15.10.40: Writing this at Wallington, having been more or less ill for about a fortnight with a poisoned arm. Not much news—i.e. only events of worldwide importance; nothing that has much affected me personally.
There are now 11 evacuee children in Wallington (12 arrived, but one ran away and had to be sent home). They come from the East End. One little girl, from Stepney, said that her grandfather had been bombed out seven times. They seem nice children and to be settling down quite well. Nevertheless there are the usual complaints against them in some quarters. E.g. of the little boy who is with Mrs.———101, aged seven: «He’s a dirty little devil, he is. He wets his bed and dirties his breeches. I’d rub his nose in it if I had charge of him, the dirty, little devil.»
Some murmurings about the number of Jews in Baldock. ———102 declares that Jews greatly predominate among the people sheltering in the Tubes. Must try and verify this.
Potato crop very good this year, in spite of the dry weather, which is just as well.
19.10.40: The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.
21.10.40: With reference to the advertisements in the Tube stations, «Be a Man» etc. (asking able-bodied men not to shelter there but to leave the space for women and children), D.103 says the joke going round London is that it was a mistake to print these notices in English.
Priestley,104 whose Sunday night broadcasts were by implication Socialist propaganda, has been shoved off the air, evidently at the instance of the Conservative party……It looks rather as though the Margesson105 crew are now about to stage a comeback.
25.10.40: The other night examined the crowds sheltering in Chancery Lane, Oxford Circus and Baker Street stations. Not all Jews, but, I think, a higher proportion of Jews than one would normally see in a crowd of this size. What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so. A fearful Jewish woman, a regular comicpaper cartoon of a Jewess, fought her way off the train at Oxford Circus, landing blows on anyone who stood in her way. It took me back to old days on the Paris Métro.
Surprised to find that D., who is distinctly Left in his views, is inclined to share the current feeling against the Jews.
He says that the Jews in business circles are turning pro-Hitler, or preparing to do so. This sounds almost incredible, but according to D. they will always admire anyone who kicks them. What I do feel is that any Jew, i.e. European Jew, would prefer Hitler’s kind of social system to ours, if it were not that he happens to persecute them. Ditto with almost any Central European, e.g. the refugees. They make use of England as a sanctuary, but they cannot help feeling the profoundest contempt for it. You can see this in their eyes, even when they don’t say it outright. The fact is that the insular outlook and the continental outlook are completely incompatible.
According to F.,106 it is quite true that foreigners are more frightened than English people during the raids. It is not their war, and therefore they have nothing to sustain them. I think this might also account for the fact—I am virtually sure it is a fact, though one mustn’t mention it—that working-class people are more frightened than middle-class.
The same feeling of despair over impending events in France, Africa, Syria, Spain—the sense of foreseeing what must happen and being powerless to prevent it, and feeling with absolute certainty that a British government cannot act in such a way as to get its blow in first.
Air raids much milder the last few days.
16.11.40: I never thought I should live to grow blasé about the sound of gunfire, but so I have.
23.11.40: The day before yesterday lunching with H. P., editor of ——.107 H. P. rather pessimistic about the war. Thinks there is no answer to the New Order,108 i.e. this government is incapable of framing any answer, and people here and in America could easily be brought to accept it. I queried whether people would not for certain see any peace offer along these lines as a trap. H. P.: «Hell’s bells, I could dress it up so that they’d think it was the greatest victory in the history of the world. I could make them eat it.» That is true, of course. All depends on the form in which it is put to people. So long as our own newspapers don’t do the dirty they will be quite indifferent to appeals from Europe. H. P., however, is certain that ——— 109 and Co. are working for a sell-out. It appears that though ———110 is not submitted for censorship, all papers are now warned not to publish interpretations of the government’s policy towards Spain. A few weeks back Duff-Cooper had the press correspondents up and assured them «on his word of honour» that «things were going very well indeed in Spain.» The most one can say is that Duff-Cooper’s word of honour is worth more than Hoare’s.
H. P. says that when France collapsed there was a Cabinet meeting to decide whether to continue the war or whether to seek terms. The vote was actually 50–50 except for one casting vote, and according to H. P. this was Chamberlain’s. If true, I wonder whether this will ever be made public. It was poor old Chamberlain’s last public act, as one might say, poor old man.
Characteristic war-time sound, in winter: the musical tinkle of raindrops on your tin hat.
28.11.40: Lunching yesterday with C.,111 editor of France…. To my surprise he was in good spirits and had no grievances. I would have expected a French refugee to be grumbling endlessly about the food, etc. However, C. knows England well and has lived here before.
He says there is much more resistance both in occupied and unoccupied France than people here realise. The press is playing it down, no doubt because of our continued relations with Vichy. He says that at the time of the French collapse no European looked on it as conceivable that England would go on fighting, and generally speaking Americans did not either. He is evidently somewhat of an Anglophile and considers the monarchy a great advantage to England. According to him it has been a main factor in preventing the establishment of Fascism here. He considers that the abdication of Edward VIII was brought about because of Mrs. S.’s 112 known Fascist connections….It is a fact that, on the whole, anti-Fascist opinion in England was pro-Edward, but C. is evidently repeating what was current on the continent.
C. was head of the press department during Laval’s government.113 Laval said to him in 1935 that England was now «only an appearance» and Italy was a really strong country, so that France must break with England and go in with Italy. On returning from signing the Franco-Russian pact he said that Stalin was the most powerful man in Europe. On the whole Laval’s prophecies seem to have been falsified, clever though he is.
Completely conflicting accounts, from eye witnesses, about the damage to Coventry.114 It seems impossible to learn the truth about bombing at a distance. When we have a quiet night here, I find that many people are faintly uneasy, because feeling certain that they are getting it badly in the industrial towns. What every one feels at the back of his mind is that we are now hardened to it and the morale elsewhere is less reliable.
1.12.40: That bastard Chiappe115 is cold meat. Everyone delighted, as when Balbo116 died. This war is at any rate killing off a few Fascists.
8.12.40: Broadcasting the night before last……Met there a Pole who has only recently escaped from Poland by some underground route he would not disclose….. He said that in the siege of Warsaw 95 per cent of the houses were damaged and about 25 per cent demolished. All services, electricity, water, etc., broke down, and towards the end people had no defence whatever against the aeroplanes and, what was worse, the artillery. He described people rushing out to cut bits off a horse killed by shell-fire, then being driven back by fresh shells, then rushing out again. When Warsaw was completely cut off the people were upheld by the belief that the English were coming to help them, rumours all the while of an English army in Danzig, etc. etc….
The story going round about a week back was that the report in the papers to the effect that the Italian commander in Albania had shot himself was due to a misprint.
During the bad period of the bombing, when everyone was semi-insane, not so much from the bombing itself as from broken sleep, interrupted telephone calls, the
