell-Smith came in, and said of her brother Tommy, who crashed fatally last week in an aeroplane, ‘He very much enjoyed the party while it lasted.’

Saw two little London boys today in the lane. They said they liked Peaslake village better than Fulham. I showed them some coloured leaves I had picked for a vase. ‘Our lady picks them like that for her vases,’ they said. They then told me that they had crossed the tree trunk that spread across the path from two high banks. And one in the river. They were keenly interested when I said I used as a child to put paper boats in the Tillingbourne, hoping they would sail safely to the sea, by the Wey and the Thames. They didn’t know the Tillingbourne water went into the sea. They had just had roast beef at the canteen, and apples and rice.

To tea three people. Mrs H. spoke of interviewing some of the evacuated mothers here. ‘Poor things, they stand in the street and cry, and say their homes will never be the same again, and what have they to do with this village?’

Talked with May B. on the phone. She spoke of the excessive demand, freshly in, of income tax on her small income. About one hundred and seventy pounds on four hundred! She says it just can’t be paid. All over the country these demands must be ignored, especially in retrospection. A mistake has been made by the Exchequer; the tax will paralyse trade, paralyse individuals, and create more unemployment. May thinks that the government is doing all sorts of foolish things in its attempt to appear prepared this time. Why could not the evacuation, for instance, have been purely voluntary? Why pool all butter, bacon, fats and so on, and charge so little per pound that the poor trader will be forced out of existence, by making hardly any profit? May is busy with the eternal anti-gas arrangements at Aldershot, organising decontamination squads, etc.

Christmas things, rather half-heartedly displayed in the shops, give one a queer feeling. ‘This war may last thirty years if it is not going to have any big offensive’ was the remark I heard, passing from one man to the other in the High Street.

Two letters came in by evening post from Harry. Splendid. I wrote him two letters today which was half-a-crown well and truly spent.³⁶

Madge tells me that Colonel B., only fifty-four, is chafing to be employed, but nothing doing.

Barbara writes that specialists are finding that no-one in England is being ill in wartime. On the other hand, my own doctor tells me he is never finished till nine-thirty, so when the wounded do come, and there are lots of anaesthetics to be given, he will have no time to breathe. Barbara says that when rationing comes in ‘with its immense muddles’, she means to register with one butcher, and her husband with another, and the dogs with another!

We are now having Radio Paris broadcasts; they are charming, and much better mannered than ours. We heard a delightful description of Orleans in wartime the other day, speaking of streets I know and love, where the black-out seems as entire as here, by the broad, swiftly-flowing Loire.

North-easter, and rain. Will the Germans go through Belgium? That is the question of today.

At Blenheim Palace, where Malvern School is billeted now (at the cost of £5,000 in alterations³⁷), the boys may not use ink, in case they spoil anything.

Rather terrible stories filter through of muddle in Army hospitals in Woolwich, of officers lying shivering without hot water bottles, and so on, and there is a great scarcity in the Army of gum boots, which, however, the noble ARP at home are being supplied with.

No Sunlight soap in the shop today. The butcher says all fat will be taken off his meat soon by the government.

The German propaganda reports us as very hard up for food, and says potatoes will be rationed here soon.

Travelled in the train with a woman who said that when the children in Guildford were billeted, they were all set down on the edge of the pavements, a long forlorn row, then pushed into the houses, often compulsorily. She accepted two little boys, though she had rooms booked in a hotel in Cornwall for a holiday. This she quietly gave up.

On the BBC tonight the repetition of the famous play Lost Horizon was peculiarly appropriate to our times.³⁸ The dread that everything fragile and beautiful will be lost. I passed the Tate Gallery today, and forgot for a moment that it had been emptied of treasures. It is a close secret, jealously guarded, as to where the Blakes and the Monets lie today.³⁹

Went to the Hospital League today.⁴⁰ Mrs Wilmott, the mother of a local boy who went down in the Royal Oak⁴¹ came in, a large woman in black. When she had paid her subscription, and gone, my fellow worker told me that she had paid a visit of condolence to that poor mother after the dreadful news. Mrs Wilmott had said: ‘Well, if I had known he would be drowned, I would never have let him join the Navy!’

As I write, at 9.25, before the fire, Sir Ernest Swinton is talking to us on the BBC of the touchy proposition of forcing the Siegfried Line. Neither side is likely to atttack, Swinton says. Time is on our side, thank God.⁴²

Nancy’s brother is on twenty-four hours leave from Gibraltar. He was on a sloop, one of forty, forming a convoy to protect passenger ships and trading ships of every sort. He says he was not in dry clothes once through the eight days they took to zig-zag through the German mines.

To tea Marna and John Hopgood, both emancipated through the war. John (aged eighteen) is quite a man now, walking about London; his lawyer’s office is in the West End. Marna is sharing a bed with a Guildford stationer’s daughter at Woking, billeted with a policeman’s wife in a bungalow. She is a Woman Terrier Clerk, and fills in forms all day long. The government pays the woman one pound each for the girls; they don’t expect tea for that, but breakfast, and midday meal and a night snack. She washes their sheets; the girls supply bath towels. Marna is cheerful: it is all new; she goes to shilling hops, dances Boomps-a-daisy with the soldiery, and is very gay. I think of her mother over in France, probably uselessly worrying over these two, who are roving free.

A letter from Canada. Beryl writes that the country is solidly behind England, troops drilling at the top of their street, and looking very dashing. She writes: ‘They parade past our window at eight-thirty, and cause mild heart-flutters.’

I copy this out of the papers today from the advertisements, showing the need for men:

Wanted: milling setters, universal millers, vertical millers, internal and universal grinders, thread millers and borers, tool shapers, surface grinders, slotters and rate fixers.

Went to Guildford to see the house taken over by the Town Council for child evacuees who could fit in nowhere else. The desolation of the place inside is unutterable, no floor covering of any kind, bare boards of a poor wood, a steep dismal staircase, of course bare, with marks of former carpets. Dreadful black-grey blankets on the camp beds, and only one sheet on each. Everything gloomy, uncared for, big windows dirty – and in short, a scandal for rich Guildford.

I planted six iris bulbs, very small, but I hope they will yield bright purple flowers. I got them for a penny a dozen at Woolworths, who are today reducing all their bulbs.

The silver birch in the front garden does look graceful and wonderful. There are high winds at night now, and everyone wonders when the Germans will begin their offensive; huge beams of searchlights ray out across our darkened heaths and lanes.

‘The sooner we are all dead the better,’ said poor Mrs Murray to me just now, ‘what with the world in such a state, and all our best young men likely to be killed.’ I feel very sorry for her, sitting in her tiny, pretty room feeling her bad heart.

This morning news of the bomb at Munich which nearly finished Hitler.⁴³ ‘So Mr Nasty has had a fright,’ observed the village postmaster in a laconic British voice, as he took Harry’s air mail letter from me.

To tea with the Shrapnell-Smiths. Mrs Shrappie and I cried together over Tommy’s death, only twenty-three, in a mimic battle in the air. She has had nearly 400 letters. Tommy was very popular – lucky she has a first class photograph of him. It was sad to drive away from the fine old house with its clipped hedges and red-berried creeper high round the old windows, where we have had such hospitality, such happy tennis parties. No use to write like this. The house is up for sale.

Winston made a splendid speech yesterday. He said in a memorable sentence, ‘We shall have suffering, but we shall break their hearts.’

It is a fine, still, thoughtful November evening, with veils of mist round the green fields of Newlands and winding about the golden woods. Everything now is governed by black-out time. The post to my sorrow is deteriorating here, as in the last war (and we only restored it about ten years after). The postman comes while it is still daylight and there is already only one delivery round Dorking. People are writing much more than they did I think, and the troops in France manage more than one letter per head per day.

