May 3, 1944
Our wedding anniversary, the
thirty-ninth, it was a Wednesday, too, the day we got married. My God! How long
ago!
May 4, 1944
Planes passed overhead incessantly all
night; our planes. I thought our invasion of Europe must have begun, at last.
But no, all we have been told today is that our aircraft were out over occupied
territory during the night.
May 5, 1944
Mrs. Camus was here this morning. She
tells me that Bobbie (Roberta), her youngest daughter, barely sixteen, has
commenced as a probationer in a London Nursery Hospital, and that Beryl, the
elder, has volunteered to do Red Cross work, in her evenings, here at Old
Church Hospital. She says Old Church is absolutely empty of patients, but has
increased its staff of doctors and nurses, and that many foreign doctors are
there; American, Polish, Czech, etc. They are standing by waiting for invasion
casualties. Beryl has been warned to prepare herself for terrible sights, men
without legs, men without faces. War, damnable devilish war!
In London a conference of Prime Ministers
is sitting on Wednesday dined with the King at Buckingham Palace. Mr. Fraser of
New Zealand, Mr. Curtain of Australia, Mr. Mackenzie King of Canada, General
Saints of South Africa, two Indians, the Maharajah of Kashmir and Sir Firoz Khan
Noon, and Sir Godfrey Higgins; and of course, Mr. Churchill. The old gang, they
have met, they say, “to examine afresh the main efforts and opportunities which
lie before their peoples in war and peace.” In effect, how to conduct the war,
how to make more men fight, work, and pay taxes, and how to pocket the
proceeds. Vile old men, on the spree. Old men who talk glibly about war and
glory. Rich old men who suffer none of the discomforts of war. Talkers; damned
talkers. Opportunists. Fools. Hateful old men.
May 6, 1944
In the Catholic Herald of yesterday, is
printed this: “An allied woman who does not wish even her nationality disclosed
because the people she worked with might be arrested and put to death by the Nazi’s
talked to me in London about her experiences in Hungary. She escaped there from
one of the occupied countries and worked for some time in the underground
movement with others of her compatriots who have escaped. Two or three months
ago she managed to get to this country by way of Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey,
a great deal of the journey being done on foot although she managed to travel
on trains when she could board them away from the big towns. She arrived in
Hungary about March, 1943, and spent seven months there.” (Then there are a
couple of columns about what she saw, etc.) This is what caught my attention,
and what I wish to stress: “But” and this was said very sadly, “I sometimes
wonder if resistance to the Nazi’s does any good to a country. It is heroic and
noble, I know, to resist as the Poles have done, but what have they gained?
They have lost three and a half million of their people, not to speak of one
and half million deported to Russia, and their position is not going to be too
happy in peace. Big nations cannot understand the position of small nations who
have to live beside powerful neighbors. To resist them may only be folly. It
may only be abnormal. It is unfair to judge those who feel they are unable to
do so… Everyday some member of the underground movements in Europe gives up his
or her life for the course of freedom from the Nazi yoke. I wonder sometimes,
are we right? The end is not so rosy.”
Exactly. What is the use of it all? Jesus
said: “Make peace with your adversary quickly.” War is madness, the most
colossal madness possible to mankind. It need never be. Men insist on making
war. Oh, I hate men, the old men who maneuver nations into war, for their own
ends. War fills me with furious anger, not against the poor young combatants,
who are forced to fight, but against the statesmen who bring it to pass. The
fool politicians.
May 13, 1944
Artie and Hilda moved into their house
today. We have combed this house to gather enough furniture so that they can
start on their own. Finally Bodger’s carried away a van load. New furniture is
absolutely unobtainable, but young couples starting up housekeeping, or folk
who have been blitzed out, can obtain from the government a book of coupons
permitting them to buy a certain limited amount of utility furniture. Artie
says he can not get his coupons until he has his premises, then he must fill in
forms, then he will be investigated (authorities will probably call here to
interview us, to find out if his new address is authentic, and so on) then he
will get his coupons, after that, then he must wait until the merchant procures
it, probably up to three months. What a game! So we’ve furnished him. This
makes me think of Mother furnishing homes for Eric out of surpluses of her
house. There is a heavy rainstorm this evening, and a big drop in the
temperature. We have had summer weather for a month past, maybe all the summer
we are going to get this year.
