27 May 1940 – 2 June 1940

Walking today (Nessa’s birthday) by Kingfisher pool saw my first hospital train—laden, not funereal but weighty, as if not to shake bones: something— what is the word I want—grieving and tender and heavy laden and private— bringing our wounded back carefully through the green fields at which I suppose some looked. Not that I could see them. And the faculty for seeing in imagination always leaves me so suffused with something partly visual, partly emotional, I can’t, though it’s very pervasive, catch it when I come home—the slowness, cadaverousness, grief of the long heavy train, taking its burden through the fields. Very quietly it slid into the cutting at Lewes. Instantly wild duck flights of aeroplanes came over head; manoeuvred; took up positions and passed over Caburn.

Scraps, orts and fragments, as I said in P.H., which is now bubbling. I’m playing with words: and think I owe some dexterity to finger exercises here—but the scraps: Louie has seen Mr. Westmacott’s man. “It’s an eyesore”—his description of fighting near Boulogne. Percy weeding: “I shall conquer ’em in the end. If I was sure of our winning the other battle . . .” Raid, said to be warned, last night. All the searchlights in extreme continual vibration: they have blots of light, like beads of dew on a stalk. Mr. Hanna “stood by” half the night. Rumour, very likely: rumour, which has transported the English in Belgium who, with their golf sticks, ball and some nets in a car coming from Flanders, were taken for parachutists: condemned to death; released; and returned to Seaford. Rumour, via Percy, transplanted them to “somewhere near Eastbourne” and the villagers armed with rifles, pitchforks etc. Shows what a surplus of unused imagination we possess. We—the educated—check it; as I checked my cavalry on the down at Telscombe and transformed them into cows drinking. Making up again. So that I couldn’t remember, coming home, if I’d come by the mushroom path or the field. How amazing that I can tap that old river again: and how satisfying. But will it last? I made out the whole of the end: and need only fill in: the faculty, dormant under the weight of Roger, springs up. And to me it’s the voice on the scent again. “Any waste paper?” Here I was interrupted by the jangling bell. Small boy in white sweater come, I suppose, for Scouts, and Mabel says they pester us daily at 37; and make off with the spoils. Desperate fighting. The same perorations. Coming through Southease I saw Mrs. Cockell in old garden hat weeding. Out comes a maid in muslin apron and cap tied with blue riband. Why? To keep up standards of civilisation?