Henrietta's War Read Online Free

that it would take place at 9.30 a.m. At 9.29½ a beaming young policeman poked his head out of the little bit of police-station window which is not covered, and spread a sheet of newspaper on the sandbags. On this he tenderly laid the siren, pressed a knob, and immediately the air was filled with what we have been taught to call an intermittent warbling note.
    The result was electrical. You would have thought that siren was a herald of good tidings instead of possible death and destruction. Delighted faces appeared at every window. People in the streets were wreathed in smiles and some were doubled up with laughter. Quite a little crowd gathered in front of the police station, where the young policeman, flushed with success, changed the key, like a cinema organist with the floods on him.
    Old Mrs Candy, who has been in bed for four years, appeared at the front door in her dressing-gown and was given an ovation.
    I haven’t seen this place so gay since the Coronation.
    Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,
    HENRIETTA

    January 24, 1940
    M Y DEAR ROBERT
Faith took it into her head to be vaccinated last week. She has a theory that the Germans are going to drop germs on us in the spring, and wants to Be Prepared. She says that the Germans are going to fly at a great height over England and release thousands of minute parachutes laden with bacilli. The parachutes will disintegrate in descent, so that we won’t know anything has happened to us until we begin breaking out in spots!
    Faith says her vaccination was a great disappointment to her. She makes no bones about her infatuation for Charles, but admits that his reactions are disappointing.
    She says she went to the surgery in the evening because the light in Charles’s consulting room is more becoming then. This pleased me very much, because I arranged that lighting with no little care. Doctors are gradually being laughed out of having nothing but last year’s seed catalogue for their patients to read in waiting-rooms, but I still think they are inclined to overlook the fact that a woman who feels she is looking her best is much easier to deal with than one who feels she is looking her worst.
    Faith says she sat down on a low stool in front of the fire and pulled her skirt up and her stocking down. In fact, she took her stocking right off, because she thinks that a stocking hanging over the edge of a shoe looks sordid.
    Whatever else you may have forgotten, Robert, I am sure you have not forgotten Faith’s legs. She says it was a pretty sight, and I am prepared to believe her.

    â€˜Now, where do you want to be vaccinated?’
    Charles, in the meantime, could be heard in the next room, madly scrubbing his hands. Then he came in with a knife in one hand and a small tube of cow-pox in the other. Faith says he was looking wildly attractive in a white coat, and she stretched out her foot to the fire and waggled her toes.
    Charles came forward with his kind, encouraging smile and said: ‘Now, where do you want to be vaccinated? Arm or leg?’ Faith says she could have hit him. In the middle of the operation, when she said she felt faint, he said: ‘Don’t be so silly, Faith. Of course you don’t.’
    Poor Faith! I had to comfort her by telling her how Charles forgot our wedding day on Monday. As a matter of fact, I forgot myself until lunch-time, but that is between you and me . . .
    I have been rather bad about the war lately. This time the feelings of waste and desolation have taken the form of extreme irritability with Mrs Savernack, whom I suspect of enjoying the war because she can sit on committees and boss everybody about as much as she likes, as well as practising those small economies so dear to her heart.
    Yesterday, when I was changing my book at the library, she told me, firmly and loudly, that this war was a Crusade. I said I seemed to have heard that before somewhere, about twenty years