FROM AWAY, TOWARDS. June 1940

FROM AWAY, TOWARDS.

June 1940 - October 1945.

Departure, Journey, Absence and Return. Departure June 1940

Through the open door of this army hut, only three yards away from where I lie on this straw palliasse, three red poppies wave wildly, and in a mad world semaphore sanity from a bank of simple grass. They leap, tilt and argue with the wind in a lovely wild but tethered liberty. So do I here, and tether my own little bit of tethered liberty to them, to the shape of that hill, to the friendly phantom of Corfe Castle in its milk of mist, and to you. Sanity.Everything goes into the memory, visually, so easily, but somewhat more hesitantly into pencilled words. Poor things, they are trying to perform some form of partial marriage for me - to you, to what I see. Having been pulled up by the roots and taken from home, is it possible to put down others so quickly in the barren misery of absence, in this military opposite of living? But there they are -three red poppies, the river light, Corfe Castle delicious in its mist. It is almost with a sense of guilt and betrayal that any kind of pleasure grows.

Yesterday I was with you. Yesterday I said goodbye to you, to eyes as wet as the pouring rain outside. Today I am without you. It’s so simple, so astonishing. Today is only one day after yesterday. How can there therefore be so much difference? Yesterday so much rain, today a huge wet sun. And this gorgeous sun blinks from every particle of glittering dew, and yet it is not dew. It is the knowledge of those unsayable goodbyes, the memory-ghost of those wet unforgettable eyes, the bald beginning of war. The sun will dry up the dew but not the sense of banishment, not the sense of fear that goes with it.

In the pastoral off-duty evening, all the day’s official military waste vanishes in the swagger and the beauty of a single gull. The army’s mad misery fights a losing battle with the pleasures of the day the eye retains - the same gull’s flight, one cloud’s hard edge of brilliant light, the wicked grace of the AA gun barrels swinging in symmetry from right to left in drill, the long hundred yards of shadow behind a three-foot fencing post, the kinetic geometry of moving circles swallows make, and the memory, the memory of your few shoulder-freckles shaped like the small shadows under these trees at noon, and the lark, ah! damn the lark for spilling downward its thrilling climbing song. I cannot cope.

The regimental dog (rescued, and brought with them all the way from Dunkirk) teaches us ironically things about liberty and freedom all day long. He runs so freely in and out of our fixed and drilling ranks - the essence of it.

Evening leave, and walking back from town, just before regaining camp, stood still and listened to the quiet sounds of Dorset nibbling at the silent rind of night. The stars were the brilliant fragments of our short marriage, the night the sadness over all. The cold iron misery of the local church bell chilled all the remembering warmth to stone. Then, went past the guard into this other military world.

1 Saluted to the right, to the left, to the front, for two hours this morning, and yesterday, and it seems all mornings, for weeks. Before that, other drill. Learnt how to left turn and right turn. There is only shame and absurdity in standing in a field with a hand to the forehead counting three before one takes it down. But you can stomach such drill if it's before breakfast. The eye can leap to the early light, and the mind can cool its fretting and rebellion in the dove-grey clouds left over from the dawn. Before breakfast too, you are allowed those few marvellous moments of precious personal privacy in the camp latrines. Round their almost obscene centre centres so much. They are where, for a moment, tethered like those poppies, a personal life can still wave, even in the concentrated perfumes of this military air.

Today it has been all day “ How like a winter hath my absence been.” Unbelievable how the cold precision of the sonnets, the deliberate absence of lyricism in them, should have all the more power to prick the eyes to tears, without emotional fuss, with such complete accuracy.

All day today, gun practice for the beginner-gunner. Waiting endlessly sitting in the so-called operations room, reporting things occasionally, and yet still managing, surreptitiously, to read King Lear between, and sometimes even during, simulated operations. Plane bearing 115. Searchlights up. Formation approaching, bearing 120. Then Lear: ‘Oh how this mother wells up toward my heart. Hysterica passio, down thou climbing sorrow, thy element's below.’ Oh, yes, and so cry I to what continuously climbs in mine.

I think they sense they have to harden me, and I’ve no doubt that they are absolutely right. I am now breech number on Number Three gun, the terrified master of a mass of shining steel. At a touch, dear God, you used to yield, and I melted too. Now these damned great guns explode, lurch, recoil and nearly lift me off my feet.

Cookhouse fatigue, before lunch, in glorious weather. Heavenly. Almost a sack of potatoes to peel, sitting in the sun. A pleasant, peaceful job. And afterwards, on one side, there are piles of dirty shapeless peelings, but on the other are fine shining mess-tins full of small, bald, decapitated heads, bright, fresh, aristocratic, clean, creamy ovoids, and after lunch, the way the hungry grab and scuffle for a bit of extra food is quite a shock. Some of us hover round near the not quite empty mess tins after each meal like the old men we used to see hanging round the restaurant dustbins in the back streets of Piccadilly.

They have moved the whole regiment, after training, down here on the Cornish coast. Lovely.

I can see the sea from here. It’s calm, with many delicate edges, with a gentle inward flow folding over the gentle backward ebb, and there’s a gentle, modest burst of small spray backwards off every visible rock. Hardly any colour. It all seems drawn in black and white. The high clouds are gentle and delicate too, like small, neat, laundered heaps of linen in the sky. Washed, ironed, starched, set out to dry. It’s all too ironically tidy while everything else is torn to bits.

2 Not so ironic. There’s a field of rye next to the gunsite. The wind is sending vast excited shoals of silver fish across its green tide, but there’s a dark hem of poppies all round the headland, blood at the gills. Fear.

On spotting duty today, and watched a hawk through the heightfinder. It held its hover, without shifting, for minutes on end. Magnificent. Tony should also have joined the Ack Ack. It gives endless opportunities for unofficial birdwatching through the strongest of Barr and Stroud magnifications. Off duty in the evening reading. Looking up, startled to find, in the only window of the Nissen hut, the outside sky grow gradually scarlet and in the end the window and the whole hut and myself became just this violent square of dark scarlet light disembodied from the hut.

Never been alone under a tin helmet before. Alone, yes, but not under a tin helmet. Was on sentry duty today, and, strangely, the helmet didn’t seem to interfere with a mind that simply romped about with the sun and wind, and romped again and again up in the sky along long chains, Christmas paper chains of gaily coloured clouds, and slid along and up and down the horizon’s hills as if on a scenic railway. In the middle of the guilt I suddenly felt, (because you weren’t there), a JU 88 suddenly appeared out of nowhere from these lovely clouds, like a symbol of that guilt, and tried to bomb, presumably, Saltash Bridge. It missed by miles, and then, far too quickly even for the Battery to shoot, it disappeared into those same gaily coloured clouds.

Is there an alternative to accepting this bloody war? Should one throw one’s cowardice to the winds and opt to play the passionate and deliberate Conscientious Objector? Has one that sort of conscience? I don’t think I have. Wouldn’t it, perhaps, be reading a world lesson in terms of one minute and pretty paltry self? Or, in our case, two minute and pretty paltry selves? I think, on balance, I would wish to defend ALL individual selves first and before even that the freedom of every individual self to freely speak his mind, to have a personal life, though I would hate to pay the full price for it. I think I accept the necessity for this war. To be an objective acceptor. Is that better or worse than a conscientious objector? Or is that being too pliant? Perhaps, yes, we all need both.

Wonderful day, in summer, and in war. And yet to be allowed to smell the pollen-laden air so sweetly crammed into the column of space between the earth and those white clouds. To listen to this marvellous summer murmur. To watch the whole thing shift its slow, lovely drift northwards from the south, with all this warmth and scent and murmur in its mouth. I know where it is blowing towards. It’s in the direction of you, and, like a simpleton, (who really knows better) all the same I talk your name into it and let it blow on with you included until it reaches where you are and I can whisper in your ear, and you can listen to me.

“Good argument hath Peter in his head, But better argument hath Peter in his….” It’s a good jibe, and on my bed, or rather military bunk, which is definitely not the same thing, I am reading Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard for the second time in my life. It is written with immense clarity of vision, with a wonderful recall of the whole age she and he are concerned with. It’s a mentally passionate book with a religious conviction about it that quite easily defeats the jibe. That may well have been good

3 fun for Peter’s young students but did they miss the point of the real relationship? Mutual argument in the head, the mind, the heart, religious or otherwise, will still last longer than that lovely argument in bed. Is there so much conflict now between physical passion and religion? They are surely just two of the highest peaks possible for the mountaineers of the human range to scale. But also, surely, you’d add the other equal peaks, of music, painting, poetry and prose. It’s getting them out of focus or perspective that brings the problems. Perspective is all. It’s the same as ripeness. One peak is as high as the other. My God is higher than your God is so bloody parochial. Isn’t it time they left their parish pumps behind and put each other into perspective?

On my favourite military duty, spotting duty again. Favourite not just for bird-watching, but, for being, like Garbo, alone, and liking that so much. That’s a special gift in the army, or anywhere. But this time it was at night. Fine, except that it was under the unfriendly, pitiless, and brilliant stare of the stars. Felt indeed very much alone, and didn’t like it. Was utterly unalive to the ‘Look, look up at the stars’ mood of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Thought them totally indifferent to everything. indifferent, furtive, deceptive, and stealthy, the way they crept imperceptibly, almost, into changed positions. Felt very small, very mortal, and very much afraid. What’s next? What’s next? Oh, God, what’s next?

Well, it turned out to be a posting to a shooting camp in Scotland. Bleak, cold, and full of hours and hours of military drudge, and days and days of pouring rain.

One evening off on the whole dreary thing. Some of us decided to go into the local village for compensation, for infinite requital, for a Scotch. We found there only one pub, but no way could we fill our cups of bitterness. It turned out to be a Temperance pub.

Still in Scotland, and received your telegram that Jenny and Ren had been born. For me, here, unbelievable. Two at a time seemed typical of your lovely, and almost outrageous, generosity. I blessed you not just twice, but two hundred times, and wished only to be at home to help, and not here useless and at war, and with leave impossible.

Back on the gunsite at last. A few moments to spare, and walked down the slope into the neighbouring farm. Still at peace, still all steep hill, all grass and sheep and cows, and the guns above. They have a huge white, Australian turkey cockbird. He’s terrific and struts about the yard like a huge white puffed up cumulus cloud, all curves in side view, except for the sudden straightness which the vertical of his wonderful tail opposes to the curves of wing and breast. His comb and wattle are poppy-red against his whiteness. His face is a bluebell blue. His two vast white wings are like sails, or they hang loosely to the ground and drag like the lee-boards of a Thames barge in the water. There is an awful male arrogance about him. No doubt Lawrence would have liked him.

It’s so good, after Scotland, to be back here. To see and hear the sea again, to smell the mud in the bay. It rained softly and blew hard all day, and the colours of everything were reduced to simple but rich greys, and low-pitched subtle greens. The sea and the wind between them made a noise like a swarm of bees. Off duty in the evening, took the tuppenny Turnpenny ferry and bobbed jauntily across the bay 4 and back under a still firm coastal breeze and a dark, fast-moving sky draining itself of rain, the shower coming aslant and dragged sideways across the sky.

Nothing for several days, then Line Up on the guns under clouds up there curling high and tight against the heavens. Later all day came hours and hours of sandbagging, but I managed to see you once, very clearly, between spading and digging. Later still, all digging done, you came clearly again. I was lying fagged out on my bed, we all were, and turned on my side and looked under the next man’s, and there you were. Vivid as daylight till his clumsy army leather boots and his canvas haversack asserted their shape and rang down a leather and canvas curtain on my little stage, but I had, for those few precious seconds, all those old splinters of pleasure that used to catch in my flesh watching you.

All morning a storm of wind and a cold insolent rain. In the evening, peace and solemn clouds the colour of bruises.

In these stray, daft moments of excited awareness, misery for the loss of you merges with this sense of what is lovely, and then what is lovely crumbles into misery. So, when the heart leaps to the nearness of a gull, the cold distance between us folds over and into the feeling and numbs with pain. You have made yourself so much part of my very love for life that I stand bewildered seeing all this high excitement humbled into misery by the very love it lives by.

First Christmas day in the army. It meant no orders, no drill, no parades, but endless hanging about until Christmas dinner, at lunch time. The Christmas dinner was indeed Turkey and Christmas pudding and the reversed order of service with the officers, poor chaps, rather self-consciously waiting on us. There was also beer. But it was poisonous stuff and flat. There were cigarettes. Two each, free. A pretty good effort really and appreciated, but there were also crowds of shrieking-with-laughter ATS, in the charge of the most hideous Sergeant-Major ATS woman I had ever seen, including the three witches in Macbeth. She was a real, middle-aged monster, thick with the impasto of paint and powder, just about on her change of life, and looking as if she were utterly lost in a life of sin and corruption. She, and, it seemed, all the rest of them, had false teeth, and, as one Cornish wag put it, “Hear they rattle just as thee’s about to kiss’n, that’d put I off!” I agreed with him. In the evening I was birdwatching again through the Barr and Stroud, and feeling with intense clarity the hovering of our resident hawk. Later, but only for an hour, I was on sentry-go, watching the unbelievable other life, the civilian life, go past me, strangely almost without envy, for a change. The horse-rider, the girl on her bicycle, the swift comfortable cars, the man and his wife walking their dog, all things which normally disturb. Think I was still coping with my hawk.

Took my first step up the corrupt ladder of authority today, and was made Acting Unpaid Lance Bombardier. They must have needed another Guard Commander, for I am now he, for a whole night’s duty here in this new ghastly place. We have been moved temporarily from our gunsite. There I never minded guard for it was nearly always quiet and peaceful, and off immediate actual duty, one could sleep. Here, in town, where this huge slightly dilapidated barracks actually quarters at least two regiments, a guard is a Guard, all pomp and circumstance, mounted even in war with the utmost peacetime formality. In the evening there is no quiet, no peace and no sleep. On the gunsite one knew everyone. Here more than

5 half the men are strangers, and life, especially at night, begins and ends at the guardroom. Everybody off duty is in and out, it seems all night. It is all a mad continuous business. In charge, inside, suddenly the door of the guardroom opens. A complete stranger from the 69th Regiment shoves his head in and says, cryptically, “I’m off out. I’m the 69th”. “Oh” I say, and ask where the other 68 are. He stares at me dully, leaves the smile with me, and shuts the door again. Another minute and another face I have never seen before, nor ever likely to see again. “Going down the road to get some fish and chips. OK?” Well, that’s that. Nothing for me to say. So I nod, my arbitrary hold upon his diet signed, sealed, and delivered by years of the King’s Rules and Regulation. It is all unbelievably serious, and fish and chips are serious sacred things.

For the next step up the ladder of authority (but I fear down the ladder of integrity) am now training for officerdom at Shrivenham OCTU. It is just one hell of a place, an appalling place, physically and mentally. Less intelligence and human dignity than on the gunsite. Roll-calls night and day. You are not trusted. Petty restrictions right, left and centre. And you only sixteen miles away. It’s a military cage with a million bars. I knew the army was a pretty brutal stupidity, but in my innocence expected something more reasonably intelligent at an OCTU. But the atmosphere here is borstal. A potential officer is a potential criminal. Is this the centre of the military machine? Then thank God, at the circumference, at the gunsite, the centre gets forgotten.

The work is, at least for the first fortnight, boring, simple, repetitious. It’s as if one had had no training before. One is a recruit all over again. Drill for the sake of drill is endless. It’s learning to count up to three again. Instruction is all shouted, aggressive platitude.

Ah, now, this evening we actually had something different, Something we’ve never had before, here, or on the gunsite, and don’t wish ever to have again. It was a session on ‘Unarmed Combat’. A polite title for a form of sheer thuggery. It’s part of what the OCTUs call ‘the hardening up’ process. And believe it or not, it was preceded by a senior officer’s (certainly no gentleman’s) almost incoherent pep talk on HATE. No way could I believe it was all actually happening it was so awful. I looked round, surreptitiously, at everyone else, and it seemed to me, and I praise it, that we were all sitting in silent but absolute hostility. Afterwards, we watched a demonstration by the most complete set of thugs I’d ever seen, except in one of brother David’s anti-fascist political cartoons, something I thought we were supposed to be fighting. They were all sitting in an ugly row on a wooden bench. Dark blue trousers, red and white jerseys, the stripes circling the body, football jerseys, real soccer hooligans. We were shown several well-executed brutalities, and the finale was how, unarmed, to attack a sentry and actually kill him in silence. You bash him in the mouth with the edge of your steel helmet, kick him with all possible force in his genitals, then, violently reverse his curvature and break his neck with what seemed to be quite an easy hold. How’s that for an evening’s entertainment for a nice quiet gentle art-student and one tutored in your remembered gentleness? Kafka must have been in the army to have got his special vision of authority, the sense of something, unimplacable, deranged, logical, illogical, capricious, and absolutely relentless. To oneself, in some corner of the mind or other, one sometimes seems essentially reasonable, good (well fairly) and innocent (well fairly) and yet by

6 this authority, every instant of one’s life in the army is potentially criminal, guilty and challengeable.

Your letters come like mercy. Every moment of anything approaching a personal life, especially yours with the children, with reading, with music, is precious here. Here in particular, so that I can see you, hear you, be with you for the time it takes to read a letter. That done, time here is the rush from parade to parade, from drill to drill, from class to class. In a fortnight it might become more accepted, more automatic, less rebelled against, and perhaps inside the knowledge of the necessity for such a machine, a small area, a very small area of goodwill might develop, but here and now, everything stinks and hurts.

When, at last, in a few days time, at the end of all this, I get out of here, will I be different? For apart from being a trained artillery officer (though I will never feel more than semi-trained), I shall also qualify as an infantry officer (and there is a difference), a staff-officer (another difference) a gunnery expert (oh God, Oh God, the trigonometry), some bit of an accountant, a motor mechanic (speciality lorries), a fire-fighter, and a First Aid expert! It's all in a three months syllabus. If it will help, I am determined not to be different, and the three days promised leave at home with you will help.

Back to the gunsite again. This time as an officer, and in the Officers Mess, - in many more senses than one, and very heavy in heart after those three magical days of leave with you, remembering out of your early morning open window, the love, the simple green of things, that small lawn, the almond and the pear tree darkening into autumn. What is hopeful is that tenderness seems to return so quickly. Even in the first second of the first day of those three days of magical leave. It seems to be your natural gift, and Oh God, I accept it, and need it, and no doubt at the end of all this, whenever it does end, I will need as much of it as you can spare and will quickly learn to forget all this and return it. But next spring, wherever we are, will that come tenderly too? Next spring, still with an army-crowded heart, will that be able to ache in the tiny residues of pleasure war allows? Those quiet quantities of Wiltshire green, the vigour of Wiltshire skies? Will we still be stable, us two against next spring’s shifting skies and the increasing tempo of this rotten war? Will our two small personal lives outlast the general slaughter? Indeed, in my very bones I know we will, but we will have a long wait to see.

Today I am still relishing that leave, and recollecting the second night of it when, in bed, very late, we suddenly woke to our Eastcourt church bells clanging out the terror of the invasion signal. Could it be? Panic at first, grabbing for clothes. They must be parachuting on to the downs! First thoughts for the twins and Pom who was sleeping with them. We dressed and grabbed our gas masks, opened our bedroom door and there was Pom already in hers. She looked incredibly impossible, and we burst out laughing. We sat back all of us on our bed wondering what to do. I remember looking for and finding the government leaflet, and reading it, and that restored our sense of humour even further. All the same, we all searched out our maps and tinned food, and in a few minutes, a bit surprised to hear no guns and see no searchlights, I found myself rushing up the garden path in the dark and the wet, wildly shoving the maps down the downpipe of garden shed, and shoving the tinned food into any hiding place I could find. The torch battery, of course, gave out, and

7 sitting in the black-out, we just waited and waited for the worst. Finally I went out and found our neighbour and one or two others. In the end it was a false alarm. Apparently old Mr Carver, postmaster and churchwarden, was drunk in charge of his telephone, - had misunderstood a practice message! Panic over. But fortunately the leave wasn’t, and yet it lasted only one short day more.

Then indeed back to the gunsite, and today on duty at HQ, and exactly at twelve noon, when I was supposed to be preparing a lecture on Security someone in another room turned his radio on and the lovely running theme of a Scarlatti Sonata raced up the long corridor into my room. It gathered in one corner of the ceiling, like an eddy, and plunged deep down into my delighted receiving ears with an excitement that goosefleshed all my skin from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. Exquisite.

The Plymouth blitz. Our Friends from Above (as father refers to them in one of his rare epistles to his son, full of the pomp and pride of his special phraseology and the Victorian necessity for capital letters and underlining every other word) have been far too active here for days, or rather nights. Two more successive nights brings Plymouth’s score to nine. Nine. But now it seems to be over. I had to leave the gunsite to collect some orders from GHQ, and having to cross the town to do it, found it was no longer there, it had gone. Instead there was just rubble, and an odd, heady, giddy sense of space. The long line of huge multi-storied stores both sides of the main high street were gone, you could now see for miles. A sense of space spilt drunkenly over the curiously pleasant colours of huge piles of rubble. The broken bricks and masonry are all swept up clearly to the sides, intolerably neatly and tidily. What was the crowded High Street is now a path through a rockery. A very few people are black against it, and move quickly, as if still scurrying for shelter, like beetles suddenly exposed under a lifted stone. There was someone selling flowers from a flower stall, like an act of mercy at a grave.

On the gunsite, at the command post, each raid is an inferno of noise. Above the stream of shouted orders is the main din. The sharp, high, ear-bursting crack of our 3" Heavy AckAck guns. Sometimes, depending on the angle and direction of fire to wind, it pulls the ears apart, splits the skull, and meets like scissors in the centre of the brain. At other times it seems tolerable. Then there's the curiously tuneful hum of shrapnel falling, the pretty hum of a child’s huge spinning top. Across the silver bay, on the silhouette of the opposite hill, the German incendiaries twinkle in the dark like coloured lights on a Christmas tree. An occasional Lewis gun stutters and stammers with frustrated excitement, and over all murmurs the heavy droning of the raiding planes. They are like giant bees fumbling for peculiar honey in the unfamiliar darkness. They are sighted sometimes by the slow pale antennae of the searching lights, and sometimes by groups of shell-bursts, like a company of camels. All this for hours on end, right through the night. The final silence, when it comes, is unbelievably lovely, while the fire that is Plymouth burns gently into the dawn.

This is a bleak place, but at least it is warm in today’s sun. Beyond the dull gleam of the guns, across the bay, is Fort Stadden, and the tuppenny ferry still flourishing in spite of the blitz and yet so much is being lost. Always you, and half Plymouth, half London, painting in Wiltshire, and now David. But above all you. Multiply that for each individual here and everywhere, and there’s a mathematically vast loss and a system of separation operating over the whole of Europe. It’s the

8 blindness, the futility, the totality of it all that's so desperate. And all in the name of what? Race, power, greed, freedom, the I-am-bigger-and-better-than-you syndrome? All of which doesn’t add up to more than two pins, does it? And, of course, the number of dead that will never dance on the heads of those pins again.

HQ, for some reason, decided to move on to our gunsite today. Where there were only three officers, and that’s a crowd, now there are six, and umpteen visiting ones, and this son of man has nowhere to lay his head in peace. Each crowded busy army day is rounded in regret and grieving. The loss of you runs through everything I do, until a restricted, uninterrupted misery is as familiar as my hands, my pencil, or my shadow, touching me always somewhere. At night, during the hurly-burly of the shooting, I stand and disintegrate under the steadfast, uncomprehending company of stars wandering how all this will ever be remedied, hating the curious sense of guilt it arouses (are we guilty or is it someone else’s fault?) and for the moment disliking so much the hard drive of metal through these lovely night skies.

It is disorienting. Six and a half nights’ sleep since Saturday. It is now Tuesday morning lunch time. It is not Plymouth this time: it is now, it seems, the turn of Bristol, or Belfast, or Swansea, and for some reason they come straight over Plymouth. Perhaps the river is their giant silver signpost, and we have to fire at them as they go, stand by, and fire at them again when they come back. Stupid, in a way, because they fly so high that they are well out of our small range. But we have to show them we are awake. Last night we did not bed down till five o’clock in the morning, at cock-crow, just at the time when the late bright moon had gathered and buckled to itself a small white skirt of lacy cloud, packed to each other like fish scales or bird feather, all overlapping. There were stars, but their clear crisp brightness fractured in the water of the eyes.

Kept too busy, the mind taut and trapped in the tremendous trifles of the irresistible military machine. We’re in brackets, in parenthesis. Nothing is final, Nothing is done willingly. Nothing here is wanted and wished for. It is done, but it is impossible to retain even a small corner of awareness in which the young and prickling green of this year’s spring can come quietly into this kind of mind.

At last, outside the hut, late tonight, barefoot, a dark night and an enormous multitude of daisies. Seriously simple stuff, this. The whites of their eyes staring at the naked palms of my feet.

Today a soft, gentle feeling as if in summer. A haze in the sky and air like coloured chalk on the fingers. The colour is the general blush of rose. All the local colours of each and everything overlaid with it. It’s everything so pink now, below the sky, that all green grass is magicked to a flare of flowers.

Posted an a fortnight’s gunnery course, to Manorbier. Arrived too early, luckily, in the morning, and had time, after reporting in, to have the afternoon off, and took it all on the rocks below, with the lift and drop of salt sea water, the pretty dimpling and spinning of the current, and when the wind rose had the roll and riot of foam.

Miserable about the course. Apprehensive that everyone would know so much and I so little. Even more apprehensive of the quantity of trigonometry

9 necessary. Trigonometry and I will never go hand in hand like you and me. Oh God, that I could be hand in hand with you right now!

Day after day, at the desk in class and on the guns for practical work. The desk has more terror, for yes, and yes, there’s this endless nightmare of Trigonometry. Have no stomach for the abstract or the absolute, ending rapidly in vertigo. I live for the relief of Sunday, last Sunday in particular, the very first relief from Sine and Cosine, and precious, precious time to watch the healing sea again, to have the tongue happily beggared of words, the mind bankrupt of images for those intensely bright and flashing points or cressets or patines of light the sun showers on a calm sea, so that they flicker and spurt and scatter headlong all over themselves, toppling, tumbling, on the tilt, and somersaulting under this bright spring sun. A multitude of tiny golden dinghies in regatta, a whole multitude of new-minted farthings smacked, bounced and spinning simultaneously on a counter.

In one place, lying on a shelf of flat, circular and sloping rock, just before the next wave came, saw the same foam from a previous wave go round the rock twice, being caught in a very fast eddy before it fled away in the nick of time. In another rock pool, watched the delicious behaviour of a shoal of young smelt. How for several moments they were all in constant wriggle and hurly-burly in contrary ways, and then, in a flash, seemed seized with one sudden single tension, all drawn darting in one way, rigid little iron rods in a magnetic field. Noticed also it was as if they had a leader, for when they turn they seemed not merely to turn about and the rearmost take the lead, but the leader turns from the front, and then all the rest turn in turn and follow, threading through the ones coming up behind. It is what PT instructors know as counter-marching or Swedish drill. I’ve seen massed brass bands do it, but never young smelt!

Still on course, but nearly off my head, for it is now full of the insane unpredictabilities of what is called The Predictor as well as the hurting intricacies of Trigonometry. At one point of the day, for some reason, remembered the night journey by rail all the way from the gunsite here, and, in particular, that astonishing waiting room at Bristol station where I had to change. Soldiers, sailors, civilians spread-eagled all over the seats, the wooden settles, the tables, the floor, and even the large window embrasures, all posed in sleep, like a tableau, or one of Goya’s etchings of a madhouse, or a hospital, in his Disasters of War. Remembered too the long Severn tunnel, its darkness broken every now and then by groups of workmen lit by flaming torches which cut such deep shadows into the sockets of their eyes. Then, at the end of the tunnel, came out of it in a flash into the early morning light, the Welsh hills and the clouds. Changed trains again, this time in coal-coloured Swansea, that black hole in the green hills, where, like Bristol, and like Plymouth, its civic heart had gone, and like Bristol and like Plymouth it bore its loss neatly, like the trim scar left after a major operation.

The whole course on manning duty last night, under a high thin thatch of moon-coloured clouds. Today, off duty, I tried first to memorise some gunnery equations, and, invaded by the rich smell of gorse, wandered off to the cliffs, and looked down from them to the small sea creaming thickly at their feet. Learnt how far army boots sink so deliciously into the marvellous soft moss that does for grass here on top of the

10 cliffs. Returned to duty, having, of course, forgotten the equations. In a way, I liked that, but felt that I was not doing my duty by the Regiment, by God!

Back at the gunsite and tonight, in the last of March’s midnights, watched the night drag slowly on its shirt of stars.

The course is now long over, and now comes the warm surprise of a decent day in April. There are small birds somewhere in the small corners of the air, entirely local, here, to this tree, this hedge, that blade of grass. I can hear shouting Easter children too, and I’m back with you on those few entirely precious hours of leave. They were, and are, entirely irreplaceable. I remember them, and at this moment all that memory is for that bicycle ride with you to Pewsey that afternoon - the two bicycles, our two natural selves, the burning bush, the fish you never saw as we leant over the stone parapet of the bridge, and the quiet utterly natural talk as we rode the bicycles back home in the lovely evening. Was never for a moment tired all leave, but am lost and tired and almost sick now trying to think myself back to you again from this entirely unnatural gunsite and absence. Yet, busy with guns, men, lorries or duties, the moment I relax from them, this loss of you asserts itself and I am back with you. Like a huge bee clinging awkwardly to a small flower, the heart seems so clumsy, so pitiful in this useless foraging for love, and I feel emptied out, ignorant, and like a child in my desire for you and our two small daughters. It is so simple, so direct, so overwhelming. And, as to a child too, comes the tantrum of useless anger that the facts don’t fit the feelings.

But for now, this stupid, unbalanced world is all for war, and being an adult, I fear that for the sake of two daughters and that extraordinary thing called freedom, I voluntarily submit, and, grumbling like hell, take a willing and unwilling part in it. A headmaster once said “There’s no such thing as freedom, boy, and no such thing as fairness either. Get that into your head early.” And no doubt he was right, but perhaps only partially right. Our adolescent refusal to be slaves is an OK cliché with me, and a lot of us.

It’s Wednesday and wonderful, and the air is plentiful and cool and comes with such a courtesy against the cheek and, after the silvers of a quick rain, the green grass is all rinsed clean and topples warily over under the gentle pressure of the breeze. The eye gets excited but yet can never get lost for long in this lovely light because bloody memory is unreasonable and recalls too quickly too much that comes slanting sideways at you, spoiling with its underdrag of misery the open afternoon. MUST this crowding agony go on so long? Always to be happy remembering you, always to be miserable with your loss? These moods, all moods, change so fast, and even faster in war. Anything is possible and sometimes all at once. Love, happiness, misery, death, especially the last, the possibility of death in war, where it no longer seems furtive and in the future, but where it comes brazen here, in the sun, cool as a cucumber, and as polite as a priest, all inside the courtesy of this wind, and possible any minute. It all rouses the quick opposition of the heart, but fixes the mood lower in tone by several degrees.

A storm. The stillness before. The stillness after. For a moment silence, and the dull light stretched between. Like a small boy with an elastic catapult the moment before he lets it fly.

11 Another courteous midsummer day. What can be more delightful than in war to have such a moment, to have the opportunity to lie in a field next to the gunsite and to honour, inside the restricted limits of his little kingdom, the full-throated sovereignty the skylark wields within this gentle air, and to share his tiny fierce defiance of the scale of this bit of our bloody little history, to share his temporary stability against the shifting clouds, to be airborne on the rising thermal of his song, then suddenly - the sergeant major was yelling for me - to be recalled hedge high by the bullying noise of a military finch.

Whatever it is going to be is beginning to happen. Rumours, desperate rumours of being posted abroad, have crystallised in all ranks below A1 being posted away from us. I remember being called up in the beginning, and being examined medically by, to my amazement father’s doctor. We grinned at each other and Grade C3 I hope, sir, I smiled at him, but not a chance even though he found on my papers that I was 5'11" downstairs in one test, and 6' upstairs in another. “What” he said “Still growing at that rate, Victor. Then you’ll do.” It means we’re for abroad, and it is absurd not to expect and accept.

Feel shabby, stale, gutted of liveliness, utterly bedevilled with the incessant undesiredness of what is happening.

The very next day, right in the teeth of ever-thickening rumours, the impossible mood of optimism. The war WILL be over. I WILL come home. It’s daft, bouncing, inordinate hope, alias stupidity.

Raid last night, from midnight to four o’clock. There was a very high, very thin covering of very bright small clouds, full of the sense of sea-shells, and a sense of space everywhere that dazzled the eyes. We actually, so bright it was, spotted a Junkers 88 at 12000'. Very sinister it was, scuttling venomously across these lovely clouds, very black, very fast, and worried? Surely not by all those little powder puffs of smoke, too soft, too low to hurt it, and always miles behind. We fired at others, often, all through the night with the same result. Have never gunned for grouse, but with the number of birds downed, surely the human eye and brain is better at it than the technology of trigonometry and predictors. We went to bed just as the first lark went lifting into the early light, its first trill of song so hesitant, so tentative in the lovely utter quiet always left to us after the din of the guns has gone. In the standing down, stayed to listen as the small noise gathered its confident crescendo and finally filled our miserable world with its downward shower of singing.

Day off, and took it to Looe. The beach and then the quay, and its crowd of coloured boats in the inner harbour. In navy blue smocks they were gutting with pink hands huge multi-coloured mackerels. All the cool blues, greys, greens and silvers suddenly spurting the red of its guts. Red, pink, and orange, they went thrown flying up to the gulls. Vulturous grey and white screams and squabbles in a chaos of white breast, grey wings, pink feet, murderous yellow beaks, and small vicious black eyes. At one moment four of them tore, simultaneously, at the same gift parcel, stretching the pink pliable elastic knot till the pink gave way and the parcel broke into pieces. The sea inside the harbour was calm. Very calm. At the harbour wall, its fingers were gently lifting the soft seaweed there, then letting it fall. My fingers. Your hair. Eheu, eheu. And the rumours are still thickening. The consequences of

12 one small decision so high up can be so wide? Who would have thought that one single heart so far from Whitehall could wither to the size of a bean with apprehension and terror?

Today the rumours were confirmed in writing, and writing this the writing is pathetic. The mind can slip on its seven league boots and stride easily over this small geography between us, but it comes back defeated, not because it cannot remember and cover that small distance, but because it remains as ever fastened to my feet inside these military boots. We will have to learn how to cover even longer distances that’s all.

As part of our preparation, the whole Regiment is now in a Practice Camp. The local town has little attraction, the Practice Camp none, save, thank God, it is right beside the sea and I can get down to it so much the more easily, and in one minute flat I can be with it, looking into its clear, green, juices which so pleases, but also watching small bits of seaweed creeping along its bed, like Eliot’s small fragments of despair. Ah, the sea, the sea, the sea is only just one hundred yards from the guns and the huts, and all the military claptrap, and the moment duty stops, it’s mine, and I can watch two waves meet, hold hands, clasp and unclasp. But only watch, and with so much envy! And I wonder in what ways you are dealing with separation too. Is it not even more difficult for you, with everything round you the same as ever it was, except for the addition of those two tiny daughters? Here it is all differences, but even the differences are gradually becoming familiar.

It doesn’t happen all that number of times a week, but I try hard to keep all the military din clear of myself and you, and very happily put it off from my shoulders whenever I can, like this off-duty Sunday, with a huge moody sea straining inland in powerful breakers. The ease of flow and the foam’s fragility of edge are so much part of the great vigour and violence of the mass that only the eye can reconcile them. These fierce, surging, ambling waves are bursting themselves on flat abutting angles of rocks and striking a mass of foam upward into the air, a billion brilliant bubbles in the brilliant sun. And more astonishing still, there’s a moment when all that leaping stuff is stilled. Throw a ball into the air, and there’s a moment when, at its topmost height, the tiptoe of its reaching ceases, when it hangs still, neither flung up any more, nor yet falling, but just for an instant utterly still, and that’s the moment when the burst of all that brilliant spray is most beautiful, a very pretty shrub of arrested upward leap, rigid, tense, precise. A split second later it melts into movement again. All of it becomes a collapse, a fumbling, shabby capsize into the sloppy shapeless and murky sea.

Away from you, each day finds a new area of misery, and the possibilities and occasions for misery are so many. Why is it that activities in which I have absolutely no enjoyment whatsoever, nor any interest either, quite exclude you from my mind, yet even the tiniest spark of pleasure, or the slightest thing that catches the eye and gives the heart the smallest twist generally into sadness, a bit of untidy string, a bud, the colour of a bird, one of the men’s eyes caught in quietness, a dog, a stick, a leaf falling, in a moment bring you crowding in to me, near and marvellous with memories? Today, for the whole period of one of these endless practice shoots, I was depersonalised. Relaxing the moment after the last shot was fired, I happened to notice, with pleasure, the distribution of weight in the way one of the blokes was standing, and was immediately conscious of you, and therefore my sad self again.

13 The last Sunday of the course here, and , for a change, we have it off. Taking it, I sidled off to Clovelly on a bicycle. Clovelly a small, trim, picturesque Cornish cliché. Preferred the next village. More available rocks there, and wilder children, and, actually, someone reading The New Statesman and Nation. Will we always read it, I wonder? Will we always pretend that we are interested in politics, or will we grow up? At least that’s better than being addicted to Prediction, or the Autocar! I also met an Angus. An exact West Highland replica, right down to the same melancholy brown eyes and the same doggy hatred of a pebbled beach.

Back to a Dorset gunsite, away from seaside Practice Shoots. Instead it’s all now Mobile Training and just as disastrously busy. Out all day today with the guns and the vehicles, through Alfpuddle, Turner’s Puddle, Bryant’s Puddle, and one I made! And there were Bere Regis, Throop, Owermaine Heath. All Dorset, I suppose like any other county is full of lovely names, but perhaps only Dorset could have been painted by Corot. Or perhaps by the Japanese. Speeding along in the Hillman Utility, I remember, sharply in focus, the bright red comb of a dark green and black moorhen among the reeds of a shallow stream. And yes, whatever imperialist and military faults they have, how well they realise such a delicacy on silk.

To the dentist. Military, but amazingly good. Better even than the dentist was his assistant, Nesbitt. “Nesbitt, the amalgam.” “Nesbitt, my forceps.” “Nesbitt, the cement.” And the amazing Nesbitt kept flitting in and out of my line of sight, silently and efficiently producing everything from everywhere. No sign of chaos with Nesbitt.

The orders have come. My sweet, we have to accept now, departure, journey, absence, - and return? I can’t see what else we can do except be quiet. The scale upon which everything is working for the moment seems too large, too wide, too deep. Strength, if you can call it that, can only come from a completely passive state in which the scale of this mess can be seen, and felt, and somehow be put into perspective. What sort of life is it, when every personal wish and want, especially for love, is beggared of its natural act? How long will the length of longing be? And why indeed add two more tiny extra crying voices to that vast more general sound of misery the whole world is making?

Leave, and I cannot get the rain and the smoke from your departing train out of my eyes, my mind. My heart ran out into the wet after you. And now the rain has railed you off behind its steel bars, unreachable, untouchable and our short marriage is gone, and the scale and map of everything changes once more. The unit leaves England next week.

14 THE VOYAGE.

January / February 1941

15 The long wait on the station and then the whole Battery entrained. We started moving away from you at exactly 11.35 p.m. How long will it be before we really realise we are apart? Today a train. Tomorrow a boat. Next week, next month, next year -where and what and when and why? We are just a circus turn in this rotten world’s ring. Reduced to the sawdust of words, words, words. But it will only be a question of for how long. It won’t be for ever and it won’t be of despair. Strength comes from somewhere, look, from these stars tonight. And they’re there every night. Renewed like a miracle, every night. The fact that they have never given a damn for anyone and his wife is a kind of stoic strength in itself, isn’t it? And they’ll be there even if we are defeated, even if we die, even if we remain alive, even if we meet again in peace and take up once more the unquestionably questionable happiness of existence in this curious, stupid but star-given world.

Entrained, and now embarked, and all within twenty-four hours. And safe, so far, and soft and in a lap of luxury so much disgracefully above the level of the blokes. On the way up to the port, an open door of the train, at some station or other, somehow knocked down a porter. He was out there in the rain, on his back on the platform, rolling from side to side in pain while the M.O. and a stretcher were fetched. He was dressed in one of those black oiled macs, and as he rolled the bright wet lights on the folds of the mac flashed in sudden white wet crushes of changing shapes.

Still here, still motionless. All day I’ve worried and worried, and watched the casual, shabby stevedores slowly load our equipment into the vast holds of this huge handsome liner. They will knock off and go home tonight. Ye Gods, is that still possible?

Another day, and today, this evening, the last enormous rope slipped from the last bollard and the great dead weight of the liner was slewed round, worried and nosed and tugged at by the furious tugging of the tiny tugs The Bramleymore, the Egerton, the Flying Breeze. The men’s dark heads and tin helmets made a pleasant pattern, edged against the light on the water, breaking the strict hard line of the boat's rail into a lovely disorder. They stood on the steps, the ladders, the booms and the lifeboats. We slipped down river to a cheerful stream of chaffing at the dockers, the harbour authorities, the solitary policeman. This afternoon it felt as if the boat was loaded to the brim with men and misery. You couldn’t think so just now. Afterwards, a little later, we anchored in the roads, for the whole night.

We have moved again. At night. In the morning there was parade on deck for roll call, and we saw the Clyde, and watched the morning sun rise and flood these lovely Scottish hills, but with absolutely unpaintable and dreadful colours. Only Cezanne, and perhaps the Chinese have ever painted mountains well, and they only succeeded because they managed to leave practically the whole mountain out.

16 We are now almost away. A convoy is forming up. We wait for it, and the promenade deck is becoming a death-trap. Mad English officers pound round it ‘for exercise.’ “Fat white Colonels whom nobody loves, Why do you pound round the deck in gloves, Missing so much, and so much?”

Today we have left behind us those lovely, tough, Scottish hills and by evening there is, yes, just as lovely a contrast this celtic twilight, all soft and silver, and we can see the Irish coast. Remembered you strongly. “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?” And, ah, it is everything, everything, everything.

There are six thousand blokes on board. At night, is it all loss, misery and fear for them too? I know too well what it is that I feel.

It matters so much what larger and larger bulk of water comes daily between us, even though sometimes it comes freckled and lipped with foam for partial delight. The mass, the great dunning mass of it just lugs my heart out by its roots. Sometimes, though, in the vast ditches of the sea, that same heart, right in the height of its loss and all this water’s violence, flies, like these small birds (Petrels? Skuas?), nonchalant, and somehow perfectly at ease with the seek and find of shelter in the trough and trail of waves or, when the wind drops, the rain stops and the clouds lift, moves easily outward into the openness and the sudden freshness of the space, into the broad and general flow of air and wave across which this toy cavalcade of tossing ships churns its pleasant way, on a decent day, with a chicken-comb of white foam at each ship’s nose. Most of the time, it is otherwise, and rolled tight and small in my bunk at night, the heart shrivels and whitens at the patience we shall need, at the infinity of love required to ride this misery of absence out. Then the mind bucks from side to side, like these waves, trying to find some sort of balance between grief because so much is being lost to us, and delight which, in the circumstances, almost shames me for being there at all. Is there some way of rendering oneself immune to misery? Any way of being delighted without that delight being tainted with misery? And you will have the same problem with delight, and another, even more difficult, in dealing with that particular delight you get with the children. But heavens, just as these waves have a flow and a drag, a lift and a drop, so has the heart. Behind the waves are the pull of the moon and the drag of the seabed making tides; behind and beyond the heart is a whole continent of love whose natural influence cannot any the more easily be broken. Couráge mon amour.

On deck today remembered sharply, ah, too sharply, brother David’s death at the Bristol hospital, after the raids, with that oxygen mask all over his face, and the rubber bladder which panted like a trapped wild bird on his chest, at the sad roar of the cremation of his body, and the tragic little cask of his ashes wrapped so pitifully and neatly in fresh, unfingered brown paper, tied up as neatly in new bright yellow string. How did we live through that? And God, with all that young promise, it would have been better if he had lived and not us. All of us. How did Dennis manage, carrying that brown paper parcel on his live knees, by train, all the way home to Brighton? What sort of courage matches that sort of knowledge?

17 Damn this war. Damn all wars. Damn the loss of his marvellous drawing. Damn that we will never see him again. Damn the loss of shared affection. Damn, damn, damn. It is not believable. And for us? For those four short years we knew each other, three of knowledge, one of marriage, from first sight, from the first moment of love, that marvellous sharing affection was our familiar, a totally free and natural delight, renewing itself in every gesture, look and act. We both knew the tide of love in which you walked and cooked, and, for that last week of leave, fed Nicholas and looked and shared eyes, and moved your hands and head in all the ordinary acts of normal life. Now, without any of that normal renewal, we will have, like the Pelican, to feed upon the knowledge of each other that we carry in ourselves. But, dammit, there is help for both of us in the daily delight the eyes can find almost anywhere, if they forget themselves and look for it. The children, the garden, Eastcourt and winter in Wiltshire for you. Anywhere I am for me. Sometimes and some how we must remain buoyant on this sea of misery, and, for the moment, the sea is about the only thing I’ve got, and day after day, it takes so long in days and weeks and waves and clouds to crawl across the pages of an atlas, over the vast belly of the sea. How dared man ever cast himself off land on a small ship into such a terrifying space, a ship which must have seemed so small and frail and vulnerable, and with nothing much to measure distance by, except the way the sun climbs more steeply over head, and the gradual dropping of the pole star down each successive rich night sky towards the northern horizon till it hangs there, trembling and watchful, - over Eastcourt?

When he cannot find a seat, the Brigadier squats, without dignity, on the deck. Some officers find this odd and reprehensible. But, at home, he would be pottering about the garden, pruning the roses, or tidying the herbaceous border, or sitting on the grass playing with his grandchildren, and being as homely as any other reasonable old gentleman of his age. Why shouldn’t he sit on the deck?

A small ripple of excitement over a huge chaos of white cumulus clouds in the distance. It’s piled up, so they say, over land we cannot see.

Again and again, in the teeth of the daily misery, the sea yields up the opposite, sheer joy. And that comes too from our attendant gulls; their flight; and occasionally they land, for a moment or two, and lock their pink feet on the handrail of the boat. But they are so welcome as constant companions whose company I prefer, for their silence, for their grace of movement, to some of the things that pass for human beings on this boat. It’s hot and it’s calm, and in those conditions, the sea, flat and unending, and all more or less one colour, is visually dull. How can I show you that it only comes alive at the ship’s side where the water is smashed into foam as pretty as lace, or the white veined pattern on a split and knapped flint as in the sides of dear old Blythburgh Church? It’s mostly in a white untamed disorder, but occasionally it gets puckered and packed almost symmetrically by the wind and the push of the sea till the foam is packed close and backed like fish scales, or the heavy braid along a chair. Further back it uncurls, unravels, and the frayed ends sag and die in limp defeat in the trough of the wave after the swell has gone rearing on.

Fabulous. We were at the centre of a very violent, but localised storm today, and the lift and drop of our huge bows became disturbing almost to the point of fear,

18 and yet somehow there also seemed to be a queer sort of what, nobility?, in the massiveness of the movement. It was magnificently rough sea all round us, and the sky locally dark and low. Then clear, and then further ahead another violent storm, low on the skyline with a divided cloudset reaching sea-level in two places like giant claws. It was pouring there, and there was vivid lightning and yet just above these claws the sky was calm and clear and very pale and gentle. And in that area of sky there was just one star, calm and clear, and very pale and gentle too. Hope is equally absurd and frail, but thank God it is equally there and felt.

Told we’re very near Africa today, and running with a handsome escort from the navy. Very reassuring. There was a Focke-Wulf miles ahead of us today, searching, and reporting us?, working backwards and forwards across the horizon. It has been infinitely warmer the last few days, and we have run through winter, spring and summer in a week. The sea, till now rough, or chopped or dark, is deliciously calm and thin with this pleasant summer light warm and liquid all over it, the water and the sky sauntering and cruising past us. Both sky and water are angelically clear, both like glass and the sea like a cliché mirror except for a few patches here and there where a very vague capricious breeze puckers and freckles it with its moderate, gentle breath. There even seems to be a sort of loose skin upon all this water, and what swell or movement of water there is takes place entirely underneath it, and, because the swell is so slow and so small it never manages to break the skin. It remains all day, unbroken, reflecting the sky. The clouds are underneath it, swimming inside it.

On board, the better for more misery and regret, we seem to be kept so far so safe and well. The battleship and destroyers accompanying us still steam so reassuringly and undefeatably alongside. It’s Rule Britannia and the last night of the proms, as if nothing could go wrong, though everything clearly is. We move, on this one-time famous liner for the moment so well fed, so sleek, so fat, in such an environment of pillars, concealed lighting, art-deco decoration that we should all be in white flannels and not uniformed; bound for Tahiti or Hawaii, not Singapore, which is the rumour. Amazingly, there is practically no military preparation, apart from PT and a lecture in the morning. We are an early convoy, I suppose. Surely they will change this later. But if we really are bound for Singapore, the lack of tension and urgency in our training is amazing. Will the Japanese be in white flannels?

Overhead, all round in the miles of sky, you can see and follow logic. That of the wind. It operates so well on clouds, and teases them into different shapes each day, according to how strongly it blows and from what direction. It sets up not only lovely shapes here, but whole progressive perspectives of those shapes right to the skyline.

Most evenings, all the clouds, still drifting in the great bay of the sky, herd towards the horizon, towards the setting sun, huddling there for the last warmth. They are like a crowd of professional mourners daily grieving at a punctual and splendid death.

Good to have a really rough sea today, for a change, and positively delightful to watch the catastrophically comic gestures of a colonel constrained to sit down

19 suddenly and unexpectedly by the unpredictable movement of the boat. Truly sometimes man has no more grace than a tortoise.

