The war was the most peaceful period of my life.
Ours was the only house in the terrace without a new baby, and Mother said we couldn’t afford one till Father came back from the war because they cost seventeen and six. That showed how simple she was.
Father had an extraordinary capacity for amiable inattention. I sized him up and wondered would I cry, but he seemed to be too remote to be annoyed even by that.
“It’s not God who makes wars, but bad people.”
I was sickened by the sentimentality of her “poor Daddy.” I never liked that sort of gush; it always struck me as insincere.
I simply longed for the warmth and depth of the big featherbed.
“Mummy,” I said with equal firmness. “I think it would be healthier for Daddy to sleep in his own bed.”
All his previous shouting was as nothing to these obscene words referring to my person. They really made my blood boil. “Smack your own!” I screamed hysterically. “Smack your own! Shut up! Shut up!”
[…] but the sheer indignity of being struck at all by a stranger, a total stranger who had cajoled his way back from the war into our big bed as a result of my innocent intercession, made me completely dotty.
“I’m going to marry you,” I said quietly. Father gave a great guffaw out of him, but he didn’t take me in. I knew it must only be pretense. And Mother, in spite of everything, was pleased. I felt she was probably relieved to know that one day Father’s hold on her would be broken.
I couldn’t understand why the child wouldn’t sleep at the proper time, so whenever Mother’s back was turned I woke him.
It was his turn now. After turning me out of the big bed, he had been turned out himself.
At Christmas he went out of his way to buy me a really nice model railway.