May 17, 1944
Artie and Hilda came today, in time for
lunch, and afterwards Artie laid the lino in the front bedroom, from which we
had let him take away the large blue carpet. Hilda looks very well. They tell
me they have received a card from Joan inviting them to spend the evening this
coming Friday with her in Hammersmith.
May 18, 1944 Ascension Day
Ascension into what? The stratosphere?
The Bomber Squadrons? The Spitfires? The Mosquito’s? The Flying Fortresses?
May 19, 1944
I am reading “The Sheltering Tree” which
is the autobiography of Netta Syrett, one of the popular novelists of my youth.
I quote, with agreement:
“The war years began for me on that
night, and it is only in retrospect that I realize how much more than the
actual four years of its duration it took out of the lives of women my age; of
most women my age, at any rate. In nineteen-fourteen we felt young, full of
energy, as ready for exertion and almost as unmindful of it as we were at
twenty-five. By nineteen-eighteen, even for those of us who like me led a quiet
existence and suffered no bereavement through the war, much of the “spirit’' of
youth had fled, and I fancy this was largely due to a prosaic physical cause;
undernourishment. It was, as I remember, only when by chance I had a good meal
that I realized how much I needed it, and loss of physical vigor meant a
corresponding loss of the feeling of youth, to my contemporaries and me. That
after all, is so little a thing compared with the terrible suffering of
thousands of other women as not worth mentioning.
It was a changed world into which women
of my age emerged after nineteen-eighteen, how greatly changed it took some
time to discover.”
Yes. That is how it is today; we are
undernourished, we are filled but not fed. When this war began in nineteen
thirty-nine I felt well and in the prime of middle age, but for a long time now
I have definitely felt myself to be an old woman. All my spring has gone, all
my resilience. Everything has become a trouble to me, and I am always tired.
Every extra exertion fatigues me excessively. I regard the house with detestation;
I don’t want the trouble of looking after it. I don’t want to dust, I don’t
want to cook, and I don’t want to sew. In fact, I don’t want to do anything.
Above all, I don’t want to have to look after anybody, but I long to be looked
after. I am always hungry; not with the healthy hunger from emptiness, but with
a gnawing hunger which craves a satisfaction from something, it doesn’t know
what, but can’t find. I long for juicy meat, and for fruit, for real bread and
real butter. I am so disgusted with all the substitute and ersatz foods. I want
real fresh food, and plenty of it. I wonder, I really do, if when once again we
can get good food, shall I be able to recover my vigor on it, or shan’t I?
Shall I be beyond recovery? Oh, damn the war, damn the war!
May 20, 1944
Oh, but I am tired! Almost all night
long, airplanes have been droning overhead, our planes going out, and then
returning. There must have been thousands of them. Europe must be bombed now
more than we were in 1940. Civilization is committing suicide.
May 22, 1944
Just before ten this morning, as I was
beginning to put my fresh bandages on, the alert sounded, and we had a short
day light raid, the first day light one for some time. This mornings bombs
dropped somewhere, supposing they had dropped on me.
What has disturbed me right now is a
photograph from America, which I received on Saturday. It is a fine large
photograph of Eddie, holding his little son; the child looks adoringly up to
his father, and his father smiles out at the world. My eldest son and his
eldest son. My heart is pinched and bruised afresh. I long to see Eddie face to
face, I long to see all the little children. Of our seventeen grandchildren I
have only seen two. I have missed all of the pleasures of their adorable
infancy's. For what? So that Ted can live in England and go to mass daily.
Isn’t it absurd?
Artie came in at teatime without Hilda.
He said they had been shopping downtown and she was tired, so he had sent her
home ahead. I told him that I had expected them for lunch. He said, I hadn’t
said lunch, so they didn’t like to come in, because of rations, etc. His chief
news was that he is “starting” work tomorrow. He received his Army discharge
last week, so now is a civilian again, back in the family firm.