Sitting and sulking in misery and memory, I had you and the whole of Eastcourt on the deck this afternoon; especially, the whole edifice of this topdeck became the body of our rather ugly church whose squat tower broke against the sky much like this funnel, and remembering the children, all these tossing ships were the traffic of the nursery. For a matchless minute, I could stand near you, with my feet again in grass. Among the many torments of this war, distance is the worst of tortures. In the agony of this endless travel, the mind creaks and stretches with great difficulty. Oh, that the world had no more bloody ships and distance were the inch between our kissing lips! Eheu, eheu, and eheu again and again! I wonder continually what you are doing, what you are feeling, what you are doing with your hands, whether your head is held for a portrait, or simply whether you sit or stand, and how your weight is held, and if your eyes slant so, suddenly, in the middle of talking, to search for some impossible discovery in the corner of the room, like mine do. You would have been in odd places had I found you where I looked and wanted you to be, in the crowding foam, the exact place where the pink feet of a gull landed and locked on the shiprail, where two clouds met and touched, or two waves melted, “in the caulking of the deck, and on the other side of every door.” But now, tonight, all I have instead, as I glance sideways and downwards past the ropes and rails of the ship, is this wet African moonlight lolling on the water and, glancing upwards, the impossibly bright moon itself. They are both inward, loss and misery, and yet they have a level so high up they constantly overflow upon the shallow plain of normal living, so that I often wonder at the seeming ease with which one makes the outward show of life. All this absurd military routine, the meals, the talk, the jokes. Practically every man on board must pivot on the fixed point of his private loss. Not one can be proof against the skilful thrust of personal grief, least of all myself, whose part preoccupation in life so far has been to try to set up a partially constant sort of background mood which would render me open and receptive to that extraordinary frisson of pleasure that almost anything on earth can give; provided you look at it, and if you are ready to allow it. Yes? Yes indeed, except that now, in these bloody circumstances, this stance has become very much a misery, because so much of it has come from you and now displays its poverty and misery in lacking you. But both heart and mind still insist that some sort of stance must be found to construct some sort of life on, and perhaps out of this strange, negative, military world, and when ultimately letters from you begin to flow, something will happen to help. We have to take up some form of personal arms against this enormous sea of troubles in our linked yet now separate personal lives. Absence makes the heart etc., but is that to win a greater love at far too high a cost? We could have won that, not in the sharp miseries of war and absence, but better among the blunt, more subtle, daily, lesser difficulties of ordinary life at home, the ordinary family failures, let alone failures in painting. One steps back one or two steps from a canvas to focus, think and improve, but as much geography as this war enforces was never the small distance needed to improve a canvas as small as ours.

Because it is becoming increasingly and unpleasantly warm below, have slept these last few nights on deck. That Africa rumour must have been false. The warmth is infinitely more pleasant in the air, especially at night. I’ve been learning 20 too, untutored idiot that I am, which of these quivering stars make up Orion, which the Pleiades, which of them you can see and share with me, and which you cannot, and that if we could walk together on the moon tonight we’d be astounded at the size this earth of ours would be - a great gross body in the sky eight times larger than the moon we see from the earth, that (Was I even ignorant of this?) the stars that do not twinkle, but bear a constant steady light, are the planets (I had actually heard of them) but I didn’t know that they are cast about the earth like a loose girdle, from where my feet point, then directly overhead, and then behind. For you the shape of the arc would be the same but lower, on your southern horizon, where I am, but where I am not for you, nor you for me. Neither the planets nor the stars are all that friendly. They prove too often and too easily that there are certain things one cannot reach, and then their blind lovely glitter is all ache and longing, and makes love a miracle only for mockery. And music mocks as much as well. One of the officers played the Bach Chorale, that you know by heart and play yourself, on the thing that goes for a piano in the lounge this afternoon (it’s where we have our military lectures) and that mocked me with the memory of your fingers, your hands, and made the mind mad with the memory of music shared.

We are still endlessly and literally at sea. Does anybody know where we are going? We’ve been at sea long enough now to have gone right round the world! Maybe we change course, probably every night, to thwart the U-boats.

It has now been actually hot, and not just warm, for several days, but today is the coldest day for several days as well, and ironically we are ordered into tropical kit. Pale white arms and legs and knees were suddenly pale sprouting things which had lived too long without light, and shy, fawn-coloured topees sprang up in little clusters of tiny khaki toadstools, like the ones we used to gather in Epping forest to draw and paint. We were all like things suddenly exposed under a lifted stone, and, for the first time for a long time, were actually cold. Almost shivering.

I have seen a school of dolphins! They come in a pack with a lovely spiralling play and splash and lift and plunge of dark glittering tops with rigid fins and pale fawn undersides contrasting. The whole thing has the speed and continuity of machine-threading. Sometimes it is all anyhow, each dolphin doing its own thing with a confusion of leaping and dropping that almost upsets the stomach, and then suddenly they all drop into the perfect unanimity of the ballet chorus, the controlled unanimous canter of the riding school, and then there is something to watch acclaimed by the need for order in all the forms of art. So they are solo sometimes, and an orchestra at others, and the music they play is sheer Mozart, that utterly complex simplicity, that marvellous sadness, that jubilant happiness. Please share.

I do not know which is worse. Not to see the children, like me. Or to see them as you do every moment of the day and have the heart always catching in the throat, and unshared tears too constantly close to the eyes. One day you will know I knew and it might just help, a little.

More lectures are gradually appearing. Some we have to attend, some we have to give. Most are ditchwater, some are bright gold, for not all are military. The Colonel’s oddly enough, was bright gold. He told the story of the Cornish pilchards, of the local Cornish way with them, of the local look-out man who cries ‘Hevva’

21 from the top of the hill when he sights the shoal, and the fishermen scramble for their boats like pilots now scramble for their planes. But most are ditchwater, for most are military, and all take time away from looking or reading, or thinking or remembering.

Not dolphins today, but flying fish. Like small children’s spinning tops being whipped from wave to wave. We now see them often. Every parade on deck has its compensations.

Am learning about patience and resignation very unreadily. Tonight in a warm sea-water bath. I lay soaking, soaking and railing continuously against everything. But there seems to be so little to learn in patience, resignation and denial. They are all so negative. What they call the virtue of suffering, and even actually praising it, is a Christian perversion. To hell with suffering.

All day today, there has been a magnificent white albatross with the convoy. Once, and for quite a time, it was close and flying parallel with our ship. An albatross is ten times larger and also ten times lovelier than the lovely gull, with a wonderful ten foot wingspan from tip to tip. When it flies low it is a far lovelier white than even the brilliant foam of a wave breaking in the sun beneath it. I am trying not to be anthropomorphic about it but it seems to take great pleasure in an endless very gentle ease of flight flying close to the water, and, although flying in this endless flight it seems hardly to use its wings at all, except say by two wingbeats in the whole of two minutes, when the dignified, gracious flow of its flight is momentarily broken as if just to remind you of its immense but unused power. That gracious flow of flight is not straight forward either, it’s a weave first to the right then to the left, and when it changes direction it seems to pivot one wing tip on a wave and lifts the other, and that long white diagonal tilts, sways slightly forward and then, still without a wingbeat, the whole bird yields itself to the air again, and rides gliding away down wind. One other lovely moment. Tilting upwards its great white body on the wind, its whiteness was, for a moment, underlit by the evening sun, and dipping closer to a reflecting wave, it made itself tumultuously double.

Now after so many weeks of expecting it, land is in sight, port side. Found myself rejecting it, funking the nostalgia and turmoil of civilian life. Besides, the rhythm of ship life is wonderfully slow and is half the battle to keep something of oneself alive. Here on board one has created an evasive routine which manages to keep the army in perspective and, in the jealously guarded spare moments, delights and exults with albatross, sea, sky, weather and reading. I have only to walk a few paces and lean over the ship's rail to have something I could watch forever with delight. The foam in a shaking hedge of white holly breaking all the way along the ship’s side. I often trace your name in its lovely lace. No, tomorrow will be loud with land, and I just want to be quiet trying to contain the absurd torment this business of not being able to see you arouses. Like an adolescent, I’m afraid I am still quite unable to grasp the fact that you and I are unimportant; and at night, under the multitude of stars, I bitterly and stupidly resent it all. It would have made more sense to have made our love, not to each other, but to the stillness of the stars. The body is too mortal and too portable. The stars are changeless. And yet I tell you this who every night makes a mockery of this same advice. And talking of stars and nostalgia, I will for ever remember one particular

22 leave from Shrivenham OCTU and managing to catch an early morning morning-paper train from Swindon to Marlborough, and then, about five in the morning walking to you the six miles from Marlborough through Savernake Forest, under the last stars, and reaching and surprising your marvellous warmth in bed with the cold stars still in my eyes and the crow of the first dawn cockerels in my ears.

Most of those English stars are here in Africa with me now, and many more besides, and in the African dark they seem to come down so much more closely when there is no moon. When she is not about, here, in the tropics, night is really night, and darkness is really dark and the sweet enormous sweat of stars so bright and close I can almost reach up and touch them. Down about the head they come crowding, bold, inquisitive and tame as the bright eyes of mice, and, lord, how they nibble at the night.

Land did come, and we lay off hot and fly-infested Africa for several days, but without any shore leave for anyone. The natives came crowding out to us, instead, in boats of bark, and sold us oranges, bananas, mangoes and coconuts. All of them were astonishingly black, deep jet black, and they wore the most exotically gaudy-coloured shirts, shorts and hats. After the monotonous official khaki for weeks on end, very beautiful, and I mean beautiful. So were their bodies. Dignified and lovely in any pose. But their minds! And their English! Corrupt beyond corruption! Army minds, army English. Freetown has a garrison, aye, and there’s the rub. When they weren’t selling us their fruit, they dived for us, after coins thrown from the deck. But they’d go only for silver, not coppers. For coppers they just sit still cynically and without amusement in their eyes, to watch the gleam of copper sink out of sight; but the tiny white bob, or sixpenny bit, glittering like the whites of their eyes, would bring their bodies leaping convulsively out of their boats, and down through the green juices of the sea they would go, their brown arms and legs spread out like those of gigantic frogs, following the bright erratic path of the sinking silver until it was caught four, six, eight, ten feet deep in the clear clean emerald water. Then they would stiffen, the pale soles of their feet would disappear, they would straighten up, shoot vertically erect to the surface and break like a flower into the sun. After diving, they would sit on their boats again, and twitch and shiver convulsively with cold, even in the hottest sun, until the next sight of silver. At least two of their boats were named in English. One was called CHARLIE BLACKOUT, and another, more passionately, but less articulately, I BELIV GODD. As well as fruit, sometimes they brought knives, shirts, shorts, cushions and once, even, a single live chicken. Poor thing, it crouched down on a heap of coconuts, clucking anxiously, terrified of something so desperately opposite to its nature as salt sea water. There was also the fun of listening to a tough Yorkshire sergeant haggling with a nigger over the price of a dozen bananas. The great racket on the white man’s side was to conclude one’s bargaining, and insist on two extra, free. “One for the King” and “One for the Queen.” The natives always gave in first. But later I heard one ask “How many Kings you got on board?” And to one tight-fisted native who would not give way, I heard a very cockney voice shout out “Blimey, nigger. Where do you come from? Whitechapel?”

23 It’s two days after leaving Freetown now, and today there was a funeral on one of the other boats. All the flags of the convoy at half-mast. The usual summer sky, the same calm, delightful sea. Objectivity. Impersonality. Are they good for you?

It’s now hot. Very hot, and, with others, grilled my flesh, sunbathing. The heat is sometimes broken temporarily by a small cloud’s shadow as it slowly cruises across the sun, or even by a puff of cooler wind. That’s deliciously welcome, the hot flesh hooded. Then comes the awful moment when the heat resettles like a scalding swarm of flies on a horse’s flank.

And so we sunbathe on! To Singapore? That’s the rumour. And every day the war’s news gets worse and worse in Russia, in Europe, in Malaysia.

I suppose the heat’s hold will never be absolute until we are on land. On the boat, because of continuous forward movement, there is always some small cooler wind to make the body reasonably pleasant. Even so, like a warning, when the wind dies, we nearly do too. The heat is shocking. It breaks out on the body, and when you look down, you are covered in beads of it, as large as, and very like, rice. It so drenches me that I now carry a towel with me, all day.

I sleep on deck, and generally wake early with the mind sprawling clumsily in the half-dark until it gradually gathers together the normal count of misery, automatically starts checking the too well-known losses against the pleasure of the increasing light. Occasionally it wakes richly stammering from a dream of you and clarifies, thank goodness, only slowly, for dreams have a sort of follow through, operating a flywheel that goes on running even after everything has been switched off. Today very special. No switch off till well after I had shaved.

Light on the water. It’s loose, slippery, turning about, this way and that. The leaves and flowers of a row of runner beans behave exactly the same in a small breeze.

A strange happening this evening. A serendipity I will never forget. At the ship’s rail, my usual place, I watched while somebody, several decks below mine, was deliberately flicking away a pack of cards. Understandably testing his luck, telling his fortune? Each card flicked swiftly outwards, darting from the ship’s side until it felt the air under its belly. Then it stopped, hesitated for a moment before it started to fall, slowly, leisurely, turning over and over and over. First suit side, then pattern side, suit side pattern side. I saw the two of diamonds, the four of clubs, the King of diamonds all flutter away like lost butterflies down to the water of the sea. Presently, I suppose, they sank when sodden, but for a little while there was a long trail of cards, like a strange paper chase. I didn’t count them. Was it the whole pack? Or did he, for luck, keep an ace up his sleeve to play later when he might need it?

Now we really did get land, and also three days shore leave. But on the first one I copped ship’s orderly officer; the second was a Sunday and therefore no shops; but on Monday I did get out and bought fruit, a pair of shoes to replace a pair that had come totally unstuck in the humid heat, a very small camera, and finding a quite well stocked bookshop I bought Turgenev’s Liza, the Comedies and Histories of Shakespeare, Madame Bovary, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, T.S.Eliot's Poems, The Confessions of St Augustine, and The Bible Designed To Be Read As Literature. The 24 last a lovely title and a very handsome book. They make my library by far the largest bulk of things I have in the one trunk we’re allowed. It is with great difficulty I can find any clothes there at all. And I will have a very lucky war if it allows me time to read that lot! Ridiculous. I must be even worse than all the blokes who think we are off to play cricket. All this in the morning, and even managed to rush in a quick visit to the Art Gallery. Very meagre. Only one painting there, a small Constable sketch, a firm, freshly handled little landscape, full of the fresh air that everything else lacked. Met the rest of the regimental officers for lunch, then a party of us hired a taxi and went into the country. The conventional tourist trip is to the Valley of a Thousand Hills, and yes, there they were. We didn’t count, but there they were, and looking very pleasant. Merely to stick in the town and then leave was to miss what the town had grown out of, and to miss a pleasant landscape which proved to be very open, frank, candid and unhedged. It was elusive of character, and rather fine for that reason, like meeting some one rather reserved, and with something to be reserved about. On the way back, stopped the taxi to watch some natives dancing, but, in spite of the expertise, and whatever the excitement of the dance once meant, it seemed just rather a professional job for the tourist. The dancers smiled, but it wasn’t the smile on the face of the tiger.

Now we are at sea again, and the three days of shore leave explained. We have changed ships, from European liner to a smaller ship more suitable, thank heavens, to the heat of the tropics. It is certainly more pleasant, with more space and more open air on deck. And so we cruise on. Incredible to have each of our personal miseries clothed in the almost amazing contentment of a pseudo cruise. Contentment? Well, something that seems somehow to reduce the size of misery, that doesn’t stir the mind like misery. Why does misery, sadness, grief, tragedy, any one of them become more vocal than, say, love does? They are no more important, no greater than love, but why more vocal? Those few months of love and marriage, so full of intelligent excitement, seemed to have little room for words, inhabited geographical areas of the mind and the intelligence, lessened the need for words. Misery, sadness, grieving seem to need words, to be rid of them. Love, delight, joy, jubilation, exultation are for words too? Scarcely. At home there would be you above all else, and the children, playtime, mealtime, talking, painting, listening to music, and less need of words. That sort of love is vivid, instinctual, ready with response, full to the brim with caring acts, and marvellous beyond words. Should it all be “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”? But here and now, and whether I like it or not, there is no love, no jubilation, just this allotment of small content, and that is even more difficult to deal with, because I think I ought not to have it. But the sea gently breeds it for me, covers me with it, and I find myself watching its calm surface, with a gentle light streaming all one way over it, without the heart renewing its hurt in everything it sees. For a few precious moments, anyhow.

The days come, one after another, and each one a pleasant summer day, full of pleasant summer-feeling clouds, slow, thoughtful, easy-pacing things. Oh, I could be content for a long time, to watch this slowly changing puff of clouds build and rebuild, and build again its lovely airy disorder in this summer of an early March day, if only war and the loss of you did not so much mar their marvellous neutral beauty. 25 After so many days of sun, a wonderful burst of nostalgic rain bouncing in torrents on the deck.

More rain today. But not with a bang, with a whimper. It was thin, quiet, and quite white. Later the pale washed evening turned all the sea to a lilac juice which was all fleeing westward into the dusk with the evening light slightly paler, loose all over it. Tonight there is a wider ring round the moon than I have ever seen before.

Orderly officer, and had a long, complicated and interesting talk on gardening with the very special Orderly NCO, and then, on our round, we stopped on the bridge, and shared a contemplation of the men sleeping outside on the deck below, the clumsy awkward sprawl of their poses. Even if I had been on my own, I hadn’t got a pencil, and shades of Goya interfered again anyhow.

At ten o’clock tonight, in a rich, really dark night, behold The Plough, entirely visible, my favourite constellation, even though it was now, here, upside down. A moment of wonderful, nostalgic contact with the remembered English sky. Orion has more grace, more beauty, is more complex, more decorative, and its belt is a miracle, but give me the bare, strict purpose, the clear unembellished strength of the Plough.

And on duty, at five in the morning, the Southern Cross was exactly, mathematically upright.

I’m never quite sure of moonlight all over everything, are you? It never seems quite sure of where it is. It always has a queer sense of being a kind of aeration, a levitation of soft foam, or is it meal, or is it spent ash resting suspended, motionless, just two or three inches above everything it rests on? The eyes can’t stay with it anywhere for very long without feeling a bit dizzy.

Now we have been told that in a couple of days time we will be landing at Bombay. Apparently we were only two days from Singapore when it fell and the whole convoy turned round in its tracks and diverted to up here. Yes, and I think only that could explain the inordinate time we have been at sea.

Bombay. Port at last, and gulls, kites and small boats crowding round the big ones. We have been on board, incredibly, almost to a day, two whole months. Now it is land, and the war becomes nearer? Like a coward, I would prefer just to contract out of the war, and have this journey carry on to the end of it, however sick the eyes were of the flat, stale, primary blue of the sea. How much more lovely are the modified inshore colours of the sea here. It is the North sea of Walberswick, muddy, and grey-green. Grey, surely, is the king of colours, cool or warm, hot or cold, with every shade of every other colour caught, included and modified within in it. Fawn, charcoal, lilac, beige, opal, olive, and ivory. Even the names are lovely. As we pulled round to a standstill in the bay, our churning screws brought the mud up onto the surface in huge involuted flowers in subtle colours not seen for ages. A real treat for the eyes after so much primary blue. The port is crowded silly. We weren’t really expected. It will be three days before we can land and unload.

26 Tomorrow we finish with boats until we return, I suppose. Looking at the way the war is going, with the Japanese now only across the water the other side of India, return doesn’t seem conceivable for what, two years, three? All the same, lucky so far, will we be lucky to the end? But I will miss the boat. It was clean and comfortable (at least for the officers); there was always, or mostly always just enough breeze to keep you reasonably cool; and the food (again at least for the officers) was better and there was more of it than we had ever had on the gunsites in England. And we were waited on (at least again for the officers) by silent, obsequious Indian stewards, who were, within limits, extremely efficient, and even outside those limits managed to look efficient and intelligent. All the same, if you wanted salad, which was available and cool, and not the meat, or fish or whatever was on the menu hot, - you could ask for it, and explain at length in word and gesture, they would grin, bow knowingly, say “Yees, Master”, disappear swiftly, and bring you steak and kidney pie!

Still on board, and under the surface of the waiting, the loss of you, the shape of the war as it now so disastrously and continuously runs, the shape of the immediate personal future, the possibility of real fighting makes me recoil from everything, and makes it doubly urgent to find some forward current of hope, some inkling of comfort out of all these desperately mortal things, so religion (you have to deal with it, don’t you?) raises its unusual head and offers help. But for me, as always, it does not satisfy. In the twentieth century too much wind has been taken out of those lovely sails. Cold facts have nullified all that beautiful, biblical imagery, and there’s the inflexible and stubborn Church, which within itself had begun to throttle the very learning which it had once led. Truth. I wonder if the crazy search for truth has got us any further than religion? Surely one has to like the basic philosophy of Christianity, its tolerant system of behaviour, the tenets of personal and social love. Surely that is all irrefutable; but not the divinity, not the miracles, not the primary leap into illusion, into self-deception. however much room you find there in which to envy a wonderful ready-made refuge for any and every mood of despair. You even have to approve, don’t you, of the system of prayer when its direction is towards something, someone, so generally benevolent. If only one could stomach that primary self-deception! But a kind of pride (there’s a Christian sin for you, and in what, for goodness sake?) revolts from this running for shelter. And yet, right now, and probably always, there is a real need for shelter, isn’t there? Or is that cowardice? And is the ‘personal stillness in the still centre’ any more than a sort of shelter too? And where do you go from there? Not too far, surely, because there seems so much less self-deception there, less illusion. It exists. It works. It is there.

We are still waiting to land. The orders seem to be, for the moment, to stay in India, southwards, in Madras, which to hotheads, and there are some here, will be dull and inglorious, but to you and me - safe? We may not fire a single shot for the rest of the war. Smashing. That will suit a pseudo-Christian. And all that remains will be time. For how bloody long, though? And do we have to add ill-health? And chemical change?

On deck this evening, after the sun had set and left us, but still while the sky above us was caught in the warm glow the sun actually throws up from below the horizon, there was left a high deft flowing banner of small separate clouds under-flushed with a lovely rose blush of colour, like an echo of the sun left behind.

27 And like an echo, it did not last, but vanished between two glances up and down. So quickly, that a child might cry at such a sudden loss. Or I.

Still on board. Which suits, and I have formed a taste for early light strong enough that even with the enormous weight of two ridiculous pips on the shoulder (a weight, by the way, which seems to carry amongst ordinarily two-pipped pippers the incredible privilege of remaining a quarter of an hour longer in bed than the men) I easily bring myself, without any military discipline, to get up an hour, or even two, before nearly everyone, to watch the dawn daily. This is the third while still lying off Bombay. Dawn abroad in war is for me the equivalent of the sentry-box in the ranks in England. I took to the strict, monastic seclusion of that holy box like a duck to water. Grateful, like Garbo, for the chance to be alone, especially after the noise and blunder, the communal riot, of a Nissen hut of twenty blokes all effing and blinding, even though, quite often, I really liked it. Hence the pleasure of three dawns here, and all the gradually increasing light so gently managing to lever up the enormous weight of night, watching it easing itself through the gap, filtering slowly outwards, spreading, then flooding the growing daylight through. So simple. And the delighted eyes, in war, discovering the inshore colours of the harboured sea, the early silver gull, the brown unlovely kite, the cool, poised, motionless hyacinths of smoke the busy shipping grafts upon the early, half-dark sky, the small native boats with their quick white slips of sail, tilted acutely, running with the tide and dawn’s full breeze which twigs and jogs and wriggles on the crepe and ruffle of the sea. Further off and away all round this enormous bay, the eastern sun comes up fast, grows fat, and loads its rich impasto on a fairytale scenery of towers and ships. All these big ships sit still while the many busy fingers of a hundred cranes grope in their holds and then gesture delicately in the air among the motionless masts and mist, the funnels and the smoke, unloading with grace and precision all the equipment of a murderous, modern war. The dragon in the fairy tale.

At last, today, the Regiment disembarked, and more or less took possession of the whole of this huge station. Then we were given two hours leave in the town. Everything east of Durban smells, so the saying goes. And yes, it does, and the saying implies it is unpleasant. Most of the blokes found it so, but, perversely, I rather liked it. It is like a cross between manure and incense. Animality and religion. The prophet and the beast. Oxen and the church. The manure comes from the oxen, lots of them, and lovely to look at they are, after seeing nothing but soldiery for over six weeks. They drop their little country parcels everywhere. The smell from them has a certain emphasis, an accent, a sharper assault upon the nostrils than the horse manure which is everywhere also, but both remain stably, friendly, honest to God smells, clean and indifferent to their origins. And that’s more than I can say for the Hindu religion and the Catholic church, neither of which I have ever liked, though I suppose both now suffer from the gradual hardening of their original and probably magnificent arteries. Both smell of incense, or something or other, and man himself now just smells of petrol. Let me prefer the smell of stables any day. What I do not prefer is the begging and the beggary. Wherever you go. In every street. The openly licensed principle of it shames. Felt indecently guilty of actually-liking the strange appeal of the pathetic pleas of eyes and hands, always the carriers of expression.

28 The buildings were disappointingly European and bastard. So was the traffic - a mixture of huge London double-decker buses, cars, oxen carts, and, right out of the days of Queen Victoria, hundreds and hundreds of hansom cabs. So was the dress - trilbies and turbans, lounge suits and loincloths. Thought that could be title for a novel. Lounge Suits and Loincloths. Might sum up nicely the contact E M Forster had with India! On the way back, a group of us stopped to watch a local showman stage a fight between a mongoose and a snake. Wished I hadn’t. Repulsive. A cliché I suppose for the crowd, but not for me. At the finish, this long, frightening snake was held up limp, white, and horribly dead, and the tiny, winning, bubbling-with-energy mongoose was packed back into its hessian sack with its mouth still bloody and its whole tiny body still quivering with the excitement of his kill. Afterwards we all lunched in what seemed to be an Indian replica of the Trocadero. Everybody had steak and chips, of course. I lost a lot of case ordering sliced pigeon breast, bamboo shoots and noodles. Our troop train, in the end, was ten hours late, and we had to sleep where we stood, on the station. Or some of us did. I found it difficult, but all the waiting went easily watching huge shuddering bats quiver their blind ancient pattern across the geometry of modern steel girders. And on to our wrists, hands, and faces, from the hot arc lights glaring all night above us fell an exciting selection of the queer fabulous crawling insects of a foreign land, dazed, half-burnt, frightening, and repulsively lovely with their bright putrescent colours and long delicate legs. All night the men were restless, swarmed, grew still. Once, they sang, and into the stifling foreign air rose those nostalgic European songs, all seemingly empty, worthless, yet comforting. I suppose it is not really odd that, with the huge different levels of education, even with the affection one has for the men, one still, in moments like this, seems to stand to one side, rather smugly, not liking much what they say or do or sing! Listening to the woman coming round the mountains in her silk pyjamas, and equally impossibly riding her six white horses, I was suddenly filled with an intense and mortal fear of I don’t know what. Or yes I do. It was fear of war, fear of death, but more perhaps fear, next to the chemical changes in the body, induced by living constantly in a heat like this, of the possible mental changes induced by constantly living in the army for so long, the gradual growth of toughness, impersonality, and even worse the need perhaps for compensation, indulgence, selfishness. Spare moments are already over-precious, over-personal, inward and esoteric. At the moment it’s the way one stays alive. Hopefully there will not be too much for you to undo, to change again when I return. I so miss the ease of your friendship, constantly battling to retain some reasonably sensitive area of myself for you in this constant and wearying procession of military days of undesired and often unintelligible activities. Life in authority - even, or especially, the limited authority of two pips - is pretty corrupting, and deals the most desperate blows to one’s integrity. I would dearly like you to amaze me with that wonderful sense of living and sharing that you give me. Always. Always.

We finally entrained at eight o’clock in the morning, and then travelled two whole days and nights. The grim iron rattle of sleeplessness. The subsequent querulous reaction of tiredness during the day. The men had to bear it second class. Indian second class. The carriages all only with long wooden seats, packed with too many men, and very hot and uncomfortable. The officers were The Raj. First class, with upholstered sleeping bunks, a shower, a wash basin, a lavatory, and, most

29 precious of all, an electric fan. That was life-giving, sheer resuscitation. Not, mouth to mouth, not like your kiss, but it just felt as if one’s life was being saved. At eleven the first morning we stopped for breakfast, at a small local station. The men were issued in situ in their carriages with cold meat, bread and butter and jam, and tons of tea. Not bad, but the officers retired to the first class station restaurant, to cereals, fried fish, or eggs and bacon, toast, marmalade, and real coffee. All this is presumably pure debit in a democracy but what do you do? During breakfast the Colonel tried to find out how long we had for it before the train left again. Summoned before him, the stationmaster, with great courtesy, replied in perfect pidgin English, “You will have your breakfast, sahib, and when you have finished your breakfast, sahib, we will move off whenever you intend it.” Timetables, war, the Japanese? Never heard of them. They will all be dealt with in time. I hope to God he will prove right. It is certainly far too hot to hurry. We went rattling over the Western Ghats with real vultures circling in the air below the train, and later, in a sort of musical comedy mood we went through Poona, by God, amid the cheers and ribaldry of the men, then down to the river valleys, to the hot plains of Madras, and now we are installed in a steaming transit camp a few miles north of Madras where we are to wait for our equipment. It is supposed to be following by goods train, escorted by an escort party who will also no doubt stop for breakfast, lunch and supper, and “move off whenever they intend it.”

30 THE YEARS BETWEEN.

1941-1945

31 So far, so predictable. The whole regiment in limbo in this transit camp, ready for nothing. No guns, no ammunition for them. The men have a rifle each, the officers a revolver and a few rounds of .303. Not surprising, if we were targeted for Singapore. The camp itself is a bit like Welwyn Garden City except that the ‘bungalows’ are built on a grid plan for tropical heat. They are pantiled roofed and the walls are of stone, but only up to waist high, then up to the eaves, thank God the walls are open to the air. We sleep on charpoys - very primitive four-poster beds, each of us under his own anti-mosquito net of white muslin. Very, very primitive, but at least private. A bit, perhaps, like taking the veil! At night, inside the net, it is stiflingly hot and airless, and vaguely indecent. Because of the heat you have to lie totally nude in this white seclusion feeling you really need and want this veil of protection, and not just against the mosquito! It was hot on the train. It is now even hotter, and yet it is only late March. We are told there are only two seasons in Madras. One hot, and the other a bloody sight hotter! The heat is strange, everything is strange, and yet familiar English equivalents occasionally disturb, too deeply. There’s a kind of plump thrush-not-quite-thrush bird that jets a startling thrush-not-quite-thrush stream of song over its plump shoulder as it flies off. There’s a blessedly irritating familiar cawing of crows-not-quite-crows, the not-quite English bark of a dog, and the chinking, clinking flurry and puff of trains actually made in England along the railway lines right next to the camp, but they still do not deliver our English equipment. Sometimes it all seems like a very hot English summer day in a not-quite-English park, save that the trees have twice the blossom, and the blossom twice the colours. Every now and then the depth of nostalgia shames. It is very difficult to write your address. The other not quite equivalent is the even greater inefficiency of the railway system. According to the adjutant our baggage train appears to have been lost, gone without trace, last seen in Bombay. That’s just our baggage. God knows about our artillery equipment. Perhaps we haven’t even got any. The standard of preparedness here must be about 1936, let alone 1941. And it is probably worse, even than we see. We can’t train or practice so we just have endless squad drill and PT.

The not-quite-crows are kites. As well as too many Indians, there are far too many kites but they are the only known Indian system of refuse collection, and they are therefore sacred and protected by law. All are extremely tame and rapacious. Any food, as well as waste food is fair game, and the men are having to develop unaccustomed areas of cunning to keep their meals safe on their plates on the short trek from the cookhouse, where they are served, to the Mess Tent, where they eat, or would eat, if there was any food still left on their plate. One fraction of inattention en route, a kite swoops, and the meal has gone.

As for the Indians themselves, they are Tamils down here, they are truly magnificent, visually. All the men have heads like John the Baptist. All the girls are Madonnas. Groups of either, at a bus stop, at a well waiting their turn for water, slip so easily into miracles of composition. It’s like being in the National Gallery, but the drawbacks to drawing or painting, if ever one actually conceived even the idea of doing anything, are multiple. Time off is not even remotely possible, and if you managed to open a tube of paint here, the heat would ensure that all the oil in the tube would come out first, and the pigment after.

32 Today, busy all day with motor transport. We actually do have some now. Busy also with the futility of pay problems, drill, and the usual court intrigues of officers, sergeants, and men.

Learning to like what the men call little grey tree-rats. Chipmunks is their local, kinder, more descriptive name. They are very nimble. When they move, no sorry, they don’t move, they ripple. They ripple in a quick rush along a branch and then freeze into a self-astonished stillness which yet remains alive with that almost liquid ripple, their vigilant little heads telescoping to just a pair of tiny quivering nostrils which thread-thread in the air, sensitively adjusting to every tremor of movement anywhere. The ripple travels right from the end of their nose to the last flick of the tail.

At last an evening off into Madras. Noticed on a poster that Handel’s Messiah was on at some church or other. Went supperless to find it, and there I was, listening to the Messiah. True it was only a very diminutive, foreshortened Messiah, with only a small choir and an even smaller orchestra, but to my starving ears the immensity of the music and the story came through and would have come through on any scale, however small. I gulped it down, with enormous gratitude. I even wangled it so that I got off and heard it the next night again, and even managed to borrow a score. Oh, and hearing music was so extravagant, so unworldly, in the present context, that the tendency on the first night was just to sit back and enjoy the unexpected release of mood, rather than the music. Even on the second night there was still some measure of that sweet release on the first, the feeling that something at last was welcome to the mind and, against all present precedent, the establishment of something actually wanted, a mood actual: voluntarily sought after. Strange to be so open and receptive and not on guard against outrage. By sitting still, and by a simple act of will, to be open to the torrents of delight the music let in. And don’t you think that oratorio as a form is preferable to opera, or at least opera in its present form? That not very magical marriage of music to theatre, with all that hamming from the singers (isn’t it time they were trained to act?), with all that over-the-top scenery? In oratorio, without stage or scenery thank God, the music itself comes through, the recitative sets the story, the scene, the plot and without any expense. The chorus establishes all the major moods, the soloists all the individual passions, or in duets, quartets, whatever, the conflicts. It is formal, classical, objective, austere and yet it contains all the passion that matters.

Morning parade. Five-thirty am. I inspect the men. All their beautifully shaven chins. All, except one, the one with impetigo. It sort of shocks you every morning, and has done for ages. His sores spreading all over his unshaven bristle. But today he had actually shaved. He was clean. The sores and the bristles were all gone. The healing seemed to be like a bible miracle. I could only have just hidden my startled astonishment. Miracles should be excused parade as being unfair on officers. All the same, we both managed to smile. We have parade and rollcall, of course, every day, and on parade some of the men manage to stand erect, some have heads that tend to drift sideways or downward, some look deeply ashamed for some obscure personal reason or other without any sense of indignation, some are proud to be smart (God help them) and some are marvellously indignant. I like these, and have to pass them quickly, not to show my sympathy. There must be something horrible about being inspected. But is it not worse doing the inspecting? 33 After morning parade today, Bren Gun Instruction. We have actually got one now. But only one. It is instruction with the firm competence and almost too ready tongue of Bombardier Williams. Unselfconscious, utterly impersonal, totally without nerves. Then Marching Drill. In this heat! And as if we had never done it before! And again worse to command than obey? Then it is the break for breakfast, the usual battle with the swooping kites, and afterwards drill followed by maintenance on the odd gun and lorry which now begin to trickle in. A few rifles, a few rounds of ammunition, but still no shells. I move amongst a lot of metal, disliking it. Lunch comes at 12.30. Siesta till 3.00 because mad dogs and Englishmen etc. At 3.00 we repeat all the above until 6.00. At 6.30 we have supper. All the officers eating in the Regimental Mess. What do we have? Not a difficult guess. Believe it or not, it is Roast Beef, Yorkshire Pudding and potatoes followed by Plum Duff. And in this fearful heat. Our upper lips are stiffer than ever.

No mail from you yet. No one really expects it yet, but everybody is bitterly disappointed all the same. I wonder miserably whether anything is getting through to you from me. Could be soon if not because we have just been issued with our first aerograph forms. You are allowed one page, quite reasonably large. It is then photographed somewhere and reduced to a very small negative, which tiny things are hopefully flown home, developed and delivered to you as a small photographic print which I hope you will be able to read, perhaps with the aid of a Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass. Brilliant, and not elementary either, Mrs Watson. Short and quick, and at least something. Is it going to be a new literary form? Tony, with his flair for the sonnet and wit, will surely like their limitations, their compulsory brevity, even their shape. There ought to be a Goncourt prize awarded to someone for the best one of the war after it is all over. I will be content just to receive my first one from you.

Into the third week in camp, and then came the sudden invasion flap. The Japanese fleet sighted heading for Madras, the softest part of the soft underbelly of India. The order to move came at a minute’s notice. It was all rapid rollcalls, alarms and excursions, loading up and orders shouted in the dark. An hour of panic and frantic rush, and then the slow move in convoy, in the dead of night. There was a small moon just rising and it came up quickly as I stood in the open hood of the Utility, frightened, but, strange this, still able to watch with deep pleasure everything the eyes could see. The bare, leggy palms, the equally bare, leggy, loinclothed natives, there still working in the fields, at their wells, or knee-deep wading in the paddy. I realised then why they seem to be so sleepy all day! Along the road of the convoy were all their bullock carts, ringing their pleasant sounding pretty bells, some pulling gently to one side for us, others already there, standing stock still, white patches of pale mist. A fairy tale, or St George and the Dragon. St George was hectic trying to get his guns in position before the dragon arrived. And working flat out we were ready by dawn. We were too tired and frightened to sleep, so we stood and talked of everything except what could happen next. With our ludicrous lack of ammunition we could only have fired for an hour even with rifles and revolvers. So we just stayed at the ready in our positions and watched and waited while the dawn scrambled with slow, grey, lovely fingers of light up and over the dark roofs of Madras.

34 Later the alarm grew stale and nothing happened. The Japanese fleet, thank God, had turned about, and disappeared. So, apparently had practically the whole Indian and English population of Madras, or most of it. All into the hills. Including the Governor, so the rumour went. And I for one didn’t blame him. I was frightened too. Then, at last, we slept.

We are now in the process of digging the guns in, something we now have time to do. The men are doing it themselves, with the assistance, for the purposes of speed, of a host of Indian coolies as they are called. The males dig, the females carry away, and even with the heavy baskets of earth on their heads, all the women walk like a Deportment Class, except that their grace is entirely unpremeditated. They have it, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, ‘most natural’. They talk to each other in Tamil, and sound like pigeons cooing at each other.

Several days later, at midday, the heat is like a foundry, and the hot dry winds that sweep into our tents in the afternoon burn our flesh to sand. Yet, in the very early morning, when we get up, at least the colours are coo1 enough. Plenty of nostalgia then, and if, though it is rare, you get early morning clouds as well, they all seem English, and even John Constable. Our little bit of Suffolk in a frantic foreign sky.

We begin really to settle down, and today we took on four young camp followers, young native boys, as sweepers. We pay them once a week, with the other men, on the Acquittance Rolls. They were formally enrolled with much gaiety. They will sign receipts every week, not in ink, but with their thumb prints, not pens. It makes pay-day hilarious. They keep grinning and saluting at every conceivable opportunity. It seems very difficult to get them to do anything else - like, say, work.

The gunsite is well outside Madras in the rural countryside and one thankfully sees most of what goes on, and their main beast of burden is the white bullock. The cow is sacred in India so it is not surprising that even the neutered bullock has something almost holy about it which seems to concentrate in the heads of the white ones. They don’t look intelligent but all the same there is something almost noble there. Something to do with patience and endurance and willingness? On the other hand, and even at exactly the same time, they have that soft, white, plush, velvety quality in the loose skin hanging from their throats, which makes me think of some of those handsome, well-fed wives of the publicans we used to meet at the banquets and dances of the Licensed Victuallers at the Connaught Rooms. They have the same sort of echo of the same sort of beauty in their eyes - a slow, passive, slightly stupid beauty. They (not the ladies of the Connaught Rooms!) make water as they move along the road, and the golden liquid spills all down their lovely elegant white legs, over their hocks, hooves, everything. You look for some sign of shame in their eyes, but find only a complete and rather splendid indifference. I can hear the ring of their bells, faint and tender and coo1 on the road when I lie stupefied with heat and sweating nude under my mosquito net at night. It helps to soften a little a fixed and pretty bitter mood. So many other things are intolerable.

Profusely and bitterly hot again today, and they say the heat has still not started. It is still this incredible country’s spring!

For days now it has been hot and there is still nothing but tons of work. 35 36 Ah now, for the first time on this gunsite there has been a torrential downpour of rain. There is a strange peace. All work has had to cease. Even the frantic mind is still, and I can stand still, and actually remember you with love, and feel the sadness of remembering you come as quickly and spread as easily as this lovely cool air the rain has given us. I am making this much love to you. I wish to God you could feel it.

We are all finding lyrical excitement in strange Indian insects. The men are under instructions to bring anything interesting to the mess. Our small count so far is one Six Spot Domino Beetle, a big black fellow, with, yes, exactly six white spots, two on his fierce and fighting head, four on the armour of his body. One real live locust. With thick and enjoyably jolly, human-like thighs, rather tender and pale white and speckled all over with a scatter of green, but an ugly looking blighter for the rest. One vicious, long-tailed large-clawed scorpion, with enough poison in his tail to kill outright a child. And two Praying-Mantis pretending to be priests.

Had a visitor last night. A tortoise. I woke in fright, hearing a great scrabbling, scrawing gnawing noise as if a dozen huge rats were at my vitals. It was this tortoise trying to bury itself in the ground of our tent, only a foot from my bed and head. He was instantly dazzled by my torch, and peered very crossly this way and that, trying to make out why I was making such a fuss, and when I took my topee down off its hook this morning, behold, there was a frog in it. It jumped out, frightened, without dignity, and hopped off fast, across the floor, like a frightened hen.

The local Indians here apparently think all the men are Italian prisoners of war. They have never seen an Englishman work with his hands before, let alone dig with a spade!

Into Madras today, and amongst other official visits went to SPENCERS, the, sort of, local Selfridges. With O what a lovely war on my mind, I took great pleasure in arranging a weekly delivery of ice-cream to the gunsite! In the course of doing this was introduced to Mr S., the most energetic man I’ve met in India so far, but then he lived practically all day inside his cool room, and occasionally in his freezer room. Like a proper showman he took me into both. In the Freezer Room it was twenty four degrees below zero. My bush jacket was wet through, coming in from outside at 84°, and in seconds it was frozen stiff in what felt like a suit of ice-cold armour. Depending on where you live, if you live in a hot hell, heaven should indeed be cool. He didn’t allow us to stay there long, and back in the Cool Room we examined some dry ice. If touched, it burns the hands. It boils in cold water, and leapt around in the bucket like live fish.

Stars tonight. A brilliant form of patience. A not so brilliant form of bedevilment and pain of heart. Fragments of a total misery that populated the whole night. All this because there are still no letters? When will they begin? Simply I just want to know how you are, how the children are, what the garden looks like with the first vegetables up and showing in the first pale warmth of an English spring. Here there is only endless heat and a continuous vertigo of wasted time.

To Madras Hospital, to donate some volunteer blood. Lay on a bed. There is always something frightening about the prone position on a bed in a Hospital, so was 37 relieved when they simply put a ligature round the arm just above the elbow, pumped it tight, and then tapped the rich fat vein that appeared there, that runs so bluely in the inner crook of the arm. I could watch the blood gather there, and it began to beat, as if the heart had been displaced and found itself somewhere else. They took half a pint of blood and gave me a cup of tea and biscuits. For a change, the ward air felt cool from a dozen large white fans rotating swiftly with wings whirring like a flight of white swans, or doves, or angels? I began rather to like Hospitals. So white, so quiet, so cool. Too white, too quiet, too cool, and a bit unearthly? Calculated deliberately to make you feel, after two or three minutes there, that you might have been dead a day or two and had arrived by accident in some vague, pleasant, but slightly premature heaven, so that you didn’t mind whether you lived or died, both being equally pleasurable in the white, the quiet, the cool? One qualification though. The wards are all open to the outside air, and occasionally huge black crows sweep through. They are neither white, nor quiet and their dark ominous shapes brushed us with their wings as they flew through. Happily they were not ravens.

Today the raids on Canterbury, York, and Bath. A new level of gratuitous evil, but, curiously, filling us with confidence. Or superstition, if you like, but they cannot win now, they cannot. And they will not. I am telling you now, so that you should know this, and have no doubt.

More than somewhat late, because Douglas and I have been asking for camouflage instructions for some time, the order for them came through this week. Behold, we are to dye all our white and showy mosquito nets in tea!! Wonderful! Such precision, such total vision! We both collapsed with laughter and sent a message back to HQ….WITH SUGAR, OR WITHOUT!? Surprisingly, for they are usually pretty good at humour, we received very curt, short shrift back.

We were reading, and to our delighted astonishment, a large, flabby, wet frog has just palpitated into the tent, from outer darkness into our light, and out again the other side, very composedly and in dead dignified silence. A wonderful entrance and exit. It disappeared into the other outer darkness with a last hop, disclosing the delicious under-white of its long legs.

Left you, and I have counted in slow motion every single one, exactly one hundred and twenty days ago. It feels like it, and it could be one hundred and twenty weeks, or even months ago. “Eyes that last I saw in tears.” And even yet there is no mail. Muddle is complained of, even admitted, but the desperately wanted mail is no nearer. I suppose when it does come, with all the freshness of that total loss again, it will seem even more desperate, I know. We are sado-masochists, all of us. But with nothing, it is worse. No contact, no renewal, nothing. Anything would be something. Something tangible, something outside the too well trodden area of my mind which is you. The desire is for something outside my brain, my imagination, my memory. It would be fact. Solid, objective, visible fact, beyond thought. And vital, vital, vital. Before we met, yes, misery was there to hand as it is to everyone, often. Then it disappeared for those four short years of knowledge and marriage in an enchanted bewilderment. Now in this wilderness of war there is so much of it, and it is so much worse. And before we met, yes, there was the occasional delight of things, music, poetry, landscape, untrammelled with misery and the muck of the self, reachable sometimes with just the simple trick of a walk. With you, the problem shifted away 38 from how to reach delight to how to express it and the misery was the good, honest to God failure to do it, in paint or words. Now, here, away from you, the confusion is worse confounded, and the misery and the muck of self are back and I can no longer turn towards delight so easily to relieve it, because delight has been so much modified in you and by you that whenever I can find it, and it does come, occasionally, it now seems nine parts pain for the loss of you and there is no peace in it, and to have no peace is to despise myself for not finding a way to it. Here, in the army, it is not possible to find peace, not even the peace of failure. Can one really fail, fail in something one never wanted to do? So, one wanders about in the centre of a failure surrounded by the huge nostalgia of wanting to get back, not for the peace and refuge of domestic comfort, because one is only too aware that the real struggle with love, with family, with painting, would be taken up with many more possibilities of real failures than ever there are out here, but because one wants the desired struggle, the desired misery, the desired failure, and not this pettifogging in the army. One would have to face the clean sharp admission of failure in a struggle that would have a real meaning. Does all that sound too egocentric, too pretentious? I desperately don’t want it to. I’m trying so hopelessly to be objective. To see it as it is, for real.

Oh, I begin to hate words. Does the need for them always spring from some unhappiness, some pain, some solitude from which it is necessary to break out? And with you, with you, was there ever need of words when eye and hand and heart held so much, and love was all gesture and the simple acts of eye and head and heart? Words are so removed, so passive, pensive and solitary. All the happy worthwhile things are active, and actively shared, aren't they?

Taking line-up (drill with the guns) this evening, first there was a kingfisher sharpening his flashing steel blues in the sun, then there came a hoopoe, crest erect, pricking his way in the dust and sand of the near-by road. Two small passionate lyrics between First and Second Test Points.

Had an extraordinary visit from the local village priest today. A very old, wizened shrivelled up tiny little Hindu he was. We expected perhaps the offer of a conducted tour of the local Temple, or at least a debate on Hinduism, but no, like a lot of other priests, he was simply worried about money, his rents or tithes. No, that’s a bit unfair. It seems we, as an army, had, on the ground of hygiene, forbidden all hawkers of whatever, especially of food, to set up stalls outside the camp, at least until after the first few weeks of the busy digging in of the guns was over. But apparently, so he said, the roadside here belonged to the local Temple. On behalf of the Temple, he, the local priest accepted the rents the hawkers paid for their positions. He then had to pay the rents to the Trustees of the Temple, and now the Trustees wanted to know why there was no money coming in. Indeed, as with our tithes, Hinduism has to use the same kind of shabby commerce. But there were a few stalls operating so was this rather poor specimen of Hindu priest telling the truth to his Trustees or craftily collecting some of the cash for himself? I reported it all back to HQ hoping they would have more adequate Solomons there than we had on the gunsite here.

At what point do you start recognising an artist by his style rather than by what he is saying? Or is it the form he uses? Where, indeed, does form come from? I don’t mean that of the old masters, the ‘form’ that so many use now simply because 39 it has proved itself so many times with such success. I mean form that just has to appear, that is spontaneously part of the experience being expressed. “Perfection of form imposed upon strength of feeling.” Jackson had always something good to say, though I am not sure about the word perfection. It is always so good to see small imperfections as part of a bloke’s struggle to find the more finished form. I don’t like the word finished either, actually. Surely there is always a little something more, or even a whole lot more. Should the artist always come second to what he is trying, in the first place, to express? That extraordinary something that he simply has to try and say. And shouldn’t this be said especially now when art seems to attract, not the sensitive, the humble, but the clever, the shyster, the selfseeker?

Gun drill, and all the usual First and Second Test Points, but all, this morning, in the lovely early light that rarely fails to please. Early first light can never be stale, by definition, can it? And unusually today astonished to see clouds with us, foreign clouds, and whole lines of them, arranged by someone in lovely diagonals, in fine sober colours, in fine half-tones and semi-tones. Dawn. On line up, as it is called, all four guns should, when changing from First to Second Test Point, all of them dip, and turn, in progression, together. Like a dance. But today No 3 gun forgot itself and went the wrong and the long way round, and broke, not only the rules of gun drill, but also all the rules of symmetry and aesthetics!

This evening a miracle. Douglas received the first ever Airgraph. It was all about snowdrops, aconites, and the first March sun. He read, part of it, to me. We were both nearly in tears.

Today Gunner Williams killed our first Cobra, very much, of course, to the horror of our Indian employees. They insisted that we must not bury it even, let alone just throw it away. The Hindu must have it burnt, with some milk. But our only milk here is Milk, powder, cooking, for the use of. How does one indent for Milk, liquid, sacrificial, burial of Cobra for the use of?

The inevitable Gun Drill - in the silence of the evening and the low light of dusk, and a wafer-thin, crazed, very aged Indian woman, stark naked, a walking shred of leather, singing gently to herself, like Ophelia, in some sort of state of exaltation, wandered by herself slowly and daftly past us all. Even the men fell silent, and drill stopped. It was odd even for the village of Villivakam.

Immense heat today. Started sweating at 5.0 am, if ever I stopped last night. At tea-time, the lunchtime tea was still hot in its cup, and there was a hot, gale-force wind, which was ripping up all the dust in the neighbourhood, and bringing it all into our tent, and our sweat collected it. We crowned the day in our English way with Plum Duff again. 98° in the shade.

My tour of duty in the Gun Operations Rooms at HQ. Different place, different atmosphere. Different officers. When I walked into their Mess at supper, I surprised two officers at what seemed the tail end of a quarrel. It stopped immediately but left one tense, spiteful, almost venomous, the other just gently bewildered. After supper, took a breather on the ramparts of the fort. There came the smell of the sea to refresh, repair.

