Excerpts from J. B. Priestley’s Postscripts (1940)

Excerpts from J. B. Priestley’s Postscripts (1940)
 
Preface
 
“...when first the world wondered if each week would see the end of us, then afterwards drew a long breath of relief and admiration, as the common folk of this island rose to meet the challenge...”
 
Wednesday, 5th June, 1940.
 
“...a glimmer of that poetry of action which distinguishes war from mass murder(i.e. referring to the Dunkirk evacuation between 26 May and 4 June, 1940.好文筆，一笑).”
 
“...to my mind what was most characteristically English about it—so typical of us, so absurd and yet so grand and gallant that you hardly know whether to laugh or to cry when you read about them—was the part played in the difficult and dangerous embarkation—not by the warships... but by the little pleasure-steamers. We’ve known them and laughed at them, these fussy(i.e. over-ornate) little steamers, all our lives... We have watched them load and unload their crowds of holiday passengers... Sometimes they only went as far as the next seaside resort. But the boldest of them might manage a Channel crossing, to let everybody have a glimpse of Boulogne(i.e. a coastal city in Northern France). They were usually paddle steamers, making a great deal more fuss with all their churning than they made speed... and even if they were new, there was always something old-fashioned, a Dickens touch, a mid-Victorian air, about them... But they were called out of that world... to sail into the inferno, to defy bombs, shells, magnetic mines, torpedoes魚雷, machine-gun fire—to rescue our soldiers. Some of them—alas—will never return.”
 
Sunday, 9th June, 1940.
 
“Sometimes, in between listening to the latest news of battle and destruction, or trying to write about them myself, I’ve gone out and stared at the red japonica山茶花 or the cherry and almond杏樹 blossom, so clear and exquisite against the moss-stained old wall... I’ve looked out of my house in the country on these marvellous days of sun and blue air—and I could see the blaze and bloom of the Californian poppies and the roses in the garden; then the twinkling beaches and the stately nodding elms榆樹—and then, beyond, the lush fields and the round green hills dissolving into the hazy blue of the sky.”
 
“I had to remind myself that the peaceful and lovely scene before me was the real truth; that it was there long before the Germans went mad, and will be there when that madness is only remembered as an old nightmare.”
 
‘But sometimes, too, I’ve felt that the unusual loveliness of our gardens and meadows and hills has come home to us because these things are, so to speak, staring at us—as you see so many women now staring at their soldier husbands, sweethearts, sons, just before the trains take them away. It’s as if this English landscape said: “Look at me, as I am now in my beauty and fullness of joy, and do not forget.”’
 
Sunday, 16th June, 1940.
 
‘A night or two ago, I had my first spell(i.e. period) with our Local Defence Volunteers or “Parashots(i.e. shooting a parachute invader).”... Ours is a small and scattered village, but we’d had a fine response to the call for Volunteers, practically every able-bodied man in the place takes his turn. The post is on top of a high down, with a fine view over a dozen wide parishes. The men I met up there the other night represented a good cross-section of English rural life; we had a parson牧師, a bailiff莊園管家, a builder, farmers and farm labourers. Even the rarer and fast disappearing rural trades were represented —for we had a hurdle-maker(i.e. who made wattle hurdles for sheepfolds) there, and his presence, together with that of a woodman and a shepherd, made me feel sometimes that I’d wandered into one of those rich chapters of Thomas Hardy’s fiction in which his rustics meet in the gathering darkness on some Wessex hillside. And indeed there was something in the preliminary talk, before the sentries were posted for the night, that gave this whole horrible business of air raids and threatened invasion a rustic, homely, almost comfortable atmosphere, and really made a man feel more cheerful about it. In their usual style, these country chaps called every aeroplane “she.” They’d say: “Ay, she come along through the gap and over along by Little Witchett... Won’t be long now, you’ll see, afore they gets her—and then, bingo, masters, down she comes!” They have the sound countryman’s habit of relating everything intimately to their own familiar background. Now of course this doesn’t take away any of the real menace, but what it does do is somehow to put all this raiding and threatened invasion in their proper places. The intellectual is apt to see these things as the lunatic end of everything, as part of a crazy Doomsday Eve, and so he goes about moaning, or runs away to America. But the simple and saner countryman sees this raiding and invading as the latest manifestation of that everlasting menace which he always has to fight sudden blizzards at lambing time, or floods just before the harvest.’
 
