Mrs Mile’s Diary

May Sinclair 131 came to see me at last. We had both been under duress so had not met since her wedding. Her Farnham shop is still struggling on. But she is worried about the future. ‘If I did what the Government wished,’ she said, ‘I would shut up my shop tomorrow. We are throttled by restrictions. We have a quota of goods only . . . I generally sell some specially choice little linen handkerchiefs at Christmas. I went to the warhouse in the City in November to see if I could have my usual supply. They said, “Oh no, merely a quota, a proportion of what you generally have.” I saw a whole stack of them on the shelf. “You haven’t enough?” I questioned. “Oh, we have masses of them, but it is the law.”’ (That warehouse is now burned to the ground.)

She explained how it was that the City warehouses were, many of them, burned out in the Second Fire of London owing to the lack of roof-spotters. Take the case of the great carpet manufacturers she knows near St Paul’s who lost eight thousand pounds worth of carpets in this very great fire. The manager, a friend of hers, is not young, and was almost distracted by the loss of so many of his assistants to the army. He had ten men’s work to do, and also had to contend with all the dislocations war had made in his trade. He is delicate, with a nervy wife down at their home at Westcliff, who wanted him back early to be with her, so he had to leave London by a train that would reach home ere the blackout. How could this tired, worried, overworked man roofspot himself? And he could not obtain reliable fellows that would do it. Possibly he was too dejected to exert himself. Anyway, May thought it was a clear case for the army to take over the roof-work.

Her husband, who executes orders in the printing trade, has had very bad luck lately. Again and again deliveries have been held back through enemy action. You get your order printed and thankfully put it on the train for York at King’s Cross, and then lo, there is an air raid and it’s destroyed, or the train is delayed by air raids and so delivers the goods too late to be any use. Or you can’t get zinc plates for the printing, the supplies have clean run out, etc., etc.

Joy Annett came to tea. Her brother’s factory at Coventry is burnt out and they are taking it some miles out of the town. Looms will be hard to replace.

Unless one talks to business people, one has no idea what is happening all over England. It is very serious.

Robin very melancholy, what with having seen the Home Guards playing darts, when he would like to have taken them to map-reading, but chiefly with the cutting icy weather. There was a gathering fog as we went off to tea. I was so concerned at his cries about his cold state that I forgot to post my Sunday mail.

Paper full of Bardia.¹³² Italian officers and armed troops wished to surrender to a car driven through by Richard Dimbleby (a name suggesting a nursery rhyme) of the BBC. Not an Italian who, when interviewed, didn’t say they were sick of war and Mussolini.

Two mothers of airmen called on me, both having come down from houses more than a mile away. Both refused tea, cocoa, or ginger wine.

One mother had already lost her son. The other had two flying sons. One has suffered with nerves ever since he crashed badly in the sea. The other was a pacifist, but is now delighted with flying. Brave mothers both, and ready for any blow, but life for one is changed for always, and you can see it in many little ways, though she is so cheerful.

Mrs R. is entertaining two boy evacuees from the East End. They arrived with only one of every garment. They had never used a toothbrush. Their mother, being requested to do something about it, posted one ‘to use between them’.

Mrs S. talked much of food in war-time. She insisted on me writing down a recipe for a war-time pudding made with flour, a little margarine, a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, a little milk, rolled into a dough, fried in the frying pan in margarine and served hot with hot jam or stewed fruit. ‘I really will try it.’

Mrs Rossiter has been helping in West Ham shelters. She says conditions are dreadful and it took them five days to get out of the LCC a permit forcibly to remove a woman suffering from tuberculosis.¹³³

We went to the cinema. In the news we saw various pictures of devastation by air bombing. There was one horrible photograph of Japanese bombing an undefended Chinese city. Just hell, because the fires shown were innumerable, smoking blackly side by side to the sky.

Rushed up and down the High Street to get a Hovis brown loaf, but failed. It was rather uncanny going into baker after baker and seeing the shelves entirely bare.

The papers begin to be full of the difficulties of small businesses in the City with regard to providing roof-spotters. Hundreds of them have written to the British Legion hoping to secure ex-servicemen at £4 a week. But there are not nearly enough old soldiers to go round. Others have offered as much as £1 a night, to unemployed men with no firefighting qualifications. But the majority cannot afford even £4.

A heroic Pole, whose name should be written here, Henry Brun, chairman of the Association of Polish Merchants, and one of the leading business men of Poland, was tortured to death by the Gestapo after consistently refusing to sign an appeal for funds for the benefit of the Volksdeutsche of Warsaw. ‘There is no power in the world,’ he said, ‘which can make me ask my business colleagues to pay a ransom for the benefit of our German enemies.’

I hear from Muriel that Peter, her army son returning on leave, was obliged to sleep on a floor at Waterloo station in freezing cold.

In the afternoon to call upon poor, pretty Mrs C.,¹³⁴ who has recently lost her sailor husband. He was knocked down in the blackout in a certain Scottish port, and found with a fractured skull. He died after she got there.

The situation on the kitchen front is precarious. The bit of lamb we had given us as a tremendous favour will last out for just four meals of the fourteen we have to put in, because we have a man in the house. With women only, it would do seven. I think I can get enough eggs, owing to a long and staunch friendship with my cook’s mother, who sells them, for it to be eggs every night, and we must try for a bunny rabbit, but ‘I can’t promise’ sounds down every phone in Shere. Never a fish in the fishmongers, and ‘Not so much as a bone!’ hoarsely whispers the melancholy butcher with laryngitis.

Started for Barbara’s, longing first to hear from Harry of his safe arrival. In the train to Reading I talked with a soldier. He said bread is rationed at tea where he is, just two large doorsteps. In the evening, nothing. So he and a group of pals in his hut subscribe for some loaves, and have a kettle and make themselves cocoa. It saves a lot of money, for going into the town and having supper is expensive.

On to Didcot, where Barbara was waiting for me. It was lovely to be back by her rich fire of wood and coal in the oak-beamed house. Blewbury is full of people who have fled out of London, and Sir William Nicolson, the portrait-painter, is installed in a studio hard by.¹³⁵ He came in after tea. He has painted Winston down in Kent at Chartwell. He says he is a fine sitter. He does not like them to be too still, or ‘they come out wooden in the picture’.

Heard that Harry had safely arrived in Cape Town. Oh, the relief! Immediately felt freer and gayer.

Bey came in to tell us about her time at a Rest Centre. She brought a gay scarf to knit, perching on a tiny chair in her scarlet jersey. She had a week to spare, so presented herself at the LCC hall and asked to help in the raids. They let her go to Southwark Rest Centre, where there is always trouble.

She said there were various conscientious objectors among the staff. At this Robin remarked in a cross, muffled voice, looking up from the Evening Standard, that since London Bridge was so near, he thought they might have well been dropped in the river.

Bey said the behaviour of the bombed-out ones was wonderful. One or two nights the blitz was really dreadful. Some women came in tears, but very few. They were offered a wash in warm water immediately, tea, and then other food. One old chap, quite bald, had got soot completely over his pate. He submitted to a child trying to write ‘Grandad’ on his head with laughter. Wonderful London! They are many of them shaken in nerves after their experiences, but there is not one touch of defeatism, Bey reported. One woman cried a good deal, ‘because my little shop has gone, and I was so proud of it, and we were beginning to build up the business ever so nicely. We can never begin again.’

Bey said that one on occasion she was doing office work with two men (they had to check up literally thousands of blankets) when the crumping and Molotov bread-baskets¹³⁶ came so near that between whiles the men ducked under their desks, and she lay flat under a kitchen table. Then out they would crawl, and proceed, till blast, bang again, and they would once more throw themselves on the floor.

She said that it was an awe-inspiring sight standing on London Bridge after the Jerries had gone one bad night. The flames leaping over some warehouses by the docks were twice the height of the buildings – red and gold – and they were reflected in the dark water of the Thames. Little figures were silhouetted against the dim sky, the firemen rushing out with hoses. One or two air-raid wardens in steel helmets received the fitful gleam of the moon on their tin hats, parading the deserted bridge. I wish I had stood at her side.

Biscuits, chocolate and sausages are on British minds just now. The grocer’s shop has many slabs of chocolate, but a shilling each for what is worth about fourpence.

Mrs V. said various English people she knew who had not been able to leave Paris had been left free at first, but were now put in concentration camps.

Robin went to the local ARP chiefs this morning with a clear-cut scheme for a Roof-Spotting Centre for the village. This was turned down immediately, and all its ramifications at once dismissed. Robin suggested that ladders and stirrup pumps should be easy of access by night. ‘They would be pinched,’ was the quick retort. ‘Could not the police look after that?’ ‘Impossible!’, etc.

Picked up at the bus stop by Mrs C. in her car and got a lift to Guildford. There began a long, arduous shopping. I feel sorry for those elderly, dutiful men behind the counter, eternally besieged by questioning matrons. The ration books having to be stamped with tiny stamps, and people all being put in their places: ‘Are you registered here? No? Then I can’t let you have any biscuits,’ etc.

Met Mrs H., who wishes to find two paying guests for two bedrooms and a sitting room, all found and no extras, and even hot milk at night, five guineas each. I waved the ninepenny Woolworths saucepan I had just bought, without wrapping, at her, and she told me she met a woman the day previously bearing a skinned rabbit in her hand.

Robin and I took shilling seats at the Odeon. The news film showed our King decorating airmen. He looked very much older. The Polish General kissing our airmen after giving them medals was amusing. The stolid English airmen did not move reciprocally an inch, and obviously hated it!

Miss Scott came up, and we began to laugh a good deal over absurd happenings in the day. She has a keen sense of humour. We laughed at my getting a lift in a car which had just conveyed a goat to the railway station. ‘It’s a little goatish; do you mind, Mrs Miles?’ The truth is we were tired of the war-stress, and wanted relief, and to gain forgetfulness of what Churchill calls ‘the dark and deadly valley’.