40 Bullshit still in full swing, for the expected visit of a General tomorrow. All the guns have been beautifully repainted. Mostly green all over, but with a touch of white here and a touch of red there. Felt like having a notice hung on each of them NOT TO BE USED. Just by the way, as if it mattered, all the guns have actually arrived, and, believe it or not, we have several rounds of live ammunition. The men’s Mess Room will be completed tomorrow, the canteen is satisfactory, the cookhouse has been bricked in and flyproofed at last, thank God, a mobile Library is functioning, cricket matches arranged, ice-cream deliveries have been operating for some time and we have settled down for a long war. So let the General come. And the General did not materialise!

Gunner Williamson arrested and charged. Totally drunk and disorderly. Had to give evidence to the Court Martial standing to attention. It is amazingly difficult and needs tremendous concentration. I think Gunner Williams managed it much better than I did.

Have just had a wonderful flight in an old Hawker Hart, a civil biplane from the local aerodrome. Military purpose - to study all the regiment’s gun positions from the point of view of camouflage. Somebody at HQ taking revenge for our tea with or without sugar quip? Had to be awake, washed and shaved by 4.00 am. Succeeded but dawdled a bit I fear on the road in the Utility to watch the very early light make almost beautiful all the dirt, squalor and corruption as I went through Madras, and ended up by arriving slightly late at the aerodrome, Most unmilitary! But then, I am! The plane, a pretty crazy old plane for these days, had already started up and had got twenty yards or so down the runway. Happily for my military career the pilot saw the Utility arriving, throttled down and stopped. I rushed over, managed to clamber in behind the pilot, fastened all the belts, levers, buckles and straps I could find, without a clue as to what they were, or did, or how to get out of them, or how to use the parachute I was now very much attached to and we were off before I could protest, with a loud roar down the bumps of the so-called runway, and then the nose came up and suddenly we were AIRBORNE. First time ever. Wonderful. The air soft, buoyant, full of cushions. The plane sat on them in extreme comfort. Speed and noise vanished as the sense of air and space grew. We went straight up into the clouds and the rosy-fingered dawn. Some of the clouds, honestly were pink. We seemed to rock gently, as gently and as slowly as my lovely bullock carts. I even listened for their bells. Then for an hour we crawled like a small hard bug in the cloudy petals of an enormous rose. Turner would have loved it. It was minutes before I could come to my military senses. The rose dematerialised into camouflage. Military reconnaissance had to be willed into action, so I leaned out to talk my pilot into the necessary directions. There was no reaction. I had forgotten that we were in two cockpits, in file. I shouted. Still no reaction. I leaned further out, but had forgotten or had never heard of slipstreams. The wind nearly separated my lips from my face. They were still attached but were so stretched and shuddering, rapidly, like the wings of not one but two bats, and worse, whether I liked it or not. After that I kept my head very much in line with his, and we conversed in dumb show. We pulled away from the racing shift and drift of that unbelievable rosy world inside those clouds, and dropped below. The nether world was - the nether world. Dull, unappealing, the page of an atlas. Hard, practically colourless. The gun positions stuck out like sore thumbs. I ran schemes through my head to make them disappear. The civilian pilot signalled time was up, he was going down. Still early as 41 it was we sank into the heat of the world, perhaps more like Dante entering hell. We bumped down, unloaded ourselves thankfully, and all the way ‘home’ the conjuror continued his gunsite disappearing trick.

And that was how I became regimental camouflage officer, and therefore attracted to myself another extra load of work, voluntarily. A compulsive imbecile.

Apart from the heat, the other most incessant discomfort here, tainting almost every second of the day, affecting ourselves, our nerves, our clothes, our beds, our trunks, tables, chairs, and most of all, of course, our food, is ants. Ants, and ants, and ants. Masses of them. Fast, efficient, organised armies of them, carrying on an aggressive, continuous attack on everything, all day, all night. They are sleepless, or work in efficient rota. We have to protect absolutely everything from them. With, thank God, a kind of desperate superiority, we stand everything with legs, or put on legs, like tables, chairs, beds in wide enough tins full of water. That’s the Achilles heel of this particular warrior. Water. Water, the one barrier to non-swimmers.

Watched during Command Post duties this morning, an Indian funeral procession, dragging its slow, wailing tail from the village to the little graveyard the other side of the road and the waterway. Can’t call it a cemetery. It consists only of a not very straight row of small heaps of earth. They carry the corpse through the landscape not in a coffin, politely hidden, ashamed of itself, but sitting bolt upright on an ordinary wooden chair, and it is garlanded with flowers. It shocks the first time seen. There is this grey, dead face, actually moving, shuddering with the movement of the carried chair. It is dead, but moving. And you have the added effect of the full dressing up of flowers. Jasmine and rose. The bright yellow and the full range of reds, - and then the grey of death. Bizarre first time - that wooden, deadly ugly jerking of the stiff body in the chair. It jolts in the very marrow of one’s own bones.

After complaints from the senior sergeant and a conference with all of them, agreed, slightly unwillingly, to sack old ‘Tom’, the eldest native sweeper on the site. The rather nice sergeant in charge reported, quite regretfully, that ‘Tom’ just did no work. He drew his pay, but did nothing for it. It wasn’t therefore fair on the others. ‘Tom’ just sloped off into Madras, and when wanted, nobody could find him. So, sacked he was. He returned to the site today with a long letter for us to read, in very curious and almost incomprehensible English that he had probably had to pay some Babu for, begging us to take him back, for the sake, of course, of his wife and children. Like idiots, we relented, and, choosing me unerringly, because I had been one of the first to soften, he fell on his knees and actually kissed my army boots. This was normal formality for him, but completely triggered off a dumb scream of shame and anguish and protest in me so that I had an almost irresistible urge to stamp on him, which shamed me even more. Somehow I managed to turn away and metaphorically run and hide.

Had three weeks of hard grind, upgrading the guns, changing other equipment and many mobile exercises.

Unbelievable, my dear. Now to my grandchildren, I will truthfully be able to say “Gad sir! When I was in Poona, in ’42, my boy!” I’m actually there, drafted, 42 almost to my pleasure, for a Camouflage Course. Are they trying to change my amateur status? Imagine me. In Poona. It makes me feel like Groucho. I must grow an enormous moustache, develop a different walk, start playing Polo, and learn to sing ‘Goodbye to Captain Spalding.’ And Poona itself, mind you, is ridiculous, really third, fourth or even fifth rate. Like a suburb, of Bombay, or even Worthing, and the back of Worthing at that, except that the landscape all round it is so lovely and full of English approximates. There are properly ploughed fields, real ploughed fields, masses of English approximate trees, and then the Agricultural College itself, where our course takes place, in lecture rooms! I bless its heart, its English heart. And however hot, the heat here is different. It is not exactly English heat, but at least it is in dry air and therefore tolerable. And I must beware, for the Course is grand, enjoyable. I would have no qualms about leaving the Regiment, and everyone, if I could get into Camouflage. It is like manna from heaven in the army, to receive an even partially desired problem into the mind.

Was writing notes yesterday evening late, and looking up, saw, for the second time in my life, the Southern Cross exactly upright. I begin to think that it must mean something, and something good, too. And yet there is still no mail from you. In the hall here, there is a set of timber pigeon holes, like a partitioned bookcase, and the one for the letter K is so high up I can’t even see into it without standing on the bench provided. It is galling to make the extra effort to climb up and then find nothing there, and even worse clambering down again with empty hands and eyes and mind.

The course is on the way to being finished. An extraordinary fortnight, and after finishing work for the day today, had time off and time to watch two teams, of Sikhs, playing a hockey match. Like young, graceful girls they were, with beards! And, when playing, they do their hair up in a bun on top of their heads and in pretty coloured ribbons too, which enhances the illusion. They were all very slim, gay, laughing and spontaneous at the game. Lovely.

Course finished. Back by train to Madras. Feel a bit like cattle being chucked about the place in lorries, to the slaughter house, will-less, without identity, except being alive to all the birds and landscape en route. But travel on these terms is too easy and rotten a route to a mood of misery, sheer bloody misery. What next? But there, on the gunsite, right at the end of the journey, ah God, ah marvellous God, there, on my table, there were all your letters. One hundred and forty six days exactly since I last saw or heard of you. And there they all were, all ten of them. Ten letters. All at once. And at last, the rain, the lovely rapid rain of facts - vivid, solid, wonderful, unimagined facts. You. Things you have done. Things the children have done. Things I could no way guess at, not with all my longing and reaching out for towards you and them. Towards, towards, towards and from all this away, away, away. This was all stuff totally outside that overtrodden area of my filled-with-memory-only mind. You, after the long hard frosts (a frost, a frost, a frost, for God’s sake my dear, what is a frost?) you, with your spade suddenly deep in earth, in the garden, our garden; you, earlier, in the cold snow watching the warm burnt sienna colour of the four farm carthorses; you, with the children, hiding behind chairs, you rescuing the bread from Jenny, you with them, Oh lucky you, talking with them to the ducks down the road, and the donkey; you writing in bed, you dealing with those miserable rations, you putting flowers into vases. I had all that 43 inside this army tent, in India. You, the children, all that snow and frost, all in a temperature of 92°. How much forgotten, how much missed. How much not guessed. So much not had. So much I could scarcely contain. And even more troubled to find you with the same hard facts of separation, sharing the need to cover yourself against the hurts of memory, against even the hurt of any felt pleasure, avoiding thought and feeling, sharing the same ridiculous dream that if the whole world’s love and misery could be added together and used in sanity it could alter the shape of the war. And then? We come to our senses and both face the real misery of what actually is, standing and watching that great wave of longing dwindle under the stars to an ineffective little chatter on the rim of the sky, running and dribbling as much to nothing as the vast throw and thunder of a mighty sea goes thin and runs to nothing on the sand. All the same, your letters are life, renewal, relief and the losing of the tired self in wonderful, undreamt facts outside that area of the mind too, too closely cropped by all the sad sheep of memory. Out here are many facts and things that are new and strange, and often even beautiful, but it all feels only skin-deep, eye-deep and shallow. Not looked at, felt, shared and loved a hundred times. It’s the number of familiar referrals that add the depth, isn’t it? So, when I had all your letters, and had again, fresh, all those old familiar everythings, I was at one end pretty near heart-break, and at the other all in a flash fresh, upright, hopeful, and also tender and very humble with the quality of yourself.

Today fairly cool, for a change, and therefore precious beyond price.

And today, the opposite. Hot as hell must be. Heat like this comes to a stranger like me as the most merciless, crippling, malignant, stupefying force I know. Yet even here, I’m lucky that it does not physically upset me, or, worst of all fates, bring me to boils. Also it is so uncomfortable that it often reduces and eliminates all moods, and for that I’m often grateful. You, on the other hand, with this last batch of letters, are the great inducer and creator of moods. Tumultuous, jubilant moods.

The memory of the sheer, complicated marvel of simply having breakfast with you in Paris. This, in the middle of a real bloody world of having breakfast at the same time as a hundred and seventy other men, most of then effing swearing their heads off.

The utter monotony of the sun in Indian weather. None of the lovely, fickle, variables of the cool English sky. Here nothing but sun, sun, sun, sun. It races into the sky in the morning, and hangs there all day, hot, staring, bald, bold, vicious. By half-past six, even before I have shaved, I’m sweating in full flood. The fluid comes like a flood of juice and bursts all over the face in large beads, like some blistering disease. Indecent, but the MO says I am lucky. It will keep me healthy. But undignified. For most of May, June and July the temperature is invariably between 90° and 100° and often goes to 106°, in the shade! - what little shade there is, shadows being such mean, scraggy little things here, with the sun so much immediately overhead. By rights, it should become comparatively cooler in the evening. Comp- aratively, say, just under 90°. Quite often it doesn’t and then it is hell, and a really hot, sticky night is something dreadful beyond prayer. You can sleep nude, but it makes no difference, sweat makes the whole length of the body wet. Wet. 44 We have succeeded in rescuing and denying some of our more intimate areas of geography to the ants, but they are still there. Have just looked at the floor of our tent. Most of it is covered with coconut matting, but that again is covered with another matting, a multi-moving matting....of ants. It is a revolting spectacle, to look at something that should be still and stable like most normal floors, only to find it moving, crawling, wandering.... with ants. So many. Like an extra surface, They teem. They swarm, like a dream swarm, a nightmare. Some, the huge black soldier ants, for instance, wander busily all over the place. A bit daft. No system, no direction, no brain. But others, the more terrifying ones, are the ten times smaller ones, little fellows the colour of vinegar. They are fast, highly organised, efficient, throwing chains of themselves between the food they find and their homes. They set up a furious convoying there and back, in lines, all day, all night. I dropped a walnut for them. They worked on its rockhard cliff face incessantly, and finished it in half a day. Quite terrifying to watch. So fast, so determined, so clean, so indifferent. If you died, you’d be just another bit of walnut. They’d set to work on you with same furious system. It would merely take them longer, and they wouldn't notice the difference. It is too easy to imagine them life-size. We wouldn’t stand a chance. Fortunately scientists know that ants have not changed physically or mentally for a thousand years. But can we, for ever, rule out the qualifying mutation?

No storm, but brilliant lovely lilac sheet lightning all yesterday evening, and the gift of a fresh cool wind today. Pleasure. Rare pleasure. Being opened to it, and therefore open to you, and therefore am I made miserable. The misery of nearness and farness. Trying to find, and not finding. Losing in fact, you, and having instead, and certainly no substitute, just the feel of this unusual cool wind on the skin of my hands and face. Relief, yes, but there is your absence, not easy to deal with. Sometimes you are so difficult, so lovely, so known, so gentle, so implicit to remember, and I feel so clumsy, so crossed in fate, so ignorant and so incapable of dealing with the tide that seems to be washing the world and both of us away.

It is the morning after the first Thousand Bomber Raid. One rises to the excitement of what it might mean to the duration of the war. One sinks to the hard solid core of savagery and misery, the sheer, blank dismay at the way of men with men. Are there no sane sanitary answers to the filthy things we do?

It is intensely hot, and that has, of course, coincided exactly with a host of mobile, biliously busy mobile exercises.

Amid the blaze of the many colours that all the women here wear, plain black, the one plain black sari that I saw today was a most startling and vivid foil.

The exercises we have been doing often take us miles inland from Madras, and to villages which have never before seen such monstrous military convoys of soldiers dressed to kill, of huge guns, lorries, motor-cycles which roar through the only village street. The people turn and run, and run like hell. They vanish into the gloom of their tiny mud huts. Then, in the security of that dark, after a moment of regrouping, the whites of their eyes appear again in pairs, at different levels in the dark, adults and children and babies, like the eyes of owls, about fifteen pairs to every hut. It is real fear, at first, and to us that operates as a kind of challenge to try 45 and prove them wrong. When we pull up to a halt, everybody’s behaviour becomes totally exaggerated to try and prove them wrong. Is it for the same reason that Sikh soldiers put flowers in the barrels of their guns? Or is that just another charming hypocrisy?

We have a little Indian boy named Monsopoly who has taken to frequenting the camp. He’s only six or seven at the most, but he’s a born actor already, with a wonderful sense of stage and timing, and of knowing that he has got an audience in the palm of his hand. He’s a great favourite of Douglas and myself, and indeed all the men. He’s like a court jester to us and just as wonderfully comic. Much to the troop’s amusement, (and, my goodness, doesn’t he know it) he does a marvellous mime of poor old Gunner Mahoney on guard, the way he challenges entry. “Hey! You! Boy! Villivakam! Where’s your pass?” Only the a in pass is short, Lancashire like, and the s is taken, by Monsopoly, to ad lib length. “Hey! You! Boy! Villivakam! Where’s your pusssssssss?” All this a la Mahoney, a mixture of bully and weakling. Then comes the superb slide into the subdued, mock tragic, whining traditional beggar-boy. “oh, please, sirrrr. Me no father, no mother, no sister, no aunt, no food.” And then “No pass. No PUSSSSSSSSS.” This last, very loud and sudden. Then he goes back to Mahoney. “Hey! You! Boy! Villivakam! Where’s your PUSSSSSSSSSS.” Perfect transition. Perfect pause. Then he pulls down his eyelids with his fingers and pushes up his nose, like little boys so often do, and it is an absolute accurate mock of dear old Mahoney’s face, and then would come out another “Where’s your PUSSSSSSSS.” twice as loud and the whole watching troop would rock with laughter.

All honour today to the Madras Literary Society. A discovery. And it produced for me - The Letters of Héloise and Abelard (a lovely first edition too) a Clive Bell, a V.S.Pritchett, Roy Campbell’s Poems, and a book on John Donne.

Have nearly got the better of the ant menace. I rarely get more than one in the glass when I pour out a drink. In fact I am getting so sensitive to them and their slightest movement that I now often catch them before they bite. Not so long ago I could never feel them on me at all before they had buried their bloody little jaws in me. I now swear I can sense it as soon as the idea of climbing on to my shoe enters the crafty, malicious little head of any of them.

I’m with you and the children now, often, when you all arrive in letters, and knocked sideways, too, by the simplicity of so many simple, lovely, ordinary human acts, their utter abstraction from all this complicated abstraction.

You won’t believe it. You certainly won’t like it, but they actually have professional dogshooters in India, paid civil servants, locally employed. It’s a title, an actual office. And, I fear, necessary. So many starving dogs, so much risk of rabies. I saw a Dogshooter actually at work today. In brilliant sun shine. Sun, sun, sun, over all the men, carts, cattle, birds, flies, filth and dogs of India……one doomed, mangy starving cur sniffing hungrily and cringing over some bullock dung in the middle of the road. Through the open sunny afternoon comes the Dogshooter. A plump, well-fed, smartly dressed (European style) dapper little bureaucrat, riding a jaunty little bicycle. Like anyone riding to the office, or the shops, except that he carries, not an umbrella, but a rifle. He cycles up, sights his victim. Stops his bike. 46 Drops one leg to the ground to steady his aim, and shoots without dismounting. The starving cur falls without a yelp. In the sun, its starved ribs keel over and lie flat and level with the ground. There seems hardly to be anything there. It is picked up, put in a bag and carried away. No chance, no dignity, no choice. It isn’t easy to escape the same obvious impersonal level of authority in the army. No chance, no dignity, no choice. Oh yes, and another cliché: when, one day, we must all face the Great Dogshooter? No chance, no dignity, no choice?

Promised, at last soon I hope, but far too long delayed (eighteen months, in fact) the very first few days’ leave. The nearest local leave station in the hills seems to be called Kodaikanal. It’s an overnight train journey away, if you can call that local, but it is 7000' above sea level and, even more precious, above that level, in hills where one is, unbelievably, told you even have to wear a reasonable amount of clothes, have fire in the evening, and a blanket at night!

Two weeks later, still waiting for the promised land, and read this evening Roy Campbell’s poem, The Sleeper. Well done, vaguely, but has anyone ever really caught that utterly unreal, beautiful moment of time....watching, at midnight, sleepiness, raised on one elbow from the pillow, the sleeping beautiful isolation of the beloved’s head? Surely Auden’s “Fall sideways brown, beloved head” comes nearest perhaps, and is most immediate and, of course, was probably addressed to a boy. Does that matter?

At last, the leave, and I am writing to you from 7000' above the rank, damp, military sweat of Madras. In an air as cool and giddy as the wine we used to drink at Corti’s after a prom concert. Remember? I’m giddy with the same quiet, giddy with the same pleasure. Only the sad postcard, wish you were here, mood catches in the throat. I can go out into the cool early morning light before breakfast and lie down on pine needles with the sweet, gently stinging smell of resin in the air. The afternoon sun is actually friendly and temperate. There’s a light-headed feeling of release from oppression and opposition. I can watch the evening sun fall downward through the upward trees, striking the leaves variously in its fall, passing flatly through the trembling green of some, leaving them as echoes of that fall....pale green, sunny, naked footprints in the motionless air, then falling further sparking and splintering on the very edge of others. Delicious, delightful, delovely as Cole Porter sang. But does this delight really need its collateral misery to make itself this special? Not having you here is enough of misery. To have misery in these lovely leaves as well? And yet, as T E Lawrence says “If pain is too intense, it does not last. And if it lasts, it is not intense.” Always some small degree of pleasure is around. The journey here was good. I rushed the drive from the gunsite to the station in case the leave wasn’t actually happening. Found it was when I found the booked sleeper, and at one time thought I was going to have the sleeper for the night to myself. But it wasn’t to be. At the last moment before take-off another officer clambered in. From the Medical Corps. A doctor, oldish, very fussy, with a German accent, on his way from Burma, to convalesce. He chattered. Something I didn’t want to do. After a while, I took refuge in the monosyllable, and after another while he took the message. He gave me a look, and stopped. Then he began to sing to himself, which was worse. He undressed, but went on singing seemingly for hours on end. I bedded down as well, but not to sleep, partly because of this chap’s eccentric singing, mostly from the excitement at being on leave.

47 Woke in the morning to a fine sky, and washed and shaved in complete detachment before the other fellow woke up. We shared the sharp flesh of a pineapple of mine for breakfast and, of course, chattered. Later we got out at Kodai Road Station, the junction for the hills. Early as it was, we sweated gently just standing about in the station yard watching a small red country bus being loaded and got ready for us. We had a flat, twenty mile run to the foot of the Palni Hills, then our little red bus and its honking hooter went winding and honking up the narrow road into them like a goose migration, up the twisting and tormented steep contours of the slopes, the bright sharp blare of the hooter spread like a banner over the deep valleys, the echo of it bucking from hillside to hillside, muted only slightly by the massed silence of the million trees up and down the slopes. We stopped half way up to replace the water in the radiator which had boiled away, at a pack pony station. The ponies, loaded heavily, kept coming in, ringing with bells, in single file. They drank as well, then stood around, resting in lovely poses while their drivers washed themselves in the stream, also in good poses. There was a halfway shop too, where the drivers could eat. I just looked and listened to the rich, deep hum of millions of bees droning among the flowers and the trees all round. Reloaded, and the radiator watered and cooled and refreshed, we drove further and further up and into banana plantations. Banana trees with big, broad leaves. Floppy eared, like the ears of cocker spaniels; then further up still we went past dark, vital little trees, packed with electricity. Oranges, ripening. Further still and we went through a belt of cloudmist that chilled us. Through that and surfaced into the sun and there was a smell of eucalyptus. Indigenous, from lanky Eucalyptus trees all round and we were in Kodaikanal. 7000' up with birds, bees, trees, a lake, and now you and I, and all the world of war below.

Astonishment; to be in civilian clothes, even still to have some. Also at the ease with which the army fell away. It came off with my officer’s cap. It felt almost as if it had never been there, nor ever affected me. How much has it? Being away from you, from the chosen job, much, deeply. And what of the loss of all this inoperative time without you, without the job and the army itself, war itself. You undergo them and yet have extraordinary levels of withdrawa1 from it, them. They even teach you withdrawal , how to do it. The ability to withdraw becomes essential. That has affected me I am sure. It now happens, wonderfully, even in the centre of being occupied; superbly, in the centre of gundrill. So much of that is a routine which almost conducts itself. It’s a strange business and asking how it happens is a kind of research into the mechanics of awareness, almost the only sort of living that makes life here possible and makes it rich. The richer the better, please. It’s even curious taking part in richness, if you can call it that, because the first essential seems to be a withdrawal. Stepping back, away. Away from what you want to get into. Detachment that isn’t really detachment, but a taking part. It’s both inward and outward, negative and positive. Both at once. Withdrawing, lingering and working excitedly forward, outward. Which is all very vague, but also sharp as hell.

Echoes of our pre-war Newton Ferrers holiday here. We have a narrow lake, almost the same width as that lovely river, the same level surface area of water. It levels out a lot of misery and adds some nice reflections. I see you, the house, the whole of Eastcourt village, and the children. A lot of trees walk down the slopes to the water, like cattle to drink. It’s a sounding board for the children’s voices. It all lasts for precious instants, then fades and fails to resolve the battle between misery 48 and delight. No hope for that until we meet, touch and stay still, where we are, or will be, not for a moment but for at least our temporary form of permanence, our taste of lastingness. Here, at the edge of this unsuccessful lake, even though I am here for two precious weeks on my own, army life still manages to disintegrate everything, even the sound of English children’s voices, sweet and clear, and crushed between two hills.

Living round this lake surrounded by hills is like living in a cup. You can look up all round but not over. But today, walking further afield than ever before and over one of the hills, there in three paces, opens up and outward into space, a sort of vision. From 7000' to far below all the spread of the Indian plains. Miles of them in pastel colours. Oyster-blue, oyster-silver, oyster-pink. There on the crest of another, far-off cobalt blue range of distant hills, were a few soft stationary and fractured clouds, poised as if for ever.

Awful, this. This evening I felt constrained to go, with my kind hosts, who are Danish missionaries here, to a crowded party at The Missionary Hall. Kodai was founded by English, Danish and American missionaries, and, though I didn’t know it, is thick with sects, chapels, churches and missions, and a general flavour of religion which already gives me the creeps. If ever I get another leave, I will stay in a hotel and not accept what is otherwise a wonderful and generous stay with hosts. It all involves too much gratitude and ingratitude. And this particular party was awful. As Groucho said, leaving one - “I’ve had a lovely party, but this wasn’t it.” Because of my own weakness (I should have left), I was trapped like a fly in a spider’s parlour, and had to play jolly parlour games and sing jolly community songs. I nearly ran, screaming with horror, out of the place, but somehow managed to overcome the utter misery such games produce in me (admittedly not a nice fault) by asking myself why religious groups are so often run by young men with weak eyesight and aggressive manners? And why all the girls are extraordinarily plain and slightly silly? And why I dare think that I have unimaginable pretensions to being something different?

The last walk on the last day - but again hosted with the utmost, and for me unwanted, host-kindness - first to a dull puny, teetering of small waterfalls over tiny ledges, and then to a special house with a special garden, full of special roses. A dozen excited missionary connoisseurs running in short bursts from rose to rose squealing delightedly a whole catalogue of Latin names. I challenged this attack on my total ignorance by hotly defending vegetables! I protested their deeper value, their deeper poetry. Flowers send the senses upward, lost in the clouds. Vegetables are for the hands, the taste buds, the belly and other exciting parts. Flowers are sexless, immaculate, unusable. They are eunuchs. They have no balls, as D H Lawrence might have said. Or did he actually say so? Walked on the way back with the Danish Mrs G. arguing literature with her, somewhat on the same lines. Against the cerebral classics, the mandarin style, the formality and good manners, defending the modern interest, not just in all that, but in the heart as much as in the intelligence, in the wilderness we live in, as much as in the over-use of the will. I wanted too much, I was told. And, of course, rightly. And one minds quite a bit when one doesn’t get it, or can’t do it. Kodai is a leave station, even for the missionaries, and the community has no real work, and perhaps therefore feels a bit barren. But, oh, that underestimates its wonderful wartime therapy. 49 Leave over, in the morning it was windy, and we got into the bus with the wind sounding like a huge rough sea in the trees. Then we went slowly down, first through the clouds, then through the oranges, the bananas, the zone with the cacophony of cicadas, the pack-station and the ponies, all the way down the tormented road, sinking slowly into the heat, the welter, the hot soup of the plains. After the bus and supper at the station, the train making its slow way through the sticky irritation of the night heat. Was met at the station in the morning by the troop truck, and lastly came the gun position itself. The same, and different. There was laughter meeting with the men, and I remembered how little I had laughed on leave. Laughed especially with Douglas. His marvellous sense of humour spikes most of the guns of misery. Even, sometimes, some of his own, I think. And then there were two of your letters, and they spiked more and more of my own. They enrich, enliven, and then also therefore hurt. But wouldn’t, couldn’t do without them.

Awake early with the luck of a cool mackerel-coloured and clouded sky. Parade and gun drill, and then, at breakfast heard that Tobruk had fallen to Rommel. All the misery of a longer war pressed itself into all the dust around us.

Woke from a dream of you straight into the sound and fury of a C section practice move. Wanted only to stay utterly still to keep the dream fresh, to try and match it to five quiet banks of heron-grey clouds, and right at their base, the bruise of the sun rising. The noise of the shouted orders and the crashing gears of the Matadors won easily. The rest of the day was lost also, working out the details of D section’s move tomorrow, and worse still, in a way, all the details of the camouflage course I have to put on for the Regiment next week. At night the rain came, falling full, loaded and loud in the still air and raising, deliciously, a smell from the dust like that of sweet young beetroots cooking.

It now gets dark so early. And we often retire to bed early too, often at 7.00 p.m. The Indian dusk is lovely, with deep colours like some of the Indian miniatures. Too short a fairy tale, and we have to switch lights on early. We are immediately invaded by squadrons of every species of flying insect here and take cover therefore under and inside our mosquito nets. Except when we are on duty, that’s where we have to read, eat, drink, and write letters, and, of course, sweat and curse. Earlier in the year, the evenings’ long light and, comparatively at least, cooler air was what we longed for. Now we almost dread it. The air goes dead still, and thickens to a dense broth of heat mixed with misery, the sound of all these insects just outside the nets, and further off the loose, ragged, rusty creaking sound of myriads of frogs.

Another mobile scheme last night in a vast electric storm, under a sky shuddering every now and then with lightning. Somebody shaking out a sheet in a wind that took it from horizon to horizon. One forked flash very disturbing: staggered with a deep red. While the guns were going in at the right spot on the grid (hopefully) one of the Matador drivers came up to the Command Post and reported, shamefacedly, that he had unfortunately grazed a wall of a hut back in the village. The sergeant following him in said “Blimey, mate. Thought you grazed it? You knocked the whole bloody house down, man.” And he had. Another Court of Inquiry. And we won’t be able even to smile there, not at attention. It is not funny for the householder 50 either, but there is often this small flicker of amusement across the general misery, and it more often than not comes from the sergeants. I will remember all mine with much affection.

Orderly Officer today, and irritable, blank, light-headed. The mind a tough membrane stretched tight. Nothing got past it.

Yet one more mobile scheme. What do they all portend, we wonder? On this one, at one time, found myself as Recce Officer waiting on the chosen gun position a whole half hour before the troop arrived with the guns, to wreck the midnight silence. The sky was neurotic, and couldn’t make up its mind whether to dribble rain on us or not. In the end it didn’t. Waiting, I could see lights moving and heard drums and singing in a distant village. Then suddenly, almost in my earhole, I heard a voice. “Would you care for a cigar?” It flashed through my mind that it was a visiting General. I turned. It was an Indian, bare to his loincloth. Good English. Good accent. He’d been to Oxford. Lincoln. Next door to dear old Exeter. It was strange and exciting, but immediately interrupted by the arrival of the guns and the noise and the rapid frenzy of setting up. He vanished and I never saw him again. I would dearly have liked to.

Even with the war as it is, became positive today, and was almost transfixed with hope at the very idea, that, sooner or later, there will come a specific moment of time when the mind, in that instant, will know that the war will have stopped being lost, and will be won, that peace and being with you, the whole of you, will be only a question of time. Let something bring that moment to us soon.

My so-called Regimental Camouflage Counsel It started yesterday, and after all the planning and preparation, it started almost, for me, enthusiastically. The model scheme went down best. It was even praised by a visiting Brigade Major. The Colonel actually called me a keen young officer! My God, clearly I am capable of being a complete impostor. You will have to beware.

Several of us went on a visit to the local Regular Army Sappers Unit, to try out dummy flashes. There was a tall, thin, languid young Subaltern there ‘playing’ with pounds of high explosives. It put me in mind of Lawrence of Arabia’s enthusiasm for the stuff, and, watching it go off, found it very plausible. It does so obviously exactly what you want it to do.... it blows up, deliciously, with a lovely childish bang!

The gift of a still, soft, not so hot day, which filled us all with a deep nostalgia for one of those decent, well-mannered, English summer days we used once to have. For long grass pushed over by a well mannered breeze, for a freckle of poppy and buttercup in the green, for summer holiday weather, for holiday idleness. Eheu, again and again. Right now it is all military fuss, bustle and waste. Even misery gets packed into small corners, poked into deep holes, but not out of memory where it just festers. A long time ago, idling in convoy, I could deal with it. Not now.

Just before bed today, heard some Bach on the radio. All his intelligent, sad, gentle feelings. In a moment I was back in our sitting room listening to that loom of music, as intricate as the loom of love. Bless you. 51 Nothing much for many weeks, but now we have to move gun positions. Wait for it. My troop is moving to Madras Racecourse!

In a way, it seems almost……to England! Complete absence of palm trees and villagers. Actual maisonettes or bungalows to live in, the men housed in the Totes. Real evergreen trees all round us, a haze of clouds today, on their shoulders. Very friendly. No snakes. No prickly pears. And, in the season, when it comes, we will have racehorses to watch. Like Degas, ye Gods. We have only been allotted the Third Enclosure as it is called; the rest of the place is being kept available for the Races. So, our lucky, top-hat, white-flannelled war goes on. Elsewhere it seems to be getting worse and worse.

Received your wonderful parcel of books and magazines. The Hopkins, the English Towns and Villages with the lovely, cool, fresh little Constable, the richly packed Samuel Palmer, and The New Statesman. New? But it has so shrunk, I hardly recognised it.

Reading the Gerard Manley Hopkins. “The sun, just risen, flares his wet brilliance in the dintless heavens.” God, yes, I remember indeed, but, ah me, not in India. The risen Madras sun never gets anywhere near that lovely, wet, clean flare or fanning out of pleasure. It is up too quickly. The whole day it stands bald, tough and staring. There is never any tenderness.

And now it is very hot indeed, and we are plagued with flies. Not the strange ones that can sometimes interest and excite, but the bloody ordinary ones, extraordinary only in their excessive multi-multitude. They are on everything, hands, face, head, cups, books, crumbs, and even every now and then on one’s lips. Particularly repulsive there, because there is there such a lively sense of danger. Such a dangerous, filthy, licentious kiss.

No fun, owning a European eye compulsorily emigrated to India. Everything, but everything, yes, appears to be wonderfully paintable, which, in itself, is disturbing. The eye is dazzled with so much material. But when you try to nail the stuff down, it evaporates into the appealing. To the mind, in the end, it doesn’t seem to add up to much more than a picturesque excitement. In England a horse meant a horse, in depth. Something watched and studied a thousand times, with undertones of Stubbs, Constable (that solid, leaping ton of Suffolk Punch) the frenzy of Gericault, the elegance of Degas. Here, there are lovely white bullocks, but, attractive as they are in themselves, they are not part of the subconscious. There are no references back for them. For the moment they don’t achieve much meaning - yet. All the excitement is shallow, no more than the skin-of-the-eyes deep.

A short precious storm of rain, which pulls the busy camp up short, and allows, therefore, a pause, and therefore a short even more precious storm of love, sudden, cool, vigorous, and clear-headed even in this ghastly heat, in the aridity of this brown landscape, which I would like to be green, grass-green, you-bewitched and bankable only in Wiltshire. Things, personal and military, seem in ever-increasing misery and confusion. The war looks so dark and shapeless, or what shape it has goes so grossly against us. It will take that much longer to put right, and meanwhile this great, dreary drag of 52 time slips through our intimate fingers, and dribbles away in small, efficient, but apparently useless army duties, and a lack of exulting. Only these rare rains and your always happily disturbing letters keep the heart fresh. All those antics of the children, the village gossip, the four seasons of the garden (how much I miss our shared Vivaldi!), the new fruit trees, the rhubarb bed, the currants and the strawberries. The deep-down gardener mourns the loss of his love for growing vegetables. And what about your flowers? Can you get more of those star-shaped narcissi Carver once gave us? I loved their sharp, clear frailty, the clean gentle tension of those pale white petals with the sudden abundance of gorgeous hot yellow-orange at the centre.

Censoring the men’s letters is an activity no one could like; legally and officially breaking and entering the vast area of all their privacies to erase beyond enemy recognition that minute minuscule of what they could possibly give away seems appalling. There is so much courage, real courage, in their clichés. The cheer up, stick it, I’ll be home bravado, which seems the constant of nearly all of them. But it must be, mustn’t it? Damn it, it is mine too. It has to be. The poetry is not only in the pity, pity is somehow too patronising; it’s the actual truth behind the pity that is so hard to bear, and yet so lovely in its way. The men are wonderfully likeable, not so much for their clichés and their hardly won literacy, but for the way they answer fate back. The war, even the war here, is framing them, altering them. Their sentiments, their all the world of bonds, of promises, and mock-cheerfulness - all these clichés are positive. The men use them for answering back in no uncertain terms.

“And my vegetable love will grow”….Your letter with the runner beans up to the top of their poles came today, that tall, leggy, vertical, almost holy rood-screen of poles right across the garden, the curious looseness of all those green leaves waving in their bean-leaf way, and the multitude of red-flowered flags to wave the summer on. I liked that so much, and my vegetable love grew too, and I had the flowers and the leaves of those beans, and you too.

Rich beyond dreams today, with another letter from you, with the simplicity of your blackbird in it. I saw it. It made for a moment the sky between us no longer blank, but coming to a definite point where sits a small black factory with an orange bill pouring out an excited blue smoke of song.

Managed to squeeze in a flying visit to a Madras bookshop, and returned with real booty. Three very small books on three mighty giants. Cezanne, Van Gogh, Degas. Spent all last evening with them, and wanted to all day today, in between the thises and thats of a busy gun position and the continuing disasters of this rotten war. Never will I, under any circumstances now or for ever, forget the luck of being where I am, in the context of this war, and being able, miraculously, to have books on art available, to have the time, even the restricted time, any time at all, to even think about painters, to wonder why they actually painted, and to wonder at the way each painted so marvellously differently, compelled by the differences at the core of their vision of what life and art are about. Cezanne with that heavenly logic of restricted colours and subtly scaled scaled brush strokes carrying the eyes so calmly into the exciting warm distances of Provence, or shaping the rotundity of all apples into one. The answer so emotionally intellectual. Van Gogh and his restless rush for emotional identity with the sun, the sunflowers, the sitter and the cypress in that 53 whirl of impasto. And Degas? Ah, one bends the knee to all three, but my knees give, just that much more in front of him, and I think your lovely remembered knees do too, don’t they? That ability to speak and outspeak everyone else, in line and paint about the whole human register of looking at the human scene. You look, and learn to look more and more deeply at the world out there almost without looking at Degas himself. Both Van Gogh and Cezanne get in the way a bit themselves, don’t they? Do you think that, or is it unfair?

Horribly bludgeoned by the heat today. It is up in the high nineties. And bludgeoned even more by the bloody successes the Germans are having against everyone. Since the fall of Spain it feels as if the barometer of the Good has continuously fallen. I know it is ridiculously simplistic to reduce it all to Goodies and Baddies, but ye Gods, that’s what it feels like. And is it presumptuous also to dare to identify oneself with the Good? It must be, in a way, and yet so many others are managing to do it as well, millions of us, and yet we are still losing. If we were to lose altogether, what then? I mean you and I. For me, I know I would give in and go underground rather than risk anything of the tiny lyric love we share, the very small speck of personal life that you and I are. I just don’t believe it will happen. The political system we would be up against would mean the negation of the natural liberty of hand and heart and mind to do and say and speak out as they wish. We still have a chance with all the others to do what we can to stop it happening, and even if that chance disappears in total defeat we must still hang on and hope to get another. I know I would be a coward and go underground but I could not be a pacifist. All that doesn’t soften the feeling of being bludgeoned with dismay.

In the process of time passing, I have taken to doing more PT than ever. It’s for the mortification of the flesh. I never thought to have to deal with the problems of continence and a thirty year old puberty! And is there anything one can do for the mortification of the spirit? I have tried reading, writing, just plain thinking and even dreaming. Nothing breaks through this enormous clot of blankness which is the military brain. The whole of this week I have lost all contact with you and anything personal. There has been nothing except excessive and unwanted, totally undesired duties. Can’t shake off what feels like a film across the eyes preventing me seeing or thinking richly at all. There are here, “No eyes in which I learn that I am glad to look.” There is just daily, weekly, monthly Bedlam.

I must report a break in the months of Bedlam. Or report it as a ridiculous part of it. Imagine, this afternoon, Regimental Cricket! Absurd, yes, in war, but, at last, something delightful. I sat amongst the men’s noisy, open, genuine enjoyment and enjoyed it too, having only a very small part of me watching, partly in despair, the tips of a near-by bush shivered, divided, taunted with a sweet, almost cool breeze. In the end I made 17 runs, caught two out, captained our Battery side, and we won easily. How’s that? And what, for goodness sake, could be simpler, less full of fear and misery?

Moon silver-bright, and high up, a sky of curdled cloud, crusted, like clotted cream. Remember it? Small clouds, high, tight together, lapped over each other. Like the breast feathers of a thrush.

54 Your letters sometimes come coincidental with a shower of rain. This evening, one just before the heaviest shower for ages. And showers, like your letters, are such rich rare things. When they come they cool us. It’s like the laying on of hands, and it is lovely to watch them dampen and deepen the colours of the earth the all-day sun has bleached and baked to concrete. Lovely to know that all this colourless and withered grass will bud and blade green tomorrow. It happens. I can cope with that. But your letters make the same difference to my brain. Without the laying on of your cool hands I couldn’t cope at all. You say you have managed to paint Margaret, and if you say the paint stayed fresh, then fresh it was, and I saw it clearly, the quiet misty way you have with paint, with the paint dragged slightly diagonally downward and broadly, and the tones you get to sing so, and so often shocked me with a fierce envy. Paint more. Paint for me too. It’s impossible here.

While the Russians bitterly retreat, and the Japanese advance, look, here, we can have the evening off to watch Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara at the local cinema……exciting, funny, magnificent, but also spurious, unreal, unrelated? So moodless somehow, so empty-hearted and yet still brilliant. He knows so well the fun of words and phrase, and the accuracy with which his irony sinks its daggers into the heart of hypocracies. One meets him and his ideas eyeball to eyeball with such enormous affection, but one is laughing too much ever to be deeply disturbed, and yet he will, occasionally, very occasionally, I know, come so near to a mood, so near to something of the heart that it startles. Do you remember in Heartbreak House, for example, speeches and speeches of the usual Shaw and then, of a sudden that long, long pause, like a soundless sigh, and then “Let the heart break in silence.” And in Major Barbara “You have learnt something. And that always feels as if you have lost something.” Which reminds me of John Macmurray’s “The way to truth lies through the destruction of illusion.” But that, I suppose, could have been said by Shaw, anyhow. The Heartbreak one could have been Tchekov, and not Shaw.

We have been billeted on this racecourse now, all spring, all summer. The men bed down in Tote No 1 and Tote No 2. Their Mess and lounge is in Tote No 3. Other official events take place in the lounge area of the Mess. It being Saturday, and our turn, the Regimental Padre called in and gave me a message to pin up on the Notice Board for tomorrow. He just dropped it on my desk, no words, and not a glimmer of humour, but it must nearly qualify as one of the funniest, and one of the most extraordinary notices of the whole war. It read “HOLY COMMUNION WILL TAKE PLACE TOMORROW, SUNDAY, AT 11am, IN TOTE NO 3.” Wonderful, and I nearly added “ANY HORSE, ANY WINDOW, WIN OR PLACE.”

Both you and Tony recommend Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It should be topical, agreed. But I’ve already tried to read it twice, and failed. Tony says if I could manage to get past page 100, I would almost certainly go on. But I’ve tried that too. He just doesn’t work for me. He’s too smooth, too mandarin, too urbane, and too Christian, or pretends to be, the old hypocrite. Look how beastly he was to his wife and children. And I like a writer, every writer, to have a wild area in him somewhere. Tolstoy doesn’t seem to have one at all. Or, if he has, he denies it in all that moral Christianity of his. Gorki has it, Dostoievsky has it, Babel has tons of it. Perhaps they all have too much. But they all have at least some of that necessary fierceness of immediacy, of awareness, of love, of dislike. It’s a good area. It’s 55 positive, uncompromising. All the best prophets come from the wilderness. Tolstoy seems to come from somewhere like St James’ Park.

About midnight every night for the last week or so, we have been woken up by some wretched dog snuffling noisily, routing about in the dustbins at the back of the Mess. Last night Reg armed himself with a couple of half-bricks by the side of his bed. I woke at midnight with the dog there. Reg woke too, and cursed. I was too hot, too tired to make a move or a sound, and lay silently listening as Reg gets up very quietly, takes his bricks, pauses for aim, and hurls them at his target. There was a long yelping howl as the hits registered. It died gradually into the distance and the silence of the night. Reg returned to bed, and I distinctly heard him saying to himself “Most satisfactory, most satisfactory.” It must have been, but the underlying tone of it made it sound more like the satisfaction of some deep, terrible, urgent, secret vice, worthy, if a catholic, of confession.

Routine is daily and dull. It is a device to devour all time, sometimes by the day, sometimes by the week, the month, the year. It lasts as long as it continues and as long as it is not interrupted, and when gone, however long a time it has taken up, when you look back at it all, you look back at only one day and at the same time a whole year vanishes instead. Every now and then a moment of richness comes to the rescue, or a week-end leave off duty, or even just this Sunday which I spent with Duncan Macpherson, a very nice Scot, a bridge-engineer, who works for the Madras Railway. He took me away from the dull, military grind, to go sailing with him in a creek a few miles north of Madras. We got there by rail, rigged his boat and launched. There was a good strong, gusting wind. I thought, as a complete beginner, far too strong. The boat was only a small sailing dinghy and it heeled wildly over on its side with every gust. We both had to sit tight out on the edge of the boat, and hang backwards, right out over the water. Although I had never done it before, I quickly saw the point of it, because the sea, the other side of the boat, was several times almost over the gunwale and in the boat. Then you had to lean out even further until your head was within inches of the water just under you, and that was pretty scarring. But it worked, and it worked every time, thank goodness, and in the end, it was obviously an exhilarating kind of game. Exciting also the acute visual slant of the mainsail and the mast, and the tense trembling of the sensitive little jib. Afterwards we landed on the beach and bathed. Lovely warm sea water running with brilliant foaming surf, crowding the eyes and ears with huge bunches of white flowers and the smell of salt sea oxygen. We had tea in full sun, very warm, full of this new easy friendship, and the almost unbearable memory of Walberswick and Sole Bay, the North Sea and our friendship came far too close. We took far too long over our tea and therefore had to try and hurry our sail back, to catch the last train for Madras, but of course, the wind played us false, and dropped, and we had to stow the sails, get out the oars, and row like mad the last few hundred yards. We heard the train pull in to the station just as we beached the boat. We hauled it up to safety, dumped it, snatched our clothes, me my uniform, and still in bathing costumes ran like hell for the station. We got there but with the stern of the train just disappearing out of it. Almost to my shame as a shy observer, Duncan, like a typical overseas, brash Britisher, was not to be outdone. He stormed up to the tiny little Indian stationmaster, shouting and cursing and pointing at his watch, swearing the train had left early and that the whole war effort would collapse if I didn’t return immediately to camp. The stationmaster seemed to cave in immediately. He had the signals altered. The train was halted, and then reversed, the 56 mystified native passengers all hanging out of the windows wanting to see what was up. And what was up was two whites in bathing costumes, carrying trousers, shirts and shoes and uniform waiting all alone on the station with one of them feeling absolutely awful. I suppose it might just about have been possible also in Spain, or Ireland, but surely nowhere else.

At last, the long programme of Camouflage courses which I have had to run for Regiment, in addition to all the usual gun-site work, has finished, and I can rest on the laurels without quite so much of a daily rush and tension, and I celebrated today with time to enjoy the dawn, which came in like a gentle tide on the heels of the ebbing night, leaving a high shallow shore of clouds, ridged and waved into small cushions, in exactly the same pattern a retreating sea makes and leaves in sand.

Relieved Reg at Gun Operations Room in town today for an extra hour so that he could go to Mass. There was, for a change, no exercise on, nothing actually happening, so I sat at a window and sketched the goats outside. Presumably a lesser activity than Mass, but I enjoyed it all the more for the contrast. Perhaps there is something about a goat that even a priest can’t have, whatever other qualities they share.

Two mobile schemes, one after the other, in an all-day outing with the guns and the vehicles. In the morning, to Elliot’s Beach where, after, with much rapidity, getting the guns on site and reporting ready for action, the whole Troop bathed. Enormous shouting contentment, and, because of the very strong offshore wind, everybody chased giant, luscious-coloured Swallow-tailed butterflies all over the salt sea-water. Strange to see such a mass of them there. Did they, too, think the foam all flowers? Over the sea they were completely out of place, “Like nuns in Piccadilly.” After lunch and the bathe, we took the guns up again and did a long drive to Pallaveram. Put them in action again on another site. The Troop took tea outside the village catholic church. We were watching a small, old, nut-brown and wrinkled nun teaching a bunch of gaily-skirted little Indian girls how to dance and sing, when suddenly, with a roar, Douglas drove up on his motorbike and scared the lot of them. Like flowers, their long gathered skirts spread in panic, and they scattered like hens across a farmyard, their skirts lifted and spread like wings half taking flight.

57 1942

A thick, stultifying, bruising-hot day until late in the afternoon when a storm of delightful rain came. We were at Gun-drill, and it broke on our heads, thrashed us, stopped, broke again and thrashed us again and then it was all over. This feeling of being alive again, aware, with such a rare rush of feeling in the middle of the dull mechanics of drill is especially exciting, obviously, but it happens so rarely, and, all too soon it ends up in the same old misery and memory of loss, in the same kind of maimed peace. This is not self-pity, it is meant to be an acknowledgement of how this most colossal luck to be here, to be doing what we are doing, in the way we are doing it, cancels itself out.

A Junior NCO course which we have been running on the site is nearly over. They had their written test this afternoon. They all hate writing anything of course, let alone a test. One of them, during the course, had poisoned a finger and couldn’t write at all, so I acted as his amanuensis. I found it one of the most enjoyable things I had done for ages. He is one of our nicest blokes, anyhow, about twenty, from Devonshire, with a good-looking, open, honest-to-God face and mind too. A mind which, even if it wasn’t all that literate, at least came straight from the shoulder as it were. It was like seeing his Englishness, and his so nearly complete honesty and goodness, coming straight out of his eyes. It gave me some idea of what it might be like to be someone else, especially as likeable as this chap. Does that sound ridiculously pretentious and patronising? The reverse, really. I accepted his thanks afterwards like a pat on my head, from him. When I had finished writing his answers out, there were still several who had not finished theirs, and I stayed on watching over them, like some humble old patriarch, liking so much their vast mental labours over the simplest things. And, in between this invigilating, in between these vast and absurd extravaganzas of affection, I was also able to read a book on Sickert, that wise, deep old sobersides with a lovely swiping wit and immense depth of wisdom and sheer common sense. How different is the language of the actual artist from the jargon of the critics.

The news from Russia worsens every day, but at least winter is nearly there now and there is so much roused in her, and I keep thinking of Napoleon, don’t you? Is there not a small morsel of confidence still there?

