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.
Monday, 10 March
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.’
Tuesday, 11 March
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?
Thursday, 13 March
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
Friday, 14 March
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.
Saturday, 15 March
Jam is to be rationed. Robin winces over this. Half a pound a month.
Sunday, 16 March
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!
What an amazing war.
Monday, 17 March
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.’
Tuesday, 18 March
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.’
Wednesday, 19 March
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.
Thursday, 20 March
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 o
ver 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
Saturday, 22 March
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.
Sunday, 23 March
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.
Monday, 24 March
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.
Tuesday, 25 March
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!
Yugoslavia has caved in, I am afraid.
Wednesday, 26 March
America quite likes our slogan, ‘Britain can take it’, but would prefer, ‘Britain can dish it out’.151
Thursday, 27 March
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.
Now what? Will the Germans rush in to the rebellious country?
Grand news tonight. We have captured Keren and Harar.152
Friday, 28 March
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.’
They returned. ‘Do come. He is suffering so much.’
‘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!’
Saturday, 29 March
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.
Sunday, 30 March
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.
Monday, 31 March
No letter from Rhodesia yet. What a pause! In which ship’s hold is it lying?
Tuesday, 1 April
The morning paper continues to be most interesting.
‘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.’
Again:
‘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.’
And in an article on the conditions in Belgium:
‘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.’
Thursday, 3 April
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.
Saturday, 5 April
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.
Sunday, 6 April
Woke to the news that Germany and Yugoslavia were at war.
Wednesday, 9 April
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 pe
ople.’
Thursday, 10 April
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.
I fear Coventry has been badly damaged once more.
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
Easter Saturday
The news is bad and there have been many appalling raids. But we have great resources and America stands behind us, very nearly awake.
Easter Monday
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.’
Wednesday, 16 April
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.
Mrs Miles's Diary Page 16
