Leave Your World Behind - A Fantasy Fiction Sampler: Five free tasters of other-worldly literary delights, from horror and zombies to spooks and fairies by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781472115430
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2013-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Diaries

Saturday, 16 November 1940

Bedford Square

Bloomsbury

I used to go to the Lakes as a child. My parents would sweep me up at the start of summer and drive me all the way from London in our Hispano-Suiza H6 and, from the early thirties, the J12. We had a chauffeur, of course, first a man called Higgins, an elderly chap (or so he seemed to me), then Morris, a much younger man. In town, only my mother drove, getting, I think, a measure of pleasure and independence from doing so. And they were very beautiful cars, which added greatly to her enjoyment, for she was something of a snob and an aficionada of fine things like Japanese netsuke and, of course, the best Portuguese azulejo tilework, which she used in our Oporto home to such great effect. Not that many people had cars back then, and no one of our acquaintance fielded a Hispano-Suiza. For that matter, not many people had a house in the country either, to which they could repair for summer holidays. We went to the Lakes because we Lancasters always went there, apart from our stays in Portugal, which were mainly for business. The Lakes’ house was old and went back in the family to the early eighteenth century. Growing up, I felt rather special trundling down country roads almost free of traffic, cocooned in the protected space my mother and father created. I would spend the summer playing with the Howtown children or setting out with my friends Peter and Maurice for trips on the lake, to play pirates or swim out to Cherry Holm Island. I tried to contact them when I arrived here in London last week, only to be told that Peter has already been called up and Maurice has followed in my footsteps and joined the Navy. I wish him better luck afloat than I have known.

I was one of the first casualties of the war. I worked in a non-reserved occupation, in the small advertising department of the family firm. I was twenty-three when hostilities began, and when conscription was brought in that November, I signed up for the Navy in the old church hall where I’d gone once a week as a child to our Cub Scout meetings. There were old friends with me, old Cub Scouts, winking and smiling at each other, walking to our fates. When I was ten years old, I’d hastened to join the local branch of the Sea Cadets, where I learned to climb without flinching the rigging on a tall sailing ship in the heart of a storm. I fancied myself a sailor, and spent more and more of my holidays on Ullswater, sailing on board our little yacht, the Firefly, and swimming in the lake’s calm waters. The outbreak of war seemed to me such an opportunity, a chance to show I was more than just a businessman being groomed to run the family enterprise, but a real man, perhaps a hero in disguise.

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