“Well, as we talked on our post on the hilltop, we watched the dusk deepen in the valleys below, where our women-folk listened to the news as they knitted by the hearth, and we remembered that these were our homes and that now at any time they might be blazing ruins, and that half-crazy German youths... might soon be let loose down there. The sentries took their posts. There was a mist coming over the down(i.e. a gently rolling hill). Nothing much happened for a time. A green light that seemed to defy all black-out regulations turned out to be merely an extra large and luminous glow-worm; the glow-worms, poor ignorant little creatures, don’t know there’s a war on and so continue lighting themselves up. A few searchlights went stabbing through the dusk and then faded. The mist thickened, and below in all the valleys, there wasn’t the faintest glimmer of light. You heard the ceaseless high melancholy singing of the telegraph wires in the wind.”
 
Sunday, 30th June, 1940.
 
“Already the future historians are fastening their gaze upon us, seeing us all in that clear and searching light of the great moments of history... As Chesterton once sang:
 
Rise up and bid the trumpets blow
When it is gallant to be gay;
Tell the wide world it shall not know
Our face until we turn at bay(i.e. the point when the prey can flee no further and must turn and attack).”
 
Sunday, 7th July, 1940.
 
"It was rather late the other night, and we were coming home to Highgate Village by way of High-street, Hampstead, and the Spaniards-road, which run, you might say, on the roof of London(夏濟安注：倫敦西北區地勢較高，那條街和公路好像是在倫敦屋頂上走過). We had to pass the Whitestone Pond. Now I like the Whitestone Pond. On fine afternoons, boys sail their toy boats on it, and when there’s a wind blowing across the Heath(i.e. Hampstead Heath，倫敦公園、公共綠地) the toy boats have to battle with enormous waves—about three inches high. At night, this pond is like a little hand-mirror that the vast, sprawling, yawning London still holds negligently; and you see the stars glimmering m it. Well, the other night was one of those mysterious nights we’ve had lately when there seems to be a pale light coming from nowhere, and the sky has a pure washed look. The dim lights of a few cars could be seen in the dusk round the pond, and some people, late as it was, were standing and staring.
 
“We stopped, and heard a solicitous關切的 quacking and a great deal of faint squeaking. Then we saw on the pond, like a tiny feathered flotilla船隊, a duck accompanied by her minute ducklings, just squeaking specks of yellow fluff. We joined the fascinated spectators; we forgot the war, the imminence of invasion, the doubts about the French Fleet, the melancholy antics of the Bordeaux Government(夏濟安注：時為1940年6月，法國西線崩潰，法國政府遷至西南部的波爾多(Bordeaux)後再遷至維希(Vichy)，希特勒陳兵英倫海峽，侵英之舉，迫在眉睫，法國艦隊誰屬，與戰局影響極大，英人疑慮自深；而波爾多政府倡議求和，行動頗多乖謬，殊為昔日盟友所心痛，故作者稱之為「令人傷心的反常行為」(melancholy antics)).
 
“Our eyes, and ears, and our imagination were caught and held by those triumphant little parcels(i.e. part) of life. This duck hadn’t hatched her brood here; she’d hatched them in some hidden corner—nobody knows where—and had then conveyed them—and nobody knows how—to swim happily in the dusk on this summit of the city. She hadn’t asked anybody’s advice or permission; she hadn’t told herself it was too late or too difficult, nobody had told her to “Go to it” and that “it all depended on her”. She had gone to it, a triumphant little servant of that life, mysterious, fruitful, beautiful, which expresses itself as a man writes a poem—now in vast galaxies of flaming suns, now in a tiny brood of ducklings squeaking in the dusk.”
 
Sunday, 28th July, 1940.
 
“I will tell you what we did for such young men and their young wives at the end of the last war. We did nothing... After the cheering and the flag-waving were over, and all the medals were given out, somehow the young heroes disappeared, but after a year or two there were a lot of shabby, young-oldish men about who didn’t seem to have been lucky in the scramble for easy jobs and quick profits, and so tried to sell us second-hand cars or office supplies we didn’t want, or even trailed round the suburbs asking to be allowed to demonstrate the latest vacuum cleaner(J. B. Priestley, English Journey, "We could drink to the tragedy of the dead; but we could only stare at one another, in pitiful embarrassment, over this tragi-comedy of the living, who had fought for a world that did not want them, who had come back to exchange their uniforms for rags.")."

 
“...so I repeat my question—in return for their skill, devotion, endurance and self-sacrifice, what are we civilians prepared to do?...Don’t insult them by thinking they don’t care what sort of a world they’re fighting for. And here’s a bit of it in a letter that reached me a day or two ago. It runs as follows.
 