A dull, quiet morning. No air raids. Last night I went down in the dark arm-in-arm with my wealthy, dutiful old neighbour, to the local inn to attend a meeting on Night Watchers for Shere. Our Head Warden, who is dry as the sands of Arabia, was in the chair. A handful of people were there, representing the particular district of the village, about forty-three houses, to be dealt with.

No advice was tendered to us, nor information as to what the rest of the villages were doing. One old inhabitant sprang to his feet, and started talking of the night when we had a shower of incendiaries on the village, explaining how he and a squad of friends had extinguished this and that, ‘but have been ignored by the ARP ever since, and not invited to any meeting’.

This grief our pale president did not assuage at all. He looked up gravely and turned it all off, by talking languidly about something else. What a pity! One warm word of apology, a hearty sentence saying they were so glad of his help, would have sent that man away ready for more service.

Resolved to have watchers in shifts. How or where to watch? Undecided. Whether to watch fully dressed or to be allowed to sleep if quiet? Undecided.

The Sunday papers are as full as ever of remarks about invasion. Certainly things are stirring in the Mediterranean. Malta holds out in the most amazing way.

When one thinks of Dunkirk and the miracle there, when the little ships – Auntie Gus, Bull-Pup, Dinky, Folkestone Belle, Skylark and the rest – got away with them, one can hope everything. It will always be a big regret to me that Robin was not there, to bring some of our men home in any possible craft he was given, for he happens to be able to handle any.

It is terrible to be missing all these joyful weddings of my friends’ daughters – Dulcie’s in Edinburgh, Phyllis Anne’s in the Isle of Wight, now Celia Anne’s in the Saltmarket, Glasgow. Then there will take place, I suppose, all among the crocodiles and red kopjes, Harry’s wedding, in early spring in Rhodesia. If only Jenny gets her boat from Singapore!

Mrs B. rang through to say that her only sister’s boy had gone down in the lost submarine Triton. She has been up to Rothesay to try to comfort the young widow. There is a baby a year old, a darling. What a good thing! For life will be long for that young girl.¹³⁸

Olive has just remarked in the kitchen that some of the soldiers in Aldershot have been caught stealing margarine, to put on the toast they make themselves every night for supper (since they are not given that meal). ‘You would think they ought to have butter.’

‘People subscribe to give the army wireless sets and the officers keep them for their mess.’

At this onslaught I can only feebly murmur: ‘Are you sure? It doesn’t sound to me like the officers . . .’

Downstairs our dear old man (over eighty) is agitated because his sister and family, now next door, may move to a house in Worthing, and if they do, they must make him go too. They were bombed out of Folkestone, and the old lady is very nervous indeed after severe bombardments and shivering by night in the garden dug-out. It seems to me rather crazy that they should shift their furniture simply along the shore, to another house by the waves. The little cook, keeping her birthday sorrowfully enough, with a high temperature, says nothing will induce her to move southwards again. We shall see. The old man ought not to have to take any decision at his age.

Muriel sent me a charming letter to read from one of her boys in Africa, homesick for England.

Cis says no potatoes could be got in Glasgow last week. They lived on oatmeal and butter beans.

I went down the village shivering after tea, holding in one hand a bundle of Harry’s cast-off clothing, in the other a pudding bowl into which I had put two eggs, some dripping, a shower of sugar from my rapidly declining reserve, all the sultanas I had, and I took it all to the Widow G.

She had already made Robin’s birthday cake and accepted what I brought, together with two-and-six.¹³⁹ She said, ‘I saw some peel in the shop, and they said, “There’ll never be no more”, so I took it.

‘I heard from my Ted, what’s joined up. He says, “It’s not too bad, Mum”, but he’d never worry me if it was.’

To the Valley Hall to see the Ministry of Information films. A group of village boys about eleven stood behind me, exclaiming, ‘There’s a beauty!’ when we had the aeroplane films. A timid young farmer explained later to us that poultry clubs were to be formed everywhere, for those of us who had less than fifty.

Went off to Farnham – a glorious spring day, suddenly. We were all so cheered with the Prime Minister’s speech. Every single person I met going down the village spoke of it with admiration. ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job’ was on every lip.¹⁴⁰

Inspectors have called on May’s workroom, to see what girls could be taken away to munitions factories. ‘Two could be spared,’ they said. But you cannot conscript unwilling girls. It is absurd, as every woman knows.

My idea of earthly Heaven, on this cold and fortunately still February night: a) to talk to Basil after armistice, about some happy plans for his work and our moving near him, or b) to walk up the little flight of steps just inside the Hotel du Grand Monarque at Chartres, May Sinclair at my side. We are beginning a long peaceful holiday there, and it is spring, and we have light pretty clothes and laugh together.

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the world’s greatest architects, American, writes of his plans for a reconstructed London.

London should be a motor-car/aeroplane city, ‘the spacing all laid out upon a new scale of human movement, set by car and plane’. He advocates elevated railways with continous storage space between the tracks, lorry traffic set low on one side.

‘There should be no traffic problem . . . Make broad streets concave instead of convex, with underpasses for foot travellers. No street lights, because roads themselves would be low-lighted ribbons.’

