Peace Breaks Out!

On that terrible evening, as I was weaving my way through the West End . . my name was called. . .Turning I saw in a doorway the man who had put up with my airs and graces all those long, horrible months in Baron's Court when I had first come to London fourteen years earlier.

He said, 'You look terrible '

The horrors of peace were many.

. . not only did love and death become rationed. Even mere friendship grew scarce. Londoners started to regret their indiscriminate expansiveness. People do when some moment of shared danger is past. . . I, who had once been a landmark more cheerful looking and more bombproof than St. Paul's Cathedral, had ceased to be a talisman. I had become a loathsome reminder of the unfairness of fate. I was still living while the young, the brave and the beautiful were dead.

All these external changes came at a bad time for me when they could add their weight to other unwelcome alterations that were taking place within.

I was growing old.