AM I AFRAID? she asked herself in 1940, when the Battle of
Britain was raging and invasion was expected any day. Yes, in-
termittently, she concluded. But the worst of it was that one's
mind didn't work well next morning. She tried to imagine what
death might be like, being flattened by a bomb. She had got it
fairly vivid, she wrote in her diary. Painful? Yes. Terrifying? She
supposed so. But for once she wouldn't be able to describe it.
And after one very bad day in August ("Two raids in London.
One caught me in the London Library"; followed by confusion
at Rodmell, not knowing whether the plane that came down
over Lewes and the other planes that swooped and dived and
then made for London were British or German), she concluded
that "It would have been a peaceful matter-of-fact death to be
popped off on the terrace playing bowls this very fine cool sunny
August evening." She thought she was a coward for suggesting
it was not a good idea to stay two successive nights in London,
and was much relieved to find that Leonard and Miss Perkins at
the press agreed.

But the fact that they had somewhere to go outside London,
and the means of leaving that assaulted city, even though their
refuge was still in the area under attack, did not prevent her
from realizing that she was more fortunate than millions of
others. "The people I think of now," she wrote, "are the very
grimy lodging-house keepers, say in Heathcote Street; with an-
other night to face; old wretched women standing at their doors;
dirty, miserable."

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