# THE LAST DAY

## (January 1941)

The last day of the first month of the year, Jo and I have lunch together in the basement restaurant of the apartment store, next door. Streams of shop-assistants, girls and women and back-stage work-women in coarse aprons make a stage-set or film-set of this small somewhat shabby Edwardian dining-room. As the all-clear goes, they all stream out again, from the shelter behind the restaurant. The all-clear is soon followed by another alarm or alert, as we say, and down they come again. This goes on; it gives an odd sense of unreality, as if these were really supers, called for duty in a crowd scene, dismissed, recalled.

We seem to be in another town, although my apartment is a stone's throw away. We seem to be in some provincial Leeds or Manchester; the people look different, they are my next-door neighbours during working hours. The things in the shop have a Hollywood appearance of slightly provincial Edwardian smartness. The details one feels are cleverly worked out. We ourselves are in and of this. It is like this all the time; we are all actors, all the time.

We go back to my rooms and Jo stays on for tea, the girl comes in. When the guns were quiet and a final all-clear went, they both slid off. It is dark and cold, not yet five, with thick

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mist. The gun-fire seemed to come through blankets or thud
artificially from a distant "lot".

---

I was thinking of a dream I had a few nights ago, during
my fever. The side of a room, my own room, seemed to have slid
away, but this was not unpleasant. It was linked up or suggested
no doubt, by the houses we see, with rooms open to the street like
stage-rooms, some are neatly sliced off with furniture still stan-
ding. So in my dream, the side of my room is sliced off. I am
there with a pleasant intermediate crowd, undefined old friends.

This open-to-the-street room is dim, but now snow swirls
and drifts and to my surprise as the snow swirls into the room,
in a soft living cloud, I realize that the snow is not cold. It
has all the qualities of snow, the whiteness, the lightness, the
softness, the beauty - but this snow is as natural as air, it
fills the room as air made visible.

Through the rifts there are stars; one great cluster seems
almost artificial, picked out in rose-red, yet it is natural and my-
sