Monday 19th June 1944
I've just seen April off to work on the 7 o'clock bus. (It seems strange that I don't have to work myself!) The air raid sirens wailed just before the bus began it's journey. Newspaper reports of the new weapon remind one of fantastic, pseudo-scientific books by such writers as HG Wells. Reference is made to pilotless aircraft, flying bombs, flying robots, robot planes...
Tomorrow we go to Court. This is the sequel to the case of the mislaid Identity Card on May 30th. The curious thing is that April has been served with a summons dated May 31st in respect of this “offence”. We're hoping this technical error may provide April with a chance to escape the full and dire penalties of the Law!
NB: Have I begun to lose my long appetite for diary writing? It seems more of an effort these days; perhaps now that I'm married the hobby will fall out of use because I'll be less introspective and lonely. (One must be both, to be a thorough diarist, I think.)
Well, I'll carry on to the end of this book and then stop writing, perhaps for ever, perhaps only for a short time. By the day that I reach the end of this book I should be back at work and April and I settled down. Such a termination (if the journals are ever read) would give an air of completion to the whole.
Yes, I'm not a very good diarist now. Why! for my Sunday entry I didn't make any reference to the evening walk of April and I on the hill; how we helped to put out a fire in the garden of a lonely cottage and then explored a lonelier house, a ruinous “rat's castle”, inventing many fantastic stories as we roamed around it's chaotic rooms – of the body in the sack at the foot of the ladder and the new-born baby (dead 10 years) in the doctor's bag. (Of the latter, April added gruesomely, “Not really new-born, hardly formed...” “An 8 month baby?” I suggested. “Oh no, they begin to look human after the sixth month...”)
And we peered suspiciously at old photographs and letters and a newspaper we found there. There was a Last Will of somebody, and a news cutting dated 1890 regarding the succession to the Throne. That mad April trailed after me from eerie room to eerie room, squeaking plaintively, “Don't leave me!... You're going to shut me in!”
We finally concluded that the owner, a natural son of Queen Victoria, had caused his wife to have a miscarriage that killed her and then had thrown her body down the well, (Tall nettles grow all over the garden, but not around the well...) and finally he'd sewn himself in a sack and laid there 'til he died and rotted and began to smell...
All these pleasant details should have been included in my Sunday entry.
Tomorrow we go to Court. This is the sequel to the case of the mislaid Identity Card on May 30th. The curious thing is that April has been served with a summons dated May 31st in respect of this “offence”. We're hoping this technical error may provide April with a chance to escape the full and dire penalties of the Law!
NB: Have I begun to lose my long appetite for diary writing? It seems more of an effort these days; perhaps now that I'm married the hobby will fall out of use because I'll be less introspective and lonely. (One must be both, to be a thorough diarist, I think.)
Well, I'll carry on to the end of this book and then stop writing, perhaps for ever, perhaps only for a short time. By the day that I reach the end of this book I should be back at work and April and I settled down. Such a termination (if the journals are ever read) would give an air of completion to the whole.
Yes, I'm not a very good diarist now. Why! for my Sunday entry I didn't make any reference to the evening walk of April and I on the hill; how we helped to put out a fire in the garden of a lonely cottage and then explored a lonelier house, a ruinous “rat's castle”, inventing many fantastic stories as we roamed around it's chaotic rooms – of the body in the sack at the foot of the ladder and the new-born baby (dead 10 years) in the doctor's bag. (Of the latter, April added gruesomely, “Not really new-born, hardly formed...” “An 8 month baby?” I suggested. “Oh no, they begin to look human after the sixth month...”)
And we peered suspiciously at old photographs and letters and a newspaper we found there. There was a Last Will of somebody, and a news cutting dated 1890 regarding the succession to the Throne. That mad April trailed after me from eerie room to eerie room, squeaking plaintively, “Don't leave me!... You're going to shut me in!”
We finally concluded that the owner, a natural son of Queen Victoria, had caused his wife to have a miscarriage that killed her and then had thrown her body down the well, (Tall nettles grow all over the garden, but not around the well...) and finally he'd sewn himself in a sack and laid there 'til he died and rotted and began to smell...
All these pleasant details should have been included in my Sunday entry.
posted by Paul Wilson at 8:34 pm
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