Now in 1942 in April 1942 there is no longer any standing around waiting for something to happen that is among those who are not fighting of course those who are fighting are like that, they are standing around waiting to do something but everybody else is now as is normal in adult life they are busy not necessarily with everything but they know from day to day that they will do something to-morrow. From fifteen to twenty-three or four nobody does know really know that they will do something to-morrow.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three nobody ever can get back in time.

And now in 1943 at any age nobody can get back in time. And for the same reason, there is so much to do, there is nothing to do, there is no way for anybody to leave home and everybody is on the road and everybody talks to everybody and beside sometimes you know them all of which makes it impossible for anybody to get home in time. In time for what. Well just to get home in time or to get back in time and that is the way it usually is between fifteen and twenty-three. Nobody can get back in time.

War and enemies.

As I was saying there are so many enemies in Shakespeare.

We have now two sisters no longer young who run this house which we have taken and where we are very comfortable and even rather magnificent and they know what enemies are.

They were born in the upper reaches of the river Rhone. We always like Thornton Wilder’s story of the American tourist who said that there were two schools of thought about pronunciation, some said it should be pronounced Rhine and some said it should be pronounced Rhone. Well anyway they were born on the upper reaches of the river Rhone, a nice river that is always accompanied by a great deal of wind, a little wind or a big wind but it is always accompanied by wind. They were born and they had strange names given to them, they were not twins in fact one is definitely older and the other is definitely younger, and the strange names which were given to them were Clothilde and Olympe although to them they were natural names not strange names at all. The family around them died and then the younger one was quite young, seventeen she went to be a chamber-maid in Moravia where they talk a strange language but where life was pleasant, the older Clothilde had a son, this son was killed in the beginning of the war 1914–1918 and she never had another one. So every one was dead around them they had a little furniture, and in the meantime each one of the two of them separately were personal maids to different Italian countesses, they always like them to be noble and they lived 1914–1918 and a little later then with the Italians who were not enemies not to them then. Then they came back to the valley of the Rhone Clothilde a cook and her sister a maid and they did and they did not know what enemies were. Here they were very comfortable and relatively magnificent. And then many natural things happened and things changed the way they change and then came ’39, and their mistress went away because bombardments might come that way and so they stayed on here alone that is sometimes two alone and sometimes one alone but always alone in a big house and park and alone. Then the war came to be a little more war that is soldiers were there and then soldiers came and soldiers went away and it was disturbing but they did not realise that enemies could be more of a bother than that but they can. And then the enemy came, it was here right here right here in the house and remaining in the house and they were enemies and nobody could deny that they were enemies certainly not Clothilde and Olympe. Olympe and Clothilde and they knew what enemies were enemies were like that.

Enemies being like that make enemies tremble. They made so much noise they said to them you are vanquished and they knew the enemies were there, but that was not what being vanquished was, being vanquished was a sadness and a sorrow and a weakness and a woe, but it was not a horror. The enemy there, here, that is a sorrow that they wished they could be spared but they were not. The enemies were there. They were all alone in the kitchen, they did not sleep there, they just could not do that, they could not sleep with the enemy there, they found a little room outside to which they went to sleep, but all day and each day they were in the kitchen and the enemy were living there, not in the kitchen but in the house. It was awful, they can never forget.

The day they won the enemy came in one by one to tell them so not only that they had won but that the others were done and that every one would be done one by one. Alas it was too true only two years after it was not so, that is to say if they had won the enemy had not finished everything it was only beginning and perhaps they were not winning.

But the enemy had come in one by one on the day they had won to tell them and they had not stolen what was in the house because that would be stealing but they had broken open the trunks of the two women and taken everything because as they were only servants and were then in the kitchen taking everything away from them was not stealing and so they broke open the trunks and took everything. There was a woman who used to wash the clothes for the enemy in a kind of a way she was an enemy herself, not an enemy who could frighten one but just an enemy and she said the enemies would win because they had wonderful weapons that no one had ever seen, all the enemies had wonderful weapons that no one had ever seen. And now say Clothilde and Olympe and now in 1943, perhaps it is true they the enemy feel the wonderful weapons that no one has ever seen, perhaps they do.

And so it is true that they are all kinds of enemies, some that frighten some that steal and some that like a fiend make you come to heel. That is what Olympe has to say. To-day it is a fiend that is a mistress who says come and she has to go who makes her so unhappy that she has to cry.

It is funny and when you are fifteen you begin to know that enemies are not what they seem, and then by twenty-four you know enemies are enemies and in between well and then later and now it is not certain that enemies are what they seem.

At fifteen man and animals fruit trees and flowers beginning not to be things to pick but to feel. In the year ’43, milk was more and more difficult to have. There was no milk not even skimmed milk and so everybody who could had a goat. We had a goat.