Holland has flooded her fields, afraid of the German advance. I keep thinking of the Low Countries where I was only a year ago in June. I admired the sober, sturdy and independent-minded people and their neat, clean houses, shining windows and crimson shutters. Ada, my Dutch friend, said then that they were very much afraid of the Germans.

May B. to tea. She said they had spent all Friday rehearsing an air raid; so when the actual ‘I pass you the yellow warning’ came on next day on the phone at her Aldershot office, she found that her troops simply took it to be a joke, and received it as a signal for another practice about which they could go slowly. It was hard to convince them. They had the All Clear signal in about half an hour.

ATS anti-aircraft artillery spotters learn to use an identification telescope at No.7 ATS Training Centre at Stoughton near Guildford.

Photograph © IWM H14189

I had the piano tuned. The little tuner explained how he had lost his job in London, all his clients having gone into the country. One lady wishes him to go on tuning her grand, now in a furniture store, ‘probably lying on its side. How can I? It wouldn’t pay me.’ This war hits people like this severely.

He smiles and says he doesn’t notice any more the noise going on in his back garden. Over the wall are the barracks, and recruits firing all day, volleys and rattles and in the adjoining wood the raw buglers practising horrible blasts.

Robin is reading the White Paper on German concentration camps, ably written and painful.⁴⁴

Diana and I went to visit the communal kitchen and saw a pleasant scene, three happy ladies peeling potatoes (with the new patent knife), and another carrying buckets. Smart black and white lino, good stove, and so on. Pretty Mrs Coppinger in a striped overall says that her husband is very cold at Harwich now on a mine-sweeper, and also sometimes in a chilly office at Parkstone Quay. He will be glad to receive the 100 Balaclava helmets for his men which the ladies of Shere are knitting.

We went to lunch with Mrs Rayne at the Farm; a lovely room, big white chrysanthemums, huge chimneypiece, and log fire. In the farmyard was a man with a brilliant blue shirt, piling logs. ‘That is the national shirt of the Sudeten Germans,’ said our host.⁴⁵ The foreigner, happy-eyed, was piling the logs with great art. Dr Benes,⁴⁶ they think, is not keen that his men should join our army, and many have no jobs: lawyers and doctors. Mrs Rayne had just got permission for a young doctor to ‘observe’ in Guildford hospital, and was fighting to get a Czech boy into the technical school at Guildford, already overrun with evacuees.

Back through the leaf-strewn lanes. Diana and the Tuckwell girls at tea, all of them wondering when they will be called up.

Basil phones at five to say he will be stationed with the Royal Engineers at Codford, Salisbury Plain, and will get seven days’ leave for uniform.

Robin looks at the calm sky and the young moon and says that the Hun may easily be with us tonight.

I think more and more of compromise. That is very likely to be the end of all this war – an unsatisfactory peace!

My husband is a perfect war-time companion – all house repairs quietly and efficiently done. Today a ventilator carved out of some wood for a certain wall; the black-out speedy and complete.

I think generations after this will be amazed (if they ever have the inclination to read of the past) to note the extent of our precautions against air-raids. People living week after week away from home in the most annoying conditions, desperately unhappy, yet not venturing back, when everything points to their going back as the only solution to their misery.

Basil went to town to buy uniform, and there was a great discussion re how many shirts, how many boots and so on. His overcoat tried on makes him look like a thoughtful Guardsman, so very bunchy and waisted.

Rumours in the papers and on the wireless that Germany is torn by dissension in its higher commands and councils. ‘Of course the best Germans have lost faith in Hitler and his government,’ says Robin.

Rotterdam has lost 72 per cent of its trade through the war; no wonder the Dutch long for peace.

Everybody has been sulking about the black-out trains and the long terrifying crowded journeys back from London to the suburbs. ‘Hell with the lid on,’ cries the Evening Standard tonight.