“My son was formerly a salesman; he resigned in order to join the Air Force. On a recent visit home he said. ‘I shall never go back to the old business life—that life of what I call the survival of the slickest, I now know a better way. Our lads in the R.A.F. would, and do, willingly give their lives for each other, the whole outlook of the force is one of ‘give’, not one of ‘get’. If tomorrow the war ended and I returned to business, I would need to sneak, cheat and pry in order to get hold of orders which otherwise would have gone to one of my R.A.F. friends if one of them returned to commercial life with a competing firm. Instead of cooperating as we do in war, we would each use all the craft we possessed with which to confound(i.e. defeat) each other. I will never do it.”
 
His father ends by saying: “You, sir, will be able to adorn this tale—it’s a true one—I hope you will.” But I don’t think it needs any adorning.”
 
Sunday, 1st September; 1940.
 
“This is the last Sunday of the first year of the War. I want to go back tonight to the first Sunday, the very first day of the War. I’ll close my eyes and then wait to discover that Sunday of a year ago... it was an exquisite calm morning; the little voyage from Cowes to Southampton was pleasanter than usual, and the London road was very quiet, even for a Sunday morning. Nearer London, down the long hill from Bagshot, there did seem to be rather a lot of heavily loaded cars passing us, but nothing happened until we entered the long narrow street of Staines. It was then, clean out of a quiet blue, that all the sirens screamed at us. Beneath the astonished noonday sun, people in steel helmets came hurrying, shouting and gesticulating. It was then I learned that we had been at war for the last hour. Caught by surprise in this crowded little town, jammed with people and cars, I must confess to having a moment of very real fear...” 
 
"It is... upon such fears, which are themselves the result of a newly won tenderness, a deepening piety(i.e. a belief which is accepted with unthinking conventional reverence; presumption), that the Dictators depend for most of their power. From the beginning they’ve carefully taken into account other people’s affections and decencies, and have struck at the places from which a growing civilisation has removed the armour. It is for this reason that no talk of treaties, or economic injustices, can ever excuse them as persons, for they and all their kind recognise the goodness in others as a weakness to be profited by, a bared breast for their daggers, and if this isn’t evil, then nothing is."
 
“But no bombs fell that morning, and we continued our journey into London, now a strange city of sandbags and shelters and first-aid posts. I knew then that the London I’d quitted so casually six weeks before had vanished for ever. Whatever might happen, I could never see that City again...”
 
“I was making my exit from London that evening by train from Paddington, and I never remember seeing streets so empty before. It was like going in a taxi through an immense deserted film set of a city, still illuminated by great yellow lights. Through this unreality I carried within me a companion feeling of unreality, not unlike that I remember having on my way to a Nursing Home for an operation; a rather chill sense of a dreamlike state. This didn’t survive my entrance into Paddington, which was crowded and looked as if it had had six consecutive Bank Holidays(即公共假期). History was being made, and as I suspect is usual when history is being made, the place reeked(i.e. smell; stink) of weary humanity. The platforms were thick with wastepaper, half-eaten buns and empty bottles, and everywhere mothers appeared to be feeding their young. The trains you felt had no longer the old particular destinations. They were simply going and perhaps would never return. As soon as my train pulled out, perhaps because although the train was crowded I happened to be alone, I was back again in that dreamlike state of mind. As we moved through the Western suburbs I stared up through the open window at the evening sky. Over in the west, hiding the dying sun, was the only patch of cloud to be seen, and it was shaped like a dragon. Do you remember that, any of you? Yes, a rampant dragon, etched in fire. The beast had been trapped inside the vast azure bowl(i.e. sky). Against the exquisite fading blue, the barrage balloons防空氣球 glimmered like pearls, and they might have been a pattern of pearls, that had somehow been stitched on to the fabric of the evening sky. I don’t ever remember seeing a nobler end to a day. It was the strings and clarinets單簧管 and flutes bidding a high clear farewell to some lovely adagio(慢板，暗喻戰前氣氛). The light had grown unbelievably tender. How was it possible to believe that such a sky could spill ruin and death. It caught at the heart—that sky; not the heart that is entirely human and can go home and be content, but that other homeless heart we all possess, which even when there’s no war, is never at peace, but dimly recognises that long ago it was conscripted for a bitter campaign and nameless battles in the snow. The train gathered speed, the Bowl of Heaven paled and expanded, and the dragon smouldered and then utterly faded.”
 
