Edith’s Diary Read Online Free Page B

I had hoped. Late tomatoes given by Johnsons still yielding in garden. Every day a little improvement on the house. B. arranging for a printer in Trenton for our newspaper which we think to call
The Bugle
.
People here quite friendly, esp. the Johnsons who are one of us politically. Gert J. gives me gardening tips, comes to have a drink around 5:30 now and then.
    B. likes his job. Less pressure, less money, but it is time B. began to enjoy life, existence.
    A hasty entry, that was. A few days before, in the first weeks of Cliffie’s starting at Brunswick School, Edith had written:
     
    C. today accused of having stolen a football from gym. Teacher called up, asked if I’d seen it in the house. I said no, but would search the house. Did not find it. Have no doubt C. did steal it, maybe passed it on to some boy who doesn’t even go to Brunswick School. This evening C. was evasive, angrily says he is being falsely accused. B. and I on the fence whether we should offer to pay for football. B. ashamed, says let it ride till we know something definite. Too bad C. starts out so soon on wrong foot.
    Edith stared at the remaining half page, which was blank, on the right side of her diary, and rubbed her forehead. She and Brett now made Cliffie take a swat at his arithmetic, still his worst subject, two or three evenings a week. She or Brett would sit with him, trying to make it amusing, never making the session a full hour, so that half an hour or forty-five minutes would seem a treat. His English teacher and geography teacher, a woman and man respectively, had written them courteous notes saying that Cliffie was turning up without his written homework done, though Cliffie professed to have had no homework assignments, when Edith had asked him about it. Edith was pleased that the school troubled to write her, after two months. Certainly no New York school would have troubled. Confronted by Cliffie’s obvious lying, Brett had drawn a hand back as if to hit Cliffie. But Brett hadn’t.
    She sighed and picked up her pen. She didn’t want to make the entry she was about to make, that she thought she ought to make to keep an honest record. Still balking, she turned back some eight or ten of the sturdy white pages and read:
     
    7/Nov./54. In New York people say politics don’t interest them. ‘What can I do about it anyway?’ This is the attitude government powers in America want to foster and do. News is brief, filtered and slanted. The Guatemalan ‘uprising’ would have been far more interesting if social conditions there had been described and if United Fruit Company’s activities had been exposed – by radio and TV. Discussion clubs should be set up all over America to talk about forces
behind
things. We have been brainwashed for decades (since 1917) to hate Communism.
Reader’s Digest
has never failed to print one article per issue about the inefficiency of anything socialized, such as medicine. From the American news media we have snippets without scenery, character or background. How could it be ‘interesting’? People attempting to start discussion clubs, such as B. and I envisage, are labeled Communist. When a Russian is quoted on radio or TV, I find myself thinking in advance, ‘This probably isn’t going to be true, so why listen?’ and if I feel that way already, how about the others? It is still true from 1936 to 1939 the Communists (Russians) were the only people giving the correct interpretation of the Spanish Civil War, giving reasons for the behavior of USA, Germany, France and so on, and the proof was the further rise and enhancement of Hitler and Mussolini and the Second World War.
    Since then, of course, she’d read Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia
and
1984
.
Betrayal, betrayal.
    That thought did not make Edith feel any better, but she took a firmer grip on her pen – she preferred her lever-filling Esterbrook to a Parker Brett had given her last October for her birthday – and wrote:
     
    9/Nov./55.