Blitz Writing by Inez Holden

Author:Inez Holden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Handheld Press
Published: 2019-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

It Was Different At The Time

by Inez Holden

1938

April

My sitting-room window looks out on to the well-kept grass of the rich woman’s lawn. Most of the morning a gardener, wearing a green baize apron, ambles round the flower beds keeping everything up to a high pitch of excellence. My bedroom window looks out on to the street, and to-day a boy is bicycling towards us, whistling, steering with one hand and holding, in the other, a false foot in a black leather boot. He is bringing this to the lame refugee who lives on the ground floor.

My limping neighbour is ‘a business man in a small way’, but since escaping from central Europe he has found it increasingly difficult to keep up his connections abroad. A few weeks ago he got married to a tall, thin woman from the Balkans. She tries to earn a living by selling face creams. They keep a small black kitten which gets lost every night, and after dark I can hear them calling out in the street, ‘Kitty, Kitty, Kitty, kom here’, and after a while one of them wails, ‘Our katchen ist lost once more.’

The man with the false foot limps down the road to the post-box, but whatever he sends out he is disappointed at not getting much back, because when I go down to get my letters from the ledge in the hall he opens the door of his room to see if there is anything for him. ‘Oh, Madame, you have so many letters continually komming to you — always so many — I am quite jealous of them.’

The letters which ‘continually came to me’ yesterday were of the kind which are sent out alphabetically. Some from the deathly sweet centres of charity printed on shiny paper, gold-edged — a ball was to be given in aid of this or that, So-and-so’s well-known band would blare out, and some of the balance from the evening’s high boredom would finally filter through to an institution named at the bottom of the announcement. These announcements of supper and champagne came at one like maniacal laughter from behind dry-rotting wainscoting in a collapsed castle.

When the street door opened the boy handed the refugee his false foot and then remounting his bicycle he went whistling away. The sun shone through into my room. The large house on the other side of the lawn had the sun blinds drawn down, the long windows were blinkered.

From Friday to Sunday last week I stayed at J’s country house. Acquaintances in the four-figured income class gyrated round the grounds to slow conversation. They seem to think a great deal about money, to talk money, and to brood over it. The possibility of the money getting any less preoccupies them, but on this subject the conversation is always kept within a certain radius — far outside the poverty of the mining districts. Distressed areas, malnutrition, and unemployment are all subjects before which the blinds of the mind must be drawn down quick.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.