SITTING in South-east England, I can take a deep breath
and say fervently, "Thank Heaven that's over." For three months the right proportions of life in the countryside have been knocked into surrealist shapes. All the quiet things and events have been thrust into a sort of vague back- ground, to give place to the blatant and boring melodrama of the doodle-bombs and their ugly consequences. Stories about them have been told ad nauseam. More lovely and graceful tales are still to tell about the release from them. What infinite variety of mental and emotional experience people are feeling as they see lost values once more solidifying. For example, I had noticed that during the twelve-week bombardment I had lost all sense of home. I could not sit at night in my house and be surrounded by that interior world, that mysticism oj indoors, which makes one's home an eternal thing, a centre of the universe. I seemed instead to be living under canvas. The familiar, sacred hearth was a temporary affair, as fragile as the rest of human society.
Previous page
