World War ll London Blitz: 11-6-43 to 11-29-43 Today the Russians have retaken Kiev. The Germans captured it in September 1941. The B.B.C. broke into program at eleven this morning to broadcast the news.

Purchase Diary's:

November 6, 1943

Today the Russians have retaken Kiev. The Germans captured it in September Nineteen Forty-One. The B.B.C. broke into program at eleven this morning to broadcast the news.

November 8, 1943

In the night Ted’s voice whispering, “Feeling?” and my voice replying, “A little.”

I did not say a little what feeling. I did not say it was vexation, annoyance, bother. I thought, but I did not say: Oh, get on with it. Do what you want to do and let me go to sleep. Nor presently, when my inner woman was shrieking, oh, oh, oh let me get out of here! Did I make a sound?

Then when he slept I lay wakeful a long time, my body assuaged in spite of myself, my mind crystal clear. I asked myself, what in the world made me go to mass this morning? Men are beasts. This is what man is, this creature here beside me, this body, this body, which ultimately seeks its satisfaction, and always the same satisfaction. What difference does the rosary under the pillow make? Or the early morning rising to go to communion? What is that communion but a game, a game man plays with himself. This is the real communion, which has just happened, this and nothing else, the co-mingling of the flesh, the most intimate act of union possible to the will and the flesh. A man “knowing” his woman, his wife.

November 9, 1943
A bad raid in the night, and also two on Sunday night. On Sunday a dance hall was struck, a milk-bar, and two cinemas, and the crowds of young people on the streets in the vicinity. It was London, though we may not have been told exactly where, probably the Tottenham Court Road. We have raids now practically every night. Only a few bombers come over, but they do a lot of damage. It is only sixteen minutes flying time from the airdromes in France over to London, as Gerry can make quick dashes and get away again almost before we are aware of him. Hitler made a speech in Munich last night, urging loyalty on his Germans and promising vengeance on the British. It is true the R.A.F. now does more damage to Germany than the Luftwaffe did to us, but who started this business? Germany has to be licked, and licked forever, but at what frightful price! Oh God, let the war end soon.

I’m tired, dreadfully tired. I want a goodnights sleep for one thing and I want a rest in my mind for another. I want to get through with my resentment once and for all. How? That’s the question? It seems as though they have to run their course, like any child’s disease, and only then comes the end of them. Recognizing them, and their injustices, and their futilities, isn’t enough to scotch them, that’s one great sure thing. Can’t a woman ever be philosophically detached? I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t seem so.

November 21, 1943

A hell of a row this morning at the breakfast table, precipitated by Artie saying he had begun, whilst in the army, to read the Old Testament, but could not get far with it as it disgusted him. God and the Jews had a continual bribing match. At once Ted was up in arms and practically told Artie to shut up.

“You must think again, " he said. “You ought to know better, but of course with your mother, she’s hopeless; but I won’t listen to you, Artie, talking about things you know nothing at all about. You are a very ignorant young man, but your mother does know what’s right, only she won’t acknowledge it.”

Naturally conversation dried up, but when the young people went upstairs Ted turned on me again. “I wasn’t going to have you talking about Abraham, sneering! I make allowances for you, you can’t help yourself. I wasn’t going to have you contaminating those two. You, and your crooked ideas. Look at the results in Harold, the first of your sons to leave his wife! All because of you and your infidelities. If Harold loses his religion, because of you, of course he can’t live right…”

So it went. I was dumb founded. So it’s my fault that Harold leaves Kay! “The first of my sons to leave his wife.” Does Ted expect any of the rest to do like wise? He went on and on, winding up with, “Well I hope in your secret heart you haven’t worse sins than the sins of Abraham to repent of, worse thoughts and acts, than the acts and thoughts of his."

I answered, “Yes, I do have secret thoughts and special acts of my life to repent of, but they are not in the least what you might suppose.”

Then I went upstairs and got ready for the street. It was a filthy foggy morning, but I went out nevertheless. I felt I could not stay in this house with Ted Thompson another minute. How he hates me!

So I went to St Andrews, on St. Andrews Road. I met the Pryor’s on the way, and the Darby’s of this road sat in the pew behind me. St. Andrews proved a disappointment. It is the local High Church. The service proved to be what they term sung Eucharist, actually it was a poor imitation of the Latin mass, and the parson even called it mass.

November 28, 1943 — Advent Sunday

The B.B.C. tells us that during the past eight days the R.A.F. have bombed Berlin five times, dropping in all six thousand tons of bombs on the city. This is awful. It makes me weep. I weep for Berlin as well as for us, and for all the dead, the dead in Berlin, and our boys who will never return. War, damned ghastly fiendish war! Is this the only way men can settle the affairs of he world?

One wry joke comes in. The B.B.C. reports that a spokesman on the German air told the Germans that Berlin was carrying on in the debris, life as usual, including even the theaters, and listed two of the plays still running as, Queen of the Night, and Love’s Glamour Over All. What irony!

November 29, 1943

It’s a year today since Mother died. We have had fogs throughout this November like last year's. It was the fog that killed mother, and this year too it is killing the old. I’m feeling homesick for Angel Road, Mother’s home. Of course in actuality Joan has annihilated it, she “has got rid of” the greater part of Mother’s belongings, and what she has retained she has rearranged in strangeness. Instead of the crowded and cozy Victorian home Mother kept, Joan has made a cold, forbidding, sparsely furnished barracks. Joan is strictly utilitarian and the house is now ugly and cheerless; a place that would give Mother the shivers as much as it does me, and from which she is so banished that it is almost impossible to remember her in it.

I was thinking today I have never been really at home in the world since I left Angel Road. None of the homes I have made with Ted have been homes to me. Maybe they have meant home to my children, I hope so, but they have never meant home to me. Home was Number Six Angel Road, and no place else. Perhaps that is what home is, the house where one lives with one’s parents, where one is a child supported by love, by love and discipline. I don’t know how men feel about this, but I know a husband has never given me “home” in the way my parents did. I felt at home in Angel Road, no matter what the tumult, and I felt to be myself there, but I have never felt at home with Ted, never felt, either, to be my true full self with him. To go home, no, no more can I ever do that. Perhaps that is why those who love God can feel about death that it is going home. Oh, I wished I lived alone and could do as I pleased.