Two Diary Entries from 1940
I’ve been reading two collections of diary anthologies (more on these anon) which collect entries from diarists organised by the day of the year. Since I got these, I do my best to read the entry for the day.
On September 24, I read this vivid entry, from The Assassin’s Cloak. The entry is dated 1940, and is by Harold Nicolson[1]:
I detect in myself a certain area of claustrophobia. I do not mind being blown up. What I dread is being buried under huge piles of masonry and hearing water drip slowly, smelling the gas creeping towards me and hearing the faint cries of colleagues condemned to a slow and ungainly death. Always as I write this diary the guns boom. One writes that phrase, yet it means nothing. There is the distant drumfire of the outer batteries. There is the nearer crum-crum of the Regent’s Park guns. Then there is the drone of aeroplanes and the sharp impertinent notes of some nearer batteries. FF-oopb! they shout. And then in the middle distance there is the rocket sound of the heavy guns in Hyde Park. One gets to love them, these angry London guns. And when they drop into silence, one hears above them, irritating and undeterred, the dentist’s drill of the German aeroplanes, seeming always overhead, appearing always to circle round and round, ready always to drop three bombs, flaming, and then … crump, crump, crump, somewhere. Is it Bond Street, or Lincoln’s Inn Fields? Are Victorian or Georgian buildings slipping down under the crunch of that distant noise? I feel no fear nor anger. Hum and boom. Always I write my nightly diary to that accompaniment.
And the next day, September 25th, I read this from Simon Brett’s Faber Book of Diaries, which is an acknowledged inspiration for the book above. The entry is also from 1940 – so the very next day, in the same city – from the supposedly rambunctious diary of Joan Wyndham[2]. It’s a long one, so I’m excerpting:
By this morning I had worked myself up into such a state of passion over the absent Rupert – I hadn’t seen him for a week – that I didn’t know what to do with myself. All morning at the post I was thinking about him and wondering how much longer I could bear life without him.
On the way home I saw seventeen German planes in arrow formation cutting through the blue sky, with hundreds of shells bursting around them. The guns were so loud I took shelter in the door of the Servite church. As I was cowering there I heard a yell – “Woo hoo! Joanie!” – and there was old R. lurching down the street with a cheery smile on his face, completely ignoring the guns.
[They go home. She moons over him. He seems a bit of a fuckboy, I’ll be honest. He asks about her career in painting.]
I explained that what with the bombs and working at the first-aid post I really didn’t have time for art any more.
“All the more time for looking after Rooples,” he chortled with satisfaction. [He cooks steak and tells her about the 12th century love affair (discovered through their letters) of Abelard and Heloïse – a theologian and his pupil, later an abbess – she tells us how her landlady constantly makes passes at him.]
After we had eaten he wanted to lie down with me but I resisted, and we crashed down together on the sofa, most undignified.
“Now this here Heloïse,” Rupert said reprovingly, sitting on my stomach, “she used to glide down to Abelard’s couch – in fact she spent most of her time doing it, clad only in a loose-bodied gown and carrying a lamp. Now let’s see you glide down to me, Joanie, ten stone or no ten stone.” Looking v. intense, I glided. “You know I think I almost missed you,” R. said.
After that we quit being funny and made love very seriously, and I was filled with peace and delight. You can’t write about sensuality mingled with tenderness and pity, it just becomes maudlin or goes bad on you in some way – so call it love and leave it at that, one of the few transcendent and satisfying things left in this bloody awful life.
A rather delightful synchronicity.
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A diplomat and politician, husband of Vita Sackville-West, who was a lover of Virginia Woolf and co-author of their renowned collection of love letters to each other. ↩︎
Wyndham seems an absolute delight of a character. Her diaries focus on her romantic adventures in London during World War 2, but later in life, she was a restaurant critic, ran Oxford’s first espresso bar, ran a hippie restaurant in the sixties and catered for pop festivals. She was encouraged by her daughter to publish her wartime diaries. But my favourite bit from her Wikipedia entry is about her father:
After her father was caught in flagrante delicto with the Marchioness of Queensbury, he followed the custom of the period by registering at a hotel in Brighton where he arranged for a private detective to photograph him in bed with a prostitute, rather than embarrass his lover. (This ruse provided photographic evidence of adultery, needed to obtain a divorce according to the laws of the day.)
Unfortunately, I have been unable to find copies of the collections of her wartime diaries, so I’ll have to make do with these entries. ↩︎