A hideous drawing heads the article, showing the curve of the Thames by Charing Cross with a line of ugly skyscrapers like pillars at intervals all round the bank.

Glamorous Soviet-style artwork exhorted women to contribute to the war effort. Similar posters encouraged them to join the WAAF, the Wrens, the WVS or the ATS.

Photograph © IWM MH4735

The old gentleman below has just returned from a trip by car down to Hythe, to see his burgled house. Two really good bottles of claret he had jealously preserved had been found by the intruders and drunk to the dregs. Mr Stevens said he was much struck by the small number of people about in Hythe. One nice little arcade there full of shops had entirely vanished.

Canary seed is to be stopped. What else can they eat but grain? More racing carrier pigeons are wanted to work in the war.

Robin entered after the Red Cross lecture shuddering with cold. The second time this has happened. We have soup always now at night, and he was glad to gulp some down.

It was grand to get a letter from Harry this morning posted in Cape Town. He had been for a walk in the shadow of Table Mountain. He also writes from Salisbury, Rhodesia, where he had been met.

An SOS comes from an old and clever artist in his ninety-sixth year, wishing to sell us two paintings for £4. I fear he is struggling along on very little. What a world this is for the artist and the musician!

A letter in from Margaret written from New York. It has taken five weeks to come! She says, ‘You would be amazed to know how many blind people there are still amongst us who won’t see things as they really are, and don’t want to. They accuse B. and me of being war-mongers, and still think a negotiated peace is to be desired. But those of us who feel that it is our fight are deeply fortified by all that is now transpiring, and feel more optimistic and less ashamed than in some time.’

I see that you can now buy large metal buttons in New York bearing the words ‘To Hell with Hitler’ to pin on your coat lapel.

Irving Berlin’s new song about Hitler, ‘When That Man is Dead and Gone’, is selling phenomenally.

A judge in America has given sympathetic consideration to a Mr Ribbentrop in Connecticut who would like to change his name.

So many buses full of troops went past that I wondered if there was an invasion scare. As I went up the hill with Miss Scott, I said I thought we might each have a knapsack and know what we wished to pack in it. I was pleased to remember that I had a very thin light Jaeger blanket, which went with Robin through the last war and might be squashed into the knapsack.

Mr Wright, manager of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, in an interesting article in an American paper, Aviation, puts Germany’s absolute total of aircraft of all types at 35,000, and British absolute total at 25,000. He estimates that the absolute totals (with American help) will be equal by July.

Rendel, our Ambassador to Bulgaria,¹⁴¹ has spoken severely to the Bulgarians. Far too late! He knows that Bulgaria is actively helping the Axis and that the country is flooded with Germans wearing plain clothes for the moment (oh, honourable army!).

Heard from my Scotch cousin, a minister in Edinburgh. His pretty young daughter is just engaged. He speaks sadly of ‘these young people, through no possible fault of their own, cast into the maelstrom. It is we older ones who should be fighting, not they, the mess we’ve made of things. And quite ready to make another mess of it, once the young ones are all dead again.’

Basil writes from Kent this morning that he has to teach 1,000 soldiers First Aid and is exhausted with it.

This evening I tried on Robin’s old haversack, having packed it with essentials, if compulsory evacuation comes to our village: night clothes, a pair of house shoes, a tube of Horlicks milk tablets, a brandy flask, stamped postcards and a pencil, extra pair of stockings, soap and towel, washing things, aspirin, brush and comb, handkerchiefs. I could not carry more than this, but I have included a beloved, shabby, small fat copy of Wives and Daughters.

In the post office here today I saw a woman who has many loved relations in Jersey. There is absolutely not one line coming through from the Channel Islands.

‘I know they are desolate and oppressed,’ she said sorrowfully to me, repeating ‘desolate and oppressed’.

I took my evacuation haversack to Mrs R. for more strong fastenings to be made. The wild little evacuee boy exhausts that poor, hard-working woman, who is dying for a week’s rest.

To the kitchen. Soup and potatoes and carrots in it and a host of little suet puddings.

‘This is a very nice meal for fourpence,’ remarked a big little girl. The babes at their table were busily engaged in trying to scoop up their soup with forks.

Reading a book by Mrs Nicholson, Norney Rough. It is all about a real house near Godalming and the struggle of a retired officer and his family to live decently in England.

‘Women of every sort,’ she writes, ‘are learning to live without relaxation. They seem tougher than ever before. How can they enjoy dining out in warmth and comfort when their men face the North Sea’s cruel cold?’

Walked up the hill in the windy March evening with Mrs M. She has been given a new pale blue jumper and it is put in the ‘bolting box’ all ready for hasty evacuation, and kept quite near the front door.

The Germans have fined the town of Hilversum in Holland (gay, geranium-clad, beautifully built town) £350,000 as a punishment for having shot one German soldier.

Went to call on Freda T., who told me that in Folkestone yesterday, when getting into her train for Redhill, a Dornier plane began machine-gunning, and the women porters shut the carriage doors briskly, as spatterings of bullets rained down on the glass roof of the station; and the train moved off, but not before the passengers, hanging out of the windows, saw a Spitfire rise and give chase. The Dornier eventually fell into the sea.