What’s Eastcourt like right now, summer ending, autumn beginning? Is it packed with vegetables for you for the winter? And have you fed well from it till now? Who cuts the wet cabbages in the early morning for you? And what’s that lovely walk to Westcourt like? Here, just a few feet from my eyes, perched on an electric cable, swings an Indian jackdaw, clinging precariously to his balance because the wind is strong and full of motion. Behind him and miles above, in a still sky, circle two aimless kites, small and very high, and beyond them the sky with the dull flat glare of granite but without granite’s glitter. Near to me again, on the trellis round our Mess shed a host of bougainvilleas are colourful and gay and delicate and opposite to the still glaring granite of the sky. But will anything ever lift or shift with exaltation until one is made whole again within the boundaries of one’s own home and the familiar wholeness of an English wild rose?, and will one ever again lose this sense of fear, misery and shame in sheer affection? Right now I feel very much like this foreign jackdaw, mighty awkward on his slender, swinging perch, desperate for my tottering 58 balance, jealous of the high abstracted flight of those kites, irritated by the empty glare of the sky except that he can’t feel cheated and angry, angry with these clumsy words, angry in fact with all words, angry with a word which can seem to do nothing but involve so many of us in the miseries of war.

The monsoon is not due yet awhile, but we had, instead, last night and all day today, a real fury of a storm. In a way wonderful, astounding, and yet it was also full of utterly vicious violence. The most torrential rain, from the most tormented, contorted, terrifying sky I’ve ever seen. Thick black, pendulous black, streamingly black. And it was strikingly lit by lightning, with black clouds scudding, billowing, and being blown by a wind as vast and as powerful as the sea, the whole so berserk and over-the-top that from moment to moment I didn’t think it could possibly continue. But it did, all night, all day. Amazed to see that such violence can yet do such delicate and delicious things..... to a single shivering leaf clinging for dear life to the end of a single branch, bending the slim trunk of a silver birch to a sort of moaning arch, with lightning almost caressing the dark bulky shoulders of huge storm clouds, and the deep heavy throw of thunder across the sky ending in a thin sound almost as delicate as flutes. All that, and, in between, one tried to cope with misery too. You’re on a tightrope between one pit of tumult and the next. The struggle to pick oneself up after falling keeps one alive.

Two airgraphs today! Keep writing, my sweet. Silence is dreadful when the din of misery is so loud. If I ever said anything about the wonderful freedom of silence, I’d recant immediately for one airgraph from you. It’s a transfusion. You are a blood donor. Keep me alive.

A visit to a local Indian Primary school, where a friend of Duncan’s teaches. Some of the older children danced two Indian folk dances for us, and sang some folk songs too. The slow grace and pace, and the imaginative introspection of the dances were lovely. The idiom of their songs and music perhaps too strange to be readily understandable. We could have done entirely without their attempt (in our honour, I suppose) to dance the awful hopping, skipping thing they made of one of our English dances. Afterwards, one of their teachers played us into the early dusk with a Veena, like some large guitar. Sight, light, and sound faded till at last the ears had everything.

The time between us is crazy, when I realise that the seeds you sow in the garden in one letter, will be eaten as vegetables by the time you get an answer and encouragement from me! And Oh the nostalgia for your English afternoon, the peace of the cuckoo, the chaffinch, or any odd sound that lifts up the silence of your warm English afternoon, then lets it drop gently and exactly back into its same place again for the peace to go on till the cuckoo shouts once more!

Japanese, this. Watched the neat, pert motion of a neat pert chipmunk picking its neat, pert, fastidious and dainty way across our sun-blinds. If only the Japs would stick to that sort of marvellous snapshot, and not shoot anything else!

Inspected on gunsite by a plethora of choleric, almost apoplectic, Brigadiers today. We all had a proper Army ribbing. Our B.C (barometric correction) was all to hell, we had no proper heightfinder figures, nor graphs for the Predictor corrections. 59 We’d never actually heard of them, or been given them. So I traipsed miserably round in a long file of Brigadiers, Colonels, Majors, staff captains. Everything seemed to be wrong. Such a solemn chain of authority. It stretched for about twenty yards, and I must have been the youngest, the weakest, and by far the least solemn link in that lengthy chain, and I enjoyed that at least. One of them was a gorgeous Sikh Officer, marvellously handsome. His magnificent beard and head would have fluttered your dovecotes at Eastcourt all right. Now may Jove in his next commodity of hair send me a beard as beautiful, and may the war allow me even to bring back to the dovecotes what hair I now have.

Have a mild attack of dysentery. But nothing to worry the head about. No, certainly not the head! The opposite end perhaps. And the remedy? Well, according to the MO, it is three doses of Mist. Alba, which looks, on paper, almost like a degree of romantic poetry, but it is medicine all right, and tastes like seven hells. I refuse to do anything else about it. Certainly not diet. I demand my ice-cream, in this heat, as of right. Refuse ever to take care of myself, on principle. “Keep the body trim by constant carelessness.” I quote T.E.Lawrence.

After a month or so, and, I suppose, because of my ridiculous ‘keenness’ my kind Colonel brought me today the chance of a posting and a promotion to a captaincy. A chance, actually, to get properly into camouflage. He gave me two hours to decide, and as he left me he said, over his shoulder “And don’t forget, my boy, the Regiment will be playing rugger again this winter, whatever the heat.” So, in the end, I decided not to take it. I’m not quite sure of my reasons, except that obviously I have no ambitions in the army, am sure of myself where I am, have liked and always get on so well with my rugger-mad Colonel, and, having to decide in so short a time, I remembered what some people do in like circumstances, and that is to open the nearest handiest Bible, which was my Bible Designed to be Read as Lit. erasure, stuck my finger on the page and read, believe it or not, my dear, “And go ye not into Egypt.” And I suppose that that might be exactly where I would have been posted. I agreed immediately, and that was that. It read, indeed, too like possibly perishing by the sword! So, here I stay, confirmed in funk.

Twenty-four hours’ duty in Gun Operations Room. Very busy this time with all-night exercises. Woke tired and heavy early in the morning after intermittent interruptions all night, especially with the attentions of one mosquito that had somehow got into my net. I was too hot and too tired to have much of a go at him and I just let him have at me. He was reasonably soon quite well fed. I slept, and, I think, so did he. Woke late to a hot, still, breathless day, with the heat hanging in the doorways, soaking the chairs, soaking my bush jacket, and hanging motionless on the droop of leaves on all the trees outside. Not even the dogs or the goats were moving. And I have at least three very large mosquito bites. No wonder he slept.

Starved of all contact with painting, except through your letters, I learnt by chance that there was a Madras School of Arts and Crafts. Yesterday evening I got a pass, went there and met the Principal, Roy Deviprosad Chowdhury. Besides being Principal of the place, he was a painter, a draughtsman, a sculptor, a writer, big game hunter, and even a wrestler, believe it or not. Odd combination, odd chap. By the end of our conversation, which went on, by the way, with brandy, quite a long time into the evening, I had learnt that he was also a pretty free-thinking, atheistical Hindu of sorts as well. He had one single style in sculpture, Rodinesque, but many styles in 60 painting. Western and Indian in water colour, and also almost too European in his oils. Very, very talented in all of them. As a man, to look at, he was a fine front row forward figure with huge, magnificent shoulders, which explained no doubt the power of his sculptures, and I certainly wouldn’t fancy him as an opponent in the wrestling ring! He had a wonderful head, too, very dark against the simplicity of his white dhoti. He was strong stuff and arrogant, preaching the artist’s personality at me, and relating the artistic urge primarily to sex. OK. He’s right, and also wrong, yes? It was exciting to try and talk with him, or rather listen to him. Even more exciting to have found someone like him, here. At the end of all this, he was called to supper. We had got on, and got on well. Clearly there had to be a repeat performance. To this end, and I was surprised at the sudden formality, he would give me a visiting card. When he stood up to do so and say goodbye he lifted from the table his enormous purse or wallet or whatever sort of bag it was. It opened too readily, was it the brandy? and all his money fell out. For all his physical stature, for all his impressive intellectual pride he was reduced suddenly to something looking marvellously weak, and foolish, and embarrassed, standing astonished in a shower of noisy coins falling on the terracotta tiled floor, running, in the way coins have, noisily, in all directions, all over it. He wouldn’t pick them up himself. Nor would he let me. So we shook hands and said goodbye across this slightly ridiculous field of the cloth of his gold.

Wonderful to hear that you might conceivably get a holiday soon, in Cornwall. Move heaven and earth to take it. It will rest you and relieve you a little bit, even with the three children with you. And you will actually see the water that divides us. That will help too, and not hinder, with its lovely flooding and ebbing, with all those white braids and decorations it wears on its shoulders - much more beautiful than any pips of promotion. It will surely defeat some of the sense of loss it bears and the sense of bitterness.

Magnificent tigerish dawn today. The sun behind bars. Watched it leap and disappear in a second or two into a decadent pink first, then into this monotony of blazing blue. Things disappear so quickly, and I missed much the constant, conscious sweep of pleasure watching you, and the let of love outward, outward, instead of this inward twisting anguish of missing you.

Because killed meat will not keep for more than a few hours in this country’s heat, when you actually buy meat, you go to market and buy it alive. I did that today. Bought a live duck for the officers mess. Brought it home, quacking its head off, in the Utility. Back, after the drive, Douglas and I, with much hilarity, cooled it in the shower, to refresh our minds as to how water runs off a duck’s back. And it does, deliciously, with a fine glitter of tiny highlights in each drop of water, bouncing off the duck like falling apart bracelets of rice.

A fortnight since I saw Chowdhury. Too long, because not seeing him until today I missed seeing thirty of his paintings which he had just sent off to Calcutta, for an exhibition. But we talked, this time, with a lot more brandy than last time. I suppose we had learnt a lot about each other quite quickly. He talks very good English indeed, and he wanted to show me some stories in English that he had written. Queer little philosophical? social comedies. Very amusing, but in a very dated way, in a very dated English, stamped all over Oscar Wilde. And they all had Oscar Wilde titles like ‘He Drinks to be Sober’ etc. I took some back with me and 61 read some on the gun site overnight. They were, in their way very good indeed, but written so much in Oscar Wilde journalese, that all suffered a stylised freeze-up.

Busy, bored, shallow, emptied out, for weeks. But I am still healthy, do far too much PT, play cricket, take endless drills, and eat beef in a temperature of 90°, and, I think, with Sir Andrew Aguecheek, that it all does harm to my wit, to my intelligence, to my soul!

So hot that it is almost impossible to write. I have to get up earlier than the dawn, to find time and a minimum freshness, even to fit in these few short notes every now and then. For the rest of the time the army and the nag of this heat is at one’s head all day, all night, and these brief moments of comparatively cool air are drained so quickly away. To be hot and limp so long is acute discomfort, and, worse, makes me lazy, and lacking in any lively thrust of mood. I begin to think that to be cold is the only proper state. To be cold, is to be quick, to be quick is to be alive, to be alive is to be aware. The mind races to be warm and working. But from heat there is no retreat. Withdrawal even into deep shade does not work. The heat is still there clamouring at the senses, wrecking the mind. One is ceaselessly conscious of sweat, of flies, of the hot nervous itch to shift the feet, the legs, the hands, the weight of the body. If one could only be cold, one could at least get warm. But there is no way if one is hot that one can get even cool. I sweat as I write this for you, at ten o’clock at night, a hot, greasy, irritable fellow in the centre of this hot, windless, airless, warring world.

There are far too many times now when all the accustomed scaffolding of what I now have to regard as a normal day - the floor, the walls, the desk, the bed, the airlessness, the heat, the army, the blank sky, the unaroused mind - is suddenly, and for no reason, and with no warning, utterly shattered in a reach of misery that swarms and floods about the heart like a violent tide, and these remnants of the so- called usual are all odd bits and pieces of furniture, of mood and mind, all floating about on the tide, like things that have been drowned, lost for ever. In a little while the tumult just as suddenly subsides, and then, miraculously and monotonously too, everything - the floor, the walls, the desk, the bed, the chair, the mind, return to their exact places as before, as if they had never been disturbed. So, especially after one of your precious letters, I often reach out after you as if both you and I were drowning.

At last, a real, real treat. Had lunch with Chowdhury and his wife and son, meeting them for the first time. She, slender, petite, tenuous almost to the point of fragility, and very reserved, but I felt many reserves behind the reserve. There was a clear but somehow sad tenderness there. I hadn’t met a woman’s tenderness since our last leave together, and it almost hurt. The son was but eight or nine? There was a mixture of difficulties there, both language-wise and socially, but there was a lively energy there for him to control as well. On his best behaviour? Perhaps, and I would have liked to try and reach him and his mother at a more easy level. The lunch was wonderfully memorable. We were not sitting on the floor, mind you, but I was taking it with my fingers, which is not such an easy matter as all that, and requires, I think, a bit more skill to do it reasonably elegantly than that with which one manipulates a knife and fork. All things were served at one go, so you have to deal with a mass of small bowls, with a division of delicacies therein, both confusing to me, and amusing for them but lovely to deal with, and so many miles distant from the Mess meals! There were small bowls of prawns, fish, chicken 62 breasts, salads, several sorts of chutney, several sorts of curry flavours, many hot and cold vegetables. Mathematically I’m not sure how many combinations were possible, but I tried many. With all these dishes ranged round my central plate in a large semi-circle, as I reached out for this and that, and then for another and another, I found it rather like playing an organ. You played on the dishes as if they were organ stops, pulling out this, returning that, with the harmonies, the crescendos and diminuendos changing at every move. Exciting, but I don’t think I could manage it for very long. Something to do with over-abundance? An over-abundance of differences making the palate too quickly punch drunk? A bit like polygamy? And, as a puritan, which I sometimes think I am, God help me, - in a way, perhaps I have too high a regard for the single! After lunch, Chowdhury and I were in his studio for too short a time, for me. I had to return for duty. But he is working, in clay, on a figure, a practically life-scale coolie, pulling on a taut rope, to be part of a much larger group. It was fine, vigorous, good communication of tensions from the rope, through all the figure’s muscles, right up to the strain of the neck and the head. Extremely good, but for me an important shade too much exaggerated? A personal reaction only, from one who tends, too quickly perhaps, to draw back from, and tire in front of something over-imagined, over-invented. After the first exciting shock such things afford, later they seem a bit empty. They get digested too easily in one bite. There is an element of indulgence there, which shouldn’t be there. Appraisal, analysis, almost a coldness in the observation as well as all this heat of over-imagination. Given too much freedom from restraint, given too much facility, both of which I think Chowdhury has, something becomes slightly too effortless, too unsearching, and slightly unsatisfying, however good it is. It’s this prig and puritan in me. I ought again, to be beaten like a dog! His work is still more, much more, than good.

Had a miraculous multitude of fireflies outside the Mess tonight. Walked out, and there they were, a very, very, pretty, twinkling, prickling sight full of bright tiny lights in a gay, wandering directionless movement, both sideways, and up and down. They were like tiny displaced stars, intensely bright, and being manipulated from above, like puppets on strings you couldn’t see.

The last of several mobile schemes this week, ending, intelligently again, at Elliot’s Beach, so that the whole troop could bathe again. For another of those happy few moments, the fixed blank mood of the last few, militarily over-busy weeks broke, and the mind relaxed and went into the full, thick, bustling surf careering against my shins. The sea water was thin, lean and delicious, the sky windy, mobile with huge cumuli massing and messing into each other. The men were shouting, laughing, swimming, ducking, human, and nude - all shapes, all sizes of everything! Comic people in seaside postcards.

The papers all full of disastrous disturbances in Congress up north. Ghandi, Nehru, Patel and Azad all arrested. They are clearly taking advantage of us, and yet, as a democrat, I’m with them. So are a lot of us. All leave into Madras is stopped. So I rang Chowdhury thinking a visit from an English officer might embarrass. All his students were on strike in sympathy.

Libations in the select opulence of the Race Course bar. We have all been made members of the Race Club. At the moment, ambiguous luxury of local

63 cocktails in a world of disturbances, general privation and disasters. The Committee must be a majority, white.

Borrowing more playing cards from other sections, laid on a mass Whist Drive for the men. Much amused at all the vanities, expertise, and oddities of shuffle, deal and play. It’s a pretty awful game really, whist. A shop-keepers game? Somehow unimaginative, mechanical, a bit witless, and without an atom of the boldness, the clever design, the cerebral complexity of contract bridge. The calling in whist is poor quality stuff, unadventurous. The leads are all low, you just do not aim high, but it is much more human. There is this wonderful ease of bonhomie and humour which the cleverness and tension of bridge completely exclude. The main reward? No malice or spitefulness anywhere in sight. Smashing.

Cold violent wind with a lashing thunderstorm of rain. Sheets of lightning of such sudden brilliance that gigantic clouds trembled like delicate leaves. Claps of light, boulders of sound, rain as tangible as steel rods. Remember the storm in Komisajevski’s King Lear? Can’t remember how to spell K’s name, but remember that ridiculous over-the-top storm! So much weather seems to take place in extremes here. We were completely caught, by this storm, putting the guns into action on a change of gun positions. It was very cold. We were drenched for an hour, and afterwards I had an uncontrollable fit of shivering, though it doesn’t seem to have had any consequences.

Spent two hours in a queue at the bank today getting some money to leave on a camouflage trip to recce gun positions a hundred miles or so north of Madras. Stood next to, and had to watch, two Anglo-Indian girls who had got there before me. I listened to their endless chatter and small talk. It was hot, and I got irritated by the heat, the waiting, and them. Waiting in such heat is not very good for one’s sense of tolerance.

The trip began yesterday, and it was almost pleasant to relax into the arms of a Railway Company, to watch the changing, pleasant, country side of paddy, Jungle, paddy, rocks. The paddy, especially, was in new luxury after the recent rains, about a foot high already, but as smooth as an English lawn on top. The army fixes the two points of departure and arrival, but between those two points, you can almost pleasantly shed responsibility. You can relax. Perhaps it is only the peace of the parcel in transit but, all the same, for that length of time, there is peace. There was a very nice old Indian who travelled most of the way with me. He looked like a wicked old Silenus by Rubens, but he could also have been a saint. Ugly, but his head and his talk (In English, of course, and very good English) were full of Huxley and Tolstoy, the latter as you well know, my bête noire. But we got on famously, if that is possible, about life and death. Huge topics, but I was more impressed with the shape of his dark head and the contrast with his white hair. You would have made more of his portrait than I could; and I would, indeed, and in actual deed, have loved to have introduced you there and then.

I am staying, right now, at the army’s expense, at a Seaview Hotel! Could anything be more ridiculous? All in the course of duty, and in spite of the heat, for the moment, it seems almost pleasant. They manage to keep lovely White Turkeys in 64 the grounds. Off duty, in the evening I just marvel at the contrast of their general white with the startling splash of blue and red in their barbaric heads. What is not pleasant is that I have been rushing about all day, every day, trying to site and dream up camouflage for the sites chosen, and have, because, presumably, of the humid heat here, contracted ‘prickly heat’, which is all round my waist and is a precise, particular, and continual agony of a kind I’ve never suffered before. I am at the point already of wanting to strip the whole of my skin off, not just the waist, in one great rapid rip. The relief, or different kind of pain, would be more than worth it.

Four days on end still struggling, but there was an unusual pre-breakfast freshness. It had rained softly overnight and, walking early, I found a host of grey beautifully supple and graceful little snails. They had striped, tenderly fragile shells, worn like little fashionable hats on their backs. Found them pushing their irresolute, sensitive, but erect, little periscope-antennae through the mists and dews of the green grass. Don’t think I will ever forget them. For days, you will have a rival. Among the neighbouring trees, motionless and wet, the sounds of small birds hung like bunches of grapes under the leaves. Large Indian crows also scratched their particular, curious noises on the dawn as well.

This interlude, both pleasant and unpleasant, like Shaw’s plays, is nearly over. Prickly heat is still with me, but I took two hours off this evening and took it lying watching the sea. It outmatched those little grey snails for a while, but neither the salt smell nor the neighbourly noise, nor the homeward and shoreward movement could still a shameless longing for you.

I’m back on site. The Recce finished, my report written. I left The Seaview Hotel with a pang or two for my little grey snails and my longing for you and a thankful diminution of my prickly heat. Another train, filing, in reverse, past the same tall toppling paddy, the same beautiful orchids in the same filthy ditches and I was back to the monotony of gun drill. Apart from the simple wish for home, and you, and a paintbrush, I would just like first, to be cold, and then, please, not to be tired. Then I would like to feel again what a friendly sun would feel like, and then I would like to lose the stench of water-buffaloes and drains, and to be rid of the infective shame of an overservile people (they are even servile to each other), and I would like to stand in Eastcourt’s cool green grass without the central fear of snakes, to see a reasonable, sensible hill and not these curious irrelevant blisters of earth that go for hills on these plains, not to have the need for fans to make a wind, not to sit limp, sodden, barren and stupefied for hours on end, not to act any longer continually with my will against myself, nor ever to have again the need for so many written words. Amen!

Give the slightest hint of enthusiasm in the army, and I can’t help it, and you are doomed. You run one course, so you are told to run two, then three etc. The disease spreads and you are asked, ordered, to do, not camouflage this time, but a Commando Course. So, apart from all the blood, thunder and physical gutmaking of such a course, Douglas and I are adding the little tiddly bits and having some fun, teaching them to swim, sail, row, make rafts, navigate in simple terms with sun and stars, to morse and semaphore, to use explosives, to kill, skin and cook goats! A magnificent night sky. The moon very hard, very bright, very still. A high thin ceiling of very small clouds, grained, like wood. And based upon the moon just 65 as the graining in wood is sometimes based upon a knot - curling and groining round it. I still have eyes for it, but, lady, I am sick of this war, sick of the lack of love, sick of compulsion, sick of frustration, sick of the continual use of the will, and the intelligence, trying to cope, or trying to cope with anything else it never wanted to cope with…..all the unnatural acts one commits each military day. Tomorrow, for example, reconnaissance with a Brigadier. There’s another unnatural act for you!

In the afternoon, as part of the Commando Course, we had instruction on the new Tommy-gun. Something none of us had seen before. It kills more, faster, than any other hand-held weapon. Wonderful. Instruction was by a Sergeant we had been loaned from a local Regular Army Infantry unit. A typical, shyster, foul-mouthed fellow who filled me with a fierce distaste which I concentrated on the nasty, pale puffy flesh at the back of his nasty, pale, puffy knees, below his poorly fitting army shorts. If the occult really had any force, he would have been felled by the spell on the spot!

Soaked in your last letters. Basking. Basking in the sunny summer of Eastcourt, delighting in all the sunny fun and fury of the children. Ren bending down, head between her knees saying ‘hello’ backwards, Jenny’s two year old disgruntled noises pushing at her incomprehensible mole. Happy confusion. Your own amused enjoyment connects with them, and me with you and them. Tolstoy is an elderly frump. Of course they are a torment. So is life, so is literature, so is writing, so is painting, so is war. And so, no doubt, will be peace. So, much more, is his own War and Peace. Good God, for the sake of one old man’s peace of mind, shall there be no more children? Oh, I often, defensively, think of him as the Malvolio of literature. All that pompous, so-called Christian moralising, all that subtle self-love. Children demand, yes, a lot, but the supply, surely, is an extension of everybody’s personality. You get back every bit as much as you have to give. And more.

It is a bit cooler, relatively, at last, and I limbered up yesterday for the commencement of the ‘winter’s’ rugger. Brand new rugger ball, in clean, smooth, yellow leather, like the pod of a huge poppy.

You must try some Katherine Mansfield. I actually found her Scrap Book in Madras a day or so ago. She’s very human, personal, neighbourly, easy to believe in, and so often on fire. (Is that collection good or bad? I don’t know, but I like it). She’s a bit gushy here and there, perhaps, but she writes on the stretch, spending herself, giving off a good overflow, full of those sudden creamings of intuition which happen every now and then. Is it even a fault that they are sometimes a shade too rich and scrappy and therefore slightly indigestible? Surely it is up to the reader, after all, to arrange his own digestion. You can take as much or as little as you like at a time. And, as you know, I can take quite a lot of cream.

The whole troop practised rifle and Bren Gun at the shooting range today. Part of the Commando Course. They shot from a hundred yards away. I stood in the deep trench below the targets, with the bullets thudding into the bank of force- absorbing sand above my head. Close enough to realise what it would be like to be shot at, which, God forbid. And it seemed very dry, matter of fact, and impersonal. One would have time only to be hit or not hit, each shot is so quick. Judging from the men’s results, it would be more often not hit! 66 It is often very difficult to see myself as an officer. I’m sure you must think of it with even more difficulty. You’d be amazed, therefore, to see me trying to function as one. I’m amused myself. There’s a lovely problem that’s arisen with the men on this Commando Course. It’s about PT, the least popular part of the course, of course, especially in this heat. I have actually got two main instructors for the PT. One is a Lance-Bombardier who is a rather dim, strained, lugubrious slow-minded Cornish Methodist, who sometimes lay-preaches rather well, but slowly, on Church Parades. He’s very nice, but he’s mournful, and also rather too kind by half on PT for ‘disciplining’ my commandos. The other is Gunner ‘Libby’ as he is called. Full name Libborwich, and he is a very different kettle of fish. A big, shrewd, forty-year old Whitechapel Jew, who has, as you might expect, a loud, very ready tongue on him. He stands no nonsense, is inclined to bully a bit, and assumes (like the rest of his race?) a hostility where there may well be none, but who is by far the better instructor, and, underneath, the kindest, and most generous old man in the troop. I positively like him. We even share a true cockney birth. But he knows how to instruct PT properly. Now the main bunch of blokes on the course are decent level-headed chaps who don’t really care who instructs them, but there’s also a small, vocal minority who can’t stand ‘Libby’. The Lance-Bombardier they can stand because he is pretty easy meat. And they get away with a lot. But old ‘Libby’ is a much tougher proposition. He knows all the tricks and he knows how to give it to them with his tongue as well as his physical jerks. I’ve had to use the L/Bdr until a couple of days ago because ‘Libby’ has been away on a PT Course, but now he is back, and, indeed, exactly ready for the fray, so of course, I put him on to instruct. His first day, three of the minority blokes walked off and reported to me with the complaint of bullying. Should one just get tough as a matter of military discipline? They haven’t got a leg to stand on, really, or dear old ‘Libby’ has worked their legs too tired for them to stand on them. Or does one do it more friendly-like, which would be more enjoyable? I told them to carry on, they’d get used to it. I would have a word with ‘Libby’ and we would see what happened. The next day daggers were still drawn. I talked with the two opposing parties separately. They were charmable in talk, but not reconcilable. In the end, it worked out at the cost of an extra pint or two of sweat from me. Up till the day ‘Libby’ returned, I had done PT with them all under the L/Bdr, and only too readily gave it up because we had started playing rugger and were playing or training every evening, and one has to be fairly reasonable with what one does with one’s energy. But they couldn’t refuse to do PT under ‘Libby’ if I was doing it too. At least it restrained his tongue a bit, and perhaps he was a wee bit less tough on us all for the sake of the honour of the Regiment’s rugger. It is rather easy to do too much in this sort of climate, in this sort of ‘wintry’ weather. It all seemed to work.

A new departure for our Heavy Anti-Aircraft Guns. Practice Land-Target shooting, presumably to see how we could function as ordinary artillery in conditions of total air-supremacy. It made history we were told, at least in India. Our troop was not involved in the actual practice shoot itself but we were there as spectators for instruction. I had peace enough, therefore, to find it all wonderfully remote, aloof, and almost poetic! They shot into a ridge of low, pale, cobalt blue hills about half a mile in the distance, slightly hazed, and crossed continually by the soft shadows of shifting clouds in another blue altogether. Then came the shellbursts. Huge, tall hyacinths of white/blue smoke blooming on the slopes. 67 Clusters of four at a time. A sort of Garden Party. A surprising sense of general delicacy, but the AA guns were surprisingly accurate, too.

Finale for the Commando Course today. A marathon cross country race, teams from each troop. It was set out as a relay. The first man in each team given a military message of pretended importance to be carried from here to there, about five miles or so. The message had to be committed to memory at each change of man. The result not to be judged on speed, but on getting the message accurately across the distance. First destinations were definite villages, but villages given only as map references. All the blokes had maps and we were told that all of them actually made the right villages. There they had to pass the message on to the next relay of chaps. They had to take the message on on motor-bikes they had learnt to ride on the course to further map reference villages. Message then passed on to more blokes who had to translate it into morse. They ran half a mile to another relay who had to translate the morse into semaphore and semaphore it on to another. That translated it back into English, and the last relay had to run two miles and on the way blow up a tree for a road block, swim across a river, drive on in lorries they had never driven before to a map reference home. We met them there. Much excitement and a good deal of fun. They got home amazingly level in time, and the message was just about decipherable and accurate as well. But only just!

Getting out of bed this morning in the soft dark dawn light, met a very handsome black and white cat. We were both surprised. It was very imposing. Two large yellow eyes, like two large boiled sweets. One pink tongue. Out it came, then in, quick as a child’s lollipop. It was very handsome, but I couldn’t get it to stay in spite of an invitation to have a saucer of milk.

Out here, in the East, with Japan edging ever closer and closer up in Burma, nothing 1ooks good. But with you, in England, looking back at England, and Europe, surely the war after Stalingrad is different, altered in shape, in feel? Can we now be actually defeated? Incredible question even to ask, isn’t it? But, in spite of being still in a very strong position, that’s a question Germany will have to ask herself - and without so certain an answer.

Had to do an official local camouflage tour with the visiting Divisional Officer today, plus also a local civilian guide to take us round the area. He was a scruffy, tubby little Indian of a tired but indeterminate age. He had the air of being slightly shop-soiled, wearing a dirty, battered topee, even had several of his fly buttons undone, and had gaps in his top and bottom teeth exactly corresponding so that, when he smiled you always saw his chubby little pink tongue, just like that black and white cat’s, and one wondered whether it was ever necessary for him to open his mouth when he ate. He also had a very tubby potbelly which swelled his trousers out very tightly and ridiculously sharply outwards. It probably explained his undone fly buttons. Either they were burst off or he couldn’t see the other side of the mountain to do them up! We walked the little chap nearly off his feet, but he gamely kept up with us. He had come to show us the way round the area, and that is what he did, all day. At lunch, found him very knowledgeable about local agricultural crops, and the wild flowers and wayside trees. The professional talk from the DO was necessary and informative, but I learnt much more, enjoyably, from our Indian friend: all the less obvious differences between Red Gram and Green Gram, wet and dry paddy, and a 68 lot about Chola, Jonna, the Tamarind tree, the Soapnut tree, and some of the Mangoes. Sitting beside him, watching his pink tongue as he talked and smiled and ate, I was soon more fond of him than the well-clipt military machine of the DO.

Routine day, but also incredibly cool, and very cool last night. Rare combination, and never experienced on the plains before. Actually slept in pyjamas, and infinitely stranger, slept under a blanket as well. Definitely for the first time in the plains! Slept like a log, also rare, and when I awoke, the radio was playing Handel, and the birds were yelling their heads off in choral competition, the sun was low, bright and unoppressive, the grass wonderfully green, and I could smell eggs and bacon cooking. What sort of a war am I in?

Contrast. A run of long desultory disappearing gaps of disappearing time. Lifetime? Will we disappear too?

Coming. An amazing official possibility of regular leaves, possibly three or four weeks a year. Will believe it when I am coming back from the first regular one. Kodai is not quite paradise, it lacks at 1east the one angel I know, but at 7000' it qualifies.

The tremendous advance in Egypt is exhilarating, and has the raised the spirits of the men no end. It is the first big positive victory, though I think the check to the Germans at Stalingrad much more important. It is hard to realise what a colossal thing Germany did, or nearly did. The conquest of the whole of Europe except us and a good deal of Russia and North Africa as well. It is a miracle that it has not been decisive. And it all looks even negligible now. What a strangely fated people they are! But neither they nor the Japanese must be allowed to triumph. Their kind of racial ego is anathema to every inch of one’s personal weather.

Wonderful! You are in Cornwall, with the lovely gift of cliff and rocks and sea and sky and three very young children. To be there with you, and not here, still seems possible in spite of all the time and space between us. Even here, I share your cliffs, your boats, your gulls and everything your pencil finds time to do. Blessed, irrefutable facts. I am not one for ideas, or, well, only a few. Give me facts and things, large or small, the lovely you, the lovely gull. Things that sit, stand, move or fly. Things that are folded, or sealed, seen, or half seen. It is ideas that are limited, not things. Give me Cezanne’s apples, or Chardin’s pears, even his jars of pickles. I would rather have a Cornish boat or gull to look and wonder at than the gloomy ideas of Kaflka or Kierkegard, or God. I would like the world to give me leave to make love to you not to God. He’s another idea, and not a terribly good one either. Like all religions he’s there for us to shift the buck to. Is it possible that one day we will be better at the job of living if we learn to take better care of things and each other, and not ideas? Delight dwells locally, in things you can see and touch. I don’t ever find it with God, miles up there in his heaven. Delight is here and now, in either Cornwall, or even India, and it stretches from here to there and back in a flash, and stretches the lazy mind as well (and rarely breaks it), and it keeps the heart vulnerable and working, and even, occasionally, singing! And that’s a quality of life that’s all too rare.

India’s monsoon has not yet arrived. It is expected fairly soon, on October 15th, at half past two, almost timetable like, as they say here. The sky is still hard, 69 vacantly staring at us with absolutely no eyes. That loose run of what we thought were heralding messenger clouds disappeared without trace. I dislike so much that bald blue and miss very much the lovely, variable, modified lights and colours which make the English sky so memorable. Blue skies are not the rare loveable things they are in England, not here. They are a barren, vacant, impenetrable glare coloured blue. And the grass is scarcely ever green. It has no green now, and hasn’t had, for months. It is an impossible country.

Honestly, this war of mine out here must be the strangest war ever for anybody. Have, for a fortnight now, whenever chance allowed, been reading Jules Romains’ The Body’s Rapture, most certainly a book about its title, and in a way preferable to D H Lawrence, the fashionable English Guru on the subject. Romain’s sensuality, although every bit as frank, has also a good share of Gaelic lucidity which allows him to remain cooler and more, in a sense, uninvolved. He manages to keep his head more, but also manages, perhaps, to destroy some of the poetry. That disappears in the precision and the lucidity, and, by the end of the book, a sort of cold dismay shrivelled up all his well-constructed sentences. His sensuality became like a pinned down, dried up butterfly, which is not to say I preferred Lawrence, certainly not the Lawrence of Lady Chatterly in which he ‘teaches her’ to enjoy the ‘performance’ in a very male-chauvinist sort of way. For God’s sake there must be something else as well, mustn’t there? Yeats says “beast gives beast as much”. Does it make one a prig, to ask for more?

Spent this morning visiting the men in Hospital. Just at this moment, half the men in the troop seem to be there! In this climate indeed, how much quicker, exactly, is our chemical physiology going to decay? I don’t know, and hope I am exaggerating, but it is perhaps not going to decay more swiftly than the men’s sense of humour which, thank God, does not seem to decay at all. I had gone to the Hospital hoping to try and gladden them. Instead, they gladdened me.

Our new Second-in-Command has left us already. He was a lawyer-like, pale almost shyster sort of a chap. Almost pansy-like. He couldn’t, and clearly didn’t, get on with the Colonel’s warm strength of mind. When he arrived, we all gave him three months. Actually he lasted four.

Letter from you painting still in Cornwall, and agree, yes, that the resolve is to say, almost (but only almost) coldly what is warmly felt. There is indeed something deliberate that has to control the excitement. It is shades of Jules Romains. Art has to keep a cool head. It is nine parts management of the excited ego, the excited colourist, the formless emotionalist. You have to get outside yourself to watch yourself being beside yourself. In a way it is exactly the opposite of excitement. The highest and the very deepest delight turns out to be something austere, and moderate. And yet the poetry has to be cherished. The gunsite’s new canteen opened today. I had gone there to survey the completion, and to be rid of the underdrag of a personal misery in the open friendliness of the crowd of men. Suddenly its smells of tea, soap, cakes and polish flashed up for me Eastcourt’s Mackelden’s Stores. Immediate focus in the mind, and through the haze of the men’s cigarette smoke, through the muslin of smells, I saw you ordering our groceries. Saw you so clearly, I could have wept, which would have astonished the sergeant with whom I was talking and laughing.

70 It’s like a stage performance, my war out here. I mean we really do our military duties out here. There is all the endless office work and the gun drill performed in earnest and in uniform, twice a day, rehearsing morning and evening. But, believe it or not, outside this military theatre, the civilian world, the normal one, is now actually preparing for the racing season, which begins in a fortnight! Every morning now, in the lovely half-light of dawn, they’re training, and I watch these stunning Arab horses go cantering or racing past the Mess while I shave, the horses’ heads stretched forward, their pale tails flaring out behind, the Indian ‘boys’ sitting crouched up high and forward, almost as high as the ears of the horses. The sun isn’t there yet, but its swelling light is, and look, I have another theatre, opposite to the theatre of war.

I don’t know how many each of us makes, but do you know how many long extraordinary journeys you make during each day, and oh so many at night, from Wiltshire to Madras? Madras to Wiltshire?

Letter from you tramping through Savernake forest bracken, breaking glittering wet cobwebs in the damp Wiltshire air. Here it is impossible to do anything else all day but to sit down, when military time allows, in a hot, damp, uncomfortable stupor, and rot with the heat, until sometimes the wind freshens in the evening, and many, many cups of tea revive. Still no monsoon.

At least, the news daily coming in from Egypt is magnificent. A wonderful start, and yet, schooled to disasters and pessimism for so long, I can’t help thinking that it’s a bit like laying out a rabbit, when there’s a lion round the corner. And if the rabbit takes this much effort, what is the lion going to take? Visit from the local Garrison Engineer. In spite of his title, a civilian, and one of the many English sahibs here who shame us national service men by unnecessary loss of temper, and shouting and swearing at the ‘natives’. A stupid sort of pseudo violence, and a miserable substitute for personal strength. Disliked so much his bespectacled, central, aggressive weakness.

The Madras Race Club, on part of whose property we are billeted, is being extraordinarily generous. Having made us all Honorary Members of their Club already, it has now issued all the officers and a good proportion of the men with free passes into the Enclosure Rings on all race days. Wonderful. I feel like Degas! Can wander in and watch everything - which, at home, one could never have afforded. Can actually be at the weigh-in, the parade, pre-race, of all the horses in the ring, with the crowd of owners, the doubtful looking trainers, the even more doubtful looking jockeys. Nice contrast between the somewhat shabby, seedy/sad faces of the jockeys and their expensive, highly-coloured silken blouses. Liked the saddling, the fiddling with the girths and stirrups, the adjustments, and after all that, the slow canter down the track to the start, the thunder at the winning post and that lovely slowing down of all the horses forty yards beyond the post, the lovely easing of the tension of the race to the way the horses turn and walk back, their tension gone, their personal grace returning.

November, and I honoured all the children’s birthdays and you too, in drinks. The Russians honoured them with the capture of Kletskaya, and at the rate we are moving forward in North Africa we might have it all for Christmas presents. And next spring, next Summer, what? I’m even getting used to being hopeful! But don’t 71 think I will ever get used to the luck, and our almost peaceful wartime here, and the difference from what is happening in slog and misery and loss to the ordinary chaps like you and me in Africa and Russia.

With the Congress situation a bit easier, managed to spend yesterday evening very happily with Chowdhury, talking painting, talking art, talking life. A sublimated subaltern! And today took the Regimental cricket first eleven to play the local YMCA. They play here in the local Lords! All these local Societies live so well and choose so well. The ground really was like Lords. Englishness personified. Ringed with entirely English-looking trees, the ground was quiet, magically quiet, and green and level. At moments it was almost holy with that quiet, unearthly, particular peace of all cricket grounds, with only that odd, particular, unechoing knock of the ball on the bat, and the occasional shiver of applause disturbing the utter peace.

Thank God we haven’t got the Americans here, at least not in full force, yet. Their Advance Party is here, and even that has brought chaos already. Wherever they carry their wealth, the price of everything doubles, including girl clerks. Especially girl clerks. They ride round in huge limousines marked US ARMY all over, back, front and sides. It’s TERRIFIC. ALL SINGING, ALL TALKING, ALL DANCING in GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOUR! But where would the world be without them?

By swapping duties, most Mondays Douglas and I can get into Madras, in the late evening, to the Madras Bach Choir. Thank goodness they are doing the Matthew Passion next. At the meeting a little while ago, some dear lady made the madly tactless, and certainly premature suggestion, that we do Merrie England! Several of us voted hotly and vocally against it, both as being inferior music, as well as premature. All the Indian Congress sympathisers in the choir also, of course, voted against it, for even more valid reasons.

It rained at last yesterday evening. It rained all night. It is still raining this morning, but clearing. Is it the monsoon? It is at last cool, at any rate, and everything is dripping freely, dripping beautifully. The light has seldom been so misty, so rare, so lovely. The afternoon became piebald, an unexpected blue and white, broken only by an occasional huge grey cloud, one of which suddenly broke a vicious squall of cold rain all over us at gun drill. It was very, very heavy, and sent us all helter-skelter from the guns in search of shelter. It lasted several minutes, as if there was a mighty sized tap somewhere, and someone said “That's enough! Turn it off!” And they did. And it stopped as suddenly as it started. After the noisy tumult of the rain, the silence was incredible, until you heard birds again, then ducks, then sheep, and the everlasting crickets, and the shouted orders of the ever present gun drill.

Now, indeed, it is the monsoon proper. Very heavy all day, and frighteningly heavy at night with its huge weight coming straight down through the windless air with astonishing force onto our asbestos roofing. And today we are supposed to be starting a three-day exercise involving all the so-called Madras Defences. Wow!

It’s a kind of boredom, being perpetually and frantically busy, for the Exercise fills the entire day and mind as only Army Activity can. But there have been nice moments. We have had to administer an almost complete black-out at 72 night. Had you walked into the Mess at midnight last night, and I would have loved that, it being the last of the three nights of the Exercise, during one of the lulls, you would have found me, so that I could read, perched on a chair, mounted on the Mess table, so that my head could be raised to within about two inches of the low-powered electric light bulb we were permitted to use, and that was about only one foot from the ceiling, and I had shrouded that with a black cloth fastened to the fitting and then gathered it round my shoulders. A good scenario for a play? But the only other amusement in the whole bloody Exercise was the Umpire Officer who was supposed to be judging. He was Scottish, red-headed, and very hairy. Thick small red curls broke out all over his head, like a gas fire, whenever he took off his topee, and all over his neck and his hands, his forearms and even his fingers. It was as if he was alight. He wafted in and out of the gunsite, burning gently, all day long, apparently knowing nothing, when questioned, of what was going on, doing less, and caring not at all.

Yesterday evening the Exercise was over just in time for Douglas to return, and for both of us to grab a motorbike and make a dash for the dress rehearsal - with soloists and orchestra for the first time - of The Matthew Passion. It was the shoddiest and most ill-disciplined dress rehearsal ever anywhere, for anything. Half the soloists were not even there, which was pretty casual of them, the choir was totally confused with the orchestra, the orchestra with the choir, and the conductor with everything. So were Douglas and I, and we had left the gunsite without even having had any tea.

Today, the PERFORMANCE. And to avoid any pangs of hunger, we had an enormous tea of eggs and bacon, and even had the foresight to take some peppermint creams with us, partly as a reserve food supply, but mostly in sheer self-defence. Yesterday evening, when our darker neighbours either side of us opened their mouths to roar out their hallelujahs, we were almost, to mix our metaphors, drowned in a hot gale of curry. The performance was a bit more adequately good than we could have possibly hoped after last night’s rehearsal!

The Regiment, presumably to cheer us up for Christmas, laid on Regimental Christmas Eve Sports today. But it ran them on some wretched regulation, army, competitive system which took all the fun and humanity out of them, but in the evening, with most of the men relaxed and fairly tight and enjoying themselves, I enjoyed myself too. I like my blokes, I positively like them.

And so to Christmas day, and missing you and it at home, a personal misery was running pretty high. It seemed to infect the troop as well, with other more particular miseries. RHQ, never very popular with the blokes of course, are now billeted too near to us, and the arrangement had to be that they were to come and share our Christmas dinner, so the Colonel was here too. Unhappily, when he entered the Mess most of the men cheered which was more than OK, but one, who, somehow was already drunk, stood up and shouted abuse. He was quickly escorted out of the place, but it made the meal a misery, and the whole day for me, because it was one of my men. A shame. The Colonel was very upset, hurt hard in his feelings, because in spite of his sense of discipline, few officers have greater affection for his men, most of whom come from his own county. Felt very much involved myself, for I bear the Colonel, for many odd reasons, greater affection than most. 73 Further misery in the evening, two boxes of cigars, bought especially for the men, and also twenty-three plates borrowed to feed them on, had somehow also disappeared, presumably right out of the camp, and not by any of the men. A sour end to a sour day. I gained a leave three days after Boxing Day, and was very glad of it after such a Christmas. It is for three weeks as well!

Quit the gun site and its messy army life two days ago, leaving Madras station after supper. Stood for a moment watching the night corrupt the day into an astonishingly putrescent green and orange evening, even while I gathered quiet and excitement for the journey to Kodai. It was difficult. Christmas was some sort of trial in which everyone had failed; couldn’t drag myself properly out of the sea of troop miseries onto even the smallest island of pleasure. After the train, the bus journey was all remembered rather than lived again.... the same twisting road, the same horn filling the same valleys with its goose-like honking, the same trees progressively thickening from scatter to continuous wood, the same orange trees, the same solid hilltop touching and vanishing into the cloudy heavens. The closer and closer to heavenly mists, the cooler the air, and the further from hell. On the opposite hills, waterfalls looked motionless, sticky and glucose.

This leave, in order to be selfishly rid of hosts, I booked into a hotel. Not a large one, but one large enough to be lonely in. And that’s nice. First evening watched with pleasure the feet of the Indian lad who came to light my fire. A fire, a fire, a wood fire! He knelt away from me with his kindling, and the soles of his feet came underside up, startlingly pale, and the backs of his toes became a row of small, pale, wrinkled walnuts. Delicious. And now, this morning, someone beyond sight from the window where I am sitting is using a spade, and there is a ringing of metal crunching into earth. It’s you, and simultaneously, there is the pine-scented smoke of your bonfire drifting aslant and across the morning sun, drifting in a soft glare of pale blue bonfire smoke, going up and disappearing like all these words, words, words. Intolerable words desperate to distance and bridge this ‘great gap of time’ between us.

It has rained for two days, and again today. This morning but thinly, with just a light muslin mist. Everything standing stock still. This evening it strengthened considerably to a vertical downpour and a noisy roar.

This morning, thank heavens, the sun. Real sun. But in it, this place becomes unreal, and one likes it too much. 7000' up in the hills of southern India, cool, well treed, well housed, and far too much like England. Quite a large population of English too, but a small English village in size. We have tea-rooms, a tennis club, one hotel, English cottages and houses, even a postman, a post office, and a vicar. And, of course, all that cauldron of malice and intrigue under the sweet superficiality of the surface. Amazingly, there was even a Tennis Tournament on, so I wandered into the Tennis Club to watch. It was exact, A Tennis Tournament to end all tennis tournaments. And everything was exactly right. The club house and the courts are built into a hill and things take place pleasantly on different levels. The spectators on the high level and the courts lower down not just on one level, but two. Everything moves, but seems wonderfully set in good old English aspic, except that, on the higher level, the spectators occasionally 74 seem to come alive with a polite, very English ripple of applause from pink hands gently clapping. The players down below are like puppets, strings flexing and unflexing their arms and legs, very small in the distance. It’s the sun that’s alive, and all over everything, really warm and festival after the last few days, and it makes the light on the water of the lake so level and liberal and wide. Perhaps the Tournament is rather like Private View day at a gallery. The centre of the whole afternoon is not really the pictures, or, in this case, the tennis, but the social chit-chat. “My dear, but I ALWAYS use Atora, don’t you?” The fat, the thin and the furry have not come to watch and cheer. The air is thicker with gossip, not the vocabulary of tennis. I heard “I’m sixty-nine, you know, and I told my Doctor straight-“ and “You’ve heard about Dorothy, haven’t you, dear”. Fine. But the most perfect thing here is the Tennis Club Secretary. He’s straight out of Alice in Wonderland. He’s an oldish, whimsical-looking chap, with a mop of absolutely white hair which seems to divide his head into two pieces. White hair and vivid red face. He wears a lemony-coloured waist-coat, and an old tweed jacket which is far too big for him, and the elbows and ends of the sleeves are covered with leather. He pretends to be very much officiously in charge of things, of everything, and keeps ringing an enormous hand-bell which he carries everywhere with him. Grinning fatuously, every now and then he rings the bell and calls out “interval” or “Change ends, please” or “Next Games please”. And, indeed, believe it or not, as with the White Rabbit, he actually has a watch and chain attached to his waistcoat pocket. He takes it out, looks at it, puts it back, and at the same time he rings his bell, to which, of course, nobody pays any attention. The conversation about suet might falter and hang in the air for a second, and then plunge rapidly, with renewed vigour, on and on and on its grisly way again, but the catalogue of all the ills old age is heir to doesn’t hesitate for a second. The fat, the fifty, the thin, the furred talk on, talk on.

Today is a good deal colder. Curious to notice the precautions two peoples of two different climates take against the cold. We put on another pair of socks to keep the feet warm and don’t bother with a hat. The Indian puts another shawl round his head and shoulders but forgets about his feet!

With a rather nice Navy bloke I’d met in the hotel, decided to move from the hotel to two rooms in some kind of club. Found it was considerably cheaper, but hadn’t realised it was semi-religious, and now, only two days later we’ve been asked to share one room to make room for a padre who is turning up a bit unexpectedly and has some sort of priority over the club rooms. He has turned up now, and we wouldn’t have minded if he had been a reasonable padre, but he’s a gloomy horror, a holy horror. Immensely thin, with a nose as long as a suspension bridge, attached at one end, and drooping to nothing at the other. Underneath that the only things visible are four rabbit teeth, two up, two down, and, in the faint distance, a mean, blue, very receding chin. He looks like some saintly rodent.

The Kodai weather has collapsed again. Several days of rain, several days of reading and trying to draw. But at last this evening it eased off for a bit, and I walked to the Shola falls, in real spate, and not just a trickle after the torrents of the last few days. Fine. A black, glassy-smooth transparency noticed just before the drop over the edge as the water fell, then below, it split, burst and exploded on an outcrop of rocks. It fell on, scarred with enclosed air, pulled out into long tassels of aeration, and hurt to its quick, roared ceaselessly. A deep bull roar, too continuous to have

75 even the smallest echo. There was a smell of soaked wood everywhere and the trees were still shedding water from their leaves. Was happily soaked.

