Grumbling at Large by J.B. Priestley

Author:J.B. Priestley [J. B. Priestley and Valerie Grove]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910749197
Publisher: Notting Hill Editions
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

– from Postscripts –

Sunday, 9 June 1940

I don’t think there has ever been a lovelier English spring than this last one, now melting into full summer. Sometimes, in between listening to the latest news of battle and destruction, or trying to write about them myself, I’ve gone out and stared at the red japonica or the cherry and almond blossom, so clear and exquisite against the moss-stained old wall – and have hardly been able to believe my eyes; I’ve just gaped and gaped like a bumpkin at a fair through all these weeks of spring. Never have I seen (at least, not since I grew up) such a golden white of buttercups and daisies in the meadows. I’ll swear the very birds have sung this year as they never did before. Just outside my study, there are a couple of blackbirds who think they’re still in the Garden of Eden. There’s almost a kind of mockery in their fluting.

I think most of us have often felt we simply couldn’t believe our eyes and ears: either the War wasn’t real, or this spring wasn’t real. One of them must be a dream. I’ve looked out of my house in the country on these marvellous days of sun and blue air, and I could see the blaze and bloom of the Californian poppies and the roses in the garden; then the twinkling beeches and the stately nodding elms, and then, beyond, the lush fields and the round green hills dissolving into the hazy blue of the sky. And I’ve stared at all this – and I’ve remembered the terrible news of battle and destruction I’d just heard or read – and I’ve felt that one or the other couldn’t be true.

Sometimes I’ve felt that I was really staring at a beautifully painted silk curtain; and that at any moment it might be torn apart – its flowers, trees and green hills vanishing like smoke, to reveal the old Flanders Front, trenches and bomb craters, ruined towns, a scarred countryside, a sky belching death, and the faces of murdered children. I had to remind myself that the peaceful and lovely scene before me was the real truth; that it was there long before the Germans went mad, and will be there when that madness is only remembered as an old nightmare.

Tennyson might have been prophesying this German madness in the spring when he wrote:

The fields are fair beside them,

The chestnut towers in his bloom;

But they – they feel the desire of the deep

Fallen, follow their doom.

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