Appetite for Life : The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927 (9781551996776) by Ritchie Charles

Author:Ritchie, Charles [Ritchie, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-677-6
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2012-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

PART 2

OXFORD

1926–1927

22 September 1926.

I have been re-reading my last year’s diaries. How long ago all that seems. I think I have grown up in this last year. I have worked much harder at college, but have I changed? I can only hope so. It would be too awful to remain the way I was then. Anyway, everything else around here has changed: Peter at Cambridge, Tony back in England, Katherine away and married to Martineau. (I have had one note from her since she left, enclosing a snapshot of herself. She looks different, but it may be a bad snapshot.) The biggest change is that I leave for Oxford in two weeks’ time. It is actually going to happen. Every time I think of it a kind of tingling of excitement goes through me and I cannot sit still in one place. I shall be a different person when I get there as there will be no one there who knows what I have been like till now. It will be a new page with nothing written on it, and the beauty of Oxford itself, the knowledge to be absorbed, the exchange of ideas and impressions with brilliant witty new friends – all this wonderful opportunity is thanks to my mother who is making so many sacrifices to find the money for my allowance and the college fees. I owe everything to her and I shall never forget it.

I find in my diaries how often I have written that I was restless and discontented here. How I have wanted to get away. Now that I am going I begin to think how much happier I have been than I have realized at the time, and how much I shall miss this beloved house, my home, The Bower.

2 October 1926.

On board ship. The first day up after four consecutive days and nights of seasickness. How this boat rolls and pitches. I don’t know which is worse, the shuddering roll or the vicious pitch that half throws you out of your berth. It is a small boat, 9,000 tons, and the steward says the weather off the Grand Banks is the worst they have had for years. It is the season of equinoctial gales. I have spent my time being sick, recovering from being sick, and waiting to be sick again.

If I open my eyes I see my overcoat swaying as it hangs on the hook and that is enough to start me off again. I haven’t even thought of Oxford. I have sincerely wanted to die. I have nothing to read but J. M. Barrie’s The Little Minister and if I ever see it again it will make me seasick. A kind cross-eyed steward brings me brandy and tells me not to go near the dining-saloon, where he says the passengers are “stoofing themselves with dookling and vomiting all over the place.”

4 October 1926.

Walked on deck. How this boat stinks! They have just been painting the old crock and even the funnels smell of fresh white paint.

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