But the next three days Kodai reformed and was sun blest, sun-bewitched. Spent hours brooding, lying in the shadow of wild rhododendron bushes vivid with scarlet blooms on the edge of Kodai’s hills, contemplating the vast plains of southern India seven thousand feet below, my head occasionally enveloped with the mists of a sunny cloud. One is so high that this dazzling stuff comes at you from below. The unbelieving eyes watch a kind of miracle. A solid cloud is just a pack of airy puff. And it grows and divides, multiplies and dwindles, faints and curls and clings to the crests of these hills, or to the tops of trees, even bushes, with slow furls and folds of mist, whose lethargy, caught in a sudden upward draught of air, fades faster than smoke, being thinner, and falters from a misty mass to nothing, in a second, into air. That sense of solid stillness seen from the ground is bewitchingly false and fallible. Up so high here, unbelievably inside them, they are just a ceaseless folding and unfolding flux that flares and flags itself out in huge, lovely, failing folds. A wild soft agitated beauty beyond sense. It doesn’t last. Neither will this peace and beauty here for much longer either. But just while it does, it’s good to have, to hold. It’s where the injury of war and personal loss gets so diminished it almost fades into the flux itself. Perhaps, in the end, this war will do the same.

This evening, one of the last, we had music, mostly Bach, and about midnight it was Bach and baked beans, sausages and mushrooms on toast! But without you, it was all a mocking forgery.

One of the miraculous aspects of leave, let alone the idea that, in war, you can have one at all, is that there is still a possibility you can actually be rid of the army, and war, and gunnery, and men, and find yourself still a person with personal problems which have meaning and pleasure as well as misery; forgotten moods thronging around you like a flock of released pigeons, and all without the inevitable mournful modification of a parade in ten minutes, or a detail of ammunition to reckon with, or the imminent visit of a bloody Brigadier. Always you are in check or under rein. And one pays for all those happy pigeons, all the same. There comes also time to think, and inside the shine of a friendly sun, the dissolving clouds, the wild, free birds, back floods, at times, even more strongly, the sense of loss. If only the acknowledgement of loss, the acceptance of it, ended the matter! If only it did not constantly renew itself in all these happier things.

Have actually painted all the daylight through, these last few days, but even working like this amounts to the same thing as working on the gunsite. It does not bring the wished for oblivion. It leaves the same gritty deposit of misery and failure. Am concentrating on getting down the beginnings of as many things as possible, to take away and finish later, anywhere, if ever I get time here, or I ever get home again.

The last day of leave, and in brilliant sun. Perfect temperature, unhappily to speed the parting guest. Had all the windows open for breakfast. Rewarded by the mighty droning of a single, giant, black bee, actually entering the room. And outside, past the delicious steam of my coffee, there was the friendly sun, and the even amorous clouds, much closer than the sun. Huge butterflies fluttered and landed and altered the shape and colour of the flowers they settled on. The sound of English 76 children’s’ voices carried across the quiet, level surface of the lake. All the continual holiday of it, except that today it ends. In the late afternoon came the steep journey down the ghat, away from the miracle of this almost happy dream, back to the muck of the military machine. The dream faded as we sank slowly into the plains. The pleasure of Kodai’s weather vanished as the air altered from cool, to warm, to warmer, to hot. At the railway station the air was thick with heat, and no longer even moved, and it is still January. The train was late and crowded. Found it impossible to sleep and just hung out of the window. Night-time and speed made it a bit cooler, and I could indulge in my favourite train pastime, watching the bright tumbling of the stars in the filthy water of the ditches alongside the permanent way.

In the morning, out of the train and the station, into the milling crowds of Madras, then back to the gunsite, back to the friendliness of Douglas, the friendliness of the men. In the afternoon, inspected the changes. Saw the new cook, missed the men gone, greeted the men newly come. There was new work done, old work cleared away. And now tonight, the news is all of the new Russian offensive. It is more than something to be kept cheerful after a three weeks leave.

Our dismal airmail postal service has achieved a new dismal record. It used to take two months and a few days. Now, honestly, it has taken to taking three months and fourteen days. And we pay more for that privilege as well. The price of airmail stamps has gone up out here. The sea-mail still takes only two months and a week, and that apparently costs you only 2½d. Thank God someone is asking questions in Parliament about it. Only because the weather for the last few days has been so unusually cool can one keep cheerful, and because it is cool, everything seems to be wearing an extra drift or grain of colour. Madras has looked almost beautiful. The admission is startling.

Have had an unexpected letter from brother Dennis, from somewhere in Africa. Almost as if he were next door. He is painting on his leaves, as well. He has a marvellous climate, but wrote sadly of the slow run up to Christmas. Said he was going, on Christmas Eve, to creep into a corner, drink to each member of our large family separately, several times in turn, and very properly arrange to have someone to put him to bed!

Douglas and I, in this extraordinary war of ours, took to our Bach Choir again, last night. This year they’ve decided to do Elijah, which is not quite so much to our taste, but, on our way back to the gun position, because the night itself was so bright, and yet also so soft and beautiful with moon and cloud, we decided on the spur of the moment to run down the short distance to Eliot’s Beach, to the sea. We parked the bike and walked down from the dunes over the moonlit sand to the sea’s edge. We sat down in a silence and a desertedness that were almost surrealist. We were watched coldly by the bright moon in equal silence. We took in that sense of utter silence and utter loneliness. It was meditation for several moments, but when we looked up and got up and turned to go, behold, there were at least a dozen, (it seemed a multitude) of natives standing just behind us. All standing there, first on one leg, then on the other, watching us with the same intensity as we had been watching the moon and the sea. They were apparitions. They had appeared, I swear, from the very sand itself.

77 Have started reading T E Lawrence’s translation of the Odyssey. It’s wonderfully alive, crowded, rich. It reads as if it were written yesterday and yet keeps all the wonderful sense of its being fable. There’s a mythical and trance-like quality about its remote and monstrously unlikely story, but he gives it a sort of public eloquence and a racy choice of words that yet mix magnificently. “She went, suddenly and elusively, as a sea-bird goes.” This, on the exit of a Goddess. Lawrence enjoys it, and himself, and his enjoyment infects. You can, sometimes, catch him almost cheating, but hilariously, tongue-in-cheek, talking of tackling a man low, and making frightful puns about destroying Troy. But he can also be very serious with something that seems to affect him in his own personal memory. Hunger, thirst, pain, exhaustion. “I call that pain endurable if it makes me mourn day long from the heart’s great ache, but yet permits sleep of nights.” That might, surely, have come straight from the Seven Pillars, and talked straight deep down into one’s own desperation. And sometimes he almost seems to quote in his translation, from Shakespeare? “Odysseus sank into the arms of sleep which ravelled out the tangles of his mind.” and, from the Bible, scandalously, “Make it their last supper, Lord.” I like, too, the good old Homeric epithets...., the ‘wine-dark’ sea, and Odysseus ‘The various-minded man’. I’ll bring it back for you. Promise!

Occasionally the military rush rises to a mad crescendo, and I have to be two persons, switching in one to deal with the bloody army, and another, when I can, for living with, keeping alive. But I can’t control the proportions. The army needs so much, and there is so little for oneself, which is for you. And it becomes less and less easy to switch the army off. So that often, even when there’s time, I can press the switch down to get near you, and nothing happens. Why do results have to be so capricious? Why isn’t there some form of conscious control? Or, rather, why can’t I find it? It isn’t that I can’t be still, if that is the first step. I can, occasionally. The problem arrives even when I’ve got some form of stillness, and the switch is pressed and then nothing happens. The current doesn’t arrive to a conscious call. More often it arrives out of the blue without the slightest conscious effort. And sometimes just assuming the trappings of awareness induces the reality. Certainly it helps. Then later, if I’m lucky, then the mood flows in, catches fire, and excitement tumbles into images in a race of words to be out and away, generally in your direction. But I would like to be lucky more often. What is it that sets the heart, the mood and the mind on their way to that lucky exuberance? Are there no texts? No readable experiments? Shouldn’t it be taught in schools, universities? A Chair of Awareness? A Faculty of Happiness? Heavens! Imagine it even being discussed by the Establishment at Oxford or Cambridge! Tonight, for example, I listened again to Bach’s Christ Lag in Todesbanden and was immediately open and near weeping to the somehow almost lovely desperation of its misery; yet, yesterday, when first heard, it did not stir at all. Clearly not a failure in the power of the music, but some lack of something in myself. Why? Why?

A lot of time wasted, then, at last, time off to renew acquaintance with Chowdhury. His wife was there this time too. Gentle, slender to the point of frailty, and still reserved as ever. There is a queer sadness about their relationship which besets the heart and saddens me, even in face of their obvious affection, and in the very teeth of Chowdhury’s enormous humour and vitality.

78 From where I sit in the Office this afternoon, I can see the moon. It is large, but very pale. It is nervous. It is an unwanted intruder, somehow, in the golden day.

I’m reading some Eliot, and, further to this here frightful Faculty of Happiness, or Chair of Awareness, wonder whether he would be the sort of chap to take it on. Can’t think of anyone more likely to understand, and therefore, of course, reject it! Can you bear a long quote full of his sensibility, and all his usual hesitations and qualifications? “I know, for instance, that some forms of ill-health, debility or anaemia may, (if other circumstances, are favourable) produce an efflux of poetry in a way approaching the condition of automatic writing.... What one writes in this way may succeed in standing the examination of a more normal state of mind; it gives me the impression, as I have just said, of having undergone a long incubation, though we do not know until the shell breaks what kind of an egg we have been sitting on. To me it seems, that at these moments, which are characterised by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it, what happens is something negative; that is to say, not ‘inspiration’ as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers - which tend to re-form very quickly. Some obstruction is momentarily whisked away. The accompanying feeling is less like what we know as positive pleasure, than a sudden relief from an intolerable burden. I agree with Brémond, and perhaps go even further, in finding that this disturbance of our quotidian character which results in an incantation, an outburst of words which we hardly recognise as our own (because of the effortlessness), is a very different thing from mystical illumination……Some finer minds, indeed, may operate differently; I cannot think of Shakespeare or Dante as having been dependent upon such capricious releases.” There. And I wonder what would have happened to Shakespeare and Dante in the army?

Had lovely airmail letters, full of yourself, the children and dear Eastcourt, today. But they had taken four months to get here. Surely this is breach of contract. And yet one fusses about this tiny bit of misery when, in Russia, the whole world is being saved. To Chowdhury’s to try and draw. Found him vigorously using a stirrup- pump upon one of his large water-colours propped against a wall in his garden, swilling it down with the water as hard as he could go. Turner would have approved. It is obviously the equivalent of soaking one in a bath.

As Orderly Officer, had to go into Madras for various duties, but managed to include a visit to the bookshop. It produced Letters on Poetry from W B Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley. I also got some A E. of whom Yeats’s wife said to W B, “He is the nearest to a saint you or I will ever meet. You are a better poet, but no saint. I suppose one has to choose.”

Walking out into the night tonight, there were three or four dark, vague, crumbling floors of cloud with only a few stars in between. They were twinkling only very weakly. Worse, from the men’s huts came two radio programmes, different ones, clashing in a dreadful mess of noise in my head. Men like us will never be magnificent, will we? Men, like Yeats or Eliot might. But not us. We’re, surely, such passive, noisy, shabby little instruments of ignorance.

79 Still with Yeats’ letters every other day or so. His tremendous poetry doesn’t disappear in his letters, but they bring him, every now and then, down to earth a bit, making him a bit more reachable as a person. Like catching him shaving, or asleep with his mouth open, or with his trousers down, something which brings the great man down off his pedestal, making him, for a moment, vulnerable, approachable, and yet a bit greater for the glimpse of his vulnerability.

Your letters tell me that February with you filled your ditches, fouled your feet with mud, was cold, and stated bluntly that nothing should grow. Here it’s probably the loveliest month. Comparatively cool, many more clouds, loud with birds, and today mazed all over with a shivering mass of huge Swallow-tailed butterflies. Wild, grey-green parrots infest the trees like chattering leaves, and the all day long-legged clouds stride across the sky, but in the evening they all heap towards sunset in all the spring-orchard-colours I can remember.

Night. Windless. Faintly warm, and full of fireflies. They are like loose, displaced stars. The image feels exact. The quality of their light is exactly that of stars. Fierce, small, brilliant, concentrated, twinkling. They are a very delicious vertigo.

The war, the bombing and military routine have sent several moons flying away. It is now very hot and summer. Your airgraph tells me today that when you wrote it, you were sleeping at last in silence for a change. And I remembered that English summer silence at once, and held it up against the night here, grating in incessant noise . A harsh, continuous factory of crickets, the vulgar sexy slang of the million frogs, the short shock statements of the nightjar, the far too frequent yowl and mad laughter of the jackals. But at least tonight this moon is in its first quarter and looks happily virgin, the deceitful old harlot. But it looks lucky all the same. The Russians all this time have been containing the Germans and then gradually pushing them back. Everything, like the moon, in its infancy. The young moon foretells, will the old moon deliver? In spite of the Russians, we are more schooled, actually, to expect disaster. The routine day, that, in retrospect, destroys huge periods of time. Wake in the morning sometimes early, often on time. Sometimes quickly and alert at once. Sometimes dragging out of sleep slowly, staying sometimes for minutes on end half still in its drift, and even when at last up, it still hangs round me, dripping from me, like water from a bather. Whichever way awake, the colours of the day are caught in the mesh of my mosquito net like fish. I lie and watch their gradual change of tone until the Orderly Sergeant shouts his ‘Wakey, Wakey’ to the men. A few moments later and he is calling morning roll. Each successive name rips into the air and a released pigeon homes into each owner’s successive ‘here’. This is always still in the half-light and only gradually does the more general light declare more general things through the lilacs and the pale white mesh of my net. The mesh softens the shape of hard realities - the corner of Tote No 5, the eaves of its roof, the whitewash on the walls of the ablutions, the rise of the already hot, cloudless sun. Sounds arrive to the ears, and register. The near and far birds sing their loud and faint perspectives, across which comes the sudden shattering thunder of hooves, as the first Arab horses rush past, smashing the delicate sounds of the birds as if they were smashing their eggs. It’s the early morning training gallop. The thunder makes the earth ring hollow. On the heels of its vanishing comes the sound of men shouting 80 and laughing as they shave and wash, coupled with the sound of water running into buckets. Time runs into the buckets too, and the heart aches and misery gathers, to open the day with longing on the bed, exactly as yesterday night it closed. I get up and shave into the tigerish sun, already showing its claws. I say good morning to the Orderly Sergeant on his way back to his Mess, and enjoy with excitement the next bunch of thundering horses. White horses, Arab thoroughbreds, whose long pale-white tails are sheer magic, with the low hot sun behind them flaming them into candlelight, flaring out and tapering to nothing behind them. I shave, wash, clean teeth and brush my hair. The order is invariable. The next man will do it in reverse order, perhaps, but just as invariably. I dislike shaving most. There are few defences for an exile and pseudo soldier staring at himself in a mirror at 5.30 in the morning, in India. While I am shaving, and somehow never at any other time, the melancholy old newspaper coolie arrives, and stands for a few moments in silence while he salaams, and is miserable, and smiles, in turns. I gently mock his salaams to me with my own to him; almost to the ground I go, because that’s what he does, and I chat at him, almost as with a child, in a language he hardly understands. He is impossibly ugly and helpless and hopeless, and, like so many others of them here, fills you with revulsion for that sense of abasement (it isn’t just humility) which they all manage so naturally to exude. I can’t share that with him, but he can smile, thank goodness, and that commands the half-respect that forbearance always gives. So I smile too. At least we have something to share. I suppose he is what they call out here, an untouchable. In western terms, a strange culture. From the moment the papers arrive, the day is not my own. It is war and politics over breakfast, then it is time for morning Parade, which I dread and dislike immensely. I inspect the men, putting on a fierce false face of authority and have to chivvy them for ridiculously trivial divagations from the official regulations on dress. I’m sure I do not convince. Certainly not myself. We march off this parade to our various daily duties, the main body of us to Line Up and Gun Drill, the odds and sods to the cookhouse and other fatigues. At the guns I falter around in a maze of metal and ammunition, and orders and figures, with a flash of fierceness over important avoidable mistakes, although about most things I’m afraid I keep only a begrudged amount of necessary artillery knowledge, but take much delight in certain moments of Gun Drill, which are always peacefully aesthetic. Second Test Point - when the four long slender barrels of the guns swing up and round, each picking up the movement from its previous neighbour like dancers till all four end tall and vertical, stay static (and phallic?) for at least two minutes while reports from gun pit to command post are bandied backwards and forwards in the air like birdsong or shuttlecocks, and then at the next command break their unanimous tension, and twisting and turning, again like dancers, all swing rhythmically in succession to their various defensive stand-by bearings, that the site be ready for the low-level attack that never comes. After Gun Drill comes Care and Maintenance of everything except ourselves. Then Training of Cadres where NCOs bark swift orders at the slow wits of the young trainees, humped and bewildered over the enormous complications of the latest Predictor. This started and watched for a while, I’m picked up by the Orderly Sergeant, and together we inspect the kit-layouts in all the men’s huts. We finish at the Cookhouse. “Everything all right, Bombardier?” is my usual formula. And when he says “Yes, sir”, we nose round finding several dixies dirty, some baking tins unwashed, several screws missing from a burner making it unsafe, the sugar supply not covered for the mass of flies to see, to settle and shit on, then I get angry. Flies 81 carry so much that’s dangerous in India. He is, I think, the only NCO in the troop who ever succeeds in making me angry. He’s a goodish cook, but so lazy with the hygiene, and always makes the anger worse by blaming others. By this time, having been called several times from the other end of the camp to answer the telephone, it is break. Everything knocks off for half-an-hour, except, always, the phone, and we all have a cup of tea. After that we start again, but knock off again at twelve because the army says it is too hot then for British troops to work, and it is. Try Motor Transport inspection before twelve in the, er, ordinary heat of the day, crawling about under the lorries in a stink of diesel, sweating as they say, like a pig, which I do. This done I get back to the Office, while the NCOs carry on, and write out the necessary details and orders for the day and some for tomorrow, and answer the phone. The stop at twelve is for lunch. A good break, and everything stops, except of course the incessant phone and we don’t start again until three o’clock when Army Regulations say it is cool enough to start again, which is real bosh. Actually it is even hotter. But lunch is good to have, in spite of the mass of mail which has to be censored, the leave passes for the day to sign, tomorrow’s orders to get ready, and countless committees, and the phone, the wretched phone, which scratches at the texture of the day like some persistent louse. After lunch, there is the smart leave party to inspect, the guard to change and mount, and endless more details from RHQ. All this until tea, and after tea, Gun drill and Line-up again, everything exactly as it was in the morning, the same drill, the same guns, the same men, the same orders, except, perhaps, a slightly different barometric pressure to alter in the Predictor; but luckily, if there are any at all, at least the clouds are different, and, on the ground, the shadows are all reversed and running miles long because the sun is so low so early, and the whole thing is just about tolerable, and I stand and stare and watch and think, and occasionally shout. The rest of the remaining ruins of another day are my own. With an immense effort of the will, I can sometimes read or write. After supper, the evening paper comes, and I fill up with war and politics again, which is awful, but I can’t and don’t want to do without them, for last year the news broke up all concentration in despair, but this year, the Russians are breaking it up in hope - for Europe, at least. Not here. Afterwards, I try to shove all military matters out of my mind, trying to settle to Shaw or Yeats, until, in a little while, to bed. Back to this strange white seclusion of the mosquito net, like a pigeon to its loft, to lie for a little while in longing and misery, and then to vanish in sleep, which is how the day began. With differences, and very occasional rewards, the repetition is the same. Eheu! Eheu!

And behind all this talk of routine, I watch, on the world’s real stage, as if the muslin of my mosquito net was some form of theatre Safety Curtain separating me from reality, yes, I just watch, watch, (still schooled to disasters) Germany retake Kharkov, and ourselves rebuffed so easily in Burma.

Evening in India is the only time. It’s the shadow of a shade cooler and therefore an immense benison, out of all proportion, and sometimes, even, a rare royalty of evening clouds sends its coloured embassy to the dying sun. And, on the earth, the green leaves, the green grass, the green of the trees are sun-drunk, tipsy-gold in the royal but stricken light. The evening is full of the purple and the gold and the velvet of the court.

82 Have been discussing faith with the padre. You must have faith, one is told, by almost everyone, padre, priest, politician, and probably by nine out of every ten men or women in the street. But not often by poet or painter? The need for it stems, no doubt, from the long hold the Church has held upon our education, which surely incriminates most people, and certainly the Church, for not being impartial witnesses. But what is ‘faith’? And why should it be necessary? It is on a par with that ‘aim in life’ which was all the rage when I was at school. I often used to wonder who invented that absurd ‘Aim in life’. All the school speeches I ever heard at school were full of it. It used to worry me stiff. I didn’t have one, and felt as if I’d only got one leg, or something. And yet I knew when I was happy, and even had the insight to know that I was happy when furthest from having any aim at all. Now an equal bewilderment is transferred to this problem of ‘faith’. I A Richards refers to Eliot’s The Waste Land as effecting “a complete severance between poetry and all beliefs”. But surely Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism made a nonsense of that, because, underneath The Waste Land, if ever that did sever his poetry and Eliot from belief, or faith, lay something that bound him closer to a stronger and more limiting belief than ever. (Not that Eliot would admit the limiting effects. Presumably he would argue that he was freer.) Surely the same fate isn’t waiting for you and me on our lower level. One should submit to less and less. At one time I think I got as far as submitting to this (equally absurd?) faith in the good, in the goodness of man, in his progress, in man’s obvious love for man. In the present circumstances, and looking at recent history with a slightly less rose-coloured pair of eyes, there seems little enough evidence of such nonsense, and even less for belief in the existence of a personal God - probably the largest holy red-herring ever drawn across man’s bloody trail, even though some of the effects of such teaching have been so good. Or does one even doubt that? And is man’s obvious love of man just his love for himself? And where do you run to if you run from faith? Is just some sort of moral integrity enough? Surely it would have to include, wouldn’t it, some notion of what happiness is. And what is it? Any more than a momentary excitement of almost, to use the enemy’s terms, holy awe? And recognising the importance of such moments, how do you set about having some more? Finding them, and learning with infinite patience and gradual reorientation to multiply them, coupled with the necessary willingness to compromise with others’ notions of the same thing, where are you then? Meanwhile, there is also the problem of necessarily finding a place for yourself in society, that huge frustrating octopus. What price is it proper for the individual to pay for his stake as a citizen? Quite a percentage of his rights as an individual, surely, if he gets so much in return? But they both, also, surely, have to keep squaring off at each other. The price could get too high.

In a long-drawn-out flurry of military activity, we have had to move gun- sites. About a hundred and fifty times worse than moving house. We have moved from the gun-site on the racecourse right out into the wilds of beyond, and back into tents. Will miss severely the comfort of electric fans, the pleasure of the horses and their lovely pale tails flaring out like transparent pennants against the early sun, but, at least, the troop is much, much further away from RHQ, and that has many advantages. So does being the only officer on site, except that I can no longer get an occasional evening off to see Chowdhury and draw.

I dreamt of two paintings by Courbet last night. Neither of them in any book on Courbet that I have ever seen before. But both of them were so good they must 83 have been by him, and not me! Is that possible? I hadn’t dreamt for weeks. Sleep has never been so dull and all because, I think, we have supper so early on this gunsite, about six o’clock, that there is therefore no digestive process left for making dreams later. Last night I ate some delicious small cakes late, and behold, the two amazing Courbets. I am now determined to have my cake and eat it late every night, and hope to get some more Courbets, but would prefer Degas or Cezanne, or, better than any masterpiece in art, yourself.

It didn’t happen.

Despatched to you today the second Tinker’s Parcel, stuffed full of the requested hairpins, Kirby grips, ordinary pins, safety pins, needles, elastic tape, combs, ribbon, and even a packet of Brillos, but happy as I am to be able to send you such practical help, I’d rather be a lover than a peddler, and send you myself. What an unusual and entrancing war, in a way, we are having, my dear, - except for the heartache in between, except for the heartache.

I will never make a genuine officer, thank God! One of the men at Gun Drill this evening was wearing, almost as a comic challenge to me I swear, a really highly comical hat. Very unmilitary. It had clearly been a great success with the rest of the troop. He was over on Gun No 3, so, through the megaphone from the Command Post, I shouted “What the hell are you wearing, Gunner Andrews.” Came the shouted reply “A hat, sir.” Liking it very much, I shouted “A what?” “A hat, sir.” “That is not a regulation army hat.” “No, sir.” “Then why are you wearing it?” “Thought it might be a nice change, sir, I liked it.” I liked it too, for, as you know, I have a taste for comic hats. Clearly I should have sent him off parade, but instead, fortunately being the only officer on the site, I told him of my dilemma through the megaphone and agreed to compromise. So, much to the whole troop’s glee, including mine, he stayed, the hat stayed, and Gun Drill, for a change, was pretty hilarious, with a proper curtain at the end of the performance. He removed his hat very courteously to me, and I bowed courteously to him.

Summer, and so much hope too, are icumen in. Tunisia is a preparation, for what? The first surrender of German forces is the beginning of, what? But Germany still has so much power, and the schooling for disaster still holds.

Even on this change of gun positions, and right out here in the wild, I had still managed to retain my unbelievable upright piano! It stands in my tent, its legs in tins of water to restrain unmusical ants; I even manage to play it every now and then. But strange things are happening, I mean stranger things even than actually having a piano in a wartime tent anyhow. The night before last, when I was writing to you, I was astonished to hear what I thought was a note struck. I looked up and over. Nothing else happened, and I thought it had been just a bit of hallucination. I had been reading some early Yeats. Or it might have been a lizard. Or it might not have happened at all. But last night I was actually woken up, and not by just one note, but by several. Not a chord, but a discord. I got up, went over to the piano and investigated. I opened the top lid, and there, by heaven, inside was a small rat, and it was even making a nest, looking very young and feminine (a teenager?) and startled, and rather beautiful. I had a time of it, trying to get her out with a long cane, but in the end succeeded. She gave me such a look over her shoulder, a sort of damn you look, or was it all frustration at not being much of a musician yet? 84 Apart from dealing with beautiful, young, feminine rats in pianos, I’ve been reading, when I could, mostly within the protection of the mosquito net of which I get fonder and fonder and which allows me so much pleasure and mystery, some very early Yeats. Try him and see if he doesn’t manage to shake your confidence. It is amazing stuff, and against all reason, they almost convince. If I read much more, I will be in danger of believing, ridiculously for me, in fairies, or, at least, his fairies. Fairies at the bottom of my gun site? Well, not much different from young, rather beautiful, feminine rats in my piano! I believe Yeats managed it, early, nearly. But implicitly? It’s a dreadful Celtic con, really. A very clever con. His later poems seem to be diametrically opposite. Everybody rightly prefers them. They are actual, real, hard-headed. ‘Public’ he called them with their clipped, blunt, everyday words and images, with a precision and a fire which is miles and miles from fairies. So, the period of enchantment, no. The period of disenchantment, yes. But why?

We are into another period of Mobile Exercises, again presaging what? But it is now shifting the guns about, and shifting camp, and getting the drill right for doing it fast and often. Several days and nights out. Picnic suppers under the stars, thin, far away, drowned in the hard light of the moon. We had birds all night long as well, ringed in concentric rings of song all round each camp. English cows, of course, are inquisitive, ringing the strange intruder in their field with a friendly, baffled but persistent stare. Indian night birds seem to do so too. The morning of the first night out we all awoke absolutely soaked with a very heavy morning dew. Nobody, in the warm night, had thought to put our clothes under cover. We had to put them on, literally, soaking wet. Today, carrying out reconnaissance through wild outlying country villages, some of which had obviously never seen a European ever before, let alone a stampede of military vehicles. They were terrified, especially the children. If we stopped, they ran. The whites of their startled eyes vanished into their huts, and then appeared slowly again out of the gloom. If we stayed for a while, they gradually crept out again, warily at first, then if we smile enough, they would muster in a crowd round us, watching everything we did with that absorbed, solemn concentration, which seems to be the gift of children only. There seemed to be thirty or forty to every four huts, and they only broke their silence when we left, following the trucks down the road, laughing, yelling, and chanting the usual chant of ‘buckshee, sahib, buckshee, buckshee.’

Back, after a week, to the gun position yesterday. Gift of a late Reveille, this morning. A recompense for the last few days and nights of exertion. A day off, in Madras, in the afternoon, visiting men in hospital and getting a few new books to further my sojourn in the wilderness. Found Divide The Desolation, about the Bronte family. It seemed a suitable title, so was an obvious choice; and I also got a cynical, brutal, but fascinating book by Louis Céline, translated from French into American slang, which I started reading before, at, and during, and after my solitary supper. Condemning the values, liking the lucidity and the technique.

Quiet, cool, almost too lovely outside this evening in the dusk. An immense misery settling over everything, like the dew falling so readily, and drenching everything. Indian dew is so good at that. Walked down to the river. The still fairly bright light fading from blue to silver, silver to emerald, then emerald to indigo, and indigo to night. The misery refused to fade. Low-flying birds doubled their colours 85 in the water, and went off single again in the air, their plundering beaks snapping insects from the air, audibly. Fish rose, dimpling and darkening and staining the still bright water. So did the misery. A million frogs bellowed their froggy enjoyment somewhere at the edge of everywhere. Got lost in this half-world of half grief, half-delight, bewildered by the way they twine about each other. Left without you, to return to another solo supper, the misery still uppermost.

Yet another vast Mobile Exercise is on. We’re again out in the wilds. Everything for several days has been a strong wind blowing everywhere a huge disastrous dust. No rain for at least a month, so everything that moves makes extra dust. The eyes, throat and nose are sore with it, and everything that possesses movement moves with a varying number of long trails and flags and pennants of dust behind it, at its heels. Animals four, human beings two, military lorries a huge procession, and the monkeys everywhere have three, one even for the tail that also drags in the dust so comically behind. But nothing else is comical. Each dreadful day, the rush and the dust were day-long. Only at night, after the guns were set, was one allowed to drag oneself on to a camp bed and realise that the fagged out mind could still, all the same, have enough energy left to go daintily about the stars, among them. Perhaps there might have been an odd moment or two, provided you looked strictly to the front when the countryside was rather fine to look at, but behind the convoy, everything was covered with this storm of dust. Far too fast, we went past one Indian temple which had a pale green moat of water all round it, and a medieval air of peacocks, swans, and huge monkeys. It looked exactly like one of those Indian miniatures in the British Museum. The rest of the countryside consisted of occasional eruptive hills more like large blisters, with, at their feet, a rubble of large brown boulders as if bubbled from the blister itself and run pell-mell down from the top and piled at the bottom to a halt, like cooled lava, their cold slate colour opposite to the very rich warm greens and yellows of the vivid trees and the flooded paddy fields. But such transitory delight is not available for more than a moment or two to the rushed-off-his-feet low-ranking officer. We think we are being overworked! And we have done nothing! But enough, for the moment, to make me think that, at any moment, I could insult a senior officer just for the sake of a night or two’s rest in clink!

I’m now even nearer to trying, not too hard, to get into that clink. I’m writing this to you by the light of a half-hidden hurricane lamp, which, on this exercise, is forbidden, but must put down something to you for fear that in another day or two I will not be able to write at all, or even exist. I could be, I suppose, but won’t be, court-martialled. I suppose there are some people who actually do affect to find a certain splendour in war, to find man reaching the peak of executive ability, and able to look at war theoretically, artistically; but for anyone below the very highest ranks, there can be no real thrill because he becomes trapped in detail. Only the highest and most theoretical command can possibly achieve the necessary detachment from reality to see war out there as something where moving armies, divisions, regiments, shaping offensives can give the artist-type of pleasure. The poor lieutenant! He’s at the bottom of the heap, with his tiny troop of men; and for him, and them, body, soul and mind, there is no detachment, no repose, and certainly no pleasure. The mind and the body are set going at an impossible pace on given tasks, for a given time, and you give up, you surrender in the end, because you have to, and become mechanical, abject, entirely without personal direction - except that in the very first 86 place you have consented to it all, because you want the same result. After this Exercise, it will be sheer relief just to stop doing something, to sit back and possibly, possibly, gather oneself again. But at the moment it’s as if the military mind, one’s own, has some vast fly-wheel fitted to it which, once set going, goes racing on long after the central energy has been switched off. So one enjoys it all less and less. It degrades more and more, and all in the most shocking heat and sun and dust and clamour of action, to the exclusion of anything else. There is not the faintest personal echo left. Even a comparatively cool night would be offset by tomorrow’s dust and tiredness. And all this amounts to only a peacetime exercise. What if we had been in Egypt? The men are also very tired and fed up, and think that they also are undergoing immense hardship, and are at odds with their sergeants and us who are tired too. We are all thirsty as well, and are hardly even grateful for pints of tea at a time, and they are given us seven times a day, and I mean that. Seven times a day. I have counted Sometimes, when the balance between an army and some kind of vague peripheral personal life is more kind, you can see these continual outrages as something indeed very small in the more general scale of upheaval and disaster everywhere else, but, all the same, when you find you are no longer yourself, literally, then your sense of proportion goes. How long can you live in a known, conscious, deliberate violation of yourself and of everything you value? Even freedom. And what is the end of such damage?

Yesterday, but still, ye Gods, The Exercise. In some so-called lunch break (what do they do for lunch in real fighting?) I lay, already fagged out, flat on the ground, in a local mango grove, only twenty yards from the guns, already in one position, and watched the heat go sullenly and slowly about my head, and had still the neck to curse this war and even the luck of history to have brought me here. My mind, indeed softened with the heat and giddy with fatigue and frustration. Only the delicious weightlessness of the one white cloud in the whole of the sky to prove me any worth at all. Everything was dissolving in this mad midday heat. The heat haze had absolute and total control, everything disintegrating, nothing firm or vertical. The heat was a molten curtain behind which all was being melted and run to water, shifting in rippling eddies, like reeds under water. Then arrived the pain of remembering you, and any cool, pigeon and plover-coloured April sky I used, a thousand years ago, to know.

Two days later the Exercise is still on, but that outburst must have done something, altered something, shifted some block or other. There are three more days of Exercise, but not for me. Surprised by a sudden posting for yet another Course. I will not even get a well-deserved rest after the Exercise, like all the others. It is out of the frying pan into a different fire, and worst of all fates, it is on Aircraft Recognition, about which I know nothing, and the aim is to make me an instructor!

Well, all that seemed damnable enough when it came, but at least it withdrew me from the Exercise, and that was something. But to lose the troop, the men, the Regiment, the gun position and that splendid river down below with its birds, its kingfishers and its fish? I don’t think I wanted that. Today I was en route in a train bound for a course with the RAF, and Bombay, and just before taking the train I was told I would almost certainly be sent back here, to Madras. Much relief, if it comes off. 87 Arrived and registered to find we work RAF hours, which, after the army in general and this Exercise in particular seems like sheer holiday, and the work, as far as I can see, is simply parrotry, and there is a lot to be said in favour of parrotry, however superficially undignified it sounds. It demands less submission of the mind and the will, and will be easier to be rid of afterwards. One minor indignity remains from the Exercise, My eyes are still exuding dust. It is difficult to open them in the morning.

Woke with misery as well as dust in my eyes today, and couldn’t shake the misery off. Things may be, indeed, temporarily better, but so much of one’s life is already gone, the war drags on and will no doubt drag on longer here than in Europe, you are nearly three years and six thousand miles away, and, look, the tin can of middle age will soon be rattling at my tail, and will rattle with every move I make.

‘School’ is a modern civilian bungalow at the seaside, requisitioned by the RAF, a few miles north of Bombay. It is pretty cool here, compared with Madras, which is wonderful. We travel from our digs by RAF lorry, and today I rode with my head hung down, and my head therefore close to everybody’s feet and army boots, and there cannot be much more conducive to misery than the study of army boots, but at least the ‘school’ has a garden fronting on to the sea. I can even look out of the classroom window and watch it every now and then during lessons, and in breaks I can walk out actually on to the beach. I can’t see you, except in memory, but I can see water that runs level all the way to England’s coast only those few miles from Wiltshire. Ordinary people go by riding brown horses on the yellow sand, and early in the day there is often a soft, milky light that Wilson Steer would like. Occasionally, with a vicious pang, huge home-bound liners set to sea westwards, homewards. Unavoidable nostalgia. It strikes. Rescued from The Exercise, landed in comfort, one is still ungrateful, and miserable. Miserable even to come out top in the written paper we had to do yesterday, disliking the conforming mind that permits it.

After a week I had better admit to a growing, sneaking regard for aircraft as designed shapes, functional forms, matters of some interest. But next week there are lecturettes to give. They will put me into a welter of nerves, and all this is still in the context of the growing length of this war. Who will deliver us? The kind of young Anglo-French airman who was so good and so fierce in politics in the Mess tonight? Remembered how fierce my own political arguments used to be. Why does it all die? With simply the physical cooling of the blood? With the balancing act of age? The short circuiting of wanting to alter things for the better, by other more personal things, like work, like love, like family, for don’t they teach on a higher level? It can’t be just distrust of politicians, even one’s own, can it? But ye Gods, they help. Found myself listening, approving and condemning all at once, so never said a word, despising too much the paralysis of my politics these days to take them seriously. Yet a few years ago I would have been making the same superb, sweeping idiocies, with the same magnificent and useless ferocity. He was, of course, hotly attacked by a very reactionary mess, and even by one officer on the course who (intelligently?) cried a plague on both your houses. His slogan was ‘impartiality'’. Withdrawing all support because he wanted to be an ‘observer’. I wanted to, but did not, join in here. For, if everyone followed suit and became a spectator, there would be no play to watch. Wasn’t perhaps, his line merely self-protective? But the dilemma remains. Only those who are partial and partisan, who actually commit 88 themselves fully, ever do anything, and only those who dare to do in politics can ever get themselves to get things done, alter things and therefore count. Yet when they commit themselves, they also blind themselves. There is always this paradox, that only those who are sufficiently blind can see enough to do anything.

Yeats says “Do nothing, think nothing, fix your eyes on the green trees.” Have had to, to keep my sanity, these last few days. The sky went empty, harsh, changeless and blazing blue. Like some sort of atrophy. So did the mind, with a further more intense rush of tests and lecturettes, and the usual, continuing, crying bloody misery in ears and eyes.

Across the road from the house where we have our digs, someone must be ill or dying. All night there were drummers and chanters and a group playing some sort of oboe, and several men with flaming torches circling round and round the house. Not family, presumably, but professionals hired to ward off evil spirits? An interesting interlude in sleeplessness, anyhow.

At last, like something more than the memory of you, came several letters from you, and out of one lovely fat envelope came those few photographs of you and the children. So unexpected that I just stood up at the breakfast table, and then had to sit down fast, because I couldn’t see you all for a little while, because of the salt tide that rose so quickly to hide you all. To see you; to see the children as if they were strangers. Hardly to have known anything of their babyhoods. Are they, two of them, nearly three, and Nicholas nearly two? God, is it that long already? They look wonderful and must know the delight of your company. You are still so lovely, sad perhaps, and I am missing the delight of your company too. Breakfast did not last long. The journey to ‘school’ was different though.

Course over, back on the gunsite, for another day or so. In the end, have to admit I quite enjoyed the course, and got a good deal less afraid of instructing. There was so much practice of it, very sensibly. The course over, I stole a day off in Bombay - another court-martial offence? - because I had spotted that Lloyd Powell was to play the Emperor Concerto in the evening. It was worth the risk of being found out. So old, so excellent. Wonderful sense of power in his shoulders, wisdom in his huge white-haired head, and yet practically expressionless everywhere except in his hands. All feeling focused there. No immoderation of gesture or feeling. No falsity anywhere. It seemed exact, exact. It was music, it was hope, life and all the old stabilities. Beethoven’s approval of liberty, and ours too. I know afterwards what happened. Disappointment. Will our politicians make the same mess of everything that Napoleon did? Next morning, back down across the Deccan once more to Madras. Across that vast geography of heat, dust and mountain. That’s twice. The following morning after that, the new non-upheaval! Found it true that, after all, I have to leave the Regiment, which is going north towards Burma, God be on their side, but that I am to remain here in Madras, to become an instructor in a new Gunnery School (Ack Ack) opening here soon. I must leave the hot winds of this gun position out in the wilds here, and amazingly find myself returning to the Racecourse which the Ack Ack School has taken over. The shifting of one’s centre spreads, and then contracts again. A huge change that hardly changes at all. The battle to keep one’s own personal centre alive somehow - that goes on - and on.

89 So, in a few days time, I become a schoolmaster with the very odd special subject of Aircraft Recognition. Seems very peripheral. But those who shoot from gun or plane have to deal with it as if it meant life or death, which, of course, for those involved, it does. All the same, it is sheer luck again for me. It is way down the scale of dangerous military activity. Late this evening, in the deep yellow light of a most enormous ochre moon, I went down to the river, perhaps for the last time, and caught that deep gold light sprawling, and floating, and shaking towards me. Watched the native Indians night-fishing. Up to their waists in the warm water, their bodies on smooth, wet fire, flaming like wet satin, and as suddenly going out. They fished and stood and dibbled in mud, and waited. Occasionally, with a flinging movement, they threw their hand-nets out as if they were the skirts of a dancer in ballet. One of them caught an eel, caught it up out of his net, and threw it as far up the bank as he could, rushed after it, caught it again, and beat its head on the ground. It took an age to kill, writhing and threshing until it was still.

I leave the Regiment tomorrow. Am not sure when the Regiment leaves. Tonight the stars were just stars, indifferent and remote, as if they had never once been inside one’s eyes and half way down one’s throat. Tonight will be the last time I may ever see this river with its fishermen and its huge black water buffaloes standing motionless and wet all over with water, glistening like molasses.

Up early in the new abode, for a daylong rush of preparations. We work where, as troop officer for the gun position we once occupied here, I actually slept. It’s to be our office. For the moment we have to sleep in a house we have taken over, three storeys high, and half a mile off. Last night I risked sleeping that three storeys high up on the roof, - without a mosquito net. It worked. I was under the stars, in the open air, felt the late night dew, and was felicitously ‘shamed into smallness’ under and by those indifferent and lovely stars. And there was a silence to listen to. To an owl’s shivering call, or a sudden excited scuffle in the trees, or the long distant shambles of a train lugging itself without gaiety across the plains. I was nearly cold before I got to sleep, though day by day the summer heat is rising, and we will all soon be in dread once more of prickly heat.

The papers are full only of preparations; to invade Sicily? Italy? where? Wonderful even to read about, but we can only view it all from here, selfishly, (something we’re good at) and just hope that our mail may soon come more quickly through the Mediterranean, and not take two months or so going right round the Cape. I crave, hungrily, for your letters and wish I could do something about your diet. Our rations here are unlimited, but my psyche, where it matters, depends on you, and remains undernourished, starved, starved. There is also a rumour that Italy may, at any moment, withdraw from the war and there is a sort of final tally of German prisoners taken in Tunisia. Our selfish terror here is that the war in Europe might well end, but the war out here will certainly go on for years.

Today a sunny Sunday, but useless as a day of rest. Have forgotten anything like that because the first course starts tomorrow, and no time has been spare for ages. The army, under pressure, acts too quickly, with insufficient personnel and almost entirely without equipment. This last fortnight, have worked harder and for longer than at any time, except possibly during the blitz on Plymouth, and yet we are still not really ready and will have to ‘make-do’. The trouble is one of possessing a 90 conscience, having a sense of responsibility. Public School, Dulwich-induced, I suspect. So, in the end, one gets mixed up with wanting even to do soldiering well, with ridiculous senses of duty, and loyalty, and goodness knows what. Is the subjection of anybody only a question of time?

The first course is over. A sort of success, but thank God an epidiascope turned up the second day, plus a few models, otherwise it would have almost been just silhouettes and words, words, words.

Wow! We are undergoing a cyclone. Tremendous rain and a colossal, tearing wind every day. In the evenings it might seem to calm a bit and there may be a dusk worth seeing, for a moment or two, but the facts of violence and the sense of menace return to a sort of normal. The ground has been flooded for days. We have to wade in Wellington boots to work, and, because of the continuous pelting rain, we have to change our clothes when we get there. But nobody cares or objects. This is supposed to be the hottest month of the year, and yet right now it is the coldest I ever remember it on the plains, in any month! We are all only too happy to remember it as a typical, English summer day.

The centre of the cyclone is reckoned to have passed over us last night. A few more days and it will be gone, alas.

Days later and the heat is quickly returning. With everywhere soaked with rain, the heat will steam us. Ten days’ cool weather has fled and made a hole in the heat of the year. And cyclone or no, this new job of being a school-master is, on the whole, a gift compared with life on a gun position and continuous Exercises. It was time-consuming setting the whole thing on its feet, but that sort of effort is diminishing progressively, and we will soon get a more reasonable amount of duties and less as it were Overtime on preparations which won’t have to be repeated. Instructing has set times, and the evenings, apart from thinking up new ideas, and designing new equipment to assist instruction, will be considerably freer. And all Sundays, too. On those terms, I don’t think I will miss the men too much, or the gun drill and the endless details of troop life.

Am writing to you under a shower, of notes. Musical. The lucid, running vigour of a Brandenburg Concerto. The notes gather in a corner, chase each other round the room, then vanish through the open windows and into my ears.

All traces of the cyclone have ebbed away. Saw the moon for the first time for many days last night. Pale, watery-eyed, still half drowned in thin, hurrying cloud, but the lovelier for it. The white of its single eye was trembling in the floodwater puddles under my feet. I actually enjoyed that grim, dark cyclonic daylight, the violent wind panicking every leaf in sight, and accelerating across the rain streaming on our window panes. Was two or three times caught and drenched to the skin, but to be wet was to be cool, and to be cool was precious beyond price. The aftermath is an intense calm. The early light tentative, but electric, like some calm evenings with us, I remember. En bloc, this evening, nearly all the instructors, and certainly all those attending courses, went into town, to the cinema, to see Desert Victory. Well done 91 the sense of achievement, the careful concealment of losses, some fine heads, and the build up of the immense, inspiring personality of Churchill. In one scene there he was, giving a speech to the surrounding troops, producing all those ‘bulldog’ words, exactly right for the moment, full of determination and hope for the future of the war. The men stood round, admiring, sometimes cheering, half-hypnotised, with grins which, being interpreted, could only mean, yes, if you tell us to, we’ll take it to its end. His speech went through us all, forcibly, almost infecting, and yet I know several of us, men and officers, who already question his motives for the future, and indeed most of the motives inside this war, apart from the belief in what we understand by freedom (to be able to speak out freely no matter what). For we know we must not only be fighting against Germanic fascism, but also for something. Afterwards we must not be left high and dry just with Churchill’s status quo.

Resumed sleeping on the roof last night, the first time for a fortnight? Magnificent, but it hurt, that moon’s bright glass magnifying the misery of not seeing you, being with you, listening to your laugh. There was a thin, bright scatter of stars, and a long, narrow procession of very white clouds, all going one way. They looked like a procession of Sisters of Mercy, pale and wonderfully serene. What do they kill in themselves, nuns, to win that serenity?

Today I became a Captain! Imagine! Me! With nearly as many pips on my shoulders as stars in the sky! It will mean, I suppose, a bit more money for you and for me, but also more stability for us, it confirms me in my job here.

I’ve just laid aside my wartime, very well-thumbed copy of Alice in Wonderland to write to you. And I will write to you something, as the Fish Footman says, sitting here “off and on, for days and days.” Well, every day until, until, until…..Do you remember the Fish Footman? I read often and think often of Alice, and look forward so much to, in time, reading it again at home, for myself and - even more - to reading Alice and all that wonderful spread of literature that there is for children. The nostalgia of it. The thought that our children will be old enough for me to start immediately, by then. The thought that I would not have been able to start already. I am mercilessly twitted here for my delight in Alice and in writing to you daily, but I swear to do it.

I read that we have occupied Pantelleria and Lampedusa. Never heard of them. Lord, how slowly we go nibbling at the rind of the huge cheese of Europe. When will we get at the cheese itself?

A bit of fun today. The Major-Commandant of the school here is perhaps even more scatty than I am. The School is still being equipped bit by bit, but not yet fully. We now have our establishment of transport, but not yet our establishment of Drivers. I was summoned to the office to get from him a note authorising me to drive school transport in the meantime, until the Drivers arrive. While the Major was writing it out, I turned to the Adjutant at his desk, and asked him if he had had a reply from Box 175 in the Madras Mail (an advertisement asking for an electric fan, one of which I wanted badly). The Major looked up and said, “Oh God, what is Box 175? A marriage advertisement for a Hindu virgin?” and then the conversation stopped as he handed me my Authority. I went off, but just before I drove off, I thought I had better read what he had written. It read ‘Captain V H I Knowland is 92 hereby authorised to drive Southern Army A A transport, pending the arrival of the School Establishment of Virgins’! Oh major! Oh Freud! I sat laughing in the front seat of the truck, wondering what the Military Police would think if they stopped me. I took it back for the Major to write it out again. I said “Couldn’t we have it framed?” but the Major, not unnaturally wouldn’t hear of it.

Courses are running now frequently and smoothly. It means instructing AA officers, RAF officers, and ditto sergeants. I prefer the sergeants. They seem to wish to learn, and more of them have a sense of humour.

Think I must mention it, almost every time it rains, because it only happens every so often and when it does, it always does something nice, like making it a bit cooler. Apologies. But this time it has done two things. It is now cooler, and it has laid the dust, and raised from the dust the sharp, damp smell of dust. Like the smell of sweet young beetroots cooking, coupled with the smell of linen cupboards when you open the door and the warmth comes out.

There are moments which, for some reason or other, seem perpetual, with a kind of throw forward into time, or able to dismiss time altogether, and with a capacity to go on ringing in the mind forever. After finishing instruction today, I joined Duncan at his ritzy, opulent club on the river Adyar and played tennis with him. After playing we sat out in the evening sun on a white garden seat, on a small knoll of grass under a single tree. We drank and chatted, solemnly enough about education. During a lull in the conversation, for no reason at all, I noticed the pear-shaped shadow cast by my kneecap, and then looked up at the light struggling down the surface of the river, along whose banks the club grounds run. There, just in front of me, was the total quiet and calm of the river and the whole evening, and time, for a moment, seemed to sway gently out of place, and then back again, gently, passively and without hostility, but with a movement I will never forget.

Because of the press of new courses, the leave I was due for has been put off for two whole months, and that’s misery in extremes.

While shaving early this morning, had one eye on the light trembling on the water of my hip-bath, and realised what was dislikeable about some of the paintings of Chowdhury, and many others too. It’s the sense of too much unrealised generality, plurality, as opposed to the really realised particular, the single, the concrete, the thing there. Obvious, but they do not paint the particular place or thing or person, something seen, known and exciting in itself, for itself. It always seems an invented place, a place made of many places, and in it, things, trees, people are wonderfully well drawn, wonderfully well placed but posed in a pose. So the picture doesn’t take place on earth. There’s none of the stuff of life there. Nothing belonging to the kitchen as Sickert often complained. There is no manure on the fields, Constable excepted. Van Gogh would know what I mean. So would Degas, the king of them all in the particular, the known, the seen, the felt. That tremendous yawn of the laundry woman, the singer with the black glove, the ballet girl resting after a work-out. One sees right through the generality into practically nothing. With the particular, with what is really seen, felt and realised one goes on tasting something real for ever. Yes?

