Marking Time (25 page)

Wednesday, 29 May

It is so sunny and warm that Polly and I started to unpack our summer clothes. They aren’t up to much. We’ve both grown so that our cotton frocks look silly and
there’s nothing left to let down because Ellen let them down last year. Also they don’t fit us in other places that I won’t mention here – I’ve never liked the
idea of bulging anywhere, although Poll seemed quite calm about it. ‘It’s a step on the way,’ she said, ‘it happens to everybody.’ I’ve never seen the point
of that: why, if it was the end of the world, would you feel better because it was the end for everyone else too? I do wish that Dad would write. It’s well over two weeks since even
Zoë had a letter. She doesn’t seem to mind about that so much; she likes him to ring up – I do, too, but when he does of course Zoë gets the lion’s share.

Aeroplanes go over such a lot now that we hardly notice them. Aunt Syb and Zoë said they’d make us two new frocks each if Aunt Villy would get the material and she took us to
Hastings in the car – what a treat! – and when we got out on the front to see the sea, we could hear a distant thundery rumbling and Aunt Villy said it was guns. There were quite a
lot of people on the front, just leaning on railings and staring out. Of course you can’t see France from there, and that made the guns feel worse. The sea was oily calm but we
couldn’t see any ships. Then Aunt Villy said, ‘Well! It will all be the same a hundred years hence,’ which was the only annoying thing she said that day, and we walked to the
shop to get material. Aunt Villy said we could choose within reason, which meant, I suppose, that if we chose something she didn’t approve of we wouldn’t be allowed to have it.
Polly said she wanted pink, because Aunt Syb always dressed her in blues and greens because of her hair. ‘But I think pinks and reds are lovely together,’ she said. She chose a
piqué the colour of strawberry ice and a lilac-coloured Tootal cotton with tiny little flowers all over it, but I couldn’t think what to choose because actually I don’t care
very much about clothes except I hate them to be at all frilly and girly-wirly. I asked Poll to choose for me because she really enjoys that sort of thing. She chose something called gingham
– a sort of greeny-grey or greyish-green checked in thin white squares and a white and yellow striped stuff. Aunt Villy said they were good choices, and she got four yards of each.
‘They may have to last you a long time,’ she said. Then we went to a chemist and Aunt Villy bought charcoal biscuits for Aunt Syb and a very nice torch for Miss Milliment to help
her see her way back to the cottage because she slipped and fell last week and the blood all stuck to her stocking but she hadn’t noticed. Poll and I think this means she doesn’t
take her stockings off
at night
, which is unusual.
Then
we went to a bookshop and kind Aunt Villy said one book each up to two bob and I got ghost stories by M. R. James and
Polly got—

Dad rang up! He spoke to me for a whole six minutes! He said never mind if the pips go, I really want to talk to you. He said he has almost stopped feeling seasick, but that might be because
he has been at sea for quite a long time so he’d had a chance to get used to it. He said there had been a whole bundle of letters when he got in this time – even one from Neville. I
said it was difficult to write interesting letters from a place where nothing happened, but he said I wrote extremely good letters that interested
him
, just keep doing it. He said
quite all right about more pocket money – tell Aunt Rach. I asked him when he would get leave and he didn’t know. He was off again quite soon, but he’d ring up when he got
back. I asked him whether he knew if being bored helped people to go mad and he didn’t know and asked me why I asked him, and I told him about Aunt Villy’s mother, and he said, oh,
well, I might be right. Then he made the noise that destroyers make when they’re pleased about something – a kind of honking whoop which was very funny. I don’t know what they
make it with. Me, of course, he said, and we both laughed all through the pips. Then he asked me to look after Zoë, as usual, and I said I was doing my best but he didn’t seem to
hear because he went on about her having the baby when he wasn’t there and that was hard on her. I said she seemed placid and quite resigned to her fate which he seemed to find
reassuring. I asked him how he thought the war was going, and he said he supposed not awfully well at the moment, but he was sure the tide would turn. It is quite frightening to think of the
Germans as a tide, and I shan’t tell Polly that. Then he said he thought he should speak to the Duchy, and I asked Polly to get her, and while she was doing that, he said, ‘Remember
I love you enormously,’ and I said I did too. And then the Duchy came and he said, ‘Sleep tight,’ which was idiotic of him as it was only half past six. It’s funny.
I’ve wanted him to ring up or write for so long and now he has and it just makes me feel awfully sad – a bit frightened as well. I thought of a whole lot of things I hadn’t
told him and each of them seemed trivial considered separately, but I still wanted to have told him
all
of them, because as the weeks go by there are more and more things and in about
a year he might hardly know me at all. It’s different for him, because on the whole it seems to me that grown-ups don’t change. If that is true, I wonder
when
people get
sort of finished and stay like whatever they have become. And whether they can
choose
when it is.

I cried about Dad after he rang. I wasn’t going to put that in, but I did, so I have. I just do miss him so much and hearing his voice, and then
not
hearing his voice is well
nigh unbearable. I think probably that sex makes love less of a
strain
. So when it’s a case of love, and sex is out of the question – not that I in the least want to
sleep
with Dad, but I can see that there might be something very tranquil about it if I did.

Friday, 31 May

The aunts have gone to Tunbridge Wells. Aunt Syb is to have her barium meal which apparently is thick chalky stuff that you have to drink down in one go and then they X-ray
your stomach and can see if you have an ulcer. Also poor Aunt Villy is going to see her mother again. They have taken Miss Milliment as her eyes are needing better spectacles. Zoë has made
me the yellow striped dress: I quite like it although I look a bit silly. Zoë said I should have white sandals, but I’m perfectly happy with sandshoes. It is quite hot and aeroplanes
seem to go over all the time. I know this is an extraordinary week, but I can’t think of anything to say about it. We go on having breakfast, lunch and supper and doing lessons and having
free time (ha, ha) in the afternoons. They always think of something boring for us to do. Today it was carting logs that Tonbridge and McAlpine have sawed to be stacked in the garage. The logs
have poor beetles and woodlice in them, and Polly wastes an awful lot of time getting them off and putting them somewhere else although they might easily die a natural death before the logs get
used. They are getting people back from France now, but there are thousands to collect and quite a lot of them are wounded, which must make it terribly difficult. They are clearing out the
people who are convalescent from Mill Farm in case the beds are wanted for soldiers. M. R. James is rather good: he writes as though he always wears a dark suit. One cannot imagine him in
shirtsleeves. The stories frighten me just the right amount. Goodness, I hate knitting! Poll likes it which, of course, makes her much better at it than I am.

The trouble about a journal is the feeling that you have to keep on keeping it. Polly has completely given up hers; on the other hand, she’s the one who reads bits of
The
Times
every day – in a way, if she
was
writing her journal, she’d probably give a far better account of what is going on – only about seventy miles away she says
– than I seem to do. She says she can hear the guns sometimes, but she
listens
for them, and it may be simply her imagination.