July 5, 1943
General Sikorsky was
killed last night in an accident, taking off from Gibraltar. Everyone else in
the plane was also killed, except the pilot, who is severely injured. The plane
was a Liberator bomber, in which he was returning to London from the Middle
East. I suppose this is another of those very convenient “accidents”.
July 7, 1943
I have a guess that our
invasion of Europe began last night, though nothing has been mentioned on the
radio this morning. The B.B.C. did not even report that our bombers were out
over Germany last night! Ted says, “of course not!” They’ve got to cook up the
reports first. Nevertheless the air activities over this neighborhood last
night were tremendous. We were wakened about midnight by planes directly
overhead, and the zooming intensified and went on and on until about
three-thirty this morning. Literally thousands of planes must have passed over
us. Our planes, for there was no alarm, and no gunfire. The sky as far as we
could see, was ablaze with searchlights. They ranged in orderly placing like
great shook's of wheat or corn all over the heavens and above them, clear skies,
and the multitudes of the stars. It was a beautiful but fearsome sight. It
affected me physically of course. I trembled, and my legs cramped, and my
stomach turned over and I retched so much that this morning my ribs are sore. I
am so tired from nerves and lack of sleep. I’m ready to weep.
Of
course, all the flying might have been simply practice; air maneuvers yet I
don’t really think so. The Germans opened their long promised, but long
delayed, attack on Russia on Monday, so probably we have opened on them with
the dreaded Second Front. We’ll know later of course but when there have been
practices of night flying in big formation before, the B.B.C. has always
informed us it was so the next morning. This morning the B.B.C. was absolutely
mum. As Ted says, they’re cooking up what they will say to us. Oh, this damned
war! I grow angrier and angrier about it. Not angry with the Germans but angry
with all men, and the stupidity of war enrages me. It is a mad world all right.
Yet it need not be. That is the awful tragedy of it. Oh God, when will sanity
and peace return to us?
July 8, 1943
No information about
Tuesday night, so we conclude our flyer's were simply practicing maneuvers
against searchlights.
July 10, 1943
News first thing this
morning that the Allies have made successful landings in Sicily; English,
American and Canadian troops making the invasion; and General Eisenhower has
broadcast from Algiers to the French of Metropolitan France to keep calm,
assuring them that the first step in the invasion of Europe has taken place,
and liberation is coming to them in due course, but meanwhile to do nothing rash,
they will be duly informed what to do when there is anything they can do, but
for the moment they must make no rash acts, but keep calm, keep calm! President
Roosevelt has sent a letter to the Pope, giving assurance that the Allies will
effect the liberation of Italy from the Fascists, and that the safety and
neutrality of Vatican State will be strictly observed.
July 13, 1943
There was an alert in
the night, so came downstairs just before three a.m. Before that we had heard
an enormous flock of our planes going out. At one today we were told our
home-based bombers had made a large raid on Turin last night. So I suppose it
was some of them we heard passing over. The moon is now in her second quarter,
so I expect we shall have raids every night now for the next two weeks. B.B.C.
Says a town in the Southeast was bombed last night, causing damage and
casualties but of course they do not say where. We had a bad day light raid
last Friday. The alert came whilst we were at tea, about five-fifteen p.m. The
worst of that one was on Croydon, where a cinema got a direct hit. It was full
of children, who had gone in straight after school hours, and also many
W.A.A.F. girls.
I
have many letters to write. We had bad news from Charlie last week. Marjorie’s ex-rays
show a bad patch on her left lung and the doctor has ordered her into a
sanatorium for six months. This is serious, but I have a secret idea it isn’t
so bad as it sounds, for Americans take their health very seriously indeed, and
rush off to sanatoriums and hospitals for indisposition the ordinary English
person would ignore or forget. The Americans always struck me, as verging on
the hypochondriac, and that was why Christian Science had such success with
them, for it is easy to cure what doesn’t really exist. Marjorie is a trained
nurse, apt to always be on a hunt for symptoms. Anyhow Marjorie is going to go
to a sanatorium for six months, so she’ll have a holiday, and Charlie will have
a deuce of a time, running house and family, and paying the bills. I guess I am
unsympathetic. Anyhow I’m sure, I’m no hypochondriac. I like Marjorie, very
much, but I have an incontrovertible conviction that she isn’t so sick as she
thinks she is.
July 14, 1943
I was awakened by
gunfire about three-thirty this morning, and came downstairs, where I remained
until five o’clock. Ted remained in bed, as always, but I cannot stay upstairs
once the alert is given, or the guns begin.
I
was very wakeful and did a lot of thinking. I found myself involuntarily reciting
the memorare, and with belief. This is instinctive faith. Is it fear, which
creates religion? Or is it necessary for people of today to experience fear, so
as to be driven to God, to the experience of God? I don’t know, I only know
that it is so. Fear and beauty, these are the two great incontrovertible
compulsions which drive us directly to God. Then if to God, I thought why not
to church? To the only Church, the Catholic, the Roman Catholic.
I
had fallen asleep peevish against Ted, in fact, really angry. He had insisted
upon opening the window in the little room, which I had closed on my way back
from the bathroom, and I had resented his insistence. Yes, I thought, his way,
what ever this man desires he must and will have. Even the opening and closing
of a window must be according to his likening. I felt again my awful weariness
of this old husband.
Of
course when the gunfire awakened me my annoyance had passed away in my sleep,
but some solution of lost love had evidently been thrown up, for I found myself
thinking in the early morning of this everlasting problem of the conflict of
the sexes and its strain. It is like this I thought: the most important thing
in the world to man is the gratification of his sexuality, the most important
thing in the world to a woman is marriage with its security and support, but in
marriage a woman wishes to be loved for herself alone, for her personality, not
her body, for her mind and soul, not her womb, and, after satiety, a man become
tired of the economic responsibilities of a wife. Keeping a wife is a luxury
men would like to dispose of; thence comes the strife and the natural
disappointment and dissatisfaction. Legality holds, religion, law, and society
hold man and wife together till death does them part, and this is a good thing,
it is the wisdom of the ages, luckily for both of them. So they adjust
themselves to the harness, ease them as best they can to the gall of it, they
accommodate to each other, and that is the successful marriage.
No
wonder we turn to God, men and women alike, for God our creator is the only
being who knows us, loves us, and endures us. Back we come to agree with the
statements of the saints.
I
associate the Church with the Irish, and hate it because I dislike them so
much. The Irish Catholics, the Irish, how I despise them! Why don’t I think of
the French, and French Catholicism? Catholicism in Ireland is the religion of
the ignorant and superstitious peasant, but Catholicism in France is the
religion of the educated and the intellectual. Ireland has contributed nothing
to the world except strife, no art, no literature, and no saints. France has
contributed much beauty, reason, great art, music, architecture, poetry,
sculpture, science, great people, and great saints. I thought of my very special
two, Chantal and Francis.
The
B.B.C. has reported speeches made today at Claridge's, made at a luncheon given
to Sir Basil Brooke, the new Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. Sir Basil said
that the Border created no differences it merely recognized them. Eire was
neutral and Ulster was at war. One of the many results of this was that the
bases in the South, which might have saved lives and shortened the struggle in
the long and terrible Battle of the Atlantic, has been denied to the Allied
fighting forces … but it was Ulster’s proud privilege that her ports and her
airfields should be used by the armed forces of the Allies. … Mr. Morrison
said, in the light of the relationship between Ireland and this country in this
war, it was bound to have a permanently modifying affect on many people’s
opinions in this country … You cannot avoid the fact that in the North, there
has been a positive loyalty and cooperation with Great Britain. It is not only
that, the great thing is that in the North there has been a positive and
courageous loyalty to the cause of human freedom and for the destruction of a
menace to our freedom and liberties. Southern Ireland has preferred to stay
neutral, the tragic thing is that Eire, a country which has fought many battles
for what it conceived to be the cause of liberty in one way or another, should
have stood aside neutral and indifferent to this, one of the most dramatic and
fateful struggles in the history of all mankind. That does not stand us too
well in the history of the nations.”
Exactly.
The Catholic Irish again, doing all they can to harm the English. For a long
time now our sailors have nicknamed Eire, Traitors Island.
July 15, 1943
It was a quiet night. I
received this morning from Watson Sons and Room, a check for my share of the
legacies under mother’s will. This afternoon I took it down to the post office
and put it in the savings bank. This money I shall save to spend in America.
July 16, 1943
I am very tired. An
alert sounded soon after midnight and the all clear at one forty-five a.m.
There was a new alert at two a.m. and no all clear until after three o’clock. I
spent practically the whole time downstairs. I did not go back to bed after the
first all clear, but came down stairs again almost immediately afterwards. I
was very wakeful, because all a simmer with anger against Ted, so I kept the
light on all the time and tried to divert myself with reading.
Ted
had been very ill mannered when I went up to bed at eleven. Rain had started,
so of course I closed the slip-room window, but before I could get into the
bathroom Ted came bounding out of bed and into the slip room, and opened the
window again. He was violently angry. He pulled his hand along the ledge, and
then made me feel it on my face, to prove that the rain was not coming in, and
of course he passed sarcastic remarks. I was speechless, and when I got into
the bathroom I found I could hardly breathe. His rudeness astounds me, but his
pettiness I despise. So when I got to bed I could not sleep, I felt in a state
of sort of suspension, and ready to be sick, like as in the raids. This man, I
felt, was unendurable, and my longing to be free of him surged into my breast
into a positive physical pain. Greater than my longing for God, greater than my
longing for America, greater even than my longing for the end of the war, was,
and is my longing to be free of Ted Thompson.
The
other day, when serving him his dinner I gave him new potatoes, boiled in their
skins, and explaining why, I began to say “You must peel your potatoes for
yourself” but he was up in the air in a moment, I had dared to utter the word
“must” to him. I ought to have said, Please peel your potatoes, or, do you mind
peeling your potatoes? Really it is impossible to know how to speak to this
man. Joan has told me on various occasions she has seen mother crying over me,
after her return from a visit here, because of the way in which Ted spoke to
me. Once, years ago, way back in the Bayonne days, once Blanche Sivell followed
me into the kitchen, crying, for my sake, and she said, “Oh, Ruby, no man ought
to speak to anybody the way Ted speaks to you” Ted’s scorpion tongue. Yes, I am
tired of it, and I’ve been tired of it for nearly forty years. Oh God, I’m
tired!
July 17, 1943
It is Ted’s birthday,
and a lovely day. Ted is sixty-four today. He is at the office now and I am
cooking the dinner, meat in the oven, all vegetables prepared, and now a
breathing space until it is time to start the vegetables.
Yesterday
Churchill and Roosevelt; to capitulate, to save them, and not to continue to
die for Hitler, to throw over Mussolini and his Fascist Government, broadcast
appeals to the Italian people. How can they? In Sicily over twenty thousand
Italians have surrendered, but they are soldiers, what can the people of Italy
do?
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