IV
There are things one does not want to go over in onea€?s mind again. Things that you have to accept because they have happened, but you dona€?t want to think of them again.
Rosalind rang me up one day and told me that Hubert, who had been in France now for some time, had been reported missing, believed killed.
That is, I think, the most cruel thing that can happen to any young wife in wartime. The awful suspense. To have your husband killed is bad enough; but it is something you have got to live with, and you know that you have. This fatal holding out of hope is cruel, cruela€| And no one can help you.
I went down to join her, and stayed at Pwllywrach for some time. We hopeda€“of course one always hopesa€“but I dona€?t think Rosalind, in her own heart, ever did quite hope. She had always been one to expect the worst. And I think, too, that there had always been something about Huberta€“not exactly melancholy, but that touch or look of someone who is not fated for long life. He was a dear person; good to me always, with, I think, a great vein, not exactly of poetry, but of something of that kind in him. I wish I had had a greater chance to know him better; not just a few short visits and encounters.
It was not for a good many months that we got any further news. Rosalind, I think, had had the news for a full twenty-four hours before she said anything to me. She had behaved just the same as usual; she was and always has been a person of enormous courage. Finally, hating to do so but knowing it had to be done, she said abruptly: a€?You had better see this, I suppose,a€and she handed me the telegram which reported that he was now definitely classified as killed in action.
The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering. You can do things to aid peoplea€?s physical disabilities; but you can do little to help the pain of the heart. I thought, I may have been wrong, that the best thing I could do to help Rosalind was to say as little as possible, to go on as usual. I think that would have been my own feeling. You hope no one will speak to you, or enlarge upon things. I hope that was best for her, but you cannot know for another person. It may be it would have been easier for her if I had been the determined kind of mother who broke her down and insisted on her being more demonstrative. Instinct cannot be infallible. One wants so badly not to hurt the person one lovesa€“not to do the wrong thing for them. One feels one ought to know, but one can never be sure.
She continued to live at Pwllywrach in the big empty house with Mathewa€“an enchanting little boy, and always, in my memory, such a happy little boy: he had a great knack for happiness. He still has. I was so glad that Hubert saw his son; that he knew he had a son, though it sometimes seemed more cruel to know that he was not to come back and live in the home he loved, or to bring up the son whom he had wanted so much.
Sometimes one cannot help a tide of rage coming over one when one thinks of war. In England we had too much war in too short a time.
The first war seemed unbelievable, amazing; it seemed so unnecessary. But one did hope and believe that the thing had been scotched then, that the wish for war would never arise again in the same German hearts. But it dida€“we know now, from the documents which are part of history, that Germany was planning for war in the years before the Second War came.
But one is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one! War, I think, has had its time and place; when, unless you were warlike, you would not live to perpetuate your speciesa€“you would die out. To be meek, to be gentle, to give in easily, would spell disaster; war was a necessity then, because either you or the others would perish. Like a bird or animal, you had to fight for your territory. War brought you slaves, land, food, womena€“the things you needed to survive. But now we have got to learn to avoid war, not because of our nicer natures or our dislike of hurting others, but because war is not profitable, we shall not survive war, but shall, as well as our adversaries, be destroyed by war. The time of the tigers is over; now, no doubt, we shall have the time of the rogues and the charlatans, of the thieves, the robbers and pickpockets; but that is bettera€“it is a stage on the upward way.
There is at least the dawn, I believe, of a kind of good will. We mind when we hear of earthquakes, of spectacular disasters to the human race. We want to help. That is a real achievement; which I think must lead somewhere. Not quicklya€“nothing happens quicklya€“but at any rate we can hope. I think sometimes we do not appreciate that second virtue which we mention so seldom in the trilogya€“faith, hope and charity. Faith we have had, shall we say, almost too much ofa€“faith can make you bitter, hard, unforgiving; you can abuse faith. Love we cannot but help knowing in our own hearts is the essential. But how often do we forget that there is hope as well, and that we seldom think about hopeWe are ready to despair too soon, we are ready to say, a€?Whata€?s the good of doing anything?a€Hope is the virtue we should cultivate most in this present day and age.
We have made ourselves a Welfare State, which has given us freedom from fear, security, our daily bread and a little more than our daily bread; and yet it seems to me that now, in this Welfare State, every year it becomes more difficult for anybody to look forward to the future. Nothing is worth-while. WhyIs it because we no longer have to fight for existenceIs living not even interesting any moreWe cannot appreciate the fact of being alive. Perhaps we need the difficulties of space, of new worlds opening up, of a different kind of hardship and agony, of illness and pain, and a wild yearning for survival?
Oh well, I am a hopeful person myself. The one virtue that would never, I think, be quenched for me, would be hope. That is where I always have found my dear Mathew such a rewarding person to be with. He has always had an incurably optimistic temperament. I remember once when he was at his prep school, and Max was asking him whether he thought he had any chance of getting into the First Cricket Eleven. a€?Oh well,a€said Mathew, with a beaming smile, a€?therea€?s always hope!a€?
One should adopt something like that, I think, as onea€?s motto in life. It made me mad with anger to hear of one middle-aged couple who had been living in France when the war broke out. When they thought the Germans might be approaching on their march across France, they decided the only thing to be done was to commit suicide, which they did. But the waste! The pity of it! They did no good to anyone by their suicide. They could have lived through a difficult life of enduring, of surviving. Why should one give up any hope until one is dead?
