Diary of an Ordinary Woman

by Margaret Forster

  15 April

  Sent a parcel to Robert, though God knows if anything ever gets to him. I can’t be sure he is definitely in Changi, but I don’t care. I wanted to send it. I bartered everything I had in the way of stockings, jewellery and cosmetics, even the last of that L’Aimant scent he gave me, to buy some chocolate bars from a girl who has a GI boyfriend. Added some dried fruit, apricots and raisins, which cost me about three times what they cost before the war, and a tin of pineapple chunks, same source as the chocolate. I saved my tea ration for two weeks, got it decanted into a packet every day, and sent that, and a tin of condensed milk. It didn’t amount to much. I wrapped it all in an inner lining of The Times, thinking it would give him something to read. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, maybe the parcel will be censored and no news allowed. At the last minute I slipped in some cream for the treatment of sores, and some Elastoplast. I’m not sure why, I suppose because I have dreams about him being bitten by mosquitoes. He will probably never get the parcel anyway.

  *

  The prisoner-of-war camp Robert was in had been the Changi Garrison in peacetime, holding about four or five thousand soldiers but, once Singapore fell, it was made to accommodate forty thousand. Millicent’s parcel, and indeed any letters she sent, had virtually no chance of getting to him. The Singapore Post Office ceased to function on Friday 13 February 1942 and it took until August for the Swiss Red Cross to establish a link with the Japanese through which mail could flow. It took two years for a list to be supplied of all those captured, by which time half of the men had died or been moved from Changi. In 1944, the Japanese allowed each prisoner to send one postcard to a relative. It resembled the card George King sent home, during the First World War, that is, it was preprinted and only required the prisoner to tick whichever applied (with very little choice of comment). The first letters received by any prisoners arrived at the camp in November 1943, together with a few, very few, parcels. It is just possible Millicent’s was among them, but very unlikely.

  *

  19 April

  Such lovely weather, wonderfully warm and springlike. At the end of our shift this afternoon we all sat outside the hut with our backs against it and our faces lifted to the sun and our eyes closed. Someone pointed out the daffodils growing on the bit of a hill near the gate, and I spouted the Wordsworth poem. Avril said, You are clever, Millicent, but sarcastically. I don’t usually give anything away about my educational background but I didn’t think that was giving away anything when everyone knows ‘Daffodils’. Avril’s the sort of girl I’d never meet in normal life. She’s clever and quick but left school at 15 and works in a tyre factory. I’m surprised they didn’t make her stay there since manufacturing tyres is so important, but it turns out she lied and said she was a secretary. Well, I lied too, so I shouldn’t be shocked. She never stops talking and asking questions, all of them of a rather personal nature. She was behind me, unfortunately, when I was posting my parcel to Robert and very rudely peered over my shoulder and said, Ooh, so you do have a fella, then. I didn’t reply, and as I was in front she didn’t see me flush with irritation. In fact, it would be a relief to talk to someone about Robert but definitely not to Miss Nosy Avril.

  15 May

  Weekend leave, but didn’t go home. Decided to go up to the Roman Wall and walk along it. Stayed the night in Acomb Youth Hostel, only 1 shilling, even though I am no youth. I was surprised it was open, but it was and there were six other walkers, all service people doing the same as me. Today was even better than yesterday, the route along the wall was quite exhilarating, soaring up and down as it did. The scenery is wild and barren and I suppose some would find it forbidding, but I don’t and I find the sheer fact that the wall has survived comforting. I think I walked about twelve miles in all, stopping only once to eat my sandwich and drink some lemonade. I was remembering the walking holiday I once had with Percy. Poor Percy. I don’t suppose he ever forgave me. I did really like him but was never physically attracted to him, and that matters so much. The odd thing is, that I liked Robert before I was attracted to him, much the best way round. But I was determined not to let anything spoil the day, so every time any thoughts whatsoever of Robert popped into my head I squashed them. It’s maddening when my head becomes busy with pointless worries and vexations, everything buzzing about in my brain as I jump from one aggravation to another. The only thing to do is recite a poem to quieten myself, so that is what I did, out loud, poems and songs and hymns. Anyone hearing me would have thought me mad, but there was no one, only sheep. Towards the end of the walk, I found myself wondering if this is how I am going to spend the rest of my life, on my own. I was pleased that the thought didn’t terrify me, or make me utterly miserable. I’d rather not be on my own, I’d rather be with Robert, the Robert he was before the war, but if I have to manage I can, which is more than a lot of women can say. In our hut at night, the talk is endlessly about men and marriage, it’s absolutely incessant, their desperation to have a man, and I rather despise it, which I know is not kind of me. The girl in the next bed to me is at this moment describing how she will have dark red roses at her wedding and the bridesmaids will be in blue and silver, yet she hasn’t even a boyfriend.