Woke early, and thought of Clive Modin, the timber merchant, now at Sandhurst, training to be an officer in the Royal Fusiliers, of Mickey Robinson now in the ranks of the Coldstream Guards, of Basil, off next week to Salisbury Plain.⁴⁷

Tonight there is no more Summer Time, so we shall be in the black-out well before five.

Went to call on Mrs Barlow, in bed, knitting a Balaclava helmet. She showed me a charming letter of thanks from a mine-sweeper on the Florio, saying that four helmets (of the first Shere contingent) had been dealt out to each ship, and they were furiously competed for. ‘I was one of the lucky ones,’ said the writer, ‘and I can assure you it is very welcome. When we come off our watch we are like blocks of ice, and have few comforts.’

I read the Life of Adler by Phyllis Bottome last night. Adler’s gardener knew Hitler as a boy, and used to say Adolf would never play with the others, but would watch them from afar. Once the schoolboys made a snowman, and Adolf suddenly darted forward and placed his own hat on top, as if he had had a share in the trouble of making it. This story highly intrigued Adler.⁴⁸

Robin says he feels that there must be a big air raid on London tonight or tomorrow in the moonlight, or ‘they may never come’. As we came out of the cinema after seeing Goodbye Mr Chips, the placards said, ‘Enemy airplane over the Thames’.

The days seem to slip past pretty quickly: everybody is wondering why Hitler does not start the offensive, and is not entering Holland after all. The neutral countries are in a most terrible state, their sea-borne trade is vanishing; the Danes have laid a lot of mines.

Basil will soon be gone; I dread it. It seems so far away, Codford St Peter, and the chalky Plain so wide and dreary.

At dinner Basil declared: ‘I am fighting against three things in this war. One, against the War Office with its ridiculous archaic system of red tape. Two, against discomfort. Three, against Hitler!’ I told him that I had a very shrewd suspicion in the last war that Alice in Wonderland and the Dodo had got into the War Office, turned everybody else out, and were running it, with the Red Queen as their messenger; and I believed the same thing had happened again.

Forever to be remembered as the day Basil went into khaki; and it is Eudo’s wedding day in Shanghai.⁴⁹ I did not see Basil in uniform, save for the pullover and tie, as he went up to town to try on the tunic again. The packing was at long last completed. His military cap came complete with the noble badge of the RAMC as worn by his uncle before him; the cap was too small for me, too big for Robin, tight for Basil, but immensely becoming.

After his departure, everything fell very flat, and I was grateful to my kind friends who carried me off after lunch to see the Gracie Fields film, Shipyard Sally, which swung along in very amusing fashion. Felt much more cheerful after it, driving home most cautiously through the dark roads to Shere. It is not much fun when you see a big mass looming right over you – a bus!

I was horrified to read of the Gestapo methods with the Czech student suspects in Prague. Rousing them at three a.m. and making them come off to prison (many must have been perfectly innocent) in their night clothes; pouring cold water all over them when they arrived. It is admitted, it seems, in Germany, that there were 1,700 executions of these students. What a time we live in, yet all seems so safe in this little Surrey community tonight, where supper slowly warms in the oven, and there is perfect stillness outside. Not one glimmer of light can I see in the village.

An extremely interesting article today in the Telegraph by one Villard, an American journalist. Some points are that the Germans are saving up for a terrible smashing of England in May, when our seaside towns will be attacked.

Well-informed Germans consider that the submarine which got into Scapa Flow and torpedoed the Royal Oak sailed boldly on the surface with its searchlight going, and deluded the British sailors into believing that is was one of their boats that was approaching and it never submerged.

This morning in the village I met Mr Dodds, who was beaming: his sailor son has come on leave from the Far East; their boat sailed in a great loop from Gibraltar right out into the Atlantic to avoid mines and U-boats. Tony has been away nearly two years, and looks ‘much taller and very brown, and he’s full of beans’.

