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Chapter Three

The Diary of Enid Morris. 1st September 1944

James writes to me. He said he would but I didn’t believe him. I was trying so hard not to be naive that I’d written our affair off after one night. But he writes. Beautiful letters that make me struggle not to hope for the future at a time when I have refused to think about the possibility of life ever being normal again. It’s hard here, but I know it’s harder there. People talk about the trenches but no one can know unless they’ve lived it, can they? He doesn’t say anything really about what it’s like and equally I say nothing either. My last letter started with how glorious the sunshine was. Not that someone had died in front of me last night as we’d put them on a stretcher and I’m worried that I’m starting to become immune to suffering. Or more that I worry, if I keep working with the ambulance, that I might.

He says that he writes to me so he doesn’t have to write to his family. I’ve read about the Blackwells, I think, in the past. I asked my friend Fred if he knew anything about them but he asked why I was asking and I got annoyed with him and told him that it was none of his business. I think because Fred didn’t want me to be annoyed with him, he asked his dad who said that the Blackwells were in oil or something, owned a big house and weren’t our sort of people. (Fred’s dad’s words, not mine.) But in his letters James says they’re claustrophobic.

I wrote back to say that I knew exactly what he meant. The island is claustrophobic at the moment. It’s always claustrophobic. I stand sometimes on the bridge and look down the river and just think that there is so much out there to see. I hope they don’t destroy it all before it’s my time to see it.