93 Oh, ye Gods, in the dark tonight, stars like a rain of grief, thin, white, intense, and so full of you that all the geography of the night and all the continents between us seemed to shrink to a despairing world-wide inch!

Instruction, even busy instruction, has calmed down to a routine, and I now get every Sunday off. This week I even managed to get away for Saturday night, and had the week-end with Duncan, who is such a good host. Almost too good, for a fresh guest gets the choice of music, and today, with someone else there, both Duncan and I had to put our ears in our pockets for a very different taste. But on Sunday morning we were off early to Ennore to sail. In an inland water, not the sea. Missed the sea, for with the sea, you smell it at once, of itself, but a large expanse of fresh water? I suppose it is, in every way, the equal of sea water, but its smell you have to work for, search for, to ask the wind for, because it is so much more subtle. There’s a lot of wet mud in it, rain water, reed smells and even dead birds. When you do get it, it shocks, delightedly, as something quite unknown, unfamiliar and therefore exasperating to describe, like something on the tip of one’s tongue one wants to remember but can’t.

After instructing all day, there was a soccer match to play. The Permanent Staff (nice word, permanent, in wartime) v The Present Course. Two good things happened. Just the nice innocent enjoyment, and one particular moment. While we were playing there fell on us a sudden storm of unexpected but very memorable rain. We went on playing through it, drenched, for what, ten minutes? We were almost ankle deep in it for two. Such a fierce yet soft badgering of the flesh it was. At one time it came so fast that for the water cascading over my abutting brows I could scarcely see. Field, sky, light, and the half-lost players were all silver-white ghosts. And the fiercer the rain fell, the quieter I went, and so aware that I seemed to feel each teeming drop of rain as something separate and single. Felt so passive that I wanted to sit Bhuddha-wise on the ground and vanish in a trance. Then the ball would come out of the half-light and land at my feet, and I actually had to do something with it. It splintered poor old Bhuddha to pieces, almost humorously. In another moment of equally enforced activity, so comically disruptive, I actually scored a goal, - against Bhuddha, as it were. Has anyone ever done that before? Captain V H I Knowland 1, Bhuddha 0!?

Had to retreat from my nest on the roof last night, waking just before it rained. Woke into misery, alert for you at once. Perhaps the sky wept in sympathy with me for missing you. More likely it was just piss-aller in objective contempt.

Today the first dictator fell. Benito we gather has resigned. Does it really make any difference?

Three days ago we were threatened with a visit and inspection by a GENERAL! Never ever seen one before, but, ye Gods (was He one?) it was three days of frantic flap and preparations, and then, yesterday - thirty minutes of The Presence. He was shown round the Gunnery Wing and then round us, the Aircraft Recognition wing. Between starting up and now, thank goodness, we have had time really to get going and managed to blind him with all our invented training tricks and devices. Several of them had been fun to think of and even more to carry out. He actually called us a ‘factory of initiative’!, and went away muttering to the Major ‘Damn good show. Damn good show.’ They always say things twice, generals. Do 94 they, in fact rather than presence, suffer from unexpected inferiority complexes? And therefore have to convince harder than other people? We are foolish to try so hard ourselves however. We may have landed a lot more work. He went away threatening us with ‘Development.’ And one more than earns one’s tiny pay already.

A friend of Duncan’s has lent me Lin Yutang’s ‘The Importance of Living’. He is apparently “the most important Chinese author now living” and “distils for the harassed Western World, a philosophy of quietude, tolerance and pagan good humour.” I’ve already dipped into it, gently, and find his wisdom, as it is called, obviously goes with an expensive and expansive stomach, and a knowledge of good wines. A wisdom fed on such nourishment may perhaps be a little suspect? His quietude won too easily? And his tolerance and good humour may be all right, but I can’t help thinking that the most appropriate emotion for the harassed Western World, at almost any moment of mankind’s history, let alone now, should be one of sheer bloody indignation. One needs a wisdom a little nearer to the knuckle than the vine, and lying a little further off from such personal comfort.

One has no religion, but takes advantage of The Sabbath. This one, in particular, a wonderful wide open day of wind, of sun, of swimming. Good to be quit of the army, especially in the lovely antiseptic of warm salt water. Good simply to have lunch and tea on the beach. Good to swim coolly in the heat of the day. Good to have the cool sea-breeze blowing off the breaking waves this afternoon. Very very good to have the occasional shadow of a seagull run like a live thing across and over one’s sunning naked flesh. Heavens, in wartime, to take a leaf out of Lin Yutang! Stayed out late into the evening. We drove back into Madras at night under a full moon. Enormous magnification, and spreading its fraudulent loveliness over all the filth of India.

Violent storm last night, but muffled, and dressed in sinister cloaks of rain.

Today is a day of misery. For no reason, but that it is so. Have a not surprising distaste for history, especially making it with war. It is also a distaste for all things on a large scale. A distaste for size, scale, quantity, great movements and the enormous measure of malice in man. Give me, please, just a home, a family, things local, of daily beauty, of ordinary use. To aim higher, to take the world on a larger scale, to hold the mind up to history, to war, to religion, to politics, to eternity I am sure, is not worthless, but is not for me. So life, so happiness, so elation and exuberance are bred close to hand. And would to heaven that you were close to my hand and more immediate than just to memory and mind. Personal validity, objective social validity. Can you mix both to a balance, or if you choose one, do you get neither? War has no personal validity has it? Excepting freedom, reasonable freedom, the freedom which accepts other people’s freedom as a worthwhile balance for one’s own. Surely that’s a must, and is not even sacrifice. Freedom to that extent has to be a cage, and there must be a multitude of bars in that particular cage. So freedom is a deceit and an irony as well. We all end in muddle, and why not? Is it more difficult to accept the myth of muddle than the myth of God, the myths of philosophy? Do we ever actually learn anything? Can you be sure of anything? And if you can’t, then knowledge is a stupidity, and one is off into the absurd. Back then to the local habitation and name. For me, it is you and your name, and the names of the children and Eastcourt the village, Wiltshire the 95 county, England the country, oh and so on to bloody scale and history again, and all things plural. No, surely one needs to be selfishly singular and local. One starts that way. Everybody does. Identity is single, love and awareness should be singular as well? Surely we all live them alone, single. And John Donne’s moments of what he calls Best Being, aren’t they felt also alone? Aren’t all the best things learnt when you are alone? If there is an answer to that, I’m sure it is yes, and then a split second later comes the but. Yes, but all that central focus has to be fitted into the rest of life, the job you do, the love you live, the family you make, all the local and wider human limits you find and have to take. Somewhere underneath the wider world you have to hang on to that focus of concentration, the level of living under the wider view, the level of life and love ticking away just under the surface of the kitchen, the preparation of the soup, above the occasional screaming of the children, outside the window past the heads of the attentive class one teaches. Is it possible to learn a quietness, to learn never to be busy even in the busiest moments of one’s life? Perhaps hardly. And yet occasionally one succeeds, and always that ‘best moment’ is worth it.

I suppose it is fairly natural for a conscript to meet Regular Army officers with a pretty lively sense of hostility, but afterwards, they seem to be far from the thing they make themselves out to be. Behind that front face of outward aggressiveness, behind their ridiculous moustaches, they, more often than not, turn out to be people too gentle and insecure to meet the fierce competition of living in a hostile world, so they retire from it and accept the sanctuary of a system which offers them shelter behind the military shout, peace with also only a modicum, at any rate in peacetime, of effort, and yet allows exercise of male power. Hence, thank goodness, the streak of femininity so often found, the art class Colonel, the Brigadier breeder of roses, the Major expert in orchids. They like authority, bristle with moustaches, and, sometimes, have sensitive eyes.

Invasion of Italy. At last, now, we are at the cheese itself, and no longer nibbling.

And another leave at last! Somewhat like Polonius, I have at last wrung a slow leave from the army, by wearisome petition, and would even say deserve it. Courses flow wearisomely as well, and fast and furious and often. In war, in India, in the settled conditions of instruction, it is wonderful to see so far ahead, and may it continue, and obviously with this amount of luck, I would trade continuity as infinitely more valuable than a hundred leaves, so I am not in any way complaining. All the same, it is better never to believe that you are going on leave in the army until you are actually coming back from it. Orders are very arbitrary. One of the sweetest fruits of peace, when it comes, will be when we are able to say “On such and such a day, we will do this”, and when that day comes, do it!

Woke to the dawn, this morning, to the sound of distant bugles somewhere. It’s a clean, stirring sound that fits dawn like the crowing of a cockerel. It carries in the air, so far, so clearly. The air receives it, like the hand and the fingers receive a glove.

Coming to, this evening, from the disappearance of one of those weeks in which, God alone knows what happened in it. The week had fainted away without trace, and I was near fainting again when the orderly brought me eight of your 96 letters. The moment before, I had been reading this, out of Birdsong At Morning from the Week-End Book you sent me some time ago, about Robin the Redbreast or Ruddock. “He is striking in his way of coming out into the open, in the jubilance and forthrightness of his song when other birds are silent, in his staccato movements, in his bold cavalier dress, and in his character to match it. His alarm song is as explosive as his nature, and sounds like the ticking of a grandfather clock. The sound is unlike that of any other warbler, and follows no set pattern, being at once ringing, exultant, and full of timbre, but also, at the same time, a kind of running recitative, with a beautiful undersong.” There, that would have been good to write about an almost favourite bird, and after reading all those eight letters of yours, I would have liked to have written them too. The same ringing tone, the same resilient jubilance, the same forthrightness as the Ruddock. Much, much gratitude to you and him. They were the sort of psyche-saving direct communication which went right through me, came out the other side and will remain in the room all night and all tomorrow when, after instructing, I can come back and read them all again.

Which I did, and have the same ringing hope here in the surrender of Italy. It is not all over, there, by any means; but think, only a year ago, all of our total despair lay outside Stalingrad and Alexandria. Yet now at least some English troops will be billeted in Rome! I wonder who the lucky young painters in the ranks will be? And, alas, whether they will continue to be lucky?

It is midnight. Have just come in, reeking hot, from the outside night, to lie under the luck of the swift wind from my electric fan. The one I got instead of a Hindu virgin! It would be far too hot for her anyhow, and now my head is full of Brahms and all the small inches of dark space between the almost too-bright stars. Italy is out of the war, the WAR WHICH WE ARE WINNING. Life seems almost tolerable. I would wish Italy out of the war at least once a week. She nearly was in our wishful thinking press months ago. But now she really is. An intelligent nation. Out of the war, her tyrant down, the rags and tatters of his lousy regime fluttering dismally under what must now be a fairly scared eagle’s wing in Berlin.

Yesterday, had all the written papers and visual tests, the final ones of the latest course, to correct and mark. Much midnight oil flowing. All day today, the reports to write and circulate, and then, in today’s evening, I go, quite unready, totally unprepared, on actual leave. The one owed, and now coming as a complete surprise. I almost don’t like it, in a funny sort of way. A catholic prepares for his retreat. I’m definitely no catholic, but would dearly like to be prepared for leave. At the moment, and for today, I’m stuffed with exams and tension, and will be so for a few days yet.

In the evening, to the station, in a nice storm of rain. The air thick with it, and as white as milk. At the far end of the platform, the setting sun, soaked, colourfully. On a station seat, ate a rapidly prepared packed sandwich supper, then stood up and watched the rain dribble to a stuttering finish. In the steamy carriage, with the storm retreating and the train advancing, a lot of luckily cool air flooded in. After a teasingly fitful sleep, woke in the morning to what now almost seems familiar, the station yard at Kodai, and there, magically central, the same aged red local bus. It is small, but built high. A chest of drawers, painted red, but with all the drawers windows, and, even silent, it dominates the yard. Round it, all things revolve. Its bonnet, as usual, up, the driver in his red turban tinkers at its entrails. 97 Station coolies, in green turbans, load brown luggage on its red top. All us passengers, withdrawn into the shade at the side, stand watching, staring. To the left, two lanky American soldiers, almost as tall as the palm trees they stand under. In the breeze, and in the shadows, like scissors, the sharp leaves are cutting them to bits. Pinned to the top of their body poles are two heads: one, a small head, very small, with small tightly buttoned up features, the other is a large head, large-boned, mouthy, smiling. To the right is a French missionary, part priest, with a lapdog on a lead and a loose oversized topee which keeps tipping over his eyes. Like a lot of missionaries, he is self-important, and bullies the coolies unmercifully, shouting at them and fussing over his precious luggage. Further off, on the circumference of all this, sitting on the restaurant steps, are two Indian nuns, in grey and white, like a pair of seagulls. Seagulls! I could look at nothing again until all the remembered beauty of gulls in flight had settled once more on the grey and white nuns. And there they are. Quiet, almost furtive. Like two flowers talking to each other in whispers. Everywhere else are the locals, especially the usual host of small children, the little boys, stark naked, their tiny little black penises hanging like medals under their dark brown pot bellies. And lastly, back in the centre of the yard again, slowly round and round the bus, sidles the usual blind beggar. He keeps one hand on the coach to work as a guide, and his sightless eyes raised towards the windows, appealing for annas from passengers who are not there. We all watch the bright red silent bus. At last the driver surfaces from the innards of his operation, slams the bonnet shut, grins and blows the ancient, old-fashioned, rubber horn twice, and busily we all clamber in, myself nearly last, I was too busy watching. And squeezed out in the rush for seats, I had to accept one which took my eyes above the level of the top of the window. All the way up that marvellous road, I never saw higher than the hooves of the pack ponies, the trunks of the trees, the waists of people. Left to guess at the top leaves, the oranges, the clouds. Misery.

This time my room is the guest room of the local Nursing home. Faintly difficult to accept? It happens to be for Maternity! Hope to keep my sanity by having all meals with Jean and her family.

Almost as soon as I arrived yesterday, we all had a wonderful picnic lunch on the lake. Almost too quick, in a way, because I tend to arrive slowly in places and was tired with a minimum of sleep on the overnight train, so the bright light on the water, which otherwise might have leapt excitingly for me, actually seemed to hurt my eyes. And if, for an inadvertent moment, I closed them, I was immediately two thirds asleep, and that much less human. I remember bright yellow asparagus sandwiches. Like eating daffodils. There was the lovely welcome sound of the children’s voices, the sounds of birdsong, the hollow knocking of the boats and oars, the ice-cold iron teeth of the water eating away at my wrists when I dropped them in, offset wonderfully by the friendly warmth of the sun.

Jean’s house this evening, listening to music. Rachmaninov’s First Concerto. His fierce complicated melancholy, the depth of his pessimism, the degree of resistance to what is the opposite of being alive, with the odds increasingly all on one side, and against? We just managed to finish the Rachmaninov before the room was invaded, marvellously with his opposite, children in night-gowns, and ready for bed, or, with shrieks of laughter, definitely not ready for bed. So I read to them. Made them my own, and managed, sideways, to watch that wonderful, rapt, concentration that all 98 children seem to be able to produce at will. A sort of concentration that is timeless, tense, absolute in quality. And they hold it for so long. If an adult had it in such quantity, he’d be considered mad, and the everything else of his life he’d consider worthless. We are not mad enough!

I will even have some experience of children when I get back at last, if ever, perhaps, maybe, from this extraordinary war I am not even fighting. For a fortnight, I have five here to live with. Sheila is about eight, with a round plump face, quiet eyes and a woman’s mood. Mowbray, or Mo, is five. Cleverer than her sister? Perhaps, but with the slightly faulty egoism that goes with cleverness. Their friends are Susan, who is four, and has the finest, silkiest hair I have ever seen. She wears it in very short plaits, so that the small, coloured, bobbing about bows of ribbons tied to them are like butterflies perpetually about the flowers of her ears. She’s gay, and very enthusiastic. Margaret is only two, but laughs more than all of them put together, and moves about like a drunken sailor. And last, there’s Anthony. Anthony is more difficult, because he’s more withdrawn. Huge dark eyes, already tragic looking. He’s tolerant and very, very quiet, too quiet. It was he who bore the book off for himself afterwards. He’s eight, and already too full of care for one so young.

Writing to you, this morning, at an open window, and the eyes go out into a sea of close leaves which manages to drown, a little, the small sad history of these last years. Beyond the trees, whose tops are level with the window, there’s grass. Ordinary grass. One forgets too easily the rare quality of comfort ordinary grass provides. There’s a huge murmur of bees, and the smell of pine crushed into the air. Somewhere an ordinary child is screaming its ordinary head off. The sky is an ordinary more friendly blue for a change, but the clouds, as always here, are extraordinary, so close. 7000' closer to me than usual. Close and moving so swiftly. Further out the hills lie quietly under the sunlight, their own shadows dribbling like a liquid down their sides into the receiving valley. It is disorienting. Is there actually a war on? Or have I been here for ever? It is a kind of eternity. Not the vague eternity of religion which I know nothing about, but the real, sharp eternity of ordinary grass, and cloud and sky which I can share, and share with you. This kind of eternity is daily and ordinary and can be understood, as all good eternities should, even in war, even in the miseries of absence.

Another dense orchestra of bees has just gone by. Clearly a whole swarm. By the thousand. Startling, and lovely, and taking so long. A thrumming and drumming and humming in the air for minutes on end, so long that it seemed as if they were pausing deliberately, exactly, out there just below my window as a gesture acknowledging a very appreciative audience. This done, they took off at last, and the lovely brimming sound was gone.

Leave is good. It is rare, and it is also kind, permitting time to write often, even on a boat, on the lake. The difficulty in this heavenly place is to keep oneself bound to the earth and inside the perspective of a war. At this height above mean sea level, and in this sort of mood, one’s head is continually, and literally, in the clouds, and I drift without danger, except to my brain, and can lie back on cushions in a grateful trance and watch two pigeons touch in the midway air. A sweet, delicate collision, without drama. And all the while these giant, swift clouds leg it across the lake in a swift mist, then up over the sides of these lovely hills.

99 So much so, that this very next day, have started even to dream the ridiculous dream of perhaps, perhaps, somehow, of getting you and the children out of England and up here into these hills for a while after the war, or even, dammit during! All things remaining equal, which, of course, they won’t, it would be cheap living, and there’s a year’s painting in this one place alone. But it is ridiculous to write as if it were possible. It must be a fever, an infection, an enchantment I’ve caught from the dangerous air of this delicious place, and the madness related to a short leave with only a few more days to run. Another day or so, and I am reassessing things more coldly. This war is clearly going to go on for several years yet, and nothing can happen until then. And after all that time? What will we all be like? The children no 1onger babies. And you? And me? It all seems to line the mind with several layers of something almost approaching fear. War, enforced absence, surely works more havoc in areas like these than all the noise, the damage, the physical destruction everywhere else. The blows war deals to human relationships, what of them? One is already seeing too much of them in the men’s letters which we have to censor. The huge strain on so many affections, the excuses, the suspicions. It’s a different battle, and, though grass, as they say, grows swiftly over the battlefield, the warp and thwart of human affection last longer and makes any and every misery possible. That kind of misery endures, endures. Besides, every one will want a peace and a consolation of quiet which they simply will not get, which simply will not exist.

A lone day walking. Away, for a change, from the intimacy of the village into wilder country, but still unhappily very much enclosed by trees and hills, the eyes halted and held fast wherever they looked, miserably miserably trapped in a prison of trees and leaves and dismal shadowed light until, cutting away from the main path on to something smaller, I went past a tiny catholic chapel, and turning a corner, I was suddenly out on the side of the hill, facing outwards into light and space. The wonder of space and light, and cloud and sky, all dazzlingly visible for miles and miles, and below, all those seven thousand feet below, were the plains. Miles and miles of them. Strange amazement for an Englishman, having so much below eye level. It connects more with the stomach than with the eyes.

Nearing the end of leave, now. Went on a second visit past the little chapel. But this time too much cloud altogether, and most of that wonderful vision of all that space greyed out by mist, cloud-mist, making, of all that vast space and massive hillside, something delicately painted on to silk, merely hinted at, halved, and most of everything left out.

Those moments of excited immediacy which melt the mind utterly away. Are they real? Or mirage? Remembered one of them sharply today. I was with you on an early leave at Pewsey, looking over the parapet of that bridge, sharing the slippery shadowlike shapes of those trout in the water below. A moment that seemed to flow so gently between my fingers, then suddenly stayed still, excitedly astonished, and took entire possession, a few brilliant, everlasting seconds that ran together, coalesced, invaded and changed. Like the transformation scene at the end of the traditional pantomime, when you change from, man, idiot, animal - into the fairy prince, the youngest son with all the luck. Simple, but untellable. An unreasoning exulting.

100 On the last day of leave, walked, with Jean, down a steep hill to an outlying village. Vilpatti. It is set in a countryside of falling terraces, stepping down the hill like stairs, with each two feet of contour level. The village itself looked as if it had fallen from the top of the staircase and lodged on the steps halfway down, stopped as if by its own stone walls. We stopped and watched the womenfolk fetching water from out of the village stream, then went up towards the village, up the steps down which were coming these lovely feminine structures, carrying and balancing their huge water urns so gracefully on their heads. While Jean stopped some and talked in Tamil with them, apparently of jobs, of medicine and marauding tigers, I gazed over the rooftops of their mud hovels into the misery and squalor inside the village, or, closer, at them, at their malnutrition and the sores of their bodies, the various stages of what Jean said was congenital syphilis, and yet at the amazing animal happiness they seemed to have in spite of everything.

Leave ended, yesterday evening, it was back to the army, back down the ghat, dragging the head by bus so reluctantly out of all those wonderful clouds back down to the daily grindstone. Endlessly instructing relays of only remotely interested young men amid the misery of ants and flies and sweat and heat. And back to an accumulated rush of work that will not smooth itself into the humdrum for at least a week.

Have a new course, and spent all day tilling at the barren stubble. Afterwards, more extraordinary and ridiculous activity in this amazing war of mine. The opening game of the third, mad, wartime rugger season. Exhausted at half-time, hot, and sweating, I lay, on my back, in a mixture of mud and grass, and stared into a, for a change on the plains, lovely sky. A rapidly moving broken mass of pigeon-purple clouds and, scattered in between, a few cool pools of blue. Wild. Untidy. But extraordinarily happy.

The monsoon has broken in earnest. Rain, steadily, all day, and it comes in torrents at night. The night rescued for me reading your last long lyrical letter embodying all your affection for the affectionate pig you are now keeping. From what odd places lovely lyrics spring!

The torrents of rain go on. The bonus? Not a single fly seen for four days. But not a bird, or beast either.

We have now had a week of it. But this evening it stopped. Everything calm and clear. Peace. And drama. The appearance on an empty stage of one small, dazed bee. It might now clear.

I was wrong, and the bee as much misled as myself. The avalanche of rain returned, and goes on and on.

Even more rain than ever today. Actually enjoyed it. In spite of the busy trivia, the demands and the frustrations of the army, something yet allows time enough, in a brief spare moment to watch and even enjoy the white falling rain, and, this morning, in a gale force wind, the stubborn arch of a young birch tree almost bent double under it. But, for the rest of the time, time itself rubs away the spirit that could use all this to a thin frustrated sigh.

101 Again, the whole earth and air filled with ferocious white rain, and there are now reports of serious flooding.

Today you have to add to the storming rain a huge wind panicking the very leaves right off all the trees. Nothing is done by halves in India. And so also, therefore, suddenly, this evening everything cleared and calmed and I saw the same(?) insistent hungry bee, like the dove with the olive branch, nosing hungrily into our flowers. It must have starved for at least seven days. And so also, therefore, just as suddenly, later still in the evening returned the gale force wind, and even heavier rain. Didn’t believe it was possible.

It was still raining and storming away in the morning, and all day there was that dark, brooding, special stormlight clinging all over to the floodwater.

As if waking into daylight, from a nightmare, when we woke this morning the rain had stopped. It was clear. Unhindered, the eye, freed of its cage of rain, ran wonderfully forward, and upward, and outward into all the nearly forgotten spaces of the landscape with its flickering grass and trees, and the blue, blue sky. Huge half-starved butterflies and multitudes of half-starved bees are happily tottering all over the sunny flowers, even though the wind is as strong as ever. Only two directions for all natural things. Blades of grass, the stems of flowers, the tops of trees, the light on the floodwaters all stream one way, northwards, under this immense, cleansing and drying south wind. All things that live and move, the birds, goats and cattle all move southwards in it, like a shoal of fish in the current of a river.

Here, on the gunsite, we live on fairly high ground. We are safe, and comparatively dry. In the centre of Madras, the floods are five feet high. We are a few miles out, but our river, at Saidapet, has risen thirty feet or more. The bridge across, which stands, for eleven months in the year, a good thirty feet above the trickle in the river bed below, is now with its central arch under the level of the flooding water. Smaller bridges and even roads elsewhere have melted into the general flood and mud. The electricity current has, of course, failed everywhere. Drove down to the coast in the Utility to where the flooding river burst into the sea. The whole bright blue sea there has this huge brown stain spreading out into it as far as you can see, like a monstrous haemorrhage. And, worse, occasionally, on the surface of the water, float swollen, stiffened bodies of drowned cattle, goats, dogs, and once, caught in the deluding safety of a floating tree, the body of an Indian man.

Today, even the wind has gone. It is all utterly calm and motionless. I leant over our fence. All the fortnight’s panicking leaves are still. Every one. Not one moves. Not the slightest movement. On the calm sunny grass the happy farting goats look utterly content. The air, so short a time ago, frantic and merciless with wind and rain, is now gentle and visible with many birds released into it. Impossible to believe in all the destruction. One of the Mess boy servants returned yesterday to Madras to see what had happened to his parents. Said he found his family hut gone. The whole street gone. Said he was so far unable to trace his family at all.

Many days of barren, blue sky, then, this afternoon, during instruction out of doors, there was a fine restless, polychrome sky, and a whole parti-coloured flock of 102 Kingfishers. Not the solitary, rarely seen English one, but many of all kinds, bringing the colourful heavens down to earth. Their bright focus of colour undermined all work.

Shaved early. A very unusual dew, and all those Kingfishers again.

Am reading Wolf Solent. Is J C Powys the only English writer comparable with Dostoievski? The same absorption in personal crime and the downdraft of the spirit? But why has he never heard of blue pencil? He needs one.

It is now what they call winter, comparatively, in this ridiculous country. True, the temperature has dropped from 98° to 78°, and you can, just about, comparatively, call that almost frantically cold. Can you call it winter? Here, it means, at least, that even in our main instruction room, which has to be blacked out for use with the epidiascope and simulated model aeroplane flying, we will not be swamped in sweat for one month!

Fresh torrents of rain have partially renewed the floods. Not really badly, but in some places even quite tall trees are up to their knees in water again and bushes up to their armpits, and all the gaily painted road-side shrines to the Virgin Mary are in danger of becoming Ophelias, their pretty painted dresses trailing in the water.

After an all-day Aircraft-Recognition slog, had the evening off with Duncan, in his civilian, civilised house. Music! My kind of war! Mozart first. Full of melodies scarcely tolerable because of their beauty and wrapped round his central sadness. Then we had a Brahms. His Variations on a theme of Handel. Not awful, but all the same something of Handel that was delicate and intricate stretched to something vast, clumsy and Teutonic! Late in the evening, we walked along the banks of the Adyar and watched long fingers of light run up all its length. Nostalgia, unstoppable for the Thames, the Seine, the Severn and the Blyth. Met, through Duncan again, who is also mad about boats, a Navy man who had actually sailed round the world in a small forty-ton yacht. It had taken him, solo, two-and-a-half years. He was about four feet high, as brown as vinegar, with a beard, bad teeth, and remote, abstracted eyes. Very odd, these little chaps with their vast ambitions. The littler, the vaster. Napoleons all.

Yes, it is winter, and now Christmas, and no England and no you. No Jenny, no Ren, no Nicholas. Ah, God, sighing, it is all so huge a loss. So simple. So obvious. Singly, each would be enough. The sum, the general misery of it all, missing so much. I can deal now with the military misery, but I can’t deal with all the behind the scenes intimate stuff that comes out of the wings, that comes at you sideways, and from behind. And the special memories of Christmas are too sharp to be merely nostalgic. All those bits and pieces of excitement floating over, always, the personal love, the hollying up of the house, the solemn inadequacy of all those presents, the ridiculous family meal in all those paper hats, the fun made reverend by repetition, the golden goose, the candle flames flaring and diminishing in the draughts of your movement, and all the small traffic joyfully crawling all over the rug in front of the fire. Dear God, the theft of parenthood is the sharpest misery of war. It is worse each Christmas, too.

103 And winter, and England, and the possibility of snow! Snow! And I can even see the snow from here. The sky dark up, and the earth all white below. That strange reversed emphasis snow brings and gives to everything. That intricate lawyer’s legal wig upon each branch and tree. And, with the children, the exciting ambush and the sudden war of shouts. I would even settle just for a frost, a Church bell or two, and the blood running warm and as scarlet as hips and haws if we could kiss right now under the twig of mistletoe hanging alone and palely loitering under the lamp in the hall. The world can have the whole of India for a single kiss. There is no merriment here. How can there be a merry Christmas? What, over all the geography between us, and all the misery of this bloody war?

Today, the relief of Leningrad. That’s a gift for them for Christmas, surely. And for us too? Right bang on the Christian target. Have we got at last the very first possible glimpse of a possible peace? The papers have got stories of disturbances in Germany, and rumours of concentrations against Japan. Has peace at last got his head and one arm and an elbow over the final ledge of war?

In the perspective of another two days or so, all that hardly looks possible. There are days and moments when all one’s longing suddenly narrows and concentrates and comes rushing at the heart with the kind of assault for which one is prepared, but never prepared enough. Assaults sometimes that are impossible to check or deflect before the flood of misery is in the throat and in the eyes. Fortunately they are offset by days of equally suddenly concentrating hope. In a way, the hoping ones are worse. One has to learn bitterly not to be deceived by such emotional excesses, and that’s difficult. One is made that way, and the hope stays stubbornly there. So, perhaps, soon, I quote: ‘Somewhere an Austrian corporal will be mute, At whose word once from Europe to the sky Suddenly everyone everywhere began to die.’

All this morning, throughout a violent storm. I invigilated a written exam. A receptive switch was down, and there, like a live thing, was the complete silence of absorption in the room, and outside was the elemental misery of torrential rain falling, falling....falling like all the time and miles between us. Outside there was this sad abnormal half-light rain always breeds over wet ground. Inside, all these bent heads crowded over their stupid Aircraft Recognition Papers. Do they all hide the same geographies of misery and hope?

Another course over, and three days’ rest. Wonderful, except that the puritan work ethic still bites deep, even into a mere three days’ rest. God help us, even in war, one feels guilty at being workless!

The book on Chowdhury is out, and there is a review of his retrospective in Calcutta in the local Madras paper. The adulation and flattery of its text sickens, and, at the same time, contrives to miss his real worth. How comes all this high-flown, pretentious jargon into art appreciation these days? When and how and why did all these cosmic philosophies and ideologies, this underworld of obscure interior motives, all the too-long words and the mandarin prose creep in? Why is it all so obscure and so difficult to understand, and so much more difficult to understand than the picture itself? Surely no great art has ever been obscure, has it? 104 Today cool. And a horse standing up to his knees in water at the edge of the lake, motionless, in what seemed to be a kind of ecstasy. One often gets hot legs in too much heat. There were also several goats moving daintily round his still centre, their heads and ears nodding variously, with the sunlight coming and going alternately on their knees. Nearer to me, there were two bright orange butterflies pinching their lovely heart-shaped wings together against the whiteness of my plimsolls out on the window-ledge to dry after cleaning.

News of the Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin meeting and the Fundamental Rights of Man! Almost as if they meant it! The bombings and the war goes on, the slaughter increases, nothing convinces, and every leaf one looks at begins to bleed. One feels crooked, thwarted and displaced. Perhaps if I could look at you, talk with you, whose integrity I can trust, perhaps, just for a few moments I would feel myself and even these amazing statesmen becoming open and honest again.

Yesterday I happened to mention an admiration for Yeats to someone here, who is a communist. He was at once up in arms and venomous because of Yeats’s politics and his support, after a fashion, for the fascist leadership principle and philosophy. Agree to a point, but chieftainship is part of his Irish ancestry, and better still, there is his intolerance of anything mediocre, which would include most of fascist thinking and feeling. Shakespeare had his hierarchy acceptance factor, too. Surely genetically both are right. Or are great men great but not necessarily right?

In the middle of this noisy, military dislocation of everything that you and I are, oh to be quiet, even for a bit! Just to sit somewhere, willingly, to slacken speed, to allow the pleasures of so many things on earth their natural impulse to refresh. The horse, the kingfisher, the child, your laugh. To let that happen, just happen. To be mindless, aimless, without purpose. Is that the last heresy of the modern mind, of modern living? And yet for me it is the one essential of living, of one’s small attempt to be alive. And actually, even here, it happens almost as if in answer to the wish. Have just returned from a Sunday at war, spent sailing! And in addition to that, it has been almost cold all day. Good. And a fine wind, as well, late in the morning, roughing up the sea and stopping us sailing, so we lunched, sunbathed, then later swam. For the rest of the day, the sea that divides us thundered towards me almost with an air of finality at times, until the startling white perfection of its bursting foam and the white perfection of an individual gull perfecting its own life in flight offered a different finality, and told me how precious our own small imperfections, however far apart, can be. They challenge the misery of this war wonderfully, challenge even the lucky shape of my particularly lucky war here which permits white foam and single gulls. Are they truths inside a worldwide lie? Is lyricism a lie too? Is it self-deception? Or one of the points of furthest travel?

All the days lost since last I saw you. Not so long ago I used to know exactly how many. Now I have lost count, thank God. And even if I did know, I couldn’t any longer believe it. Forget the number of days I can. Forget you I can’t; but neither can I count the number of days before I see you again. That’s harder still, or perhaps it’s not, for I still see you clearly every day. I will be taking you now on three days’ leave. The School is closing down for Christmas, and I will have this short leave,

105 which I am going to spend in Pondicherry, in French India, just below Madras, but almost, as it were, in France, our second native soil.

Arrived. It is France. And can you guess, yes, of course you can, the pitch of excitement with which I saw, when the train pulled into the station, a notice saying CHEF DE GARE? And above the roof of the station shelter, in silhouette against the early morning sun, have another guess, yes, there was Notre Dame. A replica, a church so French I had to hold my breath all the time it held my eyes, even above Jean’s greeting. Then Pelion on Ossa, there were real French croissants and coffee for breakfast, and the greeting of madame, Jean’s friend, with all the kindness of France.

Francophile nearly all one’s life, it was easy, so easy to yield completely to Pondicherry and things French. London one somehow remembers almost only as a commercial city where trade is King, and anything beautiful has arrived almost by accident. One remembers Paris as a city of sheer loveliness in which commerce is made part of the beauty. Here in India, it is exactly the same. In Bombay and Madras we seem to have done little except, in the name of trade, to despoil and exploit. Here in Pondicherry, in a French colonial capital, I have no doubt at all that the same process of exploitation goes on, perhaps even worse, but it is skilfully hidden under the beauty and the order, and less apparent. Is it that the French nationality is so much more conscious of itself, not just of trade, and that it is so much more deliberate and comprehensive, that? - with the French, there is a clear recognition, lost on our wretched merchants, that people do not live by trade alone, but also with their eyes? There is a precise, ordered, planned, conscious civic beauty here which pleases, which one finds nowhere else better than in France. The French use their eyes. The Government almost sees to it that they do. And surely that's good government - to identify with itself all the pleasant order of the streets, the civic beauty of the buildings, the very conscious care of trees and public gardens? I’m here by the kindness of Jean and the French family who own the place. Jean is the wife of the medical missionary Colonel with whom I stayed at Kodaikanal. Today I spent the whole morning with her and her gay little family on the beach. Wonderful, except that it was all under a grey, straining sky, with the sea peculiarly grim and joyless against the gay little French port town and the lovely antics of the children, and the distance from you and mine.

I had told Jean about Tony’s marriage, and tonight we all drank to Tony and Barbara in lovely real French champagne. We drank often, very often, and in cognac as well. I was able, therefore, to consider them properly launched from my end. Later think I was still able to write him something which did not show him, too much, my envy. I would like to marry you, again, in France.

This evening we all drove a few miles inland from Pondicherry to Le Grand Étang, a long lake of bitter-smelling fresh water, with the late, still sunny light shaken out all over it and the wind here and there bruising it, or staining it, or scraping it. Giant clouds with giant shadows were racing across and above it. It was exciting and I was like an animal for it, pointing my nostrils upwind into it, feeling it in my fingers, my feet and my eyes. The strong wind was invisible, but audible and felt too. Downwind, wild ducks were excitingly visible, marvellous in flight, yet utterly inaudible. The scattered light fell flat on the water, was tall in the trees and 106 low and lingering, fingering the feet of the long reeds and rushes at the edge. Just before the last evening light faded, we swam. The water a warm silk all over the body, and the colours of the sky, reflected wonderfully in the water, flooded on the surface straight up to the lips. Into the lips. Into the mouth. I tasted clouds and felt a peace that might, perhaps, last me till we meet, as I now know we will. There’s new hope, even though both Germany and Japan are still completely undefeated. But at least they are threatened.

Last morning walk in Pondicherry, to the little wooden jetty à la Boudin. Jaunty and very French. We walked to the very end and on the way you could see the sea running wildly under your feet between the quite large gaps in the planking. Squeals from the children, and shared that delicious childhood feeling of terror and adventure only walking on the planks of piers can give. Several Indian and European pedestrians with the spanking wind dragging everyone’s clothes one way. Occasionally nearly off, to the delight of the children. In the evening, it was hard to drag myself onto the train back to the commercial shabbiness of Madras.

Two days later, and it is New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day, and the midnight of another year has gone. There was a party but moving, I’m afraid, like a puritan prig among the drunks, the paper hats, the public embraces, I couldn’t manage much festivity. On the way back to bed, remembered sharply Pondicherry and Le Grand Étang, and even more sharply remembered the drive to it, as if in France, along a lovely road, trees either side, and the sunlight striking swiftly on and off on that French avenue; it looked like the sound of a stick being dragged along railings by a child. Mind you, I had some excuse for not being very gay. I’ve been too long too close to the opposite of revelry. Nearly three years of absence, even if I’ve hardly had a war, and three Christmasses away from you, and the need for you and home and a paintbrush as unquenched as ever. How does one continue to wait and live? How to find you? How will all this end? Where, all the same, does this extraordinary endurance come from? And you, this last Christmas, with the children in front of our fire, that lovely, normal, totally ordinary place, where everybody should be at every Christmas? Dear heart, what will all this waste and loss have done to us by the time we meet and touch again? Something perhaps made richer? Heavens, by the time I got back to the school, long after midnight, I think I could have told anyone everything there is to know about the misery of waste - what taste it has, its colour on certain days, its different qualities on others, even its smell, and how, always, it hurts. It will stop only when we can meet and touch, and go to a concert together.

I suppose a married man is most modified in bed, and, Lord, or rather lady, how I wish I were being so right now. But I remember all love does not take place in bed. With me, also, and with many thanks, it thrived on the coarser stuff of life in the kitchen, washing up. And carrying coal, unblocking drains, mending the ball-valves in the lavatory. And I reaffirm that all those heavenly activities are infinitely preferable to teaching Aircraft Recognition in India.

Is it possible to will yourself to be happy? Or are not happiness and the will poles apart? Can you, by an act of will, seek happiness out? Surely at the first movement of the hunter, the shy young animal vanishes. Aren’t the intense, rare, intimate moments of elation accidental, not subject to control? Perhaps by 107 perpetually slanting your attitudes towards that goal you can at least partly prepare yourself so that the spark of awareness can more easily enter and catch fire. Yes? I think I have learnt that the quieter the mind, the less there is of conscious effort, the more likely that curious state of rare elation seems to come. And also when you have it, no amount of conscious effort from the will will ever hold it and make it stay. You need at least three things. The quiet time to yourself, ease of heart, and a receptive frame of mind. A trinity most certainly not blessed in the army. Even in this strange army life here.

A curious feeling, Sunday, at least in the army in this remote part of the war. Perhaps it is the only day one really consents to. There is time to stop, to read. Time for music. Time for the sense of guilt for having so much luck. Time, also, for the sense of unredeemable loss. Time even to realise that it’s nonsense to feel that one can wait no longer, because one can and does, and will. It seems the feelings, the mind, the heart will stretch for ever, and not break. But the further they stretch the thinner and shallower they seem to get, and that is a rotten process. Will each one of us all be just a bag of uncompensated selfishness before we get home?

What startled most of us out here about the American decision to make two years the limit of service in India (some of us have done three already) was not the envy or the despair, or the anger we felt, but its utterly unexpected humanity. The anger came of knowing that with exactly half the heartbreak, they would get twice the pay!

Am duty officer this Saturday, and that will mean, in my burlesque Irish kind of war, a compulsory attendance at Guindy’s races. No top hats, mind you, just the fashionable topee, but in uniform, a Day at the Races. Groucho would have appreciated the joke. Not many soldiers could have been so indulged in wartime! Sitting in the open office, those lovely Arabian thoroughbreds will prance prettily past me on their gentle way to the start. They will come deliciously slowly, at a walk or a trot and the bright sun will seize happily, Oh very happily! on the colours of the jockeys, green cap, pink shirt, orange sleeves, and will glister all over the moving muscles of the horses. A few minutes later and they will all race past me in a sudden thunder, all the colours then nodding wildly together like a bunch of wild flowers shaken under your nose. No slow, single beauty there. Every horse lost in the tension and speed of the bunch.

Finished, yesterday, one more ridiculous rugger season. We actually won the fifteen-a-side tournament, and the seven-a-side as well. We never lost a single match. Absurd, swanky kudos! But, ridiculous or not, and mad dogs and Englishmen aside, I’m sorry it is all over. I actually appreciate the violent expenditure of energy, even in this fantastic heat. And I like seeing a group of blue shirts intricately and inextricably entangled in a group of pink, and the sun on both. It’s something that Sickert or Pasmore could easily isolate and paint.

The heat is now back with a vengeance. The sky is now, day after day, that same tedious, arid blue. The eye, and the sun at dusk, slides down and off it like a child sliding down the banisters.

Another consolatory Sunday, and this had a club wedding in it. In sour grapes, I concluded that I much prefer funerals. That florid misery with which the 108 Church manages to taint everything it lays its cold clerical hands on has perhaps its place in a funeral, but not in a wedding. I do not repent me of our shabby Registry Office, preferring the human dust, the human shabbiness of that wonderful room to the cold, false, moral indignity of the Church. I sat back in my pew, felt it all indecent and worthless, and wondered how the hell Tony had managed it. His tongue must almost have been right through his cheek before the end of the service. And, Lord, as a codicil, how I hate women dressed to kill. Through Duncan, I had met quite a few of them, but could scarcely recognise any!

This early, I’m sending you already all my militarily-manacled love, miserable it’s so little and that little so limited in means to words,and words by war. Better, much better, for you to have the double colour of this young dawn and the marriage of these near dark leaves and trees to the further off half bewildered, half dark waking day. There was a bird, too, a moment ago which dropped its trill of song, as if in a hurry, so I’m sending you that as well. There is no longer just a bridge of sighs between us, each birthday now must bring us nearer, however grim a view one takes of the ultimate length of this wretched war. Even before the Ides of your birthday in March, Germany might feel the real war beginning. Churchill has said so. Germany could be reeling from new blows struck in Europe! I suppose to that compassionate, gentle soul of yours that will be a rotten sort of birthday gift in many ways. The length and breadth of destruction and personal deaths is too much by far already, but, with one’s indignation exhausted, one’s moral resistance utterly sapped, one must consent, I suppose, to the guilt of all the licensed, necessary, public murders over which we will ultimately climb to our private happiness. Casualty figures for what has already been won back and saved, horrify, even when they are infinitely fewer than in the last war; and, worse, they can be so quickly read. And for each man and woman dead, a hundred relatives and friends are mourning, and the count of grief and tragedy mounts and accumulates in the heart - perhaps, possibly, to be purged in victory and personal happiness afterwards - but perhaps, also, not. Being modified by so much misery, will it make everybody better people later? Make it more easy for everybody to recognise and acknowledge misery when they see it later elsewhere, in somebody else, and do something about it? I wonder. It would be good, perhaps, if one were fully and really Christian, which I am not, and believed implicitly in the nobility of suffering, and in a personal God. But is it really so good to suffer, to accept suffering so readily? Can that lead to much more than a larger capacity to accept later and greater suffering? Is that good too? Surely suffering should not be made a theme for life even though one can see that many worthwhile things issue from it: a bit more of honesty, a growth of tolerance and tenderness, a personal dignity, and a personal reserve of immense strength. Yes, but it leaves a grave spiritual scar upon the mind, doesn’t it? A bias or a slant there which inhibits human joy and delight, and God knows we will need them, always need them. When we are victorious, and the immediate effects of this colossal tragedy cease, will we all be more happy? Or merely less unhappy? One knows or, more humbly, one had better say one hopes, that our own small degree of temporary unhappiness will perhaps shrink to something even smaller in the general wash everybody’s private tears of relief and reunion will make. Right now, with each new bloody advance and the loss of yet another friend, and with each new murder of yet another city, our guilty hopes of happiness will have to grow. “I see tomorrow in a tree of hope.” Yes, but God! when it is all over, what sort of trees and flowers will we grow with our roots in so much blood? There will be so much (too much?) to forgive, and yet if we manage to learn to forgive too 109 much, we might end without any fund of indignation, which might be as bad as not being able to forgive at all.

Monday. But not the black Monday it invariably is, especially when, as today, it is the opening day of yet another Course, because, surprise, wonderful surprise, unexpected bonus, I have got Pat Harvey as a student. I will even be able to mention Mozart to somebody. It was curious. I had just switched on the Radio for the evening news to hear that the miraculous Russians were well on their way to capture Pskov, when I heard through the open window, a voice I at once recognised saying “And those that came to Pskov, remained to pray”. And there stood Pat.

I think often now that you must feel so much more hope than we do here in the shaping of events. You are so much nearer the centre of the dynamo which is shaping them. There must be a tremendous ‘feel’ about in England now that there is even talk about the possible invasion of Europe. I keep thinking that there must be a pulse beating visibly somewhere if only you knew where to look for it. Out here, everything feels so remote, so far away, except, always, this tiny, and yet enormous, grain of ingrained small-scale personal misery, and almost a regret that one remains and has always so far been, so disgustingly safe. Would one be happier if one were in more danger and therefore contributing more? Should one feel less sharply the sense of shame at the comfort in which one now lives? Is it somehow my fault, for God’s sake? And is there a danger in thinking that active participation in actual killing is in fact something worthy, equal to the christian doctrine of the worth of suffering? - something that I think everyone in this war who will come through it all like me without firing or receiving a shot in personal anger or danger will feel, and absolutely wrongly. It’s a curious jealousy that other people should have the chance to risk more. Difficult not to mind it for some reason, when one is so grateful to be safe. I expected to be more free of it - especially when one is not sure, beyond certain very limited things, what one should be fighting for, or, in my case, not fighting for. But there they are, the jealousy, the guilt, the hopes, especially the hopes, which are growing stronger by the day, for the world, and our small selves. Up to now one’s pessimism has never been completely proved, in spite of all the evidence for it, and therefore often surprises with the degree of hope it now so suddenly affords.

One desperately tries to avoid misery becoming self-pity, which is abominable, but one just can’t see that any mood other than one of modified misery is conceivable. And, in any case, isn’t it misery that so often keeps the mind alert, lively and functioning? Certainly it is often misery that most often drives the mind to words. And even in the saddest misery, somehow one seems to sink only to a certain level and then finds bedrock and resistance, something central and unshakeable, and I would say that there is something worse, even, than misery and that is passivity, a contagious slackness of the whole being caught from continuous negation, wrongly directed effort, a moodlessness which comes so often out here in my strange bit of war-not-war and a School of Aircraft Recognition which is hardly even military.

Late letters from you, wonderfully tempering the heat here, all about frost, moonlight, carol singers and Marlborough in an exciting light, and, because it had rained in the night, and although it is still far too warm, here there was, perhaps, an equivalent sort of light, and the sky washed clean, and the dust, for a change, sweetly laid. Have even had broken, quivering birdsong so it has been all the easier to dream 110 the evening walk you talked of. Something is occasionally equal and familiar even here. So incredibly good to feel something shared.

Two days later, and an attack of Lachrymae Rerum. And a nostalgia which is never never vague or nebulous but swoops down on me with the precision of a bloody hawk.

School Conferences all day. The day vanished in a cloud of them as Churchill’s speech,which was all over the front page of our daily paper vanished in a cloud of promises. It is all so slow.

Courses. Courses. I would have none of them except, perhaps, one I could take myself on How To Deal Successfully With The Military Machine. Am stuck miserably inside it, submitting with difficulty. Today there was a particularly venomous and childish Instructors’ Conference for the Gunnery School as a whole. Perhaps the few of us here have lived together too long. I, personally, will be content to remain here for the rest of the war, thinking I’ve learnt enough to know the benefits of submission, but some of the others have more ambition and want more power and promotion and pay. There are at least two here with ungenerous and unforgiving minds who bite and bicker very readily, and sometimes that sort of spirit flares to a head and comes out as it did today. It was all temper and touchiness.

Forced to take to my bed early tonight, by the heat, by the multitude of insects, at only half past eight in the evening. Lay nude in bed, and eheu, eheu, eheu remembered leaping out of yours at half past seven one morning to a cool, everywhere silverware of a lovely Wiltshire sky.

It has been nothing but courses, courses for so long; but now I’ve got a seven-day leave, and I’m seven thousand feet up in Kodai, my head for the second time this year deliciously in the clouds. From the garden where I sit writing to you, the whole village is below me in the dusky blue evening air and pale, bluebell blue chimney smoke rises in undisturbed vertical columns from every chimney I can see. Beautiful, but they vanish, alas, into misery for the loss of you in everything else I see: bird, bee and bonfire (another blue); and now even the churchbell is tolling for you and for me as well. It’s for my heart homing to your heart and I’ll send it by one of these busy pigeons I can almost reach out to catch by hand. Just down the road, the School Orchestra has started rehearsing some Bach. I’d like to send you that as well. And right near me here, a leaking garden tap is dropping slow separate illuminated wet jewels one by one into the dark garden tub. Please wear them too. Two more wonderful things you can have. The noise of ordinary children playing, and screaming their ordinary, everyday, civilian heads off, so dear to me, but to you? With ours? And last a two-wheeled cart, pulled by two white oxen, loaded with freshly cut long logs, exactly the length of French baguettes. Remember? It has just passed me and disappeared down the road with you, bread, and the whole of France.