May 24, 1944
This morning I did a through cleaning job
of the top floor. Mrs. Whitbread wrote a month ago that she would have to give
up the job, as she did not feel well enough to work any longer. (I imagine she
is going to have a baby) I was sorry about this, as she was a very good char.
I had several visitors this afternoon.
Mrs.Fitch and Bertha, Mrs. James, and Elizabeth Coppen. We had another
daylight alert from four forty-five until five-twenty and only a little
gunfire. I suppose it was only a stray reconnaissance plane.
May 27, 1944
I am afraid I am perilously near what is
known as a complete nervous breakdown. I am so tired in body and exasperated in
mind I feel I can’t endure another minute. I was in such a state of nerves this
morning whilst cooking the dinner I felt I should break down and cry, and I did
not dare to let myself go in case I should never stop. I am sick to death of
cooking dinners, I am sick to death of the house and the housework, I am sick
to death of looking after a husband and I am sick to death of the war, this
infernal war. I am sick of myself, this miserable body. The weather has turned
very hot suddenly and consequently my legs are bad. It is torture to walk
about. It is worse I suppose because of all the heavy work I have done this
week. I really do feel on the verge of collapse. Ted is too silly for words. At
dinner just now he said if the war ended now he was afraid it would be too
soon, because we, England, hadn’t suffered enough. France had suffered, he
said, and Poland, and now very likely Germany was suffering, but we hadn’t
suffered enough. This is the religious maniac talking; also the safe old man.
It is true this country hasn’t suffered invasion, but it suffered the
expectation of invasion and still isn’t free of the dread of the threat of it.
It is Ted who doesn’t suffer, but he is an abnormal man. What about Artie? What
about Cuthi? What about me in my grief for them? What about all our millions of
young men fighting and dying in the air, on the sea, on the land, all over the
globe and all their families grieving for them? What about our blasted cities
and villages? What about our young women thrust into the factories and the
services? What about the demoralization of our juveniles? What about the
nightly air raids, the fires, the terror? What about the taxes, to put
something down to Ted’s comprehension? This war will never be paid for, even in
cash. All who survive will be impoverished for the rest of their days in mere
money, let alone in their affections.
If Ted were a young man who had to go to
fight he might feel differently about the war. To say the least he would find
it inconvenient to have to leave his home, and to have to take orders from his
superiors. Isn’t it conceivable that millions of our men, especially the older
and the married ones, find Army life a suffering, long before they come to the
actual fighting and the danger? What about their wives and their mothers? Isn’t
it suffering for them to sit at home, or in their compulsory “directed” job,
alone? Partings, the breaking up of homes, infidelities, intolerable
loneliness, intolerable herding, insufficient money, restrictions! All these
miseries on top of blitzes, Foreign Service, wounds, blindness, and death. Then
Ted calmly says we haven’t yet suffered enough! I suppose he wants everybody to
be crucified like Jesus! Oh, he’s mad! It is true that the sea has saved us
from the boot of the invader, but it hasn’t saved us from anything else of war.
The air war has been and is terrible. There isn’t a family, scarcely a solitary
person, in this land, who hasn’t suffered because of this war, even Ted, though
he takes it lightly, yet one of his sons is a prisoner, and the other is
mutilated, and will be mutilated for the rest of his life, perhaps another
fifty years or more. What of the agony of body and of mind which Artie has
suffered? There are thousands like Artie, and will be thousands more. War.
Devilish, damnable war; yet men will war. I can’t understand it. I don’t think any
woman can understand it. Men are fools that’s what women understand, right
well. Ted Thompson is an intolerable fool. He’s mad!
May 29, 1944
It is hotter than ever. The B.B.C.
reports temperatures of ninety-six degrees in the Straights of Dover.
May 30, 1944
Still hellishly hot. The B.B.C. reports
temperatures in the shade at Dover, seventy-nine degrees. The R.A.F. is out all
day and all night just the same; day flying planes return so hot that ground
crews have to spray them with water before they can touch them. This heat is
making me feel downright sick, as well as being bad for my legs. It makes me
feel cross also. Damn rotten world.