Joy Annett to lunch. I hoped we could avoid a long and fruitless discussion on politics. I know she is very unhappy about the war. However, nothing would keep the charming, beautiful being off it and we talked gloomily till dusk began to gather and were no forrarder. Joy thinks we should not be patriotic, we should have no country, but belong to all nations.

The papers are full of the sinking of ships. The Davidsons came back from Cyprus on the Rawalpindi, and are much distressed by her loss. So many went down with her.⁵⁰ The pictures in the press are constantly of a great boat just being submerged, looking very pitiful.

Basil writes that he has been continuously busy since he has been on the Plain, six or seven hundred men of the Royal Engineers in his charge, vaccinations and innoculations to tackle; also the questions of poor, overcrowded billets, scabies, etc. First sick parade is at 8.30. It sounds overwhelming.

Every night we hear of some ship mined, and we are losing count of even their names.

The war seems pressing on us here, especially this week. Robin walks about pouring out floods of talk and I listen with my mind half on the widows and children of the Rawalpindi. Feel very cross and touchy, and a great longing to get away.

I try to send two guineas to Canada for my sister-in-law’s Christmas gift but it is too difficult, the thing would have to be put before judge and jury (says the post office man), who would decide whether a money order could go. ‘Besides,’ he adds gloomily, ‘you know, ma’m, with them U-boats about, it might never get over.’

What of the poor little country? What of Norway, what of Sweden? What shall we do? Will Germany ally itself with Russia, and shall we automatically be at war with Russia too? What of India? What will the neutrals do? How insolent are the Russians, never pausing to reply to America’s offer to intervene before taking action.

Soon we will have had three months’ war, and I will have my journal bound up for this period. I hope it has been worth keeping. I hear 12 per cent of the printing trade is out of work, alas, and not likely to get it.

Madge says she is bored to death with the war. But there is a huge amount of local bridge going on. Everybody is knitting, and wool is difficult to get.

Barbara says Miss J., ruler of the Children’s Hour on the BBC, returns her engaging story of a mouse air warden who dealt with bats (and spoke in rhyme all the time), saying that she hopes that children don’t know anything about air raids. ‘I suppose their gas masks are to keep fairies in!’ cries the irritated author.

Down to Hampshire by bus. Most exciting; my first journey to stay with anybody since the war started.

It gave me a queer feeling, coming down the hill into Winchester, to see an aeroplane immediately above the grey ancestral tower of the cathedral. Shall I live to see our cathedrals bombed from the air?

Arrived to find my sisters-in-law’s main preoccupation the six or seven red setter dogs. The stables are almost empty, and the business of letting horses out to people who want to ride in the New Forest has vanished. Molly was up in London being interviewed by the Admiralty. They offered her small pay to be a dispatch rider in the WRNS. Molly, aged forty, declined.⁵¹

The school at Picket Post has gained pupils through this war, and the house is full of jolly, well-mannered little boys. This year, owing to the black-out there can be no performance of the usual Gilbert and Sullivan as parents could not do the journey. So all will be taken to The Lion Has Wings, the propaganda film, instead.

I heard of Peter in France (whose scarlet mess kit hung in the wardrobe of the spare room); he has been digging trenches with his men. Every morning the cordial French landlady at his billet puts a dash of rum into his coffee.

Left with great regret as always. At Southampton it was pouring with rain, but men were digging away manfully at underground shelters in the park.

Robin, surveying the shelters from the bus with critical eye, considered their structure was faulty and that they would ‘fall in’ by and by.

May B. came in the afternoon in khaki straight from Aldershot. She described the work she is doing with the FANYs and told us many stories of girl recruits, and of many well-to-do married women, who after a time come to her weeping that they are being ‘wasted’; jibbing at the menial work they have to do to begin with.

May told one rebellious maiden that she must regard herself as merely ‘a cog in a machine’. Later on wrathful letters arrived from Pa, saying his girl possessed ‘originality and personality’ and that she was certainly no cog. The CO laughed heartily with May over this.