  6 June

  Letter from Tilda. She writes such a good letter and is so affectionate, far more so than she is when we are together, and it warms me to think she cares about me as much as she seems to. She is going home for the weekend next Friday, taking Florence and Jack to see their father but leaving the twins with her sister-in-law Joan. It’s months since Charles has been able to get away to come to them and when he’s so exhausted she doesn’t want him to do the travelling and tire himself more, and besides she longs to be in her own home just for a short while. Charles has apparently got tickets for the theatre, Dear Brutus, on his birthday and she is so looking forward to it. She says she will save me the programme.

  *

  But Millicent never got the programme. On the night of 13 June 1942 her life was changed for ever. No other previous tragedy, not even her miscarriage or her father’s death, or her mother’s, had such a dramatic and long-lasting effect on the course of her life. Tilda and Charles Routledge and their two children Florence and Jack were all killed by a bomb which fell on central London that night. There are no entries in Millicent’s diary for the next six weeks – a black line is slashed through empty page after empty page, though each page is nevertheless headed with a date – and when they do begin again, in early August, no details are given of precisely where and how the Routledge family died, or how the news reached Millicent, or what she did in the immediate aftermath of hearing it. This kind of silence after a terrible event is, of course, characteristic, as she herself realises. Later on in this traumatic year, she reflects on what keeping a diary can mean if it becomes blank at times of great shock and grief. She realises that her reaction at such periods is to become catatonic, ‘words freeze in my mind’, and she literally cannot write. But she also says that there is to her something distasteful, ‘a kind of wallowing’, about describing death. But, when she takes up her diary again, what is unusual is that she does record the reason for not having written in it for so long, if only simply to state the facts before beginning again.

  *

  2 August

  Tilda and all her little family except the twins killed by a bomb in central London on 13 June. RIP.

  3 August 1942

  SLEPT PROPERLY LAST night for the first time since 14 June. Woke feeling optimistic, though there is no reason for such strange optimism. I think it was physical, merely the result of a good night’s sleep without nightmares or weeping or being clung to by the poor children. It soon faded, the lovely cheerfulness. I started to worry about telling Robert, what to tell him and how to do it. It is not because I fear he will fail to understand how my life, and therefore his, is irrevocably changed and set in an entirely different direction, I am sure he will indeed understand, and maybe even be glad that we now have t
wo lovely children to care for as our own, but he may not grasp how this tragedy has changed me. I feel it in every fibre of my being. I feel as though suddenly I have put on two stone in weight (though in fact I have lost weight) and am now a solid, rooted, bovine person whose function is to cook and clean and be housewife and mother and never look up from all that means. He can never be the centre of my life again. He will find himself an intruder. I should write to him but what puts me off is not so much knowing that the letter has little chance of reaching him in Changi, if he is still there, if he is still alive, but the impossibility of describing to him what becoming the guardian and mother of two 5-year-old children means. I can tell him about this cottage, I can tell him about Blockley, I can list the pubs and shops, I can say there are only about 1,700 inhabitants of whom I know about a dozen. I can even give him a time-table of my day from dawn to dusk, because it is already set in stone, but all of this would tell him nothing. It would be meaningless. So I have not written.

  4 August

  This country is full of orphaned children but few have been so completely robbed of their family as the twins. I fear I’ve done more damage by the way I broke the news to them, but there was no one to tell me how to do it, what the best and kindest way would be, and they are only 5 years old, too young to understand properly but too old to be unaware. They keep expecting Tilda to come home. This kind of death has no reality for them, they simply can’t envisage it. And Connie is jealous because Florence and Jack are with her mummy and daddy, and she wants to be wherever they have gone. Their grandmother and Aunt Joan talk of angels and heaven and make it all sound so desirable and, naturally, the twins want to go there too. But I’ve learned that for small children this religious talk is a blessing and I fall into it myself, holding out hope of a future in which the little family is reunited. It is shameful, when I don’t believe a word of it and have no religious faith, but it is comforting to the twins and easy to do.

  5 August

  Mrs Routledge has died. Joan says it was the shock of Charles’s death, that she simply couldn’t get over it and didn’t want to live if her brilliant, precious son was dead. She had a heart attack and it was all over in a matter of hours. She was 78, older than I thought. Another death for the twins to absorb. Joan came and told them that Granny had gone to heaven to be with Daddy and that started Connie off again, wanting to go too. This heaven is such an attractive-sounding place to the child. Joan thought it might help if the twins were taken to see their Granny in her coffin, She looks so sweet and peaceful, said Joan, but I am not going to allow it. I have seen Mrs Routledge and she looks neither sweet nor peaceful. Her dead body would terrify Connie who still thinks of her mother alive somewhere above her, floating on a pink cloud surrounded by angels. I am not going to let the twins go to the funeral either, though this will annoy and maybe even anger Joan. Her own children are going, even Helen, who is only a little older than the twins. But if I am now their mother I must start acting like one and making decisions for them according to what I think is right. So I will. No viewing of corpses, no attending funerals.