Basil came about lunch-time, bringing a young RE subaltern (whose people are in Jersey – he hears nothing).

Bertie came to tea, an old, old Scotsman, and I thought again how hard this war is on old people. He never goes anywhere or sees anybody.

The great news of the week is that in the USA the Lease and Lend Bill is passed.¹⁴²

Will the Germans enter Greece? This seems to be expected. We shall be there, I think, also.

Prices go up. There is an increase of 26 per cent in the cost of living from September 1939 to January 1941. Coal is 41 per cent dearer.

In the Weekly Dispatch today, I like this story: ‘Please, teacher,’ he asked, ‘did God make Hitler?’ ‘Oh yes,’ the teacher assured him, ‘God made Hitler.’ ‘Well I never did!’ exclaimed the little lad, and his face fell as he spoke.

Greece has addressed a spirited open letter to Hitler signed by the editor of the paper Kathimerini, Mr Georgios Vlachos. It ends with a reference to Greece as ‘a small country but now made great, and which, after teaching the world how to live, must teach the world how to die.’

From the Night Hawk magazine of the 14th Battalion Home Guard, Hove, Sussex, written by our friend Clive King-George, adjutant:

Should an attack develop from the air, parachutists and airborne troops may be expected to be landed on the Downs in large numbers, and these will have to be exterminated. The only way to do this is to shoot them. The training must, therefore, be concentrated upon musketry, and above all fire control. Remember that to shoot at the enemy at a distance of, say, 1,000 yards is only a waste of ammunition, and will give away your position and probably subject you to artillery fire. So hold your fire until ‘you see the whites of their eyes’, and make sure of a Hun with every cartridge.

Today Doris and I walked into Albury Park in the sunny March weather, and saw the pigeons on the window-sills under the high red chimneys, and the scatter of purple and white under the trees.

Tonight, looking out of the kitchen window where I had been getting supper ready, I saw on the bank opposite my husband and various villagers vigorously digging a hole and putting sandbags all round it. Will the Germans come?

Coming home [from Guildford] we picked up an old man poorly dressed. He talked almost incoherently of having been bombed out of his flat near the Elephant and Castle. ‘I can’t ever tell you, lady, what it was like when the Torpedo bomb came swish, swish, swish down . . .’ He went on muttering all the way. I could catch ‘wasn’t going to live in that shelter after a week of it. If I’m took, I’m took.’ And again, ‘I’m over seventy . . . over seventy . . . I must pull myself together . . .’ Poor old fellow: one of the thousands who have been thrown completely off their balance, and thrown out of their homes.

On a bomb-damaged street on the south coast, the local Home Guard train to hold off invaders with Molotov cocktail petrol bombs.

Photograph © IWM H8128

A long cardboard carton appeared, carried round by the post office man as it was so heavy. It came from New York City, and contained a gift of food from my dear Dells.

One side of bacon

6 tins evaporated milk

2 slabs chocolate

2 lbs lump sugar

3 sardine tins

1 lb instant coffee

1 lb tea

1 tin guava jelly

This was glorious. I spread them all out except the rich grand bit of bacon which was taken to the cellar.

I am told that many such parcels arrive in our village and some from Canada. I gave the flat below half-a-pound of tea as they found it so hard to manage on rations.

Visited Mrs Pritchard in her cottage and drank vermouth with her. She has been often to Hampstead to see her house there. There are sad gaps everywhere in Hampstead. Her husband goes to London daily, a great fag in the winter specially, and a long pull up the hill through newly ploughed fields.

Ernest Bevin is announcing a compulsory registration of women aged twenty and twenty-one in April.¹⁴³ I can see that Olive is all agog to go off to some factory; she is, I think, twenty-seven.

A glorious speech from Roosevelt. We are to have ships. But what a strange part his country is playing. To give us weapons and expect our hands to fire the guns while they sit back and feel satisfied. I venture to prophesy that by May America will be all in.¹⁴⁴

We have just had the Government’s instructions about Invasion read by the BBC. I am convinced that the authorities cannot take the prospect seriously. Coaxing hints only – we are not to send more telegrams than we need and not to use the roads unless we have important reasons, etc. Not a word as to what to get ready in case of compulsory evacuation. We are, if caught in a hostile area, just to stay put. ‘If indeed we have a trench, we might get into it.’ No need, apparently, to see that trenches are made!

A glad surprise in the shape of a letter from Flo Dell announcing her engagement.

She says: ‘I realise the uncertainty of the future, as far as all the young men of the world are concerned; but I feel strongly that if you fear what the future has in store there can be no real happiness at all, so I am perfectly willing and happy to take the risk. If I lose I will have been happy and the cause will have been worth the sacrifice.’

Phyl says that she could not bear to go to London with me to look at Paternoster Row. ‘I’d feel just like I would over going to see the corpse of a friend from whom the spirit has gone.’¹⁴⁵

Government anti-gas instructions issued in case of invasion in 1941 encouraged civilians to wear their gas masks for fifteen minutes every day in order to get used to them.

