difficulty of communications, etc., etc., I found that scraps of nonsense poetry were constantly coming into my mind. They never got beyond a line or two and the tendency stopped when the bombing slacked off, but examples were:—

An old Rumanian peasant
Who lived at Mornington Crescent
and
And the key doesn’t fit and the bell doesn’t ring,
But we all stand up for God save the King
and
When the Borough Surveyor has gone to roost
On his rod, his pole or his perch.

29.12.40: From a newspaper account of a raid (not ironical): «Bombs were falling like manna.»