  6 August

  I have to decide whether to renew the lease on this cottage. Tilda and Charles would have done, I know, for the duration of the war, with Blockley as safe a place as any, I suppose. The twins are used to it, and in fact have little memory of their real home in London, and they have their Aunt Joan and their cousins living here with them, just round the corner in Brook Lane. Yet in spite of all these advantages I somehow feel reluctant to stay. It will mean the twins starting at the village school in September and, once they do, it will be unwise to disrupt them. I wish we were in London. I feel strange here, not comfortable, and would face the future more cheerfully in London, or even Brighton, but of course it would not be sensible to go to either place. It would be dangerous, pure folly.

  7 September

  The twins started school today and I started having some time to myself. The shock was considerable. I never appreciated what relief mothers feel when the house is empty. All those years of seeing Tilda harassed and desperate for peace and quiet and I could never understand the craving, because I’d never experienced the intensity of the mothering. I used to wonder why she didn’t just go to her bedroom and read a book if she so much wanted to. That was what I did today, went home and lay on my bed, though it still doesn’t feel like ‘my’ bed, and read. Nothing challenging or particularly satisfying, just How Green Was My Valley, because there’s a film of it now – not that I’ll have a chance to see it, we’re nowhere near a cinema – and I’d never read it. I could hardly concentrate for the silence, and for this nagging worry that I should be doing something else. Well, so I should. There are the children’s clothes to mend and the cottage needs a good cleaning, especially the kitchen floor. All these household tasks which I once did so effortlessly and now feel too tired to do properly.

  18 September

  School is going well for both twins, which is a bit of a surprise and a very lucky thing for me. They are both so bright and keen, Connie even more so than Toby. Tilda would be so proud of them. Quite a few of the children cry each morning when they have to leave their mothers, but not the twins, they can’t wait to get into the school and when the teacher emerges and rings her hand-bell they are first in line. I think everyone is amazed at how settled they seem. Certainly their Aunt Joan is. She congratulates me on how I’ve ‘handled’ what she calls ‘the whole tragic business’ but in a sort of oddly suspicious tone. My devotion to my nephew and niece is widely commented on in the village. When I go into the post office or the shop I receive admiring glances, though no one actually says anything to me, it is all reported by other people afterwards – ‘that Miss King, she’s a marvel’. I must say I like being a marvel, though of course I’m not.

  2 October

  There was a piece in the paper yesterday saying that the fashion collections had gone ahead as usual in Paris. This must surely mean that the Germans are not interfering with the people who produce them, so Grace might still be working. I need have no fantasies of her being hauled off to some prisoner-of-war camp. But surely, if this is the case, she could have somehow got a message through to me. Except, of course, she doesn’t know where I am, and who knows if arrangements for forwarding mail work properly all the time.

  4 October

  Daphne came for the day, on a motor-bike, if you please, a great snarling machine and she in leather jacket and goggles. I’d told the twins about her in some detail to prepare them in case she was as off-hand as she can sometimes be, and they were impressed she was a WAAF, but she exceeded their expectations by arriving as she did. She let them sit on the motor-bike and was all for giving them a little ride, but I wouldn’t let her. She teased me, saying I was becoming a proper tartar of a mother who ruled her children with a rod of iron. When the twins had gone to the bottom of the garden to play in the sandpit she asked if I thought I had found my true vocation at last. She didn’t mean it unkindly, but for some reason it annoyed me and I snapped back that no, I did not, and that I hadn’t chosen to become a guardian who in turn had to become a mother and never would have done, and then she apologised and said all she’d meant was that as I seemed so happy in my new role and the twins happy too she just thought maybe I felt that in this roundabout way, if through a terrible tragedy, I’d found a niche I’d never found before. I asked what made her think I hadn’t found this niche, as she called it, what made her think I hadn’t loved my work and already had been happy. Daphne said she didn’t know why I was being so grumpy and taking offence when all she’d intended was a compliment, for heaven’s sake. But she doesn’t realise, she can’t realise, partly because I take pains to hide it, that however content and fulfilled I seem I cannot bear to think that the future for at least the next twelve years will be devoted to Connie and Toby. I love them dearly, more sincerely than I ever thought I would be able to, and I want to do my duty and do the very best I can for them, but still I feel disma
yed because I no longer have the freedom of choice. I know the effects of this war have meant very many people have had that freedom taken away, and God knows I didn’t do much with my freedom when I had it, but I didn’t want to be one of them. I couldn’t tell Daphne any of this. She wouldn’t have understood.

  31 October

  A letter from Robert, miraculously forwarded from my London address (so the service is working in spite of the war), or rather a scrap of paper which was in a packet of such scraps delivered to the wife of one of the officers. There was a covering note explaining that she’d no idea how it had reached her but that it must have been smuggled out of Changi Prison somehow. This scrap is a half sheet of rice paper which has some tiny holes in it and is stained with faint pale brown marks. The writing is microscopic, not at all like his usual bold hand, for obvious reasons. All he has room to say is that he is well and that he loves me very much and thinks of me all the time. I smoothed the fragile paper out and read the message over and over, changing my mind each time about what I thought. I can’t credit that he is well. Naturally he would say that. But at least he was well enough to write. I put the letter in Tilda’s Bible.