Photograph © IWM D3948

She is the proud possessor of a bee hive (‘£3. And already I’ve been offered £6 for it in the village.’) She sat up till dawn reading a book on bee lore and listening to Franklin Roosevelt’s grand speech.

Emmy W. writes from Princeton University: ‘Princeton has just received its new Red Cross quota to be filled by 30 May – 765 knitted garments and 1,700 sewn garments. That’s a lot from such a small town, isn’t it? We think of you a lot.’

Barbara arrives by train from Reading, looking quite ill with cold, and bringing her large bull terrier which howls when she goes out of the room. She distressed me by bringing rations of sugar and butter, but I rejoiced over a pigeon and a jar of apple jelly.

A letter from Alice, who works at an Edinburgh canteen. She says: ‘I have a hectic time as there are only three of us to cook and sometimes forty or fifty men at busy times. They can get any amount of women to wait but they avoid cooking, so I have to be very quick turning sausages with one hand and frying eggs with the other. When I come home I take everything off and get into a hot bath and re-dress entirely. All my clothes seem to be scented with chips.’

The Japanese press states today that the landing of the Germans in England is only a matter of time. ‘So now we know where we are,’ says Robin, peacefully. He is just back from digging a war-like hole in the field, from which bombs may be thrown.

Barbara thinks she ought to join the WRNS. I wonder if she will. People who have dogs are baking brown bread in the oven, cutting it in squares and pretending it’s dog biscuits.

Barbara writes for the BBC, and is glad to hear that the Forces often listen in to her Gummidge tales.¹⁴⁶ She tells me she thinks her Berkshire village does believe in invasion. Our tiny village doesn’t, I think.

In the afternoon Robin’s aged cousin, Agnes Haycock, came unexpectedly. She lives in a house in Haslemere, all alone because no modern servant will stay with that kind of old person with four prize Pekes. She had pushed on her, in spite of her remonstrations, one grandmother, one mother, one big girl and one tiny boy of two from Portsmouth. The boy behaves like an untrained animal all over her beautiful Turkish carpets.

‘When I said, “Oh, don’t please push the baby’s push-cart into my kitchen walls, and make holes like that,” the woman said, “Oh, you’ll get compensation in full from the government, you needn’t worry.”’

When she was ill with bronchitis they did not come near her with tea or anything, and she is eighty-four and has to do all her cooking over a small gas ring in her bedroom.

It seems scandalous, but this vigorous old person has nobody to plead her case, and will not allow Robin to do so.

The war drags on. The attack on Clydeside, Cis writes, ‘is the worst we have had yet, there are 4,000 casualties, and 100 buried under rubble quite near us.’¹⁴⁷

Cis knew and liked a little Glasgow girl of fourteen, a cashier in a greengrocer’s shop. This child, on the night of the raid, was coming home in a tram from the cinema. Nothing has been heard of her since. Blown to pieces? The poor mother is distracted.¹⁴⁸

A light warm rain is falling. The forsythia is thinking of coming out. Letters still delayed from Harry, and I have cabled today.

This war is, as Priestley¹⁴⁹ discerns, and as most men don’t, peculiarly hard on women, who loathe it all.

Walked home with Mrs Foster from London who told me how she had lost all her things in her Kensington flat. All the flats were blown to smithereens and she could not find one bit of her furniture or one bit of anything else she possessed in it.

‘People were blown to bits in Sloane Square,’ said Mrs F. ‘Bits of bodies were put into dustbins; a naked woman was caught on a cable, her clothes blown off by the blast. England truly is at war.’

At supper of salad of shredded cabbage and carrots, Robin and I discussed the mystery of the great London air raids – the endurance and indifference to them displayed by so many people we know, who we should have imagined would have simply crumpled up and fled through repeated crises des nerfs.¹⁵⁰ Yet they stick it week after week, and hardly mention it.

Tried to buy something for our lunch tomorrow, but failed. The cooked meat shop had its shutters up. The fish was very dear. The cakes had vanished entirely from the shops by midday, the glass shelves in Nuttall’s windows stripped clean as always now.

I see that eagle feathers, a gift to the RAF from the Indian Council Fire, an Indian Society of Chicago, have been awarded to a small group of British pilots who have distinguished themselves. I should love to see one!

America quite likes our slogan, ‘Britain can take it’, but would prefer, ‘Britain can dish it out’.¹⁵¹

Felt very low-spirited about the war. I was just saying in a melancholy voice to Robin at lunch that we did not seem to be doing very well, when the one o’clock news came on, and we were electrified with joy to hear that there had been a revolution in Yugoslavia, and that the government who signed the Axis had been arrested.

The good news has cheered us up. The sky is blue, the buds on the lilac swell: there are a fair number of daffodils, and opposite, Scratch is heaving sacks of carrots and potatoes destined for the army on to a lorry bound for Dorking.

Joan told us an interesting true story. A friend of hers, a woman living in Sussex, was suddenly told that a German aeroplane had been shot down in one of her fields. Would she come out with some brandy and rugs: a German was dying.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t. I simply can’t. Let him get on with his dying – the brute.’

