17 June 1940 – 23 June 1940

Waterloo I suppose. And the fighting goes on in France; and the terms aren’t yet public; and it’s a heavy grey day, and I’ve been beaten at bowls, feel depressed and irritated and vow I’ll play no more, but read my book. My book is Coleridge: Rose Macaulay; the Bessborough letters—rather a foolish flight inspired by Hary-o: I would like to find, one book and stick to it. But can’t. I feel, if this is my last lap, oughtn’t I to read Shakespeare? But can’t. I feel oughtn’t I to finish off P.H.: oughtn’t I to finish something by way of an end? The end gives its vividness, even its gaiety and recklessness to the random daily life. This, I thought yesterday, may be my last walk. On the down above Baydean I found some green glass tubes. The corn was glowing with poppies in it. And I read my Shelley at night. How delicate and pure and musical and uncorrupt he and Coleridge read, after the Left Wing Group. How lightly and firmly they put down their feet, and how they sing; and how they compact; and fuse and deepen. I wish I could invent a new critical method—something swifter and lighter and more colloquial and yet intense: more to the point and less composed; more fluid and following the flight; than my C.R. essays. The old problem: how to keep the flight of the mind, yet be exact. All the difference between the sketch and the finished work. And now dinner to cook. A role. Nightly raids in the east and south coast. 6, 3, 22 people killed nightly. A high wind was blowing: Mabel, Louie picking currants and gooseberries. Then a visit to Charleston threw another stone into the pond. And at the moment, with P.H. only to fix upon, I’m loosely anchored. Further, the war—our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation—has taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back. I have no surroundings. I have so little sense of a public that I forget about Roger coming or not coming out. Those familiar circumvolutions—those standards—which have for so many years given back an echo and so thickened my identity are all wide and wild as the desert now. I mean, there is no “autumn,” no winter. We pour to the edge of a precipice . . . and then? I can’t conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941. This cuts away something even at tea at Charleston. We drop another afternoon into the millrace.