It’s interesting to hear May’s idea of the war. She thinks this is Armageddon. Before we have finished she believes that the whole world will be ablaze. She thinks the Arabs will rise and the Russians pour into Asia.

I am writing at eight o’clock and the German wireless is giving over marching songs sung with great élan. They don’t seem in the least depressed! Fine young men are obviously shouting them.

Yet all is not well. I read in the Readers Digest that the health bulletin of Germany, taken from Germany’s own statistics, shows that rickets is prevalent, and diptheria more common. In 1935 and ’36 only 75 per cent of the men called up were found fit for active service. By last year only 55 per cent were acceptable. Dysentery has increased 300 per cent under Hitler. Heart trouble and tuberculosis are increasing, and so on . . .

Every now and then one feels the greatest pity and love for Germany, so strained, so chivvied, so much afraid, and so mechanical.⁵²

Heard from Mickey, a private in the Coldstream Guards. He says that two very nice chaps deserted from his squad on Friday night. They just couldn’t stand the roughness of the life.

From the news of the Assembly at Geneva today⁵³, it is clear that the neutrals are by no means sure that we shall be the victors. They fear to offend Russia and, behind her, Germany. Would not Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Holland help poor Finland if they could do as they longed to do? Obviously they are not certain that Germany and the Soviet would not crumple them up and never get out, while we possibly made a compromise to suit ourselves, and left them in the lurch.

I am sitting by the fire; the tenants below are dressing for a dinner party at High House with bridge to follow. This is very delightful: the Davidsons are refusing to be depressed by the war.

So the year creeps to its close – the days still shortening, the north wind bitter, Christmas a burden. I got a magazine with a first instalment of a serial [written] by me, and I wondered if the war would permit the serial to be finished.

Tonight the German broadcast is one long boast as usual. They shot – they say – ten out of twenty of our aeroplanes over Borkum. Our Admiralty says we lost three. Will the Graf Spee sail out of Montevideo harbour or stay in it, interned? The Germans are very silent about that tonight.⁵⁴

Went to The Lion Has Wings, a perfectly amazing film about our air force. A triumph indeed. It mut be a new creation, this modern airman. Clouds and guns, brains and nerve – utterly astonishing to one of my age.

I note various prophecies. The American Saturday Evening Post says Germany will eventually be (a) starved for fuel and (b) starved for materials. German artillery and aeroplanes top the Allied strength, but these are not of much use after ammunitions and petrol give out – and these will give out, says the US Department of Commerce, in two years. Denmark already lies helpless before Germany, and it is likely that Hitler will seize it; also Holland for its air bases, agriculture and shipping; Sweden for its indispensable iron fields, and Rumania for its oil.

And what of Finland, where in the Baltic north the few hours of light flit like a phantom? Some of the Russians, they say, have perished in the snow.

Ten p.m. Now the Graf Spee has moved from her moorings, and all the world waits and wonders.

Everybody pleased, and most of us surprised that the Graf Spee is scuttled. ‘I cannot get down the chimney this year,’ says the German Father Christmas. ‘Why not?’ cry out the little Hitler Youth. ‘Because there is a scuttle in the way!’ Idiotic, but the joke of the moment.

A Shere man has been killed in the black-out in the lane outside, and I knew the girl driving the car, cool and capable Joyce Stevens. He got right in front, apparently.

The Eusti came to lunch.⁵⁵ Shoulder of lamb, lots of delicious onion sauce, browned potatoes, suet pudding with hot black treacle poured over it, and a few mince-pies from Guildford. A good deal of story-telling and laughter – I think we were all very happy to meet again.

Bert turned out an ARP warden, and at any moment may be called on the telephone to be told to distribute to various centres the words: ‘Red Warning’.⁵⁶

It was noble of them to come, with their last petrol ration, and to bring me a plum pudding and a Christmas cake.

