The next night there was another raid, and every night that week.
Walter was all on edge.
The children became fretful with their nights disturbed. I thought
it would be better to stay in our beds, quietly, as though nothing
was happening, but Walter said that was silly.
He said we must take the reasonable precautions. So we sat downstairs,
night after night, Walter and I, and the servants, with the children
half asleep.
Maud had gone to Mrs. Sebright, and taken her down to the school.
‘People should leave London, who could,’ she said, ‘it was foolish
to stay behind.’
And then the raids stopped for a bit, and the nights were quiet,
and we slept again and were glad.
Afterwards, when they came, we stayed in bed.
Food was now difficult to get. There were voluntary rations.
I spent hours every week weighing and measuring them out. People
who kept to the rations put cards up in their windows. We kept
to the rations, but we did not put up a card. The taste of beans
and lentils became sickening to us all.
Ada gave notice, on account of the air raids, and it was a long
time before I got another maid.
The long months of the winter passed on slowly, harder and more
difficult than the last. No sugar, no fat, no fuel, and the weary
hours of waiting in a queue for the horrid food we got.
I got to loathe the shops where I had to market; the butcher’s
shop in the High Street, where I waited every Tuesday and Saturday,
the grocer’s where I waited hours, to be told in the end that
the margarine had given out, that there were no beans, that tea
had risen again in price; I had to take the children very often,
and Rachel was heavy now to hold. I watched the other women in
the queue, working women mostly, more tired and draggled than
me, with children more fretful than mine, and wondered at their
patience; and sometimes I wondered if they really minded it all
as much as I did.
It was so cold that Winter. I had never known such cold; perhaps
it was the lack of fats that made one cold, Maud said so anyway;
and there was so little coal. We shut the drawing-room up, and
the study too, and lived in the dining-room downstairs. There
we could have a fire; and Walter at his office was warm; but
I was always cold; and I thought of Guy and Hugo in the trenches;
Hugo had always felt the cold so much, and then I thought:
‘George will not feel cold any more, at all.’
Walter and I saw each other very little. He worked almost always
in the evenings after dinner; examination papers now, to make
more money, not his proto-Hittite Script; and on Saturdays and
Sundays as a rule. He was not happy, I knew; how could he be?
but we were like people in a fog; we could not see light, nor
each other, we could only struggle for breath, to keep alive;
and again we said:
‘It cannot last much longer. It is bound to end very soon.’
My grandmother was still at Yearsly. Cousin Delia had kept her
there.