Sunday, 8th September, 1940.
 
“There are people who really enjoy being in danger... An immediate threat of destruction and death makes them feel more alive than they are at ordinary times. Danger wakes them up and gives the mere act of living a fine flavour. Now I’m not one of those people myself. I don’t like being in danger. I’ve too much imagination, thank you. You can’t live for years by using and developing your imagination without also becoming a rather apprehensive type of person. In my time I’ve been to a doctor to have some test or other, and in three seconds of his silence I’ve promptly given myself some frightful incurable disease, kept myself dying by inches, and then buried myself, to learn then that there was nothing the matter with me. Which ought to remind us, by the way, that we’re always in danger, and that once past the age of twenty or so we know that the deaths we call violent, coming straight out of the blue, are the most merciful(George Orwell, “How the Poor Die”, “And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.”). But I’ll admit that these noble reflections don’t reconcile me to being in danger. I lived dangerously for long spells in the last war, and when that war was over I decided from then on I would be a comfortable pipe-and-slippers man and keep as close to cowardice as possible. I mention these facts so that you’ll understand... that you’re listening to a frail fellow citizen and not to one of these fire-eating heroes who occasionally find their way to the microphone. So when I talk of danger, I mean just what most of you mean, and I don’t enjoy it. But like you, I try to carry on as cheerfully as I can, and don’t do badly at it.”
 
“...I think it was a pity that in the earlier months of this war the authorities were so emphatic that we were civilians, a helpless passive lot, so many skins to save, so much weight of tax-paying stuff to be huddled out of harm’s way(一笑).”
 
“It's a good thing... to take a very tolerant line about differences of opinion, to remember that we’re all fellow soldiers, to make more and not less allowance than usual for the astonishing queerness of other folk, to be more polite and considerate... just because we are sharing a battle. It would do us no harm to imagine that everybody we meet during the day, even if it is only to buy or sell some little thing, has been encountered in the smoke and fury of the battlefield.”
 
Sunday, 15th September, 1940.
 
‘There is no evidence to suggest that Herr Hitler and Marshal Goering are well-read in English literature, and I should doubt if they ever spent much time with Pickwick Papers. But their attention ought to be drawn to Chapter ten of that immortal work, in which chapter Samuel Weller makes his first appearance. He was, if you remember, cleaning boots in the yard of the White Hart Inn, when a smart chambermaid called over the balustrade(i.e. railing) of the gallery, “Sam,” “Hello”, replied Sam. “No. 22 wants his boots.” Sam replied. “Ask 22 whether he’ll have them now or wait till he gets ’em.” “Come, don’t be a fool, Sam,” said the girl coaxingly, “the gentleman wants his boots directly.” “Well...” said Sam “Look at these ’ere boots.... The eleven boots is to be called at half-past eight and the shoe at nine. Who’s No. 22 that’s to put all the others out? No, no, ‘regular rotation,’ as Jack Ketch said when he tied the man up. ‘Sorry to keep you a-waiting. Sir, but I’ll attend to you directly’(劉凱芳譯：不行，不行，絞刑吏把人綁起來的時候說得不錯，要按次序輪流着來，對不起，要讓你等等了).
 
‘That’s Sam Weller, and there seems to me nearly all the true cockney spirit, independence, ironic humour, cheek and charm shown in that tiny bit of dialogue.
 
‘A lot of us, especially if we are from the North... imagined that that old cockney spirit was dead and gone. We thought the Londoner of to-day, catching his tubes and electric trains, was a different kind of fellow altogether, with too many of his corners rubbed off, too gullible, easily pleased, too soft; and we were wrong. This last grim week has shown us how wrong we were. The Londoners, as the Americans are saying, can take it, and London itself—this grey sea of a city—can take it. The fact that the savage indiscriminate bombing of the city has seized the world’s imagination, is itself a tribute to the might and majesty of London. There was a time when, like many north-countrymen who came South, I thought I disliked London; it had vast colourless suburbs that seemed to us even drearier than the ones we had left behind. We hated the extremes of wealth and poverty that we found, cheek by jowl緊挨着一起 in the West End, where at night the great purring motor-cars filled with glittering women passed the shadowy rows of the homeless, the destitute, the down-and-out(i.e. the paupers)...
 