It is well worth taking the News Chronicle as well as the Daily Mail and The Times. Today Vernon Bartlett is back from Geneva, and tells in an article what the neutrals were talking about. It amounts to this:

2. But, there will be no revolt – there’s not enough vitality left, except possibly in the higher ranks of the army.

Harry has been down a tin mine at Kuala Lumpur. The air mail this time has taken only eleven days.

So grim and dreadful a day, foggy, icy, that I got Robin to stay in bed with his cold. Felt very bad myself, writing in a fireless room.

A woman choosing bacon from the very slender stock at the Forrest Stores cried that she wanted collar. The man serving, amazed at her obstinacy, and her lack of realisation as to the conditions of the bacon trade, just threw up his hands and said: ‘Oh gosh!’

This will be rather a brief week’s journal, as one’s mind is completely weary with the effort of organising Christmas without any help from any other brain. The menfolk are entirely uninterested, but drop brown paper on the floor and sit down joyously to nice hot meals.

Joy and Otto came in: he is an Austrian refugee from Vienna, a very learned art critic. It is not known if he will be allowed to work here permanently, but since the Aliens Tribunal⁵⁷ it is easier, and one hopes that such a specialist will be used over here.

Wretchedly cold, so cold that in every room practically of our little flat fires burn all the time.

Madge’s turkeys failed to appear from Aberdeenshire. Our little local station, Gomshall, had heard nothing of the band of three noble twenty-five-pounders, travelling south.

The King’s speech was painfully delivered, but he got through it better at the end than the beginning. I wonder if his speech specialist, Mr Logue, was by his side.⁵⁸

The speech tonight by Georg Gripenberg, the Finnish Minister in London, was the most moving of any I have listened to on the wireless since Hitler’s War began. He drew a swift graphic picture of his little country with its brave modern towns, enlightened ideas, care of the poor, absence of unemployment. Now they are hoplessly outnumbered, and alas they have not enough ammunition or guns. It was a brave, tragic speech, spoken with great dignity and self-control. Cannot the neutrals brave all and come to help? This fear of Russia is terrible.

Woke early to wake Basil, who had to leave early for Salisbury. Very cheerful idea, this journeying in the morning, instead of the gloomy night. Tony Dodds called for him at 8.30 and the dark blue naval overcoat walked with the khaki overcoat down the village street in the morning air. I missed him all day dreadfully.

Madge is down at the canteen, getting ready roast beef (her turkeys from Aberdeen still linger mysteriously) for the evacuees’ parents who are being entertained by the village. She makes Yorkshire pudding for the very first time and is thrilled. The parents come: there are forty-five. They eat, they smile, they make speeches of thanks. They leap in the fields with their children (for it is fair) and return to eat again. Madge returns, exhausted, and has a hot bath while the parents travel back Fulhamwards and many of their sons and daughters go to bed in the cottages weeping.

Snow and muffled roads and white boughs, and the village nurse in her car slithering about the hill.

I hear from Margaret Dell in America. It is a vivid, agitated letter. They seem to listen in to Europe a great deal. ‘Our young,’ she says, ‘do not understand, but my husband and I agree that we are letting others fight our battles and that the fight is for the retention of all the things we hold most dear in life. One’s whole heart aches over the war and you.’

My article on our village in wartime is in the British Weekly. The number is a very, very thin one. I wonder how long it will live.⁵⁹

Bey came to sherry, and tells me that a baker, an elderly Czech refugee, is allowed to work at last in Guildford, and is radiantly happy. His wife is to have a little home again of her own; they are leaving their sad haven here at last and taking lodgings in the town.

I feel much overwhelmed by the state of things. Shall we win – can we ever restore Poland and Czechoslovakia?

Pipes frozen everywhere. A terrible earthquake in Turkey. So ends the year in angry frost and wintry rain.

I hear from May that twenty-two FANYs are volunteering for Finland and are taking out a complete ambulance there quite shortly. Some of them will not come back, she says.

1939