Читать книгу Sand In My Shoes: Coming of Age in the Second World War: A WAAF’s Diary - Joan Rice - Страница 41

I am becoming a most domesticated girl. The mornings see me sweeping, dusting and bed making and even cleaning the windows of my room, and most surprising, liking it. Housework, I see, is nothing like as soul destroying as typing. Lunch hour saw me in shirtsleeves and mackintosh apron standing before a sink, singing tunelessly the twiddly-pom bit of ‘Eighteenth-Century Minuet’ and faced with piles and piles and more piles of WAAF washing up. Washing up after meals now being compulsory, one of the vast growing number of unpleasantnesses that are compulsory these days. I can't say I enjoyed that but thought hard of soldiers being killed for England and me only being inconvenienced, which helped me along.

Yesterday evening I decided not to go to the station dance as I had a cold, so put on slacks, many jerseys, mittens and a scarf and went out into the back garden where I weeded and dug and generally prepared the earth for its invasion of seeds on Sunday and finished off with a truly colossal bonfire which brought all the little boys from far and wide to watch the fun. Digging there in the mildness of an early spring evening, with the faint sound of other WAAF voices on the billet the other side and a few children climbing in and out of air raid shelters, left me at peace. I had no thoughts beyond the moment; all emotion had run out of the world; it was only the pleasant day and the earth heavy under my fork and my own satisfied tiredness. All this is probably just my way of saying there's something in this gardening racket after all.

After, I came in to find Mickey roasting before my fire and we drank her soup, toasted my bread and ate my mother's marmalade. This morning I got an invitation to Barbara's wedding on 27th of this month and Our Annie, the hearty CO who has taken over from Mrs Rowley, has given me the afternoon off to go to it.