‘But on these recent nights, when I have gone up to high roofs and have seen the fires like open wounds on the vast body of the city, I’ve realised, like many another settler here, how deeply I’ve come to love London, with its misty, twilit charm, its hidden cosiness and companionship, its smoky magic. The other night, when a few fires were burning so fiercely, that half the sky was aglow, and the tall terraces around Portland Place(倫敦街道名，建有大量喬治年代(1714-1830)的英式排屋) were like pink palaces in the Arabian Nights, I saw the Dome and Cross of St. Paul’s(i.e. St Paul's Cathedral, the tallest building in London from 1710 to 1963), silhouetted in sharpest black against the red flames and orange fumes, and it looked like an enduring symbol of reason and Christian ethics seen against the crimson glare of unreason and savagery. “Though giant rains put out the sun, here stand I for a sign(i.e. G. K. Chesterton’s line).”
 
‘It’s better to say outright, now we’re all going to have a jolly good shake up(i.e. radical reorganization)... Most people don’t mind that—they rather like it, but, of course, nobody likes being bombed at all odd hours; to go home as I did the other morning at dawn and notice that a large bus has been flattened like a tin toy against the second storey of a building, is to feel, to say the least of it, that things are becoming most rum(i.e. odd) and peculiar... As a kind of civilian life this is hellish, but as battles go, it is not at all bad—with some shelter, meals arriving fairly regularly and a quick rescue of the wounded. But I am not giving this advice to the cockneys—they don’t need any from me, only an apology for ever imagining their old spirit had left them, and a staie of admiration. They can say to Herr Hitler and Marshal Goering (who really will have to read Pickwick) what Sam Weller said: “Sorry to keep you waiting, Sir, but I’ll attend to you directly.”’
 
Sunday, 29th September, 1940.
 
‘Perhaps the only solidly real place we ever know is the place in which we spent our childhood and youth. It’s there there are genuinely real streets, squares, shops and houses, and their only fault is that they have a trick, like the queer cards that conjurers sometimes use, of appearing diminished every time we go back to have another look at them.
 
‘I was thinking this when I returned the other afternoon to my native city of Bradford, where I went to see what damage had resulted from a recent air-raid. And, as I anticipated, it was far more of a shock to see a few burnt-out buildings in this town than it had been to see all the damage in London. It was astonishing to discover that the familiar large drapery布料 store and the old chapel were no longer there, and that in their places were some blackened ruins with odd pillars and bits of walls still standing, which had an unexpectedly dignified look about them... and now we come to the point—the pieshop and the pie were still there... there’d been just at the back of this draper’s a small eating-house that specialised in meat and potato pie, one of those little Dickensy places that still survive in provincial towns. I remembered it well... because there’d always been on view in the window, to tempt the appetite of the passer-by, a giant, almost superhuman, meat and potato pie with a magnificently brown, crisp, artfully wrinkled, succulent looking crust. And not only that... out of that pie there came at any and every hour when the shop was doing business, a fine rich appetising steam to make the mouth water even as the very window itself was watering. There it was, a perpetual volcano of a meat and potato pie. And that steaming giant pie was to my boyish mind... as much an essential part of my native city as the Town Hall and its chimes.
 
‘...Now, the owner himself, an elderly man with one of those “folded-in” Yorkshire faces, and character written all over him, was standing just inside the doorway. So I asked him, in my delight and relief, what had happened. He replied shortly, and, indeed, rather grumpily, that the shop had had its front blown out but was now open, as I could see, and that the famous pie hadn’t been damaged at all, because it was his habit when closing the shop to remove this noble trade-mark to a place of safety. As he said this I could feel his hand on my back and a distinct sensation of being gently but firmly pushed into the street, where, the hand hinted, I belonged. Rather grieved by this suspicious reception, I went further along to have a closer look at the neighbouring ruins. I had not been there more than a minute or two before I was clapped on the shoulder, and there was the pie-man again, this time wearing his coat and not wearing his apron, holding out a hand and beaming at me. It seems that his wife recognised my voice. I am not telling this for my own glory, though I must say it’s one of the most handsome compliments I ever received. And so after doing a quick change with his apron and coat, he came round after me. He didn’t admit as much; indeed, we never went into the question, but I think that he’d imagined that I was some trade rival—no doubt I have a look of the younger ambitious pie-man about me—who was anxious to discover after years of unsuccessful fifth-column work the secret of the famous steaming pie.
 