Just this wild, yet restful, variable, and therefore beautiful week. Two more days of sketching and thinking and being a person again, and then it is over. I think absence is abysmally incoherent. I think love is wonderfully incoherent. Perhaps the whole world is incoherent, and if you try to make a coherence of it, as the long list of philosophers do, or the politicians do, the nearest to coherence they get is to make mistakes. This war is a giant mistake. And, yes, love may be incoherent, but it is not 111 a mistake. I can hang on to the certainty of it here in these cool hills; your letters help me to hang on to it even down in the maelstrom of those bloody military plains; but however incoherent love in absence gets, love, like lyricism, is sanity. So, in a mad mad world, in a mad mad war, my dear sane lady, you still manage to keep me sane.

It is over, and it is back, too quickly, to the treadmill.

Saw Chowdhury for the first time in ages. Found him at work on what he called ‘a major work’, sculpting a figure, a figure which he says ‘will beat all your R.A.’s. Not a difficult target, I thought, but didn’t say. But I liked the figure, especially in the rough as it now stands. It’s life size. I’m just scared that he will go on and ‘finish’ it!

A flock of wild young parrots going over my head this morning. They turned hot ponderous sunlight into cool, subtle greens.

Duty flight, to Calcutta. The barmy, rockabye feeling at the moment of becoming airborne, the air catching the hard belly of the plane in its soft hands. Then you climb, fast, and the earth diminishes, fast, its near beauty lost quickly in the shabby wrinkles of a map. The clouds kneel down to receive you, stick and cling for a moment or two, then you break clear of them and shake them off below you as a swimmer does water from his eyes. Then you are into the miles-high space of blue weather all the way to the sun and back. You don’t go higher, you level off, leaving the clouds just below you in that curious state of endless, weightless suspension, a geography of very pretty froth. And nothing moves, nothing except the shadow of the plane below you, flickering like a dark bat all over that white uneven geography. And sometimes, suddenly, where there was a gap in the clouds it would completely disappear and plunge six thousand feet, like a gannet to earth, to flounder in a lake, or crash without splintering upon rock or hill, or go shivering with delight across the soft silk of green paddy. One more instant, and it would rise like a bird and be with us again, a dark, crazy, will o the wisp in its headlong rush across the close carpet of the clouds. An exciting life, and a beautiful fancy foil to the steel-steady humdrum drumming drive of the hard bright metal of our plane. What was intolerable and took the edge off the delight was the monstrous bludgeoning of the noise inside the military plane which in only half an hour had bashed the senses and the mind to a ragged wedge of weariness. There was the continuous shuddering of the sides and the guts of the whole of the plane as well, an army transport plane. One sat on a metal bench, leaning forward, shaken to bits, head in hand, for hours. Was glad to reach Calcutta and get out. Calcutta on a Sunday is clean, but airless and spiritless, and most of the rest of the morning was wasted trying to book a plane back to Madras in the evening. This effort, after a two-hour wait at the RAF Transport Office failed completely, and was repeated, but more quickly and more successfully at the Railway station for a train back instead. It left me just a comfortable time to complete my duty and make the necessary military contacts, then I got to the station in time for my reserved seat on the train, only to find that the idiots had wrongly booked it for the next day. Confusion because the ordinary part of the train was full. At the last moment, they found me a Ladies Only compartment, and all to myself. They even had the decency to take the notice down!

112 Back to Madras and madness for a week, then Sunday with Duncan. It was full of the brown sails of fishing boats moving, far out, like lice across skin. And with us the sea’s white fists shaken at the shore, the sky full of pigeon-coloured clouds and white flying gulls.

The necessity is to live, with delight, excitedly. The necessity is not for God or faith, but for something infinitely simpler - to live with delight, excitedly. One thinks of religion always in terms of negation, never, in spite of all that holy spiel that says it is, in terms of fulfilment. But think of Mozart, think of Marvell, think of Degas, think of Cezanne, think of lovely Will Shakespeare, and you are at once thinking in terms of fulfilment, of the colossal excitement of being alive. As the Bellman says “I have said it once. I have said it twice. What I tell you three times is true.” Some things, some thoughts, some feelings, renew. Some don’t. Perhaps it is just a matter of putting your question and getting back an answer that WORKS. And works here, at this moment, here on earth, anywhere and at any time; and even in war. And take one thing at a time, and love one person at a time, and, if you are lucky, be loved by one perscn, and you will have most of the answers to many of the questions. This is to be alive. But try to love too many, or try to love God, an abstraction, and you will love a ghost incapable of returning the real mutual sharing which is the basis of excited living. There is something sacred there, perhaps, everywhere, but it is nothing to do with God, or nothing to do with what is ackowledged as God. Strange, coincidental? But in the evening, after office hours as it were (as if sometimes instructing in destruction could almost be done in pin-stripe suits, which it undoubtedly could), had dinner with Chowdhury and an Indian Sadhu, or saint. Never quite sure what a sadhu is, but he was exciting to listen to, and a very odd saint, by our standards, mind you - being atheist, politician, philosopher, and using visiting cards! But I could listen to him for a very long time arguing about the non-existence of God with which I very much agreed, but not to his point of certainty, preferring to be simply agnostic. I asked him about the control of awareness, whether you could ever arrive at the point of having it when you wanted it, to be told that it was a matter of practice, sadhana, using the concentration of mind and emotion, which I think I already knew, and knew also that so far it didn’t work, and perhaps even eliminated that element of surprise which seems to add so much to that sudden rush of richness. When I manage, if ever, to reach sadhana again, I will let you know. But too many years in the army are not very good for it. Actually, views often coincided all round the table, and I thought, my God, if this is all true, I’m in the running for being a saint! I knew Chowdhury wasn’t one, but he often ‘accuses’ me! - for my views on life, sex, celibacy, and austerity veering towards the minimal on painting and drawing. You will have to try very hard, if ever I get back, to treat me with more respect! ! !

It has been very hot all April, and now May arrives with unbelievably, twice the heat. Here, an English May is pure daydream; the melt and topple of the heart at the young, fresh, prickling green, the apple blossom, the dotty appeal of lambs, piglets. No, here it is all a malignant wickedness trying to muster energy and action in the stillness of the suffocating heat, everything molten, dissolved, unfixed, unhinged, myself included. Until lunchtime we are all afloat in the monstrous ripples of heat haze. Then the sea-breeze, thank God, arrives and lowers the temperature from 100° to 90° and it is wonderful for a full ten seconds, until you realise, still sweating, what a fraud it is. 113 A tinker again. Had a wonderful, precious morning off, chasing ever more beads, hairpins (oh, your hair, oh lucky, lucky pins) ribbon and elastic.

Every one of us here is waiting for the Second Front more wildly than the Russians, and is daily, weekly, monthly disappointed. Started in some Finnish paper or other, there was a rumour that it had begun some time ago. A few minutes after breakfast, someone rushed in and yelled ‘Germany has surrenedered’ A little later, with all of us crowded round to listen to the first news, it was clearly rubbish. It was false. Cancelled. The heart first in the mouth, then, where it stayed, in the boots. And, I suppose, how much difference would it make out here anyway? There are lulls everywhere, that’s all. Slack water at the turn of the tide. And if it did start, and failed, what then? Two years ago, just the colossal scale of the bombing of Germany alone seemed enough to end it. It didn’t. Man is too stubborn, and endures too much.

Nearly two years ago on our second gunsite I actually had a piano. Billeted on Guindy Racecourse it wasn’t possible, but now, back on Guindy Racecourse everything was reorganised for the School, so now I can have another. It’s a pretty dreadful affair, this time, but it’s still a piano and this room of mine in this life-saving school has been wonderful enough. Now it is marvellous and I can fill it with Mozart. Is this too much like daring the future? Is digging oneself in like this more likely in the army to lead to a posting away? My gut feeling is, no.

May and heat and another birthday gone. My weird war-not-war continues. My weird military-routine-not-military-routine continues too. It’s a strange way to waste one’s life away except that one hangs on to little bits and pieces of it almost delightedly, and it cannot and does not prevent me believing implicitly in miracles. That, for example, the second front succeeding, Germany, quite soberly, could be defeated even this year, that, less soberly, I could still be here, in this life-saving school, that less and less soberly, you could possibly be out here with the children by Christmas, and that less and less and less soberly Japan could be defeated the year after.

Two of our Gunnery instructors are leaving, and our party of farewell took them first to a cinema, then back to the Mess for a farewell meal. The film was absolute junk. It was American, and full of American manners and American womanhood, or a type of American womanhood that fills you with a cold, creeping sense of horror, amounting to fear of it. Almost hatred of it. Every woman in it gave me the feeling that they should be taught to read and write, and certainly to think and feel. And the rest of their civilisation, their way of life, their feeling for it, seems to be the same. Do you also feel a kind of blank dismay at America? That twice they have to come to our rescue, with all their energy and the scale of their wealth, and all their consequent opportunities, and she has produced what? Not much more than MONEY, not much more than CONSUMERISM. Is that an awful thing to say? Aren’t they going to worship anything else?

Today, for the first time in five weeks, the sky has at last filled with clouds, very nearly all over, and the eyes are bathed with much pleasure in their healing ointment.

114 Listen. “As we drove home, the stars came out thick; I leant back to look at them, and my heart opening more than usual, praised our Lord to and in whom all that beauty comes home.” There, only Hopkins could have written that, and making allowances, which I have to, for his Lord, it is still more than marvellous. His Lord is, indeed, nearly all of him, but that sacred and secular, deep delight operates whether the Lord is in it or not. Listen again to him. “In an enclosure of rocks, the peaks of the water romped and wandered, and a light crown of tufty scum standing high on the surface, kept slowly turning round: chips of it blew off on the surface and gadded about without weight in the air.” Each and every word alive with his special world of watching and delight. Only the repetition of the words ‘on the surface’ seems to make the balance slightly, but only ever so slightly,imperfect. But, lord (no capitals for me, but here he comes again) how the mind aches in envy of and for things seen, celebrated and enjoyed like that, and for the time to see them in. With Hopkins it was a part of an achieved and nearly continuous attitude. Perhaps time was available for him, but not often is it available in the army, nor for you, with three small children -and that’s that. Only very occasionally can the heart open more than usual, and only very occasionally can all that beauty come home. That it happens at all to either of us, which it does, thank God, makes it two of the wonders of this bloody world. It certainly is not happening to me on this hot stifling roof where I sit for a moment or two to repair the ravages of another compulsory day away. Everything is dry and barren. An Indian woman has just gone by below me, singing. It amazes. One wonders drearily under what compulsion she can be, to sing.

Every now and then a hot desultory wind comes and goes in the air, past the open window, but there is no pleasure in it. It simply wrings the straggly neck and withers of each parched and withered bush, and passes on. I was desperately conscious of the unhappiness of your last letters, and felt myself powerless and stupid not to be able to help. “When the children are in bed, there is comfort only in the stillness of the house.” But, think, that comfort reached me too, and it is vital for both of us to catch the quality of that comfort and stillness and ride it out together on the wave it makes in the mind. Courage, ma vielle and “Do nothing, think nothing: but fix your eyes on the green trees.” This ought to be issued as a slogan for every one. Neither you nor I can alter the run of this wretched war. Be still, accept. And yet, bloody Hell, there are some things one could never, and should never, accept. Be still, endure, and bide your time. We will start again one day.

Letter from Tony in which I remember he wrote of ‘an experience which I can only call religious’ and which ‘has completely changed my whole way of life’. And there, unfortunately he left it. He was describing how depressing he found the state of the world. I share that view and have had it for as long, and respect it, and respect very much the conscientious objector, and even the padre and hoped he wouldn’t become either. CAN a new attitude be found to make this sad strange life liveable? And CAN such an attitude come from a single experience? Is there so much traffic on the road to Damascus? Sure, a single experience can be extraordinary but would think that such a one would be, and was, confirmatory of quite a few others of the same type, on a smaller scale, and over a long period. One such happened to me and is still vivid, and proved significant. It was when I was still at Oxford, in fact, when I was simply standing on the corner of the Carfax and George Street waiting for the traffic lights to change so that I could get across. As I began to cross, when the lights had changed, I happened to look up into a clear night 115 and suddenly my mind seemed to empty and fill with an exultation something reminiscent of the contact with beauty and his Lord that Hopkins felt. I had read his remark before, and THINK I can understand it, and certainly understood it better after crossing the road, avoiding the traffic and wondering how curious it was that so small a skull could be so filled with so huge an exultation simply while crossing from one side of the road to the other. What accidental confluence of conditions permitted such an outburst of feeling I do not know, but since then only some degree of that same exultation about you, about things, about landscape, about people, has been of any real worth in living. The search to discover and have it again and again, and have more of it has been, (and can be?) only partially successful. To a certain lesser extent, it was there before, and the search is still perpetual. The attitude comes from the continuity, - not the single experience.

Have finished the two Koestler novels you so kindly sent me, and now, as you can guess, actually NEED the Pickwick Papers that came with them, for which relief, much thanks. After the Koestler, feel now a bit stained and deceived by the sympathy so many of us felt, and indeed still feel, about the democratic struggle in Spain and less so perhaps with the ideas of communism. Feel more at home and less deceived in positively fighting (or in my case, again, not fighting) the brutal and degrading ideas of fascism, and now feel a bit less selfish in embracing more closely the personal life. Is it wrong to think that at least one can do less harm that way? Koestler was, at least, not falling into that trap, or he wasn’t obviously setting up a conflict of opposites, the Party State against the personal life. There is a parallel unattractiveness in both Rubashov the person and his Party the state. It doesn’t do to be too clever. If you are too clever, you, as a person, can do exactly the same as The Party - produce reason after reason, each reason reversing the former, with complete ease and apparent justification, like someone turning over a coin, over and over and over, till you see no answer to anything, but an infinite process of justified deception which ends in vertigo. Nothing is left stable. This form of ‘changing the party line’ as a form of reasoning, receding inwards ad infinitum, seems to be one of the underlying flaws in communism and in Marxist dialectics, doesn’t it? It permits all the permutations of the self-contradicting party lines based on ‘the conditions of the moment’, each one as easily justified as the other, till there seem no central stable values at its roots. It permits also, which is even worse, the complete disregard of the individual peculiar to communists - in direct contrast to their declared ideal of individual realisation. “To each according to his need. From each according to his power”. Wonderful in itself and equal to anything in Christianity, but look what Stalin has made of it. Koestler sees the dilemma but cannot produce out of himself the right values to settle the dispute. Can any of us? Are Koestler’s feelings too awry, too confused by being so clever? He seems to lose the soul of his book in a welter of psychoanalytic and theoretical motives to which, in the end, one heartily objects. There’s an even deeper dilemma: if we are all abnormal, and are all to be taught anew, who is to teach us if our teachers have to be taught first? Is the final reason not in the mind, but in the heart, or whatever part of us is not the mind?

God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone; He that sings a lasting song Thinks in a marrow bone.

116 And what, for God’s sake, does that mean? Real values must be matters of real feeling, and if all our teachers and ourselves are not really normal, are we, as human beings, actually even capable of producing real values that offer us dignity and can persuade us to accept the disciplines of living together? Yeats has to bow to the medical profession. There are actually diseases of the marrow bone, n’est ce pas? Certainly we can’t expect proper values from the mind/heart healers like Dr Bulgar, who, as Koestler points out, is much more abnormal than the people she is trying to ‘cure’. And in trying, ourselves, to put reason in perspective, we must neither run or hunt with the Nazi hounds, who would like to overthrow reason entirely and substitute blood, race, leadership and all the rest of the mumbo jumbo, nor yet see world citizenship as the answer. We are hardly decent citizens in our own little nations. As there can therefore be no ‘pure’ reason, perhaps we have to give in a bit more to the poor old faulty individual who nevertheless seems to be able to get his values slightly better balanced, slightly better oriented, than the really clever chap who thinks he knows everything. And who is going to be the judge? So, let us go out and sit on the grass and watch the wind and the sky, and add up our few moments of happiness, if ever we get them. That at least is a consummation devoutly to be wished. I keep remembering that Tony and Barbara are now married. Envy, out here, is deep and natural. I don’t forget our own marriage, and continually wonder when we can get our eyes, even just our eyes to meet again. Until then patience, and the small but royal, bitter heart must somehow be made quiet. What helps is the immense and natural therapy of concentrating those eyes outwards, fixed on the green trees, the grass, the bird, even on the light alternating on the walking knees of, in my case, foreign cattle. That’s a sort of sanity. We must plead for it, plead. To look too often inward and backward is to be bitter, and to be bitter is to be restless. To be restless is to inhibit all that quiet which alone can give the necessary conditions in which any therapy can operate. So, I will imagine you watching with intense, caring pleasure the antics of the children, the banner flowers of the runner beans, each Blenheim Orange apple on that lovely tree; and you can imagine me, in between endless instructing, mounting guard, doing PT and swotting up aircraft, in contemplation! Watching the hot wind shifting the brown, not green alas, grass, trying to work out how this immense and nauseating heat can be so delicate on ‘each vivid and amazing leaf’, watching the tranced stillness of the evening clouds, and, indeed, all those things which most naturally set singing that curious mesh of singing strings about that curious thing we call the heart. Your heart, my heart. Courage, ma vieille, once and many times more.

One day later, this evening, palladian architecture in the sky! Honest. There were three quite separated storms of rain, towards the horizon. Three dark columns of rain, with what, a mile between each?, a classical Doric trilithon holding up the sky. Quite a sight, and, at a different angle, not quite so far away, just visible in a soft glare of light, is all the nostalgia of the sea. Near at hand, a different sea of trees and leaves, shivering gently, and smelling of honey. A bit later still and the huge clouds of evening are sailing into the wounded sun, which bleeds red in the floodwaters left by yesterday’s rain.

Lay on the roof last night, looked up into the night, and told all those utterly indifferent brightnesses that Rome had fallen. At this heart-stopping news, hot from Europe, they just stared coldly back, analysing a more important history on so much larger a scale that the soldier who, on the news, had filled his Jeep full of roses, 117 became a mountebank at the scene of a tragedy instead of a small human being pleased with a mighty victory.

My God, at last, at last, it has come. The Second Front! Jesus, it is like the Second Coming. Alone, in the Mess, I had just switched on for the news, and there, with not a single inflection higher in his voice, came the news of this earth-shaking event, waited for for so long, and there was this chap, this BBC grocer handling an order for a pound of tea, half a pound of sugar. Incredible! We had landed in France, and succeeded in establishing bridgeheads. In the plural! And there, there, for me, was our dear French countryside in the May sun with the with the invasion of bullet and bomb and shell coming in with the tide from the sea. Now that it is happening, it seems such a huge thing to do, amounting almost to the impossible. Will it succeed? How much, and who will it cost us? And what will we do with all the human and political problems when it is all over? It makes Rome a cinderella, and the effort in India and Burma some tiny disturbance on the rim of an enormous vacuum. Russia will join the act soon, there will be another enormous landing in southern France, revolt in the Balkans and the giant corroding fear in Germany itself. It is curious how unexcited and the opposite of jubilant one is.

The Second front goes well, and so, here, does our Sergeant Morrissey. He is a clerk in the Office, quiet, competent, but entirely without energy. But he is interested in bees, which is nice. Perhaps that fires him with enough energy to be a competent clerk fussing with files. So, with support from the Major, and with a bit of added enthusiasm from me, our School of Gunnery now has five hives, all duly set up properly, and with advice from the Department of Agriculture here, whom we carefully consulted. You won’t believe this, and neither did I, but, in due course, they actually sent us a very special Indian Civil Servant who rejoices (honestly!) for some heavenly reason, in the beautiful, unbelievable name of Bee Messenger. Just like the Fish Footman, straight out of Alice in Wonderland. He brought us some sample honey, and it was apologetically very poor thin stuff which ran about all over the place and couldn’t be spread, and could be useful only in puddings, but Sgt Morrissey is now twice the size from pride, and we will benefit, quite apart from steam puddings, because the hives will be something to show all visiting Brigadiers and Generals, not one of whom could resist an interest in bees, in fact all of them will be experts in the subject, they always are, and we will easily be able to sidetrack them from any proper inspection of whatever they have come to inspect, sometimes for as much as an hour, I bet, and then, surprise, surprise, it will be almost time for them to leave. We have already nicknamed it The Military Sting!

While the Second Front seems stuck at Caen, for us, the School’s Indian Cobbler was married last night. The Commandant and the School’s Instructors had all been officially invited. So we went, in a body. The bride turned out to be a pretty little girl, about ten years old, and three and a half feet high! She seemed petrified with terror, her huge brown eyes wide with it. The bridegroom, the son of the cobbler, was a tall, weedy, obsequious young man of about seventeen, with no apparent graces whatever. The wedding ceremony took place, not in a room, but in a narrow street, between two rows of very rickety houses, where a space had been roped off, and what looked like, and was, a bed sheet, had been thrown across on top and in between for an awning. Quite effective actually, too. Underneath this, with the parents, sat this ghastly group of self-conscious officers all in uniform, round a small 118 table with a few ridiculous looking bananas on it. We were offered, and tried to drink without making faces, some perfectly poisonous whisky. And then suddenly it rained. And the rain came, of course, right through the bedsheet, dripping only, fortunately, and not enough, unfortunately, to disperse us, or the enormous crowd of mad-eyed and excited Indians who were continuously pushing forward, not to see the wedding, but just to examine us. They controlled their excitement, being content to stare at us wildly and silently. It was like something from Goya. One of Los Disastros of this particular Guerra! Nobody took the slightest notice of the terrified little bride, who, I thought, looked likely to burst into tears at any moment. Once, later, she nearly went to sleep, and was smartly brought to her senses again with a fairly hefty clout from her mother for her inconsideration. I think she wanted to run away. So did I, but she was hardly big enough to get down from the chair she had been made to sit in. She now, apparently, goes to live, for several years, with the parents of the bridegroom, under the thumb and direction of mother-in-law, I suppose. In a few years time comes the marriage ceremony proper, and afterwards the couple make their lives together. Poor child, so young, so small, and so, at the moment, lovely, like most little Indian girls are, especially as she was, completely smothered in flowers, white Jasmine and small red roses against her dark brown satiny skin. The cobbler and two other blokes (Best man, and father of the bride?) made completely incomprehensible speeches in pidgin English, in which, in deference to us, the game was to introduce as many long English words one after another as fast as possible, with an inverse proportion of connecting syntax, against which the short, happy, lucid speech of the Commandant appeared to be in a different language altogether.

A day made full and special with several letters from you, and in one the children hopping with excitement as the chimneysweep’s brush came out of the top of the chimney. Wonderful! That’s my sort of theatre too! The lovely absurdity of children’s laughter. The incident took the edge off all the rest of the inevitable sadnesses, no matter what the letters contain. But I was there with you, to share with you all, the arrival of the chimney brush into the open air! So far, the schoolmaster’s war has been so wonderful and lucky. No school on Sundays, so every Sunday is off unless there’s something extra on. Had even the gift of Saturday off as well this weekend, and spent it at Duncan’s. He is such a good host. Almost too good. Too firm about giving the latest guest the choice of music, which we always have and love. He, and those of us like myself, who are really no longer really guests at all, and actually share with him very similar tastes, had to put our ears in our pockets this time, while a different taste took control, and lasted far too long. That was Saturday evening, but all was mended sailing at Ennore all day Sunday, and even though there was scarcely any wind, the boat gently and beautifully fractured the bright skin of placid unbroken light stretched for miles across the water. Ennore is a freshwater lake. Do you remember the smell of fresh water in the dykes and marshland of the Blyth? It equals the stronger salt smells of sea-water. It is more subtle with something of earth and mud in it, with something of rain, reeds, dead birds again. It belongs more to the wind than sea smells do. The sea you smell at once. Fresh water smells are more reserved, come more slowly, but when they do arrive they mean more; something like a declaration of friendship.

While the battle in France halted, but now again starts to spread, had one of the happiest days possible. On Sunday Jean and her two children, Mo and Sheila, 119 came through Madras, and I took them all sailing. It was good. Children are good for you, always, in so many ways. They are a bit like cats? One moment wooing and purring at you with affection, the next quite indifferent, aloof, and independent, and you will be of no importance to them at all, which is good for you, for your self disrespect, though your own unimportance is perhaps a lesson learnt too frequently in wartime. All the same, when it happens, it is wonderful to feel a child’s frank affection work its magic in the monotony of present conditions. To be involved, suddenly, personally, at the quick of your heart, is such a rich, rare, exaggerated pleasure.

The complete lack of all mail since the Second Front started is understandable, to put it mildly, but drives me for lack of you almost to call it off. But I suppose Cherbourg and Caen are worth it?

We are running a course for Officers this week. As usual, nobody really taking any interest, but one of them, almost as if to compensate for all the rugger language and limericks that go flashing about in the Mess, actually gave me one which delighted. Actually it has to be performed. Here it is. Il y avait un jeunne homme de Dijon Qui n’aimait pas tant la religion Il cria à haute voix Ils m’embetent, tous trois, Le Père, Le Fils, et Le Pigeon. When you come to the Holy Ghost, as it were, you flap your arms like wings, and take off round the room!

Another guest weekend with Duncan et al, and therefore with Grieg, Chopin, Mendelssohn. Palm Court stuff. Light music. Facility? No conflict between the output and the inner power of the man, and his resolution of it in his medium? Is that it? The excess of their means of expression over what they have to express? In which case it doesn’t bear the weight of anyone’s whole attention, and therefore everything seems to slip away with no effort to attend, and all slops into sentiment. And you talk, or even dance. Returned to my room and tore up the major portion of all water-colours so far. All work, (but not, perhaps, wasted,) but all gone. “Seek, and the technicalities will be added to you.” - that’s nonsense. Not to me, they aren’t.

I gathered, when your letters did start arriving again, including the photograph of C’s portrait of you, that Tony is now pacifist, but what I didn’t learn was what is happening to him , now, in terms of bread and butter and daily use. Now it has happened, I feel a lot happier, unpremeditatedly so, as if it were a selfish relief to myself. Too many good people are being killed, and Tony will be an infinitely better teacher, say, if they allow him to be so, and writer, if that is what they will allow. If he feels all this violence and destruction is fruitless, which, personally, I don’t, he’s right to set up his conviction against them. Everything else follows. I do hope the tribunal will be sensible and will allow him to teach, and not insist on some other dreary non-combatant work. Tony will be wrong to compromise on this. I just hope he wont have to. He has my fiercest support. Let him know as soon as possible. My letter may go astray trying to find him. I envy him his inverted bravery, and his wife, and his child. It’s a pity perhaps that you have a husband who, not being a Christian, prefers to take up arms against this sea of troubles. Did I say arms? I mean actually just words, words, words. 120 My objections to C’s portrait of you, now I’ve got this photograph, go not to the conditions in which it was painted, but more centrally to his vision of you and the way he paints. I know how lovely you are, but he has lost your character in your attractiveness, and that’s a vividly wrong thing to me, and something Degas would have cried aloud in horror at. This portrait is a face from which all difficulties have been removed, and which is therefore not alive. Surely the artist should see the odd unevenesses which are in any living person’s face. He should be able to tap this underdrag of specific personal living, and not smooth it out like any RA with some pretty generality, or any other flattery. It is therefore just not adequate. It is just not you. And I am well aware of a crop of sour grapes. Even these are not there.

Today God is in his heaven, and the moon in the sun’s face. It is the solar eclipse, and I’m not at all sure that I’ve got the astronomy right, but all is symbolic. The Americans are out and away into the plains of France and way into the Pacific as well. The Russians have taken Brest-Litovsk, and in Italy Leghorn is ours. God is indeed in his heavens, and now the present Japanese cabinet has resigned. The tide is creeping up the German wall. In Japan the shape of the war is sharper. The mind is almost paralysed with hope.

This is now a few days further on, and surely one should be more than able to stay alive with hope, but I feel emptied out. Has the rot of all these years of stupidity set in too far, too deep, too hard?

Miracles, miracles, miracles! Twenty miles from Paris! Twenty miles from coffee and croissants on the Boulevard St Michel! Do ordinary mortals like ourselves have miracles performed for us? Is the war so nearly really over? Will repatriation so soon allow us to meet and kiss and talk again? Will there really be England, cliffs, gulls and good vegetables again? Do you really still live, keep the same cottage, walk and shop in the same village, walk in that still not finished garden? Oh, surely, if Frenchmen can have the whole of their country, surely surely, one wife, and three very young children, are not too much for one unimportant English captain’s frantic hope.

Everything develops everywhere, even here. The decision and development here is that the Gunnery School is to be wound up and sent north. For a moment, when I heard that, I thought it would be the same for us, but no: thank God, the Aircraft Recognition Wing of the School is to remain and continue here, and what’s more it is to be under my command! Very doubtful, that. But here we stay. We have courses planned right up to next Janeuary, and hints of more, and by then anything could happen.

Saw our first invasion newsreel tonight. It was of the landings and Caen, Caen broken and mutilated beyond recognition. Later, I suppose, there have been and will be many other small towns and villages in France and Belgium, and Germany too unless they surrender soon, and only over their ruins will come our own and everybody else’s happiness. Guilty, guilty, guilty. And in Caen, in some odd, very cold way, it was worse with the buildings than with the people. Life, for most of us, is pretty short, for buildings so long. And there they were, smashed to pieces. And Churchill’s speech, another one, was just “Back to peace, back to democracy.” and that seemed pretty poor stuff after years sated with destruction, and

121 poor consolation for so much national and personal expenditure. We will want something more.

The tempo of instruction here does not seem to ease with the lessening of the war in Europe. I suppose in time the whole Air Force will get deployed out here against the Japanese. I suppose we should not be surprised, and hence we have more on than ever, even on Sundays now occasionally. Imagine!

Too much hope, too quickly. Now the war has slowed down to a crawl. Germany fights on far too well and now fights for Germany itself, and the Japanese manage to corner us in Burma, but thank God they are in trouble in the Philippines. How long the war now?

Your last letter, and I confess I am glad to hear that Margaret and all the rest sharing that small house with you for so long, will soon be leaving you. I know that sounds like lack of sympathy for both you, perhaps, and them; but I believe being alone at least for some time is essential, and I think you and everybody have lived in these days too much with other people and for too long. Enforced gregariousness is not good for anyone is it? It isn’t a creative state. The quiet, the love, the wonder at life, come when you are alone. It should be part of everyone’s routine, even ours, even after these years of not being together!

How ungratefully one regards the necessary pauses in this war. It is time we swept on in Europe again, in one of those wonderful rushes which knock all the misery from the ears and fill them with the livelier noises of hope.

For three whole days, have had to entertain a military visitor to the school. He had been sent down here from the north to look at all our training ideas, equipment and devices. I celebrated my release from him this evening with a walk down by the river. After the small tyrannies of entertaining, and the larger tyrannies of hurt the world inflicts, the mild calm evening breathed wonderfully gently. I watched the familiar image of a bright blue kingfisher carry right down the centre of the light on the river and watched with as much pleasure, too, what the blue dragonflies did so vividly at the edge of reeds.

Sunday, and I am miles up the Ennore Creek with Duncan whom I have not seen for ages. Sunday, and no instruction at all for a change, and a day which, in England, would be full of an English summer. The air is warm, still and audible. A near-silence, but not quite; it’s that soft deep-singing silence of an English summer. A million minute movements monitor the stillness. A million minute sounds monitor the silence. Lying in grass, think I’m feathered with the wings of birds and butterflies. Not possible, but real. We sailed up the river in the centre of this wonderful silence. Many storks and egrets silently looked up raising their heads exactly like a row of ?????????????, interrogating silently who the hell we were. The soft hissing brush of the boat against the water was their only answer. One more tiny touch added to the curiosity of a summer silence of very small sounds. We lunched in the shade of a tree. It was hot. Duncan slept. I stayed awake, on my elbow, listening, watching. It has been so still all day that the clouds have not altered their shape by a feather. Thought of you in Wiltshire, you with your calm presence and your eyes as wide and quiet as this afternoon. All defences down, and

122 five years of your friendship flooded through four years of war and this summer silence. Your summer is now my absence here. The silence is impossible.

Heavy storm last night, calm and sunny today, and the dragonflies are drifting this way and that like thistle seed. I hate the heat but often like the things it brings. Dramatic storms and the cool air they bring, and this calm aftermath of dreamy dragonflies.

Repatriation, sweet word, but still just a word, is now in the air, firmly. But it’s only set here at four years. We have been out here since February 1941 . In theory therefore we are due back in the February 1945. Some hope! But it’s now moving so slowly in Europe and America is so slowly wreaking its revenge in the Pacific. It is therefore more important, in a way, that I have managed at last to change my piano for one that plays in tune! It has had no effect on my technique. I don’t ever seem to improve. My fingers are too large and too stiff. How, indeed, do you play the piano with things equivalent to parsnips? On second thoughts, repatriation even by next Christmas seems more like a fresh sentence to death.

Words, even the richest of them, are empty unless you yourself can fill them with what Powys calls ‘premeditated ecstasy’. You have to fill them, like the wind fills sails, with your own breath. It is not only what is written or said or sung, but also what you personally can take to what is written or said or sung. Difficult. But one spin-off, if it works, can be why, perhaps, what is still not so well written or said or sung, can yet rig out a whole ship of feeling, sweeping aside what is wrong with a sudden tide of rightness.

While I was shaving early this morning, outside the billet, as I very often do, there were, about fifty yards away, all standing at the communal water tap, a man, a woman, a child and a horse. The man was old, ugly, withered up, and his bow legs were bent almost to a circle. The woman was the same. Old, ugly and withered up. But the child and the horse were lovely. The child was young, slim, the frail bare top of her body pale brown, rising out of a long gathered skirt of many stripes. The horse was white, the beauty of its form sharing with the child a natural dignity. The woman chattered incessantly and occasionally shouted. The man spoke but only to quarrel. The child and the horse remained silent, the horse because it had no speech, the child because it seemed lost in wonder at the water falling from the village tap into the bucket with which she was watering the horse. Both were diminished by the chattering, shouting quarrel of the adults. When they had finished washing and watering, they all left. The old man and woman were still at their shrill war of words and shouts. The child and the horse a little way behind sharing their silence. Still friends. It was like a fairy story.

It is October, and yesterday came the first cool monsoon wind. Today it is blowing again and it nearly rained. Tomorrow, Sunday, dead on its dated day, it looks as if the monsoon will arrive, to drench us, and the dust, with its lovely rain and keep us comparatively (repeat comparatively) cool until next March. And by next March, will the shape of the war, the shape of repatriation, and perhaps even demobilisation be clear? And then, after so many years of loss and dereliction how long will it take everyone to readjust? Ten seconds, ten weeks or ten years?

123 The monsoon has really arrived. No storms or real downpours yet, just rain, cool grey weather and a gentle, passive, brooding light. Ointment for the eyes. Best of all, it is cool enough not to have a fan going. For the first time this year, mine is still. There is a curious absence of movement and noise. Occasionally, the luck of having this small command, living in this billet, working at the school, at no risk, with long but regular hours, sinks in. And after hours, and most Sundays, one is free. That alone is extraordinary and tonight there is a break in the monsoon, a fine evening in full spread with enormous colourful monsoon clouds coming in from the sea. They come so swiftly over your head and pile up inland in the sun for a moment or two, in a lovely muddle of white, pink, and purple, like a Kentish orchard in full spring blossom.Then it is time for a quick dusk and night.

Had a lovely, gloomy, but richly coloured postcard of a Sickert when I got to my desk at School today, lovely enough to stare at for a moment or two. It was from Irma. It was full of those fine deep, dark reds and greens and browns he uses so often. Almost ugly in their shapes close to, but richly magnificent together further off. Photographic accuracy of what is there, is not what is there. What IS there are these strange, almost ugly patches of tone and colour. They are a sort of true falsehood, and he sinks those tones and colours backwards beautifully into his canvas, half-seeing everything wholly.

Surely in a year from now there will be peace, in Europe, almost for sure . Surely Germany won’t be able to hold up against us and the Russians? The mind races forward to consent. But out here will that make the necessary difference? Miracles out here take longer. Here one’s body under the Indian sun is almost black. But not as black as the mind. Three and a half years without kiss or congress, that’s an achievement in refrigeration of which one might be proud, if one didn’t think also that one was losing one’s sense of touch! Next to you and leave in Kodai, which I don’t look like getting for a bit, the sea heals most; and here, on a free Sunday, I am, by it, and in it, all this bright afternoon, wet and cool with all its clean juices, its bulk, and the flowers of its foam about my head, my eyes, my ears, my shoulders and my shins. After swimming I suffered a sea change wandering along the shore looking for seashells. There were many and they fascinate - the mixture of liking them so much, yet finding them so cold, and, in a way, forbidding in their too perfect and immaculate beauty. It does not do to be too beautiful!

We’ve been playing rugger again for some time now. Still enjoying it. The last reminder of the Public School dies, if it is going to die, so obstinately hard that one is a bit astonished, and feels that much more guilty of still enjoying it. But should one feel guilty? What, about the simple act of running fast over grass? About enjoying the complete gracelessness of knees and boots and men? About the wonderful ease of half-time, lying in the mud with the foreign sky going so familiarly over? And, dammit, when I get home the mud is scarcely out of my ears before Mozart is pelting in.

Crossing over Saidapet bridge this morning I stopped and watched a Pied Kingfisher hovering for several exultant minutes exactly level with my head, and only five yards away, its beak pointed downwards, its eyes rivetted on the water about ten feet below him, his pied wings working wildly until he suddenly dropped 124 like a stone, vanished and then came up with the bright fish caught in his beak like a silver coin.

Wonderful airgraph from you, walking with the children in a near-gale. You and the wind and the wet road, and all of you reflected in it. You had eight of you, twice the reflected form of you, and, at first, I had none. Then I had all eight of you too and all those shouts of laughter chasing Nic’s tiny hat blown off and trundling down the road with another also, reflected in the wet. Have my thanks yourself, and share them with the children, especially Nic. Tell him one day I’ll chase his hat as well. At the moment I’m chasing wonderful rumours of peace which are all over the evening papers. I took the rumours outside and spread them all over the evening sky.

Those peace rumours were enough to drown all words for weeks. They have died a natural death.

A wild ferocious wind, fast rain clouds with rain I usually welcome, but this time it’s so hard it scratches, felt as if it could even bite, with teeth. The gale lifted leaves feet high, and made all the birds who dared to fly bank and heel and struggle through it, almost too weak to make any way. This evening we received a typhoon warning and had to lash everything moveable down.

In the morning heard that the typhoon had veered southeast and missed us. Have two more courses to get through and then I get some leave. Tomorrow I have to prepare the papers for the first course and receive a Brigadier. But I am already looking for that leave. My eyes already turned towards those hills whence cometh my salvation.

Watched the sun die bloodily behind one of those excitedly contorted skies, the dark clouds like a pack of hounds in at the death of the royal fox.

Rain again today. Rain yesterday. The air white, scrubbed clean, brushed and combed all one way.

Form in drawing, and character. Shouldn’t the balance be just that little bit more on character than form? Isn’t this where so many Art Schools have lost support, have gone a bit wrong? Sure, you cannot draw without form, but you cannot say anything without character. Form gives you an answer, a truth, but, by itself, is always a generality, and can end by being banal, repetitious and have only the ‘elegance’ of the Old Master touch. Generalities so often become trite and cliché ridden, however ‘true’ they are. But character, character has all the truth of form, and that wonderful extra truth of falshood, the pencil dragged determinedly downward, or side ways or slightly across. It’s the emphasis on the slightly ugly, on the lines of real life, the off-true, the what is not there but needs to be, the essence of the person or the object.

Today we are celebrating (celebrating?) Armistice day, that of the First World War, and we are all wearing the crimson poppy on our khaki jackets. Crimson. Crimson for shame this year. It must be. It can’t be just for remembrance. Only a thing like man, as little human, with as short a memory, could celebrate the armistice of one war in the middle of another almost in the same generation.

125 Everything man touches he sours and hurts and misunderstands. Lest he forget. Lest he forget.

Weekend off. The whole of it. And on Sunday lunch with Duncan again, miles up the river with its intimate traffic of barge, bird, bee, and butterfly. On each bank of the river, miles of level plain, all the paddy beautifully flooded, and on both sides the tall white egrets again like commas and queries in a prose of pinkish mud. Above us, the sun’s hot keel slid through a tide of small white clouds, a sea no boat like ours will ever sail through.

It’s coming up for Christmas 1944, and in spite of the German offensive in the Ardennes, we are all of us busy working out our own repatriation, based on the latest announcements, perhaps for Christmas 1945. The only trouble is that those announcements are just in the newspapers. We have nothing in writing yet, and, in the army, nothing counts but regulations in black and white. And even they can be quickly cancelled. But, all the same, we dream of Christmas 1945. The children will be two fives and a four, and you four-and-a-half busy years different. Me too. I try to imagine it all and can’t. I can easily imagine it won’t be different with you, we have kept so well in touch, but it will be sheer terror meeting with the children. Trauma for them and me. I trust blindly in my liking for practically every child I have ever met; surely it won’t be different, except deeper for our very own? But I am going to be very strange for them, and very large, and I will, no doubt, for them, be taking some part of you away from them. Will they like that? We will have to take great care. And what about all the other parents caught in the same trap? In how many cases will it work out right? And even if there is only one in which it works out wrong, that’s a price too dear for peace to pay for war. All of November is now gone, and we’re into another you-less, home-less, Christ-less Christmas, and still there is nothing in black and white for us. True, we have new, extra pay, a campaign allowance (which I certainly don’t deserve) and a very curious new arrangement of a month’s leave which, strangely, only the chaps with less service out here than us old timers will get. That’s difficult for us to follow unless it portends faster repatriation. We’d all rather have that than leave I know, and the pay etc are only sops thrown to the desperately hungry. By the rumours of the allies ganging up against Russia, I suppose that, even when I do get back, we will be lucky if we get six months together before war against Russia breaks out. If that occurs, a lot of us here, and in the ranks, will be in prison as objectors. Let the politicians beware. Nobody is going to fight the Russians. They, even more than the Americans, have saved us.

Extraordinary. Out of the blue, thought he was in Africa, had a telegram from Dennis. He is in India! He is now on the same sub-continent as I. I’ve tried to get leave, immediately, but it’s no go. Maybe he can. He was the whole of two thousand miles and the Indian Ocean away, and now only one thousand miles away, so the poles of brotherly excitement are at least that much narrowed.

Evidence that repatriation is really down to three years and eight months is accumulating day by day, but still no conformation in writing. Returns and pro-formae pour into the office daily by every post, and we work on them happily late into the evening. But I still stubbornly and tenaciously refuse to believe it except that such sweet poison works insidiously and quickly.

126 Saw some shot quails in Spencer’s (the local Selfridges) for sale, today. Very small, and their long thin legs stuck out of their small bodies like needles out of a ball of knitting, and I met two children aged five today as well. Almost shocked to think how big, how frightening, and what individuals they all will be, Jenny, Ren and Nicholas. It is now Christmas. Will it be the last? It should be, if all goes well. I nearly believe so, except that the sun here is so hot, it is difficult to believe it is Christmas at all. I have to close my eyes to ask you what today’s been like with you. What time did the children wake you up and bring those presents to you? What time was that delicious pandemonium at its most delicious? What time, if at all, did that delicious pendulum swing to the almost inevitable tears? What time did you all go for the traditional Christmas walk? Into that cold, open English sky? There could even have been snow? Certainly a pretty cold wind? And leafless trees? Something like a sight nearly forgotten. In the office, this afternoon, a fierce attack of misery, even when it is now known that it is at least not endless. All the same, think I would be rather a gibbering idiot than face openly, in full consciousness, all it means to be still away. And it could be for at least another year, and even that seems endless. Something happens to the scale of things, something happens to memory itself, to time, to misery itself, if it all goes on too long. It’s the loss of fire, the diminishing of one’s reserves, the rise of the flood of military water right up to and down one’s throat. At first, memory was the ace of hurts, for you were still so close, then it was distance, now it is time.These six thousand miles and four years of absence are as hard and as conclusive as this bloody office table.

A day or so and you saved my sanity yet once more. “The children got the milk and the vegetables for me, on their own.” God, and I haven’t even ever seen them walk. Not till your letter, now, when I saw them march off, heads high with that enormous sense of responsibility, that immense conspiracy to succeed. And I’m thirty-one! To be out of one’s twenties seems as fearful a responsibility as fetching the milk and the vegetables. And, by the way, thank you wonderfully for the parcel, that copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I like the title, especially the last word, and the Oxford Press has done a nice job, so I have determined to try again. Just once more, then never again.

Started at page 100, and have already given up . On duty tonight and spent half of it reading Ignazione Silone’s Seed Beneath the Snow, much more interesting. The other half spent walking up and down outside under the brightness of the stars. There was no moon, and the darkness was tremendous. Total. Absolute everywhere except for the stars. They prickled and stammered in excelsis. They have a vertigo of their own and seem most tumbling and most violent in all their most apparent stillness. The darker and more peaceful the night, the more tumultuous the stars until in their stillness they swarm about one’s head with the controlled violence of a swarm of bees.

Am afraid that, whatever your friendly corporal from the Middle East you met the other day says, three years and eight months is still not yet the official figure for repatriation out here. We all hope he is right, and it is going to get further East soon, but at the moment it still stands officially at four years. Notwithstanding that, we are at least preparing for it, in spite of the German attack towards Strasbourg, and preparing more because Russia has started up again in earnest. At least it proceeds. 127 At lunch time today, the most marvellous mail possible. A packet of a letter from you, and out of it came not only a letter from you, but also ALL THE POLYPHOTOS OF YOU AND THE CHILDREN. The first unremembered sight of you would have been enough to traumatize, but the first sight of the children as they now are, as children not babies as I left them, traumatized me twice. You have not changed, your lovely presence surrounded me. Sadder than I remember you, for I still remember you as magically happy, but the lovelier for it. But the children, this first sight of them ever, as children, they have changed and changed utterly and three new beauties are born. From babies to people and wonderful to look at. I managed, somehow, to get through the afternoon’s instruction and then raced into town for a photographer and ordered enlargements, and bought a folder too to put you all in.

Collected them to day. You are now all set up on my desk, and, whenever possible, I am constantly at them, like a bee at a bank of flowers. I so needed you all, actually to see you, and am bewitched. I will never fear to meet you again, and how can I possibly fear young children who bewitch as well and as easily as you do?

Another letter from you, and after being raised to such a pitch with you and the children last week, am now completely cast down by the death of your brother. I was glad for the letter’s apparent quietness, but wondered how much was hidden. Out here, Eric’s death and now also your problems in the house with the pump and the well - it is all so difficult to measure, and I should be with you to take some of the burdens off you. I have, in a way, so much here, and you so little, and now so much less. The misery of losing an only brother, that is something different to manage. I miss you daily, but am four years familiar with that, and have learnt that it is endurable, has to be, especially against the ever-ripening prospects of peace and repatriation. It doesn’t compare to a sudden death. I think that both you and I know that acceptance of some kind is in the end the only possible answer to both death and life. Both are full of horrors, known and unknown, and both are so total, but also so partial. There are also so many marvellous qualifications to what is so shabby and horrible in each, too, and the more desperate the loss, the more strongly must all the many, many, marvellous qualifications be made to operate. Give yourself time to mourn when you turn away from the children, but my hope is that they will help you to live over yet one more loss. Courage encore, ma chère vieille.

Sunday, and took Hilda, a German girl from Kodai and a friend of Duncan’s, for a short sail at Ennore. She had never sailed before. I had met her before and had found her a bit gloomy, and very serious, but she seemed for a change, almost happy and taken out of herself by something so strange, but it wasn’t long before the conversation ran full tilt into all the various values with capital letters. Is it characteristic of Germans that they will keep on wanting things like the Victorians (?) in capital letters, on a large scale, as if they must have something to overawe or frighten them? It comes in so many of their myths and fairy stories, in their philosophers and in bloody Hitler too. My dislike of scale as such, and insistence on realism sorted very oddly and badly with her views. Was glad she wasn’t a follower of Hitler, but couldn’t get on with her regard for religion. She found me too natural, too intuitive, with views too clear-cut - like bright visual seas, she said, whereas she preferred to swim in what she called the deeper seas of INNER REALITIES!- Wow! Those who belong to the LIFE-WITHIN school always claim to, or imply, that there is a greater depth of both thought and feeling there than in any thing else. That is 128 their feeling, isn’t it? And I just don’t see that the feeling they say they get or have, contemplating some abstraction within the spirit is ipso facto deeper, higher, greater than another feeling which surely could be just as deep, such as some of us get from music, art, poetry. I think they could well amount to exactly the same. One doesn’t deny them their INNER REALITIES, even if one disapproves. So why do they always denigrate our OUTER REALITIES? I object to the extra weight, or depth, or height which they seem to claim, or imply, is theirs alone. It seems so bloody arrogant. At least I only claim an equal arrogance, I’m not claiming more! I can’t share their admiration for religion and all those saints. Why, indeed, should I? Saints are alright, said he, modestly, BUT. But look, taking man, or woman, as a whole, saints surely are only half man, or half woman, for they strain their natures too much to one side, denying at least half of themselves! Surely, just as the painter must believe in the proper use of his medium, so should man or woman. Surely a man’s nature must be bound up in his body, and the curious equipment that goes with it, as with a woman, shouldn’t it? Surely a doctrine of the extension of one’s nature through nature, of man or woman through body and mind and spirit (if there is such a thing) is more logical and inclusive than a doctrine of extension through the spirit only. Surely it can only be partly true that you develop more by excluding than including? And the more science learns, the more it seems to point to the spirit as part of the mind, and the mind as part of the tissue of the body, that we are all physical, that the mind is a matter of extreme tissue, or nerve and radiations from nerves in reaction with a reservoir of reactions between man and the physical world. And if the spirit is a kind of super-mind, all the same, it will have its physical roots and need its physical nourishment, wont it? So, let us include all our physical nature, and exclude nothing!

Meanwhile the war goes on, and the wonderful Russians are now only sixty miles from Berlin! Surely the end must be in sight, and yet, ever schooled to catastrophe, one’s war-ingrained pessimism hunts out possibilities of the Germans holding out against us in southern Germany, Northern Italy, everywhere in all the mountains, and is schooled to expect setbacks, new weapons, anything that will delay the end. One even searches, almost automatically, for reasons why the war will go on, and that’s curious. And even if it ends in Germany, what of Japan? One can’t reasonably therefore expect to be home any earlier, especially if the Germans refuse to sue for peace. Then there would be no armistice, no actual ending, no time limit, only a gradual occupation. To cover the distances involved, to occupy the geography involved, would take so much longer, at least right up to November, and another Christmas, who knows? Ages to wait, another hot summer here to wade through, and on top of that, Japan. And, certainly the near approach of peace in Europe is making no difference out here, except that to meet the probable switch of operations, we out here are actually feeling the tempo rising, and are more grindingly busy than ever. We don’t mind, either, regarding it as a clear pointer to a conclusion in Europe. Week in, week out, we do more, expect more. And the expectations are getting sweeter and sweeter.