It reminds me of the story that my American godmother used to tell me years and years ago about two frogs who fell into a pail of milk. One said: a€?Ooh, Ia€?m drowning, Ia€?m drowning!a€The other frog said, a€?Ia€?m not going to drown.a€a€?How can you stop drowning?a€asked the other frog. a€?Why, Ia€?m going to hustle around, and hustle around, and hustle around like mad,a€said the second frog. Next morning the first frog had given up and drowned, and the second frog, having hustled around all night, was sitting there in the pail, right on top of a pat of butter.
Everyone, I think, got a bit restless towards the last years of the war. Ever since D-day there was a feeling that there could be an end to the war, and many people who had said there couldna€?t were beginning to eat their words.
I began to feel restless. Most patients had moved out of London, though of course there were still the out-patients. Even there, one sometimes felt, it was not as it had been in the last war, where you were patching up wounded men straight from the trenches. Half the time, now, you had only to give out large quantities of pills to epilepticsa€“necessary work, but it lacked that involvement with war that one felt one needed. The mothers brought their babies to the Welfarea€“and I used to think they often would have done much better to have kept them at home. In this the chief pharmacist entirely agreed with me.
I considered one or two projects at this time. One young friend of mine who was in the W.A.A.F. arranged for me to see a friend of hers with a view to doing some intelligence photographic work. I was furnished with an impressive pass which enabled me to wander through what seemed miles of subterranean corridors underneath the War Office, and I was finally received by a grave young lieutenant who frightened me to death. Although I had had a lot of experience in photography, the one thing I had never done and knew nothing about was aerial photography. In consequence, I found it practically impossible to recognise any photograph that was shown me. The only one I was reasonably sure of was one of Oslo, but I had become so defeatist by that time that I didna€?t dare say so, having made several boss shots already. The young man sighed, looked at me as the complete moron I was, and said gently: a€?I think perhaps you had better go back to hospital work.a€I departed feeling completely deflated.
Towards the beginning of the war, Graham Greene had written to me and asked if I would like to do propaganda work. I did not think I was the kind of writer who would be any good at propaganda, because I lacked the single-mindedness to see only one side of the case. Nothing could be more ineffectual than a lukewarm propagandist. You want to be able to say a€?X is black as nighta€and feel it. I didna€?t think I could ever be like that.
But every day now I was getting more restless. I wanted work that had at least something to do with the war. I got an offer to be a dispenser to a doctor in Wendover; it was near where some friends of mine were living. I thought that that would be very nice for me, and I would like being in the country. Only, if Max were to come home from North Africaa€“and after three years, he might comea€“I should feel I was treating my doctor badly.
I also had a theatrical project. It was possible that I might go with E.N.S.A. as a sort of extra producer or something on a tour of North Africa. I was thrilled by that idea. It would be wonderful if I got out to North Africa. It was fortunate that I did nothing of the kind. About a fortnight before I would have left England, I got a letter from Max saying that he quite probably would be coming back from North Africa to the Air Ministry in two to three weeksa€time. What misery, if I had arrived out in North Africa with E.N.S.A. just at the moment he came home.
The next few weeks were agony. There I was, all keyed up, waiting. In a fortnight, in three weeks, no, perhaps longera€“I told myself that these things always took longer than one expected.
I went down for a weekend to Rosalind in Wales and came back by a late train on the Sunday night. It was one of those trains one had so often to endure in wartime, freezing cold, and of course when one got to Paddington there was no means of getting anywhere. I took some complicated train which finally landed me at a station in Hampstead not too far away from Lawn Road Flats, and from there I walked home, carrying some kippers and my suitcase. I got in, weary and cold, and started by turning on the gas, throwing off my coat and putting my suitcase down. I put the kippers in the frying pan. Then I heard the most peculiar clanking noise outside, and wondered what it could be. I went out on the balcony and I looked down the stairs. Up them came a figure burdened with everything imaginablea€“rather like the caricatures of Old Bill in the first wara€“clanking things hung all over him. Perhaps the White Knight would have been a good description of him. It seemed impossible that anyone could be hung over with so much. But there was no doubt who it wasa€“it was my husband! Two minutes later I knew that all my fears that things might be different, that he would have changed, were baseless. This was Max! He might have left yesterday. He was back again. We were back again. A terrible smell of frying kippers came to our noses and we rushed into the flat.
a€?What on earth are you eating?a€asked Max.
a€?Kippers,a€I said. a€?You had better have one.a€Then we looked at each other. a€?Max!a€I said. a€?You are two stone heavier.a€?
a€?Just about. And you havena€?t lost any weight yourself,a€he added.
a€?Ita€?s because of all the potatoes,a€I said. a€?When you havena€?t meat and things like that, you eat too many potatoes and too much bread.a€?
So there we were. Four stone between us more than when he left. It seemed all wrong. It ought to have been the other way round.
a€?Living in the Fezzan Desert ought to be very slimming,a€I said. Max said that deserts were not at all slimming, because one had nothing else to do but sit and eat oily meals, and drink beer.
What a wonderful evening it was! We ate burnt kippers, and were happy.