… am gratified that I heard this story weeks ago:
‘There is this story, which is enjoying great popularity in Berlin. A lion escaped from a menagerie and arrived at a crowded restaurant in the dinner hour. Everybody fled in terror except one little man, who refused to move until the lion was near to him, when he took up a sharp knife and cut its throat. A newspaper reporter, who saw the affair from a doorway, rushed up and congratulated him “on the bravest deed I have ever seen,” and promised a full report in his paper the next morning. “May I have your name, please?” “Certainly,” replied the hero. “My name is Israel Epstein.” The journalist lifted his eyebrows and walked away. Next morning the following headline appeared: “Cowardly Jew attacks defenceless lion.”’
Sunday, 11 October
Our democratic liberties are in danger, so I am told. Everyone seems convinced of this – some say in the form of Fascism, an unreliable government, individual industrial interests, the Jews, Communists. The People’s Front may even be a mask from Moscow. Who is one to trust?
We want peace, individual freedom, free speech, equal opportunities. We would not tolerate a dictator. But we have no peace when partisan demonstrations cause disorder in our streets, when free speakers are bespattered with bad eggs, and opportunity is obviously the privilege of the minority.
‘The movement for a British Popular Front,’ wrote The Sunday Times political correspondent last week, ‘about which a good deal of noise was made in some quarters during the summer, is fizzling out.’ Is it? Although the People’s Front movement has brought these perplexities to my notice, and roused my sense of justice, I am still hesitant about its essence. If it is really a democratic movement, why has it not drawn in the more intelligent democrats? From what I have seen of them, the original members of the movement are regrettably peevish individuals, midgets with a grievance, hoping they have found something at last that will make them seem important. There is everywhere so much distrust. I would like to shrug my shoulders and leave it all for someone else to work out, which is an invitation to Fascism. We must learn to think and decide action each for ourselves.
Sunday, 18 October
For the first time in 27 years I celebrate the anniversary of my birth without either parent responsible for it. I have spent the whole day alone. Pooh has sent me a cable.
Saturday, 24 October
The exquisite Charles Scrimshaw is storming my imagination. I shall endow him with the usual extraordinary sensibilities and understanding, convince myself that his glances every Tea Dance in my direction are full of significance, and settle myself with him for the rest of my life – until I (if ever) speak to him. Then I shall discover he is not yet 25, is either married, thinking about it, or ‘pansy’ as Joan Silvester declares he is, because being inordinately conceited he combs his hair frequently before one of several mirrors.76
Saw Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times this evening. A moving plea for the underdog.
Wednesday, 4 November
His glances in my direction seem more significant than ever. Nockie read my teacup a short while ago: ‘You’re going to be swept off your feet. Not a very tall man, and dark I think.’ Well, I wish the sweeping’d begin. I won’t endure another of these feeble infatuations. It is so easy, so fatal to fall in love with an idea.
The tenant moves with his family into Homefield this week. Cheeta has run away. I am afraid she has gone for good.
Monday, 9 November
Events have taken an unexpected turn. Mr Watson (of the People’s Front Propaganda Committee) descended upon me on Saturday with some letters to type, stayed to tea and wants me to have dinner with him one evening. I am flattered. Now Nockie has phoned to say that what she prophesied for me has happened to her. Did she read the wrong cup?
Saturday, 21 November
Nockie is in the thick of her affair: the situation is an astonishing one. Both are madly in love with one another, but he is married, and still loves his wife to whom he has been married only six months. He says he never believed a person like Nockie could exist outside fiction, and neither knows what to do next.
Friday, 27 November
I still feel in danger of drowning when I see Scrimshaw looking at me the way he does. He is insufferably conceited: he may only think he has found another mirror in me.
Saturday, 5 December
I am now collecting opinions on the King-Simpson bombshell.77 My hairdresser was the first to tell me it was in the papers on Thursday morning. ‘One could forgive him making a fool of himself over something young and dainty, but an old hag like that …’
‘Thinks nothing of sending her £5 worth of flowers every week,’ said Mrs Rogers. That’s the sort of boyfriend I’d like. Aunt Emmie was so funny about it when I saw her in the summer: had I heard of someone at Belvedere who warmed his slippers for him?78 Of course it was a dead secret and she mustn’t repeat names, but the lady in question was married, her name began with an S, and there was a firm of the same name in the Strand …
I am intensely sorry for him. I think the whole nation is (but no, I heard of someone’s uncle on Thursday night who said he needed horsewhipping). I do agree with the Statesman’s leader writer: he is being honest, and why won’t the government make a special law that the King’s wife need not be queen?
‘One did hope,’ said Aunt Maggie, ‘He would have chosen someone fresh.’
Thursday, 10 December
I pray that the King will neither abdicate nor give in to his ministers.
Tuesday, 22 December
King Edward abdicated. I was so sure he wouldn’t. Now everyone says War is upon us. I am so sure there won’t be a war.
The Scrimshaw infatuation continues to ferment.
Wednesday, 30 December
I have been reading through my Journals again. That affair with Colin in Bath – what a fool I was during the first weeks we met. I had him in the hollow of my hand, but like a strange toy in the hands of a clumsy child he slipped through my fingers. It was too late when I returned in the summer. Sometimes I think I will burn the Journals, rough notes and all. But when I read them through I know I cannot.
Saturday, 6 February 1937
I have not had such a bad attack of inferiority complex for months. For the past week I have had grave suspicions that Joan Spall has transferred her affections (for the third time since October) to Charles Scrimshaw. I have tried to ignore them and the pain it gives me. I have only the slenderest evidence and have been making mountains of it. I woke at 7 this morning in tears about it.
This is not an isolated instance: it has happened continually through my life, and weighs upon me heavily. Unless I make a supreme effort it will continue, so that I shall miss the affection and tenderness I crave. Without it, life is empty, however full of other things. The heart is hungry for the stimulating flow of love, and without the gift