And in spite of all that, our Sunday off still often applies. Today, a green and salad sea. Fresh, clean, edible, with vegetable inshore colours, and waves creaming on to the shore for our cakes at tea. Coming back there were ospreys, gulls, heron, and the first lark heard for ages. All that sound from such a tiny throat. We were late getting back home, because the Utility went wrong, and I was a long time getting it right. Will you mind, if, after more or less four and a half years 129 of military training, I’ve still succeeded in not knowing much about the mechanics of a motor? Will you be able, like me, to take the self-defensive view that one must specialise, and therefore also ignore? Especially machinery! Learning how to ignore, and what to ignore is just as important as learning in what to specialise. Like painting. I just shy naturally away from machinery, especially if it is large, like a frightened hare. It is absurd to think that technically I am still a gunner!

Two excellent things to report today. Have passed the dreaded Urdu exam. We can now all of us talk English again to the blokes (mostly Tamils) and they don’t have to ask us what we mean! And I can now put in for overdue leave. The other is - apart from the amazing Russians - the new concessions in postal rates. All of ours to you, free, and all of yours to us at reduced rates, and everything by air. Magnificent, except that this is the sixth consecutive day without any mail at all!

On the seventh day, received a New Statesman. Tiny, but full today, for me of one of those lovely competitions. This one, to translate as comically as possible national French phrases. Found ‘J’y suis, j’y reste’, as, ‘I am Swiss, and I do no work’. Better still ‘Allons enfants de La Patrie’, as ‘Come children, keep away from the pastry!

As the MO has not been able to shift it, he got me to report to Hospital today to try and be rid of a minor but irritating inflammation in a rather shabby place, behind me, if you know what I mean. They now want me in for ‘observatian and tests.’

Hospital, which disappoints. Had hopes of a large airy ward, or room, with huge windows and countless fans to cool the air, and everything white and quiet and like a premature heaven. No way. Found myself in a small, hot, stuffy room, smaller and much hotter than my own billet, and am sharing it with a young wounded Major. As for the inflammation, I told them all about it, and how stupid it was, and they listened and looked (awful this) and prescribed a lotion of opium for it, as if my name was Coleridge, or do I mean De Quincy? This to be applied every two hours. But I get it only twice a day provided I shout loud and long enough for the orderly to get it.

Have been moved into a more open ward, with many more wounded, from Burma, and civilian casualties fram Madras. It’s a ward where, about five o'clock in the morning, almost exactly when most of us have just managed to get to sleep, they come noisily round and wake us up with an impossibly strong dark cup of tea. Then they start sweeping the ward. After breakfast we are visited by a stream, well two, of impossibly Ugly Sisters, at intervals of half an hour, who, standing imposingly at the door, one after the other, genially, and monotonously, ask us, who are obviously all wrong, whether we are all right? Amazingly most of us answer yes. Are we, like everyone else here, slightly mad? Am hoping this won’t go an for very long, because really there IS nothing much wrong with me. It has been bad enough in the army. It is even worse in Army Hospitals. Both remind me of Kafka, that curious menacing atmosphere of unreal reality he creates so well. There is that same air of slight madness and insanity and it is worse in Hospital. It’s as if your own private, personal life under the sheet were the only spot of sanity, and a very small spot too, and it is lived against all the massed forces of lunacy. As in the Army, it begins to seem that all people other than your tiny self 130 ARE lunatics, and the more important and higher the rank, the madder they become. Authority in the Army, and the Army hospital, becomes simply the incarnation of Lunacy, and because it is an incarnation of Authority it must be the more implicitly obeyed, and without question. Orders start in that very rarified, deoxygenated atmosphere many, many miles above your head, an UNQUESTIONABLE SOURCE, and come dropping downwards, like one of those Kodai streams, from level to level, drowning all the higher degrees of rank above you, until they reach you. You struggle a bit but meet the same fate, and the flood goes on downwards to ranks even below you, drowning them, drowning everything. The Orders always seem so daft. It’s the people who have to carry them out who are sane, and because they are drowning they are not too reliable either. The crux of the problem is that even if the orders are not daft, at the very least they are arbitrary. And by the same token, as soon as they are given, they can be just as easily and arbitrarily reversed, and yet in either case they cannot be questioned. They become facts in their own right, like an office desk or table, but tables that can be suddenly turned, or fly in the air, and they can end with a battallion of men being shot to pieces. Like Kafka, you have ultimately to assume, for the sake of your own sanity, that the more arbitrary and senseless they are, the more correct and just and merciful they are. In army hospitals it is exactly the same, only the problem is not so much one of Authority, but one of Knowledge. One calls it knowledge, but the line between knowledge and ignorance in medicine is so thin. One can never be sure how much they know, and the moment one reaches the stage of realising that, it immediately becomes a question of realising how little they know, and one is dealing with ignorance again. You have to reverse everything to get it right, and then reverse again immediately, otherwise it is not mad enough to be sane.

Made an effort to get out of here today. Unsuccessful. They seem to be determined to do something.

For what is a very, very minor op. (won’t dignify it even by calling it an operation, which it is not, it’s so superficial) - Ordeal By Theatre this afternoon. They are determined to cure! Whoops. I admire their tenacity but fear for their and my sanity.

The sisters and nurses all drop their voices in awe when they mention ‘the theatre’. For me (though I realise it could be very different in other more serious cases) it was all more Comedy than Tragedy. Everybody, self included, seemed so much in fancy dress. Myself in a kind of white Sacrifial Apron kind of thing, and very long bedsocks, the Orderly Assistant looked like an apprentice Butcher with another apron, with blue stripes downwards, and the Colonel Surgeon was just like Captain Hook, an all white Pirate, even down to all white Wellington Boots. All the fancy dress suited this Theatre of the Absurd, the atmosphere of unreason, for where there is something slightly wrong, they apparently found everything all right. It confirms the madness of one’s reasoning. When it was all over, one had tons of consideration from all the orderlies and the nurses, but of course no lotion. It was just the fact that one had been to the ‘theatre’, which seems to rank as the holiest of holies to all the Small Lunatics, the Inner Sanctum in which only the Very Highest Lunatics perform, when in fact it was just a Pantomime. But I don’t want to be here long. I would much prefer to go back to my School and be only mildly mad there, rather than completely dotty here.

131 Have discovered that, by walking over to one of the windows, I can play trains. Nostalgic delight. They come from the distance, across the countryside, their smoke packed in tight little Astrakhan fur curls. They knock and rattle at the knees and wheels as they go past, and vanish with a gentle slapping kind of sound.

Have been transferred, as of after the visit to ‘The Theatre’, to what is called the Surgical Ward. It’s even more social, many more of us there. All of us in even further fear of Mac The Knife. The beds on either side, and occasionally in between, after certain matinees, are even more full of Mac The Knife’s activities. One or two hobble about on crutches, most are in bed, fully bandaged, some with splints, some with even both legs hoisted up on pulleys, poor devils, and some with necks in large white Edwardian collars. I am the only impostor there. And still the same white Ugly Sisters arrive at five o'clock in the morning chanting their preposterous greeting “Everybody all right?”, and get the equally preposterous answer “Yes, sister.”

Have now adopted what I think is a crafty plan. I’m not any better really, but every morning I say I am and have arranged for official papers to be sent from School up here. Result? Immediately had one gloomy official letter saying how unlikely it was that the period of repatriation, which is still at four years, is likely to be cut down those extra few months we have all been expecting. The Government and the War Office now seem to think that the war in Europe will not finish before Christmas. The four-year period is however confirmed, so just after this Christmas it is on the cards I might be back! The idea is to show them that I can work and wish to work. Even at only several months to come, it is heart-stopping. I think the crafty plan is working. It is very easy to pretend here.

The Allies are meeting in a summit at Yalta, so I got out my T E Lawrence letters again and I quote “The old men came out again, and took from us our victory…. They thanked us kindly and made their peace.” The misery of Lawrence in 1919 and its apparent truth again as peace draws nearer and nearer in Europe, makes one weep. So much bitterness and greed, and so little hope. The wrong old men are there again. Will power always be to the old and evil because to the young and good it is anathema? Aren’t we naive to imagine it would ever be otherwise? Have we fought Hitler’s brand of fascism to change nothing? Why are we looking at a complete lack of political leadership? The proposed treatment of Greece and Belgium begins to stink. The old men with their status quo will smother all new thinking with backward looking loyalties unless we vote them out, because the nearer the end, the clearer the betrayals. Back to old patterns - the usual mix of spheres of interest, national competition, corrupt intrigues all under the smokescreen of Atlantic Charters. All the same medicine as before, and Communist/ Imperialist Russia is as much to blame as any of them. She looks like having Poland, Czechslovakia, Rumainia, Bulgaria and Hungary, and we are to make no moan. We are to keep our old, but threatened, Empire in India, Burma and Malaya, and Russia and America are to make no moan. America gets the Pacific, and we and Russia are to make no moan. Germany is clearly, and deserves to be, stifled. France will have the Rhineland and there will be no moan about that. What a soup! What a stockpot! What ingredients! It is all poison, poison. But at least the unholy row about Greece is a slightly hopeful sign, and perhaps, perhaps, Russia is merely making herself safe (rightly not trusting us) and will watch the rest of us slide slowly down the slippery slope of economic muddle and competition to open war again. Six years of war and

132 misery for this! It is inhuman only if one does not realise what a stench of a thing we have made of humanity. Can we dare hope for anything better in the new elections that will be called? Will the socialist parties everywhere ever get enough support? And if they do, will they be able to make it work against the major human factor of greed? Of the will to be selfish and get ahead of the bloke next door? Or will we all be blinded by Churchill’s hypnotic rhetoric, if he has got any left?

Yesterday, mail from you in marvellous quantity and so I remembered you so well and so I dreamt of you last night, and so sit somewhere when you get this letter, stop whatever you are doing and let me, for a moment, make you warm with remembering too, and so let your dear heart and mind and memory go remembering as well. Let your busy house, even the clamouring of the children, your will, your misery collapse like a house of cards, or take the lot into the garden, or out for a walk in the Wiltshire air, and, however heavy they all seem, let them go hang for a moment or two, let them vanish into that wash of light and sky, and weep, if you need to, that is almost equal to loving, and weeping or loving at least it will be remembering, and know that I will be remembering too, and then you can remember that once at least some dreams were true, and that there was once no dreaming or remembering to do. Soon it will be true again, and then, I suppose it will be a matter of trying to believe it. So, to your remembering add my returning, and realise that in that returning and remembering there will be so little change. It’s a strange thing with absence: the moment you realise that it is there, it’s gone. The knowledge that you are not here vanishes. You are here.

Pigtails! Jenny's pigtails! In the polyphoto, I loved them and would dearly like to see them, but if there are problems and she doesn’t like them, doesn’t want them, then I don’t see why I should be allowed to tyrannize a foolish taste upon her. Perhaps I ought to wonder what delicious, guilty thing I did to what delicious guilty girl with pigtails long ago? I must have been very, very young, if at all. I don’t remember a thing. Honest!

Oh God. First your brother, and now another of mine. I knew from Irma that Garry had gone to hospital to be under observation for longtime aching eyes and head, but had no inkling of the seriousness of it, so his death (I still can’t believe it) came as a complete shock. Have written to everyone as well as yourself, and have no words left. It is impossible and unreal, and all letters will take so long to get home and will be late and won’t help, and will open all the wounds again. Poor Irma. It is good at least that she will have Brent, but shocking that Brent will have no father.

The only apparently good thing in the world is that I am leaving hospital tomorrow, not cured, but better, and more than well enough to leave.

And today I am out, shot of some lunatics, and in the real fresh air again, looking at real things again, but looking at them with Garry’s eyes too, and knowing that Garry would never see them any more. Another impossible absence. He was so much a mentor, and I personally will miss him so much.

Never thought, for an instant at any time of my life, even here, that I would actually buy, and pay for an aeroplane, a whole one, but damaged. I did today. And the price? Just a lunch. I ‘bought’ a real Barracuda Torpedo plane, for the School. I 133 just happened to see, on my way back from Madras in the Utility, several planes being dismantled or broken up in the local Fleet Air Arm yard here, and purely on the spur of the moment stopped, went in, and asked whether, if it was possible, the School could have one. They would have given me two! But one was enough to start with! It saved them a lot of work. They’d not only give it, but transport it to the School as well, when I offered a couple of them lunch at the Racecourse. And we did it all there and then, including the hilarious lunch at the Racecourse. Ask, and it will be given unto you, and instruction henceforth on air-flaps, ailerons, elevators and dihedrals will, from now on, be much more explicit and exciting.

Dreamt I met the children, with seemingly great parental and childish pleasure, last night. I am already nearly home. And all the armies are on the move again in Germany. Us, and the Russians. The race for Berlin will soon be on.

Sunday, and as I reached my billet returning from yet again a sail at Ennore with Duncan, up went an enormous shout that nearly frightened me out of my wits. It was Dennis, all the way from near Burma, on leave! Many vast hugs of delight. Much immense brotherly delight and excitement. Livingstone and Stanley were as nothing. To hell with English handshakes. And Den can stay for one or two days. Unfortunately, the only unfortunate thing at a marvellous meeting, is that the School is so busy and instruction has to continue day in, day out; but before and after, and perhaps this weekend, all will be ours. Wonderful. Imagine. We talked into the might, but much of the gladness was quietened in the misery of Garry’s death.

A very hot day for Dennis, with the year extending. Today it reached 90°. In the shade! No sign of rain, and it will be hotter tamorrow. Already very dry, dusty, flowerless, with the leaves falling, like the autumn you and I and Dennis all want so much. At least the tide of events has turned and it is flowing and it will float us back home soon. We almost managed to convince each other that we can now afford to believe it. Events are gathering way, walking, almost running and racing toward that lovely ending. Towards indeed. To the next beginagain. Remember that old man? There was an old man called Michael Finnegan who at the end of his song beganagen? Soon, soon, please. We actually sang it several times, like a chant, to make the spell work.

At the week end, just before he had to leave again, took Dennis to the Adyar Club, showed him the Burra Sahib opulence of the house and its grounds. Showed him the river and walked with him along its banks. It became both the Blyth and the Thames. Later we dined outside with a huge honey-coloured lucky charm of a full moon mounting up into the hard bright silver of the night. It went riding over our heads as we talked and ate. Tomorrow he goes to Burma, while I stay here in this lucky luxury and safety. It seems wrong, and grossly unfair, but, at least, the way things are going, he wont get far into Burma before the Japanese start possibly withdrawing. With America at their heels in the Pacific and soon perhaps at their throats, they are now far too stretched and extended.

The first rain in what (?), three months? Changing the face of the sky, changing the face of the earth. I don’t think even you could guess how delicious is the first shuffling hush of it as the first shower shifts across the brown withered

134 grass, but you can smell with me the sweet smell of dampened grass, but have you ever seen it steam? Saw Dennis off at the station this evening in hope to see him, and you, again, and soon. It was raining quietly. Remembered all goodbyes at all stations anywhere. Oh, eyes that last I saw in tears!

But not always in tears. Not soon, except those of relief, for we are praising here the crossing of the Rhine, and talk of peace with Germany mounts in each edition of the papers. It alters little as far as Japan is concerned, or seems to. The Rising Sun looks as if it will be setting soon, or is the feeling there not one of eclipse?

After supper with Duncan, went with him and a girl friend of his to a display of dancing at an Indian girls’ school. Primary School age for us. Watched two lovely, slim young things dance a Kite Dance, then a small group did a Nursery Rhyme. Both excited. Both fresh, unusual, but what most excited was a Swan Dance by a little girl no taller than my waist. To her advantage, and ours, she had never seen or heard of Pavlova, and instead of a pale, withdrawn, sick symbol of Grace with a capital ‘G’, there was a real swan, an actual bird, with real natural grace, with a small but very beautiful ‘g’, alive with natural movement, alert and scared of what was happening on the bank, tremendously alive for fish and the struggle to live. Afterwards went back to Duncan’s and we played some of the first part of Columbia’s History of music series. Perhaps the sound of a harpsichord is the sweetest sound in existence. Not having heard it for so long, I shivered, literally, with pleasure. Remembered playing The Earl of Salisbury’s Pavane on our tiny Virginals on board the Martin Luther before we had ever heard of war.

That was Saturday and this morning was all Sunday to myself. Tried, first time for a long time, to paint. Quite a big one, of Kodai, in oils. A large foreground area proved difficult to handle until I deepened and lowered its tone, making it lie further into the picture, and lie a good deal more happily with the rest of the picture. Are all artists liars and egotists? Aren’t they just singing to themselves? But I suppose, when you sing to yourself like Mozart, you get very, very near to truth, don’t you?

There are many levels of living and loving, not often to be found in the army. Will there be that one soon, waking early in the morning to find you lying on your right side and your lovely head and eyes just inches from mine; and will I again be brimming and over-brimming having the sensitive, perceptive kindness of your familiar presence making its way deeply into every fibre of my mind? Do you think that in love woman does all the giving, and men the taking, and then they try to compensate for the taking by giving back words? Is it a code, above or below the genetic code in which I feel encoded to you? If not, then why do we so think alike, (books), see alike, (Degas, Cezanne, Van Gogh, the Florentines, Constable) hear alike (Mozart above all, but Vivaldi, Haydn, Britten, Purcell) and love alike (just you and me) in such like terms?

I believe in longing. I believe in belonging to living and loving. In the precision of longing. In the precision of living and loving. Not the abstracts, the precisions. When, in fact, did man first love instead of just mate? Who was he, his 135 name, and who was she, her Christian name? No, not Christian name, long, long before that. We are now way past religions, aren’t we? And into the much more dangerous waters of ourselves. Were they in dangerous waters? I think I acknowledge only one name, yours. For me, all the best possible words and names end where yours begins. I will whisper this to you one day soon. I will just about endure until then!

And soon again I will hear the English lark. Listen to Powys. “The shivering music of larks. As if their very heart-strings were voluble within those little upborn handfuls of feathers.”

L is for Lennie, and love, and the liking that lasts longer and longer, for Petrarch’s Laura, who must have had the same effect, for the lark who sings louder and more often than I do, for the level of empathy at the moment impossible to reach, but not for very much longer. L is for a lifelong linkage. L is for laughter and language and learning. L is for Lennie. Yes, indeed, I am very nearly deliriously nearer home, and will be nearer too, to the depth and raptness of your attention in the theatre, the concert hall, to your profile walking, to the amazing validity of you being a woman close at my side. L is for something that lasts longer than the temporary ecstasy in bed, for that is just one tick of the clock, important, but like every other tick of the clock, of too short an intensity. It even, for those few seconds, blinds every other facet of love, but I just want all the facets of love, especially those that will last and last. “I know what I to you do owe.” I feel more sane already. And soon, sanity, sanity, all will be sanity..

Intense relief and excitement. The official period for repatriation is now in writing. It’s on my desk. And it is now three years eight months, ‘where this is operationally possible’. You were right all the time. So now, will it really happen, will we start back August, September, October, or November?

Full of envy for your visit with the children to Snow White. Their excitement, their semi-terror. But surely learning to be frightened and getting through it is part and parcel of one’s natural inheritance. Nothing in fairy tales is accidental, even the terrifying parts all fit. Even grown ups still need the terrifying bits, though some of us think we’ve had enough of them for a bit.

Your letter tells me that at last all your wartime residents are gone. Peace, indeed, must be very close at hand. Try to take a holiday somewhere; even a week would help. Be lazy, find the feel of pleasure and quietness again. Isn’t it possible even with three children to look after? Try not to wait till I am back. I know you can’t just lay your busy life down that suddenly, but some of the hectic round of traffic must have gone. Your walk to Easton Hill with your picnic, the long-legged hare, and your blackthorn blossom have my envy, but all the same, think towards a holiday if you can. Here, another Sunday gave me a good stiffish breeze and a fine tilt to the sail, and we went fast, and then swam in warm water, and disturbed shoals of basking fish. Their fear was sudden, reactions violent. Terror took one of them right up and out of the water into the air.

And now Jackson’s death. I heard from Pamela, and reading that letter I keep seeing you in Oxford, white and tired, standing so sadly with a sketch book of his in your hand and, at a moment, letting it fall with all that grim space behind the eyes 136 filling up with the loss of him, his teaching we so enjoyed, his drawings and all the other losses of this bloody war, but, however cold life is at any one moment, luck will turn a warm cheek one day. Take courage. Keep going. There, and that sounds, and is, exactly the way all the men write home too in their letters. Which is good, and actually feels good to me too. Have just looked at all my polyphoto enlargements of you, and at C’s portrait of you too. Still prefer the polyphotos, and far be it from me to criticise something, in its way, so well done, but I just don’t like it. He makes you too beautiful. I know you are beautiful, but I am saying he makes you too beautiful, and I am sure you know what I mean. Degas certainly would. ‘Ils n’admèttent pas le cynisme dans l’art’ he said and I take his cynisme to be the seeing of those nice irregularities which add to beauty, character and temperament. Those who do portraits should avoid the pretty, which to me is ugly. This portrait is unlike you. I understand what he says, that you should paint what is there, but he hasn’t done it. It has never occurred to me that you were a candidate for the cover of Vogue. My memory, which is sharp from sheer compulsory practice, says otherwise.

Goodness, the rumour of Hitler’s death seems too timely, too neat, too tidy, but I think it probable all the same. So clearly the war in Europe is over, even if not declared so. Intelligent Italy surrendered ages ago.

And now the stubborn Germans too. V day must come soon and the crescendo of optimism rises here too. There is surely no ‘if’ to a Japanese surrender but only a 'when'. And there is only a ‘when’ for repatriation, and hopefully the last leave I will ever take is shortly coming up, and it will be like a mini repast.

VE day it is. And what a day. At least half the world is at peace again, and at last, with not a gun firing in the whole of Europe. Half a world of unnatural silence, and in three days’ time I go on leave which has come pat for celebration. All the same, one remains pretty sober and downcast. Five years or more of war and absence stand too tall for drowning in a single day’s celebration.

The whole School, all the men on the present courses, and all the School staff as well, celebrated with a picnic on Elliot’s beach, swimming then lunching, swimming again and then returning in time for the great Churchill’s victory speech, which, for me and most of us, was badly judged and staggeringly disappointing. He was so utterly cold about it, impersonal, and, for the first time in the war, stupid. It made me think that there was nothing to celebrate, and that what wounds we have, we will have to lick for some time yet, and right at the end that “Advance Britannia!” was total claptrap. “Advance Britannia” my foot. Advance? Where to? And Britannia? None of us have got tridents handy any more. And we don’t need any Boadiceas. It was all the stupid claptrap that goes with victories and patriotism.

Spent today dusting off the mantle of the School which, tomorrow, I shall willingly let fall on someone else, while I go on - hopefully - my last leave in India.. The next holiday I have will be with you and the children, and, heavens - that’s quite a thought. The actuality of VE day proper I will have on leave, but at the moment it all seems as remote and ineffectual as Chesterton’s don. Have plumped, this leave, to have a look at Kotagiri and Ootacamund, instead of my lovely Kodai. Both are in the hills a bit further south and almost as high in those hills as Kodai, and as high as all those May Clouds you may be looking at today, even if they may be drenching 137 your May flowers, and still gloriously higher than the heat and humidity of the Madras plains. I’m off tomorrow.

Have now arrived at Kotagiri. It took longer to get here. Will stay here a couple of days or so, then move on to Ooty as it is known to the burra sahibs and have a couple of days there. Today I am at Kotagiri and am sitting just outside a small summerhouse which is an annex to the Hotel, and for the moment mine. It’s at the top of a steeply wooded hill, and the eyes loosen and reel down the steep slope deep into the valley, down into the world I want only to forget; but I’d like to remember the tall hard vertical trunk of the Eucalyptus tree I’m leaning against. It’s hard, but it is also so wonderfully high, and gives off that nice, subtle medical smell. There’s a silent air-borne hawk below me, gliding on a strong thermal updraught of air, and every now and then he sheds a small thin sound into the air reminding me of the lapwings and curlews in practically forgotten Walberswick, in our blessed Suffolk. We must renew our attachment to that marvellous place as soon as we can when I get home. I wonder what state the Martin Luther will be in?

Leaving the school and the gasping hot heat of Madras at mid-day was neither colourful nor glamorous. The hard glare carved into both eyes. Practically every day in India one lives for the evenings when, for the space of too swift a twilight, the glare softens and merciful colours appear for an hour before dark, and the eye-ache ceases. It happened on the way. The train arrested for a moment at a signal. In full countryside, the evening light had melted the glare and the low sun struck field-long crow-blue shadows behind every post or upright thing you could see. In between these long blue shadows was the running gold of the late evening sunlight on the grass. In one field near the train, there was an Indian girl with a top tunic in bright red, with a white goat and a white bullock she was tending, all in gold. Each burned their colours vertically into the evening, and each had that long indigo blue shadow running the whole length of the field. Later the train stopped at a station for supper. In the station restaurant there was a party of several ATS English girls. First glance wonderful, but second thoughts came swiftly. Some were shouting, all seemed fat, puffy and aggressive and illmannered to the Indians serving them. Heavens, are there no decent English girls left that we get sent these? I ate my supper grumpily and returned to my carriage as soon as possible, feeling more of a prig than ever. I had to change stations at Bangalore to catch a connection for Mysore, Kotagiri and Ooty. Arriving at night, I had to miss the town; and to catch the connection I had been warned to order a taxi. Everybody wanted that taxi for hotels in the town and I had to more or less fight them off. Had been told to work fast, and the taxi-driver knew it too. We dashed off, the taxi’s horn barking madly at a pace that would have been hot, even in Paris. At the station there was a minute only to find my carriage, also, with forethought, reserved. I clambered clumsily in to my sleeper only to find that I was to share it, - with the devil! Or someone very like! In fact with a very Mephistophelian looking Sikh captain, with a very fierce, very long, beautifully waxed moustache and a beard underneath. He was already in bed and asleep, and he didn’t even wake up. He was wearing blue pyjamas, the collar of which was very decorously curled and lapping prettily over his chin. He seemed to be burning gently in blue flames, like a Christmas pudding burning with lighted brandy. It was very late, and while the devil slept peacefully burning, (he slept on his back, presumably to retain intact the exquisitely waxed tips of his enormous and 138 wonderful moustache) I managed only a fitful sleep, and each time I woke up I turned over, envying the devil still sleeping, still burning gently in those blue Christmas pudding flames lapping his beard and threatening his waxed moustaches, still intact, sleeping without the smallest trace of that vast uneasy conscience which you would have thought would keep any self-respecting devil awake and in perpetual torment.

Arrived at the very beautiful city of Mysore early in the morning. It’s the capital of one of the very few Indian states apparently untouched by the English presence, and, perhaps, on the surface,benefitting. The whole place was myth and fable for the mind. On the top of a near hill, a low cloud was caught and stood still in the sun. It hung there, dragged softly and blindly a little way down on one side. It caught my eyes more even than the domed towers of the palace, capped and tipped with pure gold. The first real gold in quantity that I had ever seen, and paying a rich dividend in the early morning sun. The tall walls of the palace were all white and cream. From what I could see, the streets round the palace were wide and there was a blaze of colour from the summer trees. Much to my pleasure and astonishment, our tiny bus from the station drove, very democratically, through the enormous elephant gates right into the Palace grounds themselves, like a clown in a gorgeous circus, right close to those fabulous golden domes, opulent, fabulous and faultless in the morning sun, but somehow also decadent. India seems to breed these contrasts, these opposites. Her riches, her shocking poverty, her heat, her cold, her palaces, her hovels, her polish and her filth, her colossal arrogances and her abject submissions. Here in the middle of this twentieth century war of complicated machines, just outside the palace gates there were, yes, soldiers, but drilling with spears! And a crowd of beggars. We exchanged a few passengers and, in our little red bus, left Mysore with its gold-capped domes, and its dreaming cloud on the hill, along an unmetalled road with what must have been a two hundred yard tail of white dust, expanding to a plume of pale smoke behind us. The few villages we passed were set in an endless plain, each impressing with its neat Village School, its Child Welfare Centre, and its tiny Hospital, then came the Bandur Forest, but that, though endless too, was so full of English-looking trees that it might have been our own Savernake forest just down the road - except for the occasional strange and delicate bamboo. Lack of sleep on the train often sent me nearly to sleep, and the cool fable of the golden domes and the dreaming hill, and India’s beggars and beautiful young Indian girls scraping up cattle muck with their bare hands into huge baskets, all seemed like a dream. Every now and then I jerked fully awake, excited to see the top leaves of a whole local bush lift and be butterflies as large as birds, or a flock of wild pigeons people the air and for a little while make it purple, and occasionally there were small flocks or families of monkeys with large human eyes watching us from the side of the road. They had a special way of using their tails as third legs and loping off, carrying a baby monkey with even more expressively human eyes, disappearing into the forest as we passed, leaping effortlessly into the lower branches of the nearest tree. Then we climbed gradually up into the hills, and pleasanter air, and on to Ootacamund. Very disappointed here, just didn’t like its presence.Too fly-ridden, too many people. It was man-ridden and somehow shabby and ashamed, scattered and uncomposed.The only thing I got that was good was a plate of strawberries and cream. Tired and hungry as I was, it was bliss, flies and all! So I just changed buses and went on to Kotagiri, arguing myself into the last seat on a crowded bus full of the usual missionaries. I sat between four nuns who 139 turned out to be Danish and more interesting than usual and we chatted away with lots of platitudes and clichés. I was glad indeed to get to a guest-house, have something to eat and the moment I lay down to sleep I slept longer and more deeply than even that Sikh devil in his blue Christmas pudding flames.

The morning when I woke up was a Sunday morning, full of the familiar sense of Sunday quiet.

Out sketching and writing to you every day after, acclimatising pleasantly to the cooler air. Had one sun-rise more rosy-bodied than fingered, the space it filled was so huge. Like being a Turner in Venice. Gorgeous, but also too gorgeous by far. Returned to the guest-house for a bacon and eggs breakfast. Reality. Spent Friday and Saturday waiting for Sunday, for the celebration of VE Day in the local church.

Sunday, Thanksgiving Sunday. Partly because I had not been to church for years, except for that silly wedding, had not even been on Church Parade as a declared and licenced agnostic, and partly from plain curiousity to see what a tiny place like this would make of the occasion, partly because I also wanted to go, and partly because I felt I ought to go - I went, to the Thanksgiving Service. The church itself might have been lifted straight out of almost any English village, the pleasant lane down which we all approached it was another English lane, and the weather was a perfect English summer day. It was a good start. Through the lych-gate into the church. It was already crowded, and, like a lot of others, I had to stand at the back for the whole service. The congregation was mainly European, but fortunately I found myself standing next to a very nice-to-look at Anglo-Indian girl. Shared hymn books with her as a matter of fact. Even felt that this sort of behaviour could be excused inside a church and on an occasion like this, confess I was more interested in her than in her hymn singing. We parted after the service, so don’t worry! Apart from the sermon and the addenda of several national anthems, the service was just as dull and uninteresting as I remember all other church services ever were; but the irony with which one used to note most of the normal hypocrisies of ‘churching’ was still with one enough to note that as they went in men took their hats off and women put theirs on, an odd yet seemingly essential reversal of fashion without which worship could not take place, and how, all through the service, the men covertly eyed the women, and the women, the men. I did too. The Anglo-Indian girl was right beside me. I couldn’t miss. It was the part of the service I liked best. And, Oh God, the hymns, made worse, they were, by the impossible addition of a thin, very reedy organ, and worse still by a badly played violin. A combination anything but heavenly; and why can’t a Christian congregation ever sing? And so we worshipped and thanks-gave on, successively standing, sitting and kneeling, as many as could, like a leisurely PT parade. Surely prayer should be meditation in absolute stillness, not this constant knees-bend business. It is all designed to keep you awake, and it succeeds. But there were momentary consolations. I remember my Anglo-Indian girl, the happy swishswish as all the leaves of the hymn books went over, hearing a small puff of noisy wind go by in the nearest tree, a quick patter of rain on the tiled roof, the sun smouldering nicely behind some pretty awful stained glass, and the unity of heads bent in prayers I couldnt believe in. I expected the sermon to be the worst part of the service (there is room for so much error here) but it was the best. A short, straight from the shoulder plea for a proper Christian peace, and for forgiveness, even of the Germans, even after the 140 disclosure of Belsen. But the high words, the difficulties of forgiveness went out over the sea of silly faces, and you could see it wasn’t getting very far. (I stood to one side of the porch afterwards, listening; and almost without exception, comment was adverse). After the last dreadful hymn, we sang the pretty Danish anthem first, because most people seemed to be Danish, then the Star Spangled Banner -the most awful words, to the most awful tune, and finally our sober-sided God Save the King. I just fretted fiercely for La Marseillaise, or Lilli Burlero! Then came the Nunc Dimittis and lastly our release, the rippling, shuffling unorganised row of everyone getting up. Outside thank goodness the trees were waving only their lovely green unpatriotic leaves. Tomorrow it will be not green leaves but the long journey back to the military forest of unwanted tasks, but this time under-pinned with waiting to move home.

Back to school it was, to be curried in the stew of Madras and a very hot curry at that, but it was a pleasure to read the mail, your mail, and further confirmation that we should be leaving in two or three months. They are no longer making qualifications. Inside the rags and tatters of my mind, or whatever it is of personal inward life this long sojourn in the military wilderness has left me with, I am already at home, and more than ready to be rid of misery and healed. And you, you too? Will we manage it? God, what a question to have to ask. Everything tells me that all will be well, not in the best of all worlds, but a better one than a year ago. Will it be better for the world society of peoples who have gone through all this? Will they understand now that they have to live together, everywhere? What will have been won if, at the end of it all, the sad, bitchy, arrogant ego of the human being has lost its ability to make a decent judgement?

After two days of rotten heat, it has managed to rain. Lovely. Somehow the earth is never finally earth until it is wet.

141 RETURN.

142 The news now is nearly always hopeful, and in every edition of the paper there is always a paragraph, somewhere, on repatriation and the slow but inevitable prospect of peace in the East. We have begun, somehow, to return.

No, my sweet deeply remembered ghost, I am too much of a prig to go a-whoring, and hold too low an opinion of that sort of entertainment. To have that paid for, done cold, and done for anybody? To a stupid romantic, that would be intolerable. It shouldn’t really be intolerable, I suppose, for why shouldn’t that lovely appetite be so easily satisfied? But my inward judge says, if the heart and the mind get nothing, why should the body get anything? Don’t know. But won’t pay!

We are now all involved only in the question of whether it will be August, September or October. We are all on our knees praying for an actual date. Name it, then all we have to do is to add the slow train journey up the long length of India from Madras to Bombay, then the troopship across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, the hot rod of the Suez, past Egypt, through the lovely Mediterranean, cock a snook at Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay, into the Channel, then to Plymouth or Southampton and then across country to London , and via London to....to….to….?

Saw and smelt horribly what the heat o' the sun does to something that dies in a hedge in India, and does it in what, three days? Such a scalding indignity of flies and maggots. And we say the sun means life?

This possibility of coming back to you, so soon now, blows the top of my head off at least twice a day. The thought of meeting the unknown, three large children, fixes it back on and fills it with, I am sure, false fears. But they are there, and I worry. If, as at once I thought, you could all of you come strange to a strange country, a strange father could have fitted in better, more easily, perhaps. But it was a totally impractical thought. You might all have seen India, or a nice bit of it, but you won’t have missed all that much. Two of the things I think you personally would most have liked to see are these grave, graceful Tamil ladies, with their grace, beautiful heads and wonderful carriage, and then, the other thing, the whole principle of the Sari dress. The classical drapery of it, falling with classical Italian folds first from the point of hang at the shoulder, touching and changing direction so gracefully at the hip, and then again at the knee where it is checked again before it falls again. But there is so much you wouldn’t like. The debasing caste system, with the so-called untouchables at the bottom of the heap, the quarter-fed skeletal misery of stray dogs, the ones that get shot, the malnourished cows, even though they are sacred, and the ubiquitous Indian beggars, and there are many more beggars than dogs. Some of them,and some families, are even, pitiably, professionals and there is no myth in the story that some children are committed to the profession of beggary by their parents, who deliberately deform them at birth.

The 6th of August 1945. The first date I have used. It shouldnt be in just black type. It should be in blood-red, deep, shameful crimson, shouldn’t it? It is the day of the Hiroshima Bomb. The so-called deterrent to all wars? Or moral, and physical atrocity? The mind freezes. Certainly it should deter everything. Will the exception be man? The decision to use it was taken at some Conference or other. A Conference of men? Or monsters? I can’t picture the effects of the bomb itself, but I CAN

143 picture that Conference. The Conference at which the decision was taken to drop it.... not just to drop it anywhere, but on a whole city! A city! On a million or two million people. They were sitting round a table, Truman, the President of the most powerful country in the world, and all those suave top politico advisers, probably drinking bourbon, and all those top military advisers in uniforms covered in medals, all in the well-fed opulence and tranquillity of the White House, or wherever. What was said, for heaven’s sake? What were the clichés used? How did the voting go? Surely not ALL in favour? Whatever dismay at America one feels, can one think that? But there they were, and under the smart suits and pretty uniforms sat the primal man with his savagery only partly tamed, still with that uneducated gigantic and dreadful ego, and at his fingertips this amazing new power, the largest and most almighty exercise of power there ever was. It is Godlike in its magnitude. And what does he do with it? He kills. He kills, even a whole city. Did God really create this man, or did this man create his God? Surely that’s a legitimate question at any time, but it scarcely needs an answer now.

The 9th of August 1945. The second date I’ve used. The Nagasaki Bomb. Would God have needed to act twice? And on such a scale? The obliteration of two whole cities, two populations, children included, and if anyone escaped immediate death, to be damaged for ever? Would God have done that? Then, Oh, for God’s sake, let’s hope that, if our politicians can’t learn, perhaps the ordinary people of the world will learn this unbelievable lesson. In amazement I wonder whether that Conference or Committee sat twice to take two decisions to kill, or sat once to kill twice! Even the Spanish Inquisition in the name of yes, religion, only sat to condemn a few unbelievers to be burnt. But TWO CITIES! Will those monstrous umbrella clouds shield and hide their consciences? Anybody’s? Theirs? Ours? After all it was done for us.

Japan has at last surrendered. But they would have done so without the bombs?

Raw, irritable and impatient. I’m writing to you outside, on the roof, watching, high up in the evening air, tiny in the fading light, a whole flock of almost abstract kites floating in vague small circles of despair. Luckily, for them, and us, above them, for once, the huge clouds of the Indian evening are also coming, and in a blazing shapeless sky are taking shape and bringing colour and shadow, and are modifying at last the hard steel glare that has all day filled the almost damaged eyes. How has that, whatever it is, we still have inside us, which has somehow or other managed to remain hopeful, managed to escape, I wont say undamaged, but perhaps with less hurt than you’d think possible? What will have happened to the joint tenancy of love and friendship we had, to our joint tenancy of music, painting, brushstrokes, the direct honesty of your gaze, the reading aloud, the certainties, and the uncertainties, shared? But it won’t be difficult, will it? It can’t be. That ridiculous optimism is still in the marrow of my bones, and I can still spread your clearly remembered presence over the whole of India’s evening sky.

At last, the moment has arrived. The trumpets of repatriation have sounded. We start off next week. Next week! It is in writing, documented, filed. All staff stages, A, B, C, and D, all in seven days. It is Bombay next week, to a transit camp. None of us know how long we’ll be there, but it scarcely seems to matter. We will have started. 144 Six more days! So busy, can’t notice time, or news, or anything. I must ask you now to stop writing letters! Ye Gods. To stop the lifeline that has kept me sane! And soon it will be stopping mine. Soon we will actually hear each other speak, and I will hear that lovely laugh instead of memory’s ghost. My eyes are no longer for the hills whence cometh my etc, they’re racing for the sea and all those inshore colours which are in your eyes, grey, subtle flecks of brown and green and blue. First Bombay then the Mediterranean, then autumn in an English mist, the Wiltshire hills and sky, then you, then three children, practically unknown except from photographs.

Two more days and then I will almost be with you all, although my body will be in a Transit Camp, half-way to heaven. There’s a long-life lustre for a temporary torture. All the same, wherever I am, you are, that’s always been true for all this long absence. The opposite is the bitterness. I know well where you have always been, but where you have been, I have not.

So, now, bless you, lady, we moved three days ago and my body is exactly where I said it would be. In Transit, but not this time sick transit, if you can spare a blush for me for that. It is with a lot of other bodies too. We will be six thousand when we get on board. Six thousand, and all their minds will be like mine, in one place. Home. But we still have to wait and dream and dream, for there are too many repatriates and too few ships. They have broken the monotony of one torture only to give us another. We have, at least, leave to go into Bombay, which I have already visited just to see the sea and the vast ships that leave so leisurely homeward bound, as if nothing matters!

It is so much cooler up here and with many more clouds. This evening they are all still and soft with the bulk, the stillness and patience of animals. Precious animal patience. But I don’t have it any more.

Still having to dream, except that facts suddenly land in clouds of paper instructions. Today it seems certain we will land at Southampton and train to London. Dream names, dream places, but still the unknown fact is when we actually start. Torture lessened by what must be your last letters, efficiently forwarded here, bless the office at the School, and don’t forget it will be only a month’s leave. It is not demobilisation, but how long that will take I don’t think will matter very much. It won’t be long. In one of your letters, a wonderfully forward looking one, you are already asking about post-war elections, post-war politics. Wow! but I have none, or practically none. My immediate thought is not to think any thoughts at all….it will be no to everything except you and Jenny and Ren and Nicholas, except perhaps music, a concert, and the Tate? Even the garden will come after that. And the barge?

To Bombay yesterday, to search for the last presents for you and the children, and in one shop as I looked at a children’s book a child actually smiled at me, and I smiled at her. We got on. Simple, very simple. Sane, and very sane. A foretaste and good practice. Wished for it more often. I like the thought of one day, soon, being married again! Present address……Officer’s Wing, Homeward Bound Trooping Depot, Darma Camp, Deolali, India Command. Wonderful! But still no hope for the moment of a boat until the end of this incredible September. Almost halfway home 145 and still a lost soul waiting for a ferry, destination Life, not Death. Charon is not my idea of a ferryman. But at least we are all now on inactive service, lying on camp beds reading, writing, thinking and hoping, and also actually still being a little bit scared, perhaps, at being alone with someone not seen for so long. But being alone and alone, with you, will work. It won’t only work but it will be a necessity. We must teach the children how to be alone, and, of course, how to share also.

Have discovered the river here. It’s about a mile and a half from the camp, but worth the walk. It is like the Severn, coloured at the moment pale tea. It flows pretty swiftly. The enforced reverence and genuflection of all the reeds at the edge is wonderful to behold. It has bitten deep into the earth and I watch it almost on a cliff about thirty feet high. Saw wagtails, kingfishers, swallows and larks. All of them for the eyes, the lark for the ears, the swallow and the kingfisher for the mind. So I walk now more often than I sit, or write. In fact, anyway, here, it is almost too cool just to sit, and that is a wonderful strangeness. It is a blessing, escaping to this solitude away from the teeming camp.

Yes, and I make for the river now almost every day, selfishly, to be rid of company. The over-crowded Mess is for meals only. I sit in silence there and don’t even want to be talked to! And there is still no news of a ship.

The days slip by. Censorship has been lifted, and that makes me furious because there is nothing important to tell you. Certainly not the name of a ship or the date it sails. The firmest rumour is that we might sail September 20th or 25th. The voyage home is not in convoy. Each ship makes its own way home. If we get a reasonably fast one, it will take eighteen days, but, with this run of poor luck, we’ll be sure to get a slow one, or if we get a fast one, its propeller will fall off half-way home, or its funnel will block or its navigator go mad and take us again to Singapore because that’s where we were supposed to go in the first place.

Three days ago, I took a train to Bombay and stayed two nights in a pretty opulent hotel, a sort of faded Ritz, full of tall rooms, lounges and grillrooms. Palm trees and aspidistras in the restaurant, and more waiters than eaters. An Orchestra playing No No Nanette stuff. Amused and amazed to find it all so much the same. A few smug businessmen, a few smug bald heads. Cartoon stuff. Outside, a few pigeons comforted me and chuckled at each other, preening the green satin which comes and goes so sweetly at their necks. From the bedroom window I could even see the huge grey shapes of the ships and hear their horns shouting. But not one of them was mine.

We hold our breaths today. Hold yours. Latest rumour says we sail probably September 24th. The ship sailing on the 20th is for priority people only.

At last, immense revelry and relief in camp tonight; much singing, much drinking, much glad feeling. It is on the Notice Board. We sail the 24th. Five days’ time. Few believe it, but it is impossible not to believe it. That would be against the whole stream of feeling in the camp tonight, and it infects even wary me. It has rained steadily the whole of the day. I could do none of the things I would like to have done to get through it. Certainly no lyrical walk to my river, but, even so, have learnt, in India, to like rain so much. I mean, enough just to look at it for hours, as if it were the sea, as if it were equal in every way to the sea. Have learnt 146 to like it even on a day like this, the white, sideways, compulsory sort of bruising of the air, as suddenly come as gone, and on other days, the change from dainty white lace to steel bars, from moist mist to hard bead and bounce. And to like it too for those few precious moments after it stops. Because it is still there, in lines of small still drops, still amazingly managing to hang on under every twig, trembling in a small wind, eye-catchingly bright, trembling, reflecting, but not falling, not breaking up and disappearing. Feel as if I am existing as no more than one of those small drops. Trembling, but not breaking up, not falling, which must be an exile’s last outburst, last plea, for more and better stability, for the granting of the wish to take charge again, the stubborn effort to have a say in what happens next. In the evening, to the Officers’ Mess, for supper. It is known here, for some reason, as the Antechamber. Give it capital letters THE ANTECHAMBER and it becomes pure Kafka. The guilt, menace, and what have we done to deserve it syndrome! Supper scarcely counteracts all that! But it’s useful, and signifies the end of yet another day of waiting. Physically it is just an enormous warehouse or hangar type of job. A huge floor space with hundreds of tables, at night only dimly lit with a line of low-voltage lights hanging all the way down the centre. You have to sit immediately under one to read or write, and if you want to do either, as I do, you have to get there very early. The bonus is that you can see to write, the penalty is to have to listen to endless, awful, Rugby songs. (The only thing about rugger I never liked).

Ye Gods, how right I was to be wary. Even the 24th is cancelled. The date is now the 27th, so add another dreary three days to now, to the journey and to arrival home. How long, oh lord how long?

I’m a fool to keep giving you dates. It is now the 26th and the wariness is now wearyness. I’m sure there are reasons, unseen and unexpected, for all these alterations, but they happen and now all is postponed for another week!

Won’t dare to tell you when, but there are now only four days left and on the fifth we leave. Resurrection delayed again. A delayed action resurrection. Is that proper? But at least life will soon begin again. Soon you will no longer be a remembered, guessed at, hinted at, ghost but the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the naked truth so help me God! Actual, seen, touched, listened to. The desired life. Meet me at Savernake, and then let me arrive slowly. There can be no miracles, or can there? I am terrified of the excitement. Tell yourself and the children I am coming. I am realising so slowly that, almost on whichever date we leave, I will be home for the birthday of the twins,and will be able actually to read to them myself the books I am bringing with me.

Today I’m awake and scribbling this letter to end all letters, for ever. The order to move came yesterday. The heart could scarcely contain its sides. We left camp at 4.30 am. Reveille was at 3.00 am. It was in darkness, rain, and perhaps our very last sweat that we dressed, breakfasted, and loaded the lorries with kitbags, cases and trunks. I would have thought that there might be a wonderful magic about this moment for which we had waited so long, but it was dark, it was raining, we were sweating, and the moment was in shreds.

But not now. This moment is not in shreds. I’m writing this on board a ship, a real ship, THE ship. There was a rumour that we would be played out of camp to 147 bagpipes. It wasn’t true, thank God! There was no fanfare, no flourish, no trumpets, no bagpipes; just a wet short march to the station. Not even the rain could dampen the drums. The drums were in the heart. We'll be coming round the mountains had sung us into Bombay many years ago. Now it was singing us out. Relief, release, rebirth in every note. It was actually happening. We entrained to a long, impatient wait in the carriages. As many of us as could hung out of the windows, watching the increasing light. It had even stopped raining, and there was a lot of happy noise until it slowly quietened to silence when a very slim young Indian boy appeared on the empty platform. He stood there alone clearly indicating, like some strolling mountebank, that he was about to perform. Which he did, and very unusually. First, taking care that we should all see, he took a needle in his right hand and cotton in his left. Then, imagine, he lay down on his stomach on the platform. He brought his legs up and forward and over his head till the toes of his bare feet were hung down level with his eyes, like a couple of those leather straps that you hang onto on the Underground, and then, God knows how, he put the needle in his right hand between the toes of his right foot and the cotton in his left hand between the toes of his left foot. He reduced us to total silence and wonder as with his toes he proceeded to thread the one into the other much, it seemed, to his enjoyment, and much more to ours. It was perfect. And perfect timing too, for, as he got up and gave us a very professional bow, at that moment the train began to pull away. There was a huge cheer for both, and a wonderful shower of annas rained onto the tarmac of the platform. He was happy. So were we. Everything was not right yet, however. Our happiness received short shrift. Our carriage went about a hundred yards and then stopped. We couldn’t believe it. A coupling between us and the rest of the carriages and the train had apparently broken, and it was nearly two hours before we were reconnected, and altogther, ten hours before we even began detraining in Bombay and marched from the station to the docks. It was early evening, but there, at last, was the troopship and the sea. We nearly forgot the heat in our heat-forgetting excitement, but lugging ourselves and our kitbags on board, the heat soon found us again, and, too quickly, all our bush shirts were dark and wet. We sweated into our cabins, mine on E deck, five decks down into Dante’s inferno. There were six thousand of us cramming into the cabins, each of which had three tiers of bunks, the top one with only three inches of headroom from the ceiling. The descent was indeed like that into Avernus. The ship was called The Carthage. Sameone with a classical wit rechristened it. It became, of course, The Bloody Carnage. But, packed tight and sweating as we were, nothing could stop the beating of those wonderful drums. We were forbidden to sleep on deck tonight, but most of us stayed there as long as possible. As late evening faded into night, there was time to watch the huge shape of other ships melt into dusk’s shadows and contract finally to underwater rows of trembling dots of golden lights, and there, there, came all the magic of the moment we had missed at dawn. Above the surface of the water, and doubled in the water itself, a maze of coloured morse lights began stammering and winking their messages, asking and answering from ship to shore and shore to ship. And this - is my very last message to you on paper. It is now very difficult to believe a paper bridge of sighs could carry so much weight, but, thank God, it has.

The loading went on all night. You could hear it even in the stifling heat of the cabin five decks down.

148 We spent the whole of the morning in Bombay harbour and then, at 12.30pm we sailed, worried out by the same terrier tugs that, so many years and tears ago, had worried us in. Gradually the exotic skyline of Bombay faded into the distance behind us, and for the rest of the day we sailed towards the sun until it set and every inch left of the space between us was in golden smithereens.

From away, it is now towards, towards, towards.

149