‘...And now, I suppose, all my more severe listeners are asking each other why this fellow has to go on yapping about his pies and nonsense at a time like this when the whole world is in a turmoil, the fate of empires is in the balance, and men, women and children are dying terrible violent deaths, to which I can only reply, that we must keep burnished(i.e. polished by rubbing) the bright little thread of our common humanity that still runs through these iron days and black nights, and that we are fighting to preserve and, indeed, I hope to enlarge that private and all-important little world of our own reminiscence and humour and homely poetry in which a pie that steamed for forty-five years and successfully defied an air-raid to steam again has its own proper place.’
 
Sunday, 6th October, 1940.
 
‘The other evening I was going by car down the western side of England, on my way to do a certain job. I was being driven by an engineer in the employ of a well-known public corporation. It was an unpleasant evening, chilly, damp, with rain threatening, and dusk coming far too early. It seemed as if winter was only just round the corner. This may explain why our talk along the road was more grim than gay. The engineer grumbled because his subsistence allowance was now less than it had been before the war, having been reduced by some strange officials who imagined that prices would be less in wartime. I grumbled at the evening and said I’d rather be faced with a desperate war in summer than any kind of war in winter. He said that travelling, which he had to do continually, was a wearing game these days for sometimes it took him an hour or two at the end of a long day to find any sort of bed. I replied, with my eye on the sad, early dusk, conjuring up thoughts of a 4:30 blackout(i.e. according to the blackout' regulations, families had to cover up all windows at night to ensure that no light escaped that could aid enemy bombers to find their targets. Street lamps were also switched off and car headlights covered except for a narrow slit), that now was the time for our leaders to use a little imagination, to light beacons in this gathering darkness... releasing in us great creative forces. Just a little imagination, that’s all, I added... and by this time the last glimmer of daylight had vanished, and we were crawling through a rainy darkness. I said we’d better stop at the next town and put up for the night... We arrived there nothing to be seen, of course—but I knew which it was and remembered it as being a pretty little place. We were told that of the three hotels there only one had been left open to the public, so we went to that one, where I enquired for two rooms; or at least two beds. This seemed to amuse them, no beds to be had there... So I telephoned to other hotels further along our route and they laughed merrily, too, and hinted that they had been full for weeks and would remain full for months. I said that there appeared to be a surprising number of people travelling in these rather out-of-the-way(i.e. remote) parts, and was told that all these guests weren’t travellers, but resident guests(案：酒店已被當地居民住滿，再無空位留給外來的旅行者了) , people who had settled in these hotels to be out of the way of sirens and anti-aircraft guns, and bombs. Well, that was all right. Nobody in their senses wants a noisy night... though this arrangement did seem rather tough luck on all those people who have to be travelling about the country on what might be urgent business.
 
‘Eventually... we did manage to obtain a room and a couple of beds, and were able to say good-bye to the black, dripping road. It was after that... I began to meditate, sombrely... on one of the smaller ironies of this war here, and it’s this, that a large proportion of the people who are able to live in comparative peace, security and quiet, consists, not of persons recovering from overwork, strain or shock, but those persons who don’t know what to do with themselves. I don’t say for a moment that it’s their fault. Many of them no doubt have tried, over and over again, to find some useful wartime occupation before settling into these remote and charming places; and, so far as this is the case, they are to be pitied and not envied. Some of them have been made to feel useless, first by stupid parents, and afterwards by a badly organised community, all their lives. This has, for a long time now, been a country in which there are far too many pleasant, able-bodied persons who, because of some system of private incomes or pensions and all kinds of snobbish nonsense, are condemned to yawn away their lives, forever wondering what to do between meals, in startling contrast to the other people who wonder how to get it all done between meals.
 
‘The bitterest letters I have received during these past few months, have not been from men, piloting fighters or bombers, or stoking minesweepers, or from women nursing under fire, or looking after evacuated babies, but from ladies doing nothing in inland resorts, where their energy is all turned inward instead of outward, turning into hostility instead of into helpfulness and fun.’
 
Sunday, 20th October, 1940.
 
‘...with the defeat of the German Air Force over England by the R.A.F. and the failure of Gocring’s terror tactics to break the morale of the people of London. We’re now entering a new period, and I think it should be interpreted to you on Sunday nights by a new postsenpter, and preferably a speaker who feels the same exultation about this period that I did about the earlier one. I admit that I don’t... the general war situation... is, of course, far more favourable to us than it was during the summer. But the high generous mood... is vanishing with the leaves. It is as if the poets had gone and the politicians were coming back.’
 
‘...sometimes the most honest way of discussing general topics is to be personal about them’