Love in a Muddle
9781465666376
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I can't sleep. I should go simply potty lying down and trying to get quiet and peaceful. I'm going to write down all the absolutely mad, freakish things that have happened to-night, and hope that in doing so I shall perceive some sane and feasible method of escape. Diaries are useful sometimes; they keep your nerves from going absolutely to pieces with the sheer unexpectedness of life. Dad and mater were in a particularly horrid mood this evening. The C.O. had complained about the Y.M.C.A. hut in the camp, or something, and dinner was filthy, so the usual mutual recriminations took place. Rows always make me feel so frightfully sick. I've never enjoyed a really proper one, because I've always had to run away in the middle and be ill, and then of course I never feel equal to coming back and finishing it. I don't think any of the shabby Tommies' wives who come over on the paddle steamer on Sundays to visit their husbands at the camp live such a petty, sordid life as we do in our diggings. I hate dad when he gets red and shouts—I simply have to beat a retreat. I can quite understand why the men are in such a fearful funk of him. I have been terrified and appalled by him all my life, such is his effect on my temperament that I could do or say anything when he loses control and goes for me, tell any childish lies or make any excuses. My moral sense positively ceases to exist. I crept from them to-night and went for a walk by the sea. I am not afraid of the dark. I enjoy it. You can think so awfully well when there is nothing to distract your eyes, and the world feels so spacious after our digs. All my life I have felt there was never quite enough room for the three of us, dad, and the mater, and myself. I believe if we lived in St. Paul's together I should still feel overcrowded. I walked for a long time. It was a topping night, the air was as soft and warm as cotton-wool and the moon was on the sea. It was the sort of night that makes you want to do a frightful lot of good in the world, mother a lot of orphans or marry a man from St. Dunstan's. I could have cried because there was such a lot of sorrow and unhappiness in the world. You do feel like that sometimes out of doors. I went along keeping close to the cliff and not thinking, and then I suddenly realised that I was right under the lee of the big guns, and facing the big guns of the fort just across the water; and the searchlights over there suddenly started playing and picked me out.