‘Oh well, I suppose I must,’ said she, and she went to the field. All her resentment and hatred vanished at the sight of the suffering youth, with his face of utter anguish. He died in her arms, and his last words were ‘Heil Hitler!’

The young English aviator who shot him down stood near by and was terribly affected, saying, ‘I didn’t think it could be half as bad as this!’

Mrs Hazeldine writes from Coniston on the Lakes: ‘This is an awful place to get food. Although it’s right in the country, vegetables are just like gold, you simply can’t get them at any price . . . I can’t think what it will be like to live next year. I have been without a kettle for three months, and at last, in desperation bought a copper one for twenty-five shillings – the last to be procured anywhere for miles.’

This has been a wonderful week. Yugoslavia’s sudden resistance has stirred sad hearts all over the world. ‘A brave choice of the hard way,’ says the Australian, Mr Fadden.¹⁵³

I should like to have written more about the battle of Keren, among its thick clouds of sand and smoke. Our British soldiers toiled up steep slopes in a temperature of over 100 degrees.

Moslem and Indian troops surged along and smashed their way through a whole colonial brigade and a regiment of Carabinieri. The Italians held out for six weeks. We have, of course, heard nothing about our casualties.

What an amazing world it is! The Jews in Poland now may not go by train without a special permit, and never by express.

In Germany, baptism should be postponed until twenty, say the Nazis. The German youth are growing up in a pagan air.

‘Laxfield, Suffolk, looks like becoming a village of young Winstons. To help the War Savings Campaign, a resident has promised to present a Savings Certificate to every baby who is named after the Prime Minister.’

‘A refugee from Holland was admitted to the London Homeopathic Hospital with a packet of diamonds worth thousands of pounds sewn into the seat of his trousers, besides 3,000 American dollars and £100 in Bank of England notes.’

‘Passive sabotage is almost universal, and sometimes more positive acts are committed, which call forth savage reprisals. When someone cut a telephone wire in Ypres the whole town was left without bread and meat for a fortnight.’

I notice that our food situation is such that when on the screen any food is shown, the audience begins to exclaim softly. In one film, somebody ate a grapefruit in a glass – and Betty groaned with longing.¹⁵⁴ ‘What is the worst thing about this war?’ I asked Sibyl. ‘Having no chocolate,’ she said promptly.

Virginia Woolf, our greatest living woman writer, has drowned herself! She had been bombed out of her Bloomsbury home: the lovely mural paintings there, done by her sister Vanessa Bell, and the man Mrs Woolf considered our finest living artist, Duncan Grant, were destroyed. ‘Every beautiful thing will be gone soon,’ she said. She felt it most acutely.

Death rides abroad in the Balkans as I write, and brave men are falling before the immense German divisions. Churchill’s speech, as reported by the BBC just now, is sombre.

Everybody is talking about national re-planning after the war. (Poor country, it’s no use trying to rebuild you for a time, you were bombed last night by the devilish young men who were breathing in English air, under a divinely moonlit sky.)

Felt exceedingly depressed over the heavy new income tax. Where can we economise?

‘Heaven defend us,’ says witty John Betjeman in tonight’s Evening Standard, ‘from pompous Civic Centres with memorial fountains, paid for out of the rates, from chaste shopping arcades among municipal flower beds, and miles from the workers’ flats in unfriendly districts. Heaven preserve us from one big garden city with communal this and communal that.’

The Pope has cancelled his Peace talk and has rewritten his speech since Yugoslavia entered the war. ‘The Nazis,’ says the Vatican, ‘are sowing a seed that will ripen to a terrible harvest for the German people.’

I read aloud to Robin Churchill’s long speech about the abandonment of Benghazi, with the regrettable acquisition by the Hun of useful airfields.¹⁵⁵ Of our obligation to move troops to help Greece.

Winston was very serious, and spoke of ‘this sudden darkening of the scene.’ There is a threat to Egypt.

We seem to be doing much better, however, and getting down Hun bombers in the moonlight.

It is a cold evening. The BBC announces that Harry’s General once at Singapore – Gambier-Perry – is missing in Libya. A very charming person, Harry used to say. I can imagine how sorry Harry will be sitting by his Rhodesian fireplace, to hear it.¹⁵⁶

The news is bad and there have been many appalling raids. But we have great resources and America stands behind us, very nearly awake.

I have tried to think how I could cut down expenses, owing to this fresh income tax, and all our extra repair bills. I have decided that I had better close the journal at the end of the week.

Tonight we hear that the British have withdrawn in Greece, that Turkey is very depressed, that German propagandists there are boasting of their victories in Libya. Turkey is nervous about this.

‘This war,’ remarks Robin from his chair by the fire, ‘is come upon us when we have too highly organised a civilisation, yet without increased wisdom. Still all the old faults are at work.’

To Guildford to lunch. The usual wistful glances into crowded bare shops. Petronelle and I went to see the film All This and Heaven Too. Wept a very little at the end. Petronelle cheerfully owned that she wept a lot. I got her the last plate of cakes to be had at the Astolat tea shop after, where a weary, hot-looking little waitress tore about doing the best she could.

