Little things first, equipment starts to arrive, first batches of uniforms after we have waited so long with promises of enough and coats for all by Friday, because WAAFs have frozen these last few days in the snow.
The second excitement was my having a preliminary interview with a view to a code and cipher commission, which I don't think I'll be given because they consider me too young.
I am sorry the description of the day's doings had been such an anticlimax but to be honest with you it's now many days later, I having been interrupted in the writing of it by a caller and then forgetting it and life being what it is the excitement is now ended.
Anyway it's now 21 January. I have been out every evening since last Tuesday and consequently feel somewhat jaded. We (Joyce and I) have drawn up the beds and are leaning against them almost in a super colossal fire. We have borrowed (with permission) the wireless from Ray and Peggy. The food is on the washstand and we are waiting for two visitors to call on us. I have to clean my buttons, which is rather a bore. I am very dirty because it's too cold to wash but I don't care. I haven't made my bed for days because I have discovered that if I crawl out carefully it will still do. In short, the layers of ladylike-hood are peeling off pretty speedily and doubtless soon I shall smell. Oh well, what the hell.
29 January 1940
What a weekend! It began on Friday when Eric was taking me to the Little Review with a sore throat and that aching prelude to flu plus a depression caused by Joyce's Monday departure to a very good Air Ministry job, fortunately quite near Hendon. Feeling frightful and having to meet Eric, I stumbled into a chemist from the rain and blackout and demanded that he gave me something to pep me up for the night. Dubiously and unwillingly he gave me a bright brown scalding liquid like fifteen fiery cocktails combined (I do love alliteration), which not only put me on top form for the whole evening but has kept me there ever since. I enjoyed myself very much, we ate and danced and laughed loudly at the Little Review, which was slick and modern, clever and Oh! The genius of Hermione Baddeley as an ancient prima suprima, colisima ballerina, or the most Novelloist of Novello gipsy heroines! Afterwards we had a taxi back to Waterloo in which he was so good that I am afraid he may be wanting to be serious and he saw me off to Claygate asking if I's see the Gate Review with him on his next leave. He's a very nice boy, I don't want him to be hurt, but I've no feeling about him at all.
On Saturday evening I met Joyce in town and we went over with some friends of hers to a dance at her old home in Blackheath. It was quite good fun but I would have enjoyed it more had my voice not been so faint but speaking seemed too great an effort to bother over much.
I was supposed to return to Hendon last night but owing to the snow there weren't any trains. I had hell's delight getting back here (Claygate) on Sunday morning as every electric train had gently died on the nation. I eventually got a steam train as far as Surbiton (passing en route a notice flaunting the words ‘And still the railways carry on’). This morning there is still no train so I am back again by the welcome home fire warming up for a second attempt after lunch starting with a cab to Surbiton.
I February 1940
I have been moved out of house number 18 to number 11 and have been put in temporary charge of it until the return of a very nice corporal friend of mine, Rene Le Mesurier. Its other inhabitants are old and staid and utterly law abiding with a conscience over helping with the housework. I am none of these, with a livid reputation for breakfast lateness. It's half past ten now, I'm on a pouffe before a very hot fire and a half-read American Ladies Home Journal.
8 February 1940
For weeks I've wantonly escaped it, tonight there was no further eluding it. I am on duty on the telephone. That unpleasantness means that you sit from five to nine in the WAAF Recreation Room, if you're like me with both feet in the fire, and when the phone rings you have to answer it and, depending on your conscience, say either ‘leave a message’ or ‘I'll see if I can find her’.
On the wireless a frightful band of men are singing over and over again the same song interspersed with remarks of dullness about keeping on key and top Bs by another man with a shaking voice. I've got to keep it on, it's my only means of knowing six o'clock. I've got cigarettes, my knitting, this diary and a magazine. I can't sincerely be martyred, especially if I did want to go out, I've got no money and owe odd WAAFs 11/6d.
Up and down Booth Road WAAFs are cleaning windows, hiding beer bottles and Dillon is reluctantly black-leading a grate. Big bugs from Air Ministry are coming tomorrow to billet inspect. My room will be the only one not with its morning face. The orderly sergeant has now arrived and is battling with the intricacies of the NAAFI finances. I've combined three good deeds tonight but I've resigned the struggle. I've helped the cooks wash up and I'm taking someone's place in the decontamination squad so that she can leave camp. I glow with a large pro-social feeling.
28 February 1940
Two weeks' interlude between this and the last entry represents a week in the WAAF sickbay with a cold and pink eye and five days in an isolation hospital with measles, separated by two delightful days of sick leave seeing both the Gate Review and Funny Side Up with Eric. I was talking while in sickbay with a girl about platonic friendship, the way you do get talking very late in the night with neither of you tired through too much bed, and she said it never worked because the very fact that you were men and women made one of you at some point, if only very briefly, have feelings for the other. That's true. Sitting beside Eric in Funny Side Up, he in his new undress uniform and I in the unaccustomed femininity of a pretty frock, this dialogue just over between us:
Joan: ‘Mind you've caught my frock.’
Eric: ‘Joan, you're getting me in quite a state.’
Joan: ‘Is that the effect the frock has on you?’
Eric: ‘The frock or you.’
I got the first feeling I had for him of sentimentality but now it's gone and I feel nothing again.
I read somewhere else that a woman who can inspire love and not even feel pity is a dangerous and unhappy character.
8 March 1940
I am becoming a most domesticated girl. The mornings see me sweeping, dusting and bed making and even cleaning the windows of my room, and most surprising, liking it. Housework, I see, is nothing like as soul destroying as typing. Lunch hour saw me in shirtsleeves and mackintosh apron standing before a sink, singing tunelessly the twiddly-pom bit of ‘Eighteenth-Century Minuet’ and faced with piles and piles and more piles of WAAF washing up. Washing up after meals now being compulsory, one of the vast growing number of unpleasantnesses that are compulsory these days. I can't say I enjoyed that but thought hard of soldiers being killed for England and me only being inconvenienced, which helped me along.
Yesterday evening I decided not to go to the station dance as I had a cold, so put on slacks, many jerseys, mittens and a scarf and went out into the back garden where I weeded and dug and generally prepared the earth for its invasion of seeds on Sunday and finished off with a truly colossal bonfire which brought all the little boys from far and wide to watch the fun. Digging there in the mildness of an early
