“Yes, that was wise, I think.” It would be silly to remind her of the smashed pillar boxes and the burnt-out vans. Perhaps she felt that the use of the term “royal” made them invincible.
“In the last war, my sister’s eldest boy, he was only two, got the Santa Claus I sent him only at Easter. I was always so vexed. He must have thought his old aunt crazy, sending him snow when he should have had a bunny.”
“You cannot do more than post at the date they advise.”
“No, dear, but somehow I always felt that I should have been more careful. After all, our festivals only come once a year. Has it ever struck you what a time we spend preparing for them, and then they are over in a flash? It’s difficult to think about Christmas with those raiders overhead; still, the British Lion is barring every door, and the more it is banged, the tighter it will hold.”
“People are being extraordinary.”
“Well, what I say is, it does not do to give way to things. I used to tell Muriel that, when she got so frightened over thunderstorms. I missed her very much at first, for if a person has lunch with you for ten years continuously the day seems upside down when she goes away; but now I am thankful she is in Montreal. We don’t always realize at the time how often things happen for the best.”
The basement vibrated with the shock of masonry falling in the near distance. It was as if they were lying at the bottom of a well with nothing overhead. All the heads stared up in unison, a grotesque sight, for what use were looks if the sky itself collapsed? There was a moment’s silence, and then the knitting needles began again, though one or two, with furtive glances at their neighbours, helped themselves to barley sugar.
“If paper could speak, what a tale your card could tell when it gets to New Zealand!” The pillar box began to bob up and down in Eve’s mind until it was an ark swimming on dark tropical seas. “I saw a film once, I remember, about a bank note. They ought to make one about your letter. I should begin with the mail”—she thought of the taxi roof that she had seen that morning on her way to work, just visible at the rim of a gigantic crater—“then there would be the docks, the ships being loaded in spite of the fires, the submarines in the Bay, at last, after the fear and the stars, sunlight on the other side of the world.” Only nothing really would explain their experience; there would be a gulf between the bombed and the unraided.
“I don’t know”—her neighbour began to sharpen a pencil—“if I do go to the pictures I like a real story; a good cry once in a while makes you fresher for your work.”
Eve could think of no suitable reply. “Oh, I’m one with you in appreciating the spring weather,” she heard above the clatter. “How glad we shall be to say goodbye to winter, though it has to come again in a year of months. I love the moment when the snowdrops bloom in our little yard, though this year everything will be on the tapis, methinks.” And Mrs. Juniper Oil’s niece (Eve did not know her name) settled back into her creaking chair, as if raids were the most normal thing in the world. “I do not think the outlook is too safe, just now, though Britain’s hope for victory is great.”
“Safe,” Colonel Ferguson murmured to himself, looking up in amazement. Was it courage or was it simply stupidity? He caught Eve’s eye, and both smiled. The barrage blew up in a gust of thunder, died almost away, and then bellowed again, until he thought of an illustration he had seen somewhere of men crouching in caves. Perhaps civilization was really unbearable, and in some rage of protest man had duplicated the conditions of the beginning of the world? It amused him to think that the distant thuddings of the mobile guns were the footsteps of mammoths.
Perhaps too much security was unendurable. Families said that they were afraid of war, yet they were unwilling to take one positive step to prevent it. Oh, they joined pacifist societies and smothered criticism, but they had never once looked the monster in the face. Colonel Ferguson shut his eyes, remembering a summer afternoon in the Wrights’ garden, on his last brief visit to England before the war. “I know you two like exchanging reminiscences,” Mrs. Wright had said, snipping off a faded delphinium head into her basket, “but if it had not been for those wretched trenches Frank wouldn’t be a cripple with his rheumatism. What idiots you were! But it isn’t going to happen again, you know, we’ll see to that,” and she had clipped off another lavender-coloured spike almost to ground level. “What about Germany?” Ferguson had inquired. “War, they think, is all that matters.”
“Tush! Scare-mongering. It’s the newspapers playing up atrocities, and I don’t believe they happen. It would be a better thing for the world if the press were abolished.” And the Parliament and laws, the Colonel had felt tempted to answer. “It is true,” he had protested, “I met a boy in the mountains. On a track I had found by accident, the real smuggler’s path. I thought the child, he couldn’t have been more than seventeen, had had an accident. At first he was terrified, then when I could not answer his German he realized I was English and showed me his hands. They had been broken by rifle butts. The Nazis had left him for dead, and an old woman had helped him to