The news tonight is shattering: Yugoslavia is broken up, disintegrated. Let us hope they will continue to conduct guerilla warfare.

Our carrier told me yesterday he had looked through a pair of field glasses yesterday, and perceived that some planes had written ‘Adolf’ in the sky!

Cis writes from Tweedmouth to say that an old Scotsman whose cottage was badly damaged in a raid replied, when asked what time the bomb fell, ‘Twelve o’clock, but a didna’ get up till eight.’ ‘So wise,’ adds Cis.

The city had the previous day experienced the sharpest and longest assault of the war.

The damage to the Kingston by-pass was not so bad as I had imagined, but a great many of the confident little villas had boards over their broken windows, and one or two houses were down. The bus conductor urged passengers to assemble in Cavendish Square in good time for the return buses, as there were great crowds.

Not till we drove past the outlying suburbs did I understand how many people had left London. Road after road showed deserted, empty houses, silent, forsaken, often shuttered.

My first journey on arriving was on foot to Harley Street. London had gone through the most ghastly ordeal. You could see it in the people’s faces: the women looked sleepless and worried, and the demolition squads hurtling along in their lorries with ladders and tools held crews of grimy-faced and weary men.

A chauffeur hung about outside a house. I asked him if it had been very bad the night before.

‘Down in my little place, lady, you couldn’t get a wink of sleep. There must have been thousands of them over. It was terrible, the worst of any night I’ve ever known.’

Harley Street has lowered its proud flag. Gone are the rows of brightly enamelled front doors – at least the doors are there, but they are no longer cherished. Dirty and gloomy and faded, and the little silver plates all dim and rusty.

I went down the Oxford Street tube. The bunks on the platform were most hygenic I thought, steel and wire, and numbers were written on the wall behind them. Coming back, I saw that bundles of bedding and shabby, broken suitcases were already placed there.

Children play on the space at the bottom of the moving staircase, and canteens come out with tea.

I got very weary, toiling about. Every major street seemed to have a barricade across it with ‘No Entry’. St Thomas’s Hospital had a pile of rubble still alight and smoking, near the Terrace.

Depressing and agitating to see the fantastic holes made in the rows of windows in County Hall. One poor little shop near the cab stand, a cobblers, had its shop window blown out, and I saw the old shoemaker on his knees in the hall, nailing up a box. God! What is going to happen to these people whose living and occupation has gone?

Then on to Leicester Square. Here men were digging at a pile of debris; a shelter had received a direct hit. I wondered if there were any bodies remaining. At one of the very worst moments of this day I found myself passing the Haymarket Theatre, outside which was written up

Very true. With mind and heart oppressed by the fearful damage, the name of the play (I’d like to see it) rang through my soul.

Up Kingsway and into Holborn tube. A tall house next to it had a big bit of roof in a pendant position; it looked most dangerous and about to hurl itself down. I saw Paternoster Row, which was my main object. The opening of the Row and its name plate are still intact, and miraculously enough Nicolson’s shop (showing pretty linen teacloths and little napkins) is intact. You go for a few yards and then – a barrier, and a shambles that was the Row, extending far back into a kind of square: all rubbish, planks leaning on bricks, dust, ruin. Where are the lost manuscripts, where the writers’ broken hopes?¹⁵⁷

In Cavendish Square I lined up in a queue and studied the square intently. I should imagine quite half the inhabitants had gone. An old man played the fiddle for us, ‘To cheer you all up,’ he said, collecting our pennies as the Green Line buses for Hertford and Gerrards Cross started up.

A woman, very pretty and smart, passed with a blue coat and skirt, a maroon pill-box hat and mauve gloves. This did me good.

The wreckage of Paternoster Square. The dome in the background is the Old Bailey, which somehow survived the devastation, although the streets around it were almost entirely destroyed.

But in a few minutes we were moving by Langham Place, and a perfect inferno of a fire showed itself behind the BBC. There was a high curtain of smoke. In Portland Place, where many houses seemed to have crashed, I saw red flames leaping and firemen with hoses. All down this broad, once luxurious street I saw flats with windows blown out. Oh, what havoc there has been here!

And now on this chilly spring afternoon, I take leave of the journal which it has given me such joy to write. Things in Europe are serious, the Greek war does not go well, we are being pushed back, and are very much outnumbered, and the poor Yugoslavs have given in. We trust Wavell,¹⁵⁸ but the Germans are giving us trouble in the desert.

Not too much to eat; our income tax about to drain our pockets; life docked of happy travel and happy meetings, the necessary machinery of a million households cracking. Girls of twenty conscripted – what a chaotic business, its humorous side apparent to every woman, and to no man.

Editor’s Note: in the eight months before Connie resumed the journal on 17 December 1941, the complexion of the war changed considerably.

The German invasion of Russia began on 22 June, ending the non-aggression pact and bringing Russia into the war on the Allied side.

Japan, which had been at war with China since 1937, was threatening US and European territories in the Far East, aiming to gain full control of the Western Pacific.

America entered the war on 8 December, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December.

Also, during the intervening period, Basil got his wish and was posted to North Africa.