Sunday, July 27th

I HAD TO LAUGH when, after being cross with D.D., who had stopped by, unaware of course that Saturday was my glorious day alone, I came on this in Rosten’s People I Have Loved, Known or Admired. He is speaking of Babbage, a crotchety Cambridge professor who invented computers: “The moment he heard an organ-grinder or a street singer, he would run out of his house and give chase, with homicidal intent. He just went wild if anyone disturbed his inner, furious peace” (underlining mine). The phrase is so exact!

Perhaps the disaster of the phlox that has reverted forced me out of my doldrums. I decided on Friday that I was going to get rid of that horrible magenta, willy-nilly. So on a hot, humid day I attacked with a pitchfork and after an hour of struggle (the roots are matted under rocks, and intertwined with the ivy that creeps up the wall behind them), I got out two big clumps that have not been touched for years. The ones Raymond planted will be far easier, and already I am enjoying that breathing space in the border, and planning what to do with it! Next morning I was able to get started again on the portrait of Rosalind, so the block appears to be broken. Writer’s block is a familiar professional ailment; I experience it very rarely, but when I do I am in a panic of nerves.

Yesterday and today have been cool, perfect summer days … how few we have had lately! … days when the sea is dark, sparkling, and in the evening gradually pales to an angelic satiny blue, then slowly turns pink with the sky reflecting the sunset, hyacinthine, behind it. I drank the day like wine, intoxicated by the change after humidity and heat.

Tamas is a little better but I think I must take him to the vet tomorrow. Last night he woke me at midnight to ask to go out. He does it by licking my hands very gently till I wake up, and almost never does it; so I felt sure it was a real need. The cat came in at three; Tamas wanted to go out again at half past four, and barked to come in again at six, so I really had a poor night’s sleep.

I must copy out two paragraphs from a piece in The Listener (June 26th) that came yesterday.

“Crime in the American schools begins at about the age of eight. Last year, there were over 8,000 rapes: young women teachers are often the targets; nearly 12,000 armed robberies; a quarter-of-a-million burglaries and 200,000 major assaults on teachers and pupils. Drugs, alcohol, extortion rackets, prostitution are all found in today’s American classroom. And knives, clubs, pistols and sawn-off shotguns are more often taken to school these days, either for attack or self-defense, than an apple for the teacher.

“The official Congressional report reads like a lurid paperback. In New York, a 17-year-old boy was clubbed on the head with a pistol butt and stabbed in the spine; 16 shootings in Kansas City schools; in Chicago, a headmaster killed and a school official wounded, and a 16-year-old shot dead over a gambling debt of five cents. In North Carolina, two children forced two others on pain of death to hand over $1,000; their ages: nine. And in Los Angeles where there are 150 recognized school gangs, the biggest call themselves the Cripps because they are dedicated to crippling their victims. There are also girl Crippettes and the junior Cripps for eight- to eleven-year-olds.”

As far as I know, the Ford administration has no plans to salvage the inner cities, and of course the trouble is worst there. We are breeding monsters and one has to conclude that we are monsters to permit such things to happen. The indifference on the part of suburbia, the indifference of the Government, staggers the imagination.