4 September 1939 – 10 September 1939

Our first air raid warning at 8:30 this morning. A warbling that gradually insinuates itself as I lay in bed. So dressed and walked on the terrace with L. Sky clear. All cottages shut. Breakfast. All clear. During the interval a raid on Southwark. No news. The Hepworths came on Monday. Rather like a sea voyage. Forced conversation. Boredom. All meaning has run out of everything. Scarcely worth reading papers. The B.B.C. gives any news the day before. Emptiness. Inefficiency, I may as well record these things. My plan is to force my brain to work on Roger. But Lord this is the worst of all my life’s experiences. It means feeling only bodily feelings: one gets cold and torpid. Endless interruptions. We have done the curtains We have carried coals etc. into the cottage for the 8 Battersea women and children. The expectant mothers are all quarrelling. Some went back yesterday. We took the car to be hooded, met Nessa, were driven to tea at Charleston. Yes, it’s an empty meaningless world now. Am I a coward? Physically I expect I am. Going to London tomorrow I expect frightens me. At a pinch enough adrenalin is secreted to keep one calm. But my brain stops. I took up my watch this morning and then put it down. Lost. That kind of thing annoys me. No doubt one can conquer this. But my mind seems to curl up and become undecided. To cure this one had better read a solid book like Tawney. An exercise of the muscles. The Hepworths are travelling books in Brighton. Shall I walk? Yes. It’s the gnats and flies that settle on noncombatants. This war has begun in cold blood. One merely feels that the killing machine has to be set in action. So far, the Athenia has been sunk. It seems entirely meaningless—a perfunctory slaughter. Like taking a jar in one hand, a hammer in the other. Why must this be smashed? Nobody knows. This feeling is different from any before. And all the blood has been let out of common life. No movies or theatres allowed. No letters, except strays from America. Reviewing rejected by Atlantic. No friends write or ring up. Yes, a long sea voyage, with strangers making conversation, and lots of small bothers and arrangements, seems the closest I can get. Of course all creative power is cut off. Perfect summer weather. It’s like an invalid who can look up and take a cup of tea. Suddenly one can take to the pen with relief. Result of a walk in the heat, clearing the fug and setting the blood working. This book will serve to accumulate notes, the first of such quickenings. And for the hundredth time I repeat—any idea is more real than any amount of war misery. And what one’s made for. And the only contribution one can make—this little pitter patter of ideas is my whiff of shot in the cause of freedom. So I tell myself. Thus bolstering up a figment—a phantom: recovering that sense of something pressing from outside which consolidates the mist, the non-existent. I conceived the idea, walking in the sunbaked marsh where I saw one clouded yellow, of making an article out of these 15 odd diaries. This will be an easy slope of work: not the steep grind of Roger. But shall I ever have a few hours to read in? I must. Tonight the Raid has diminished from a raid on Southwark; on Portsmouth; on Scarborough, to an attempt on the East Coast without damage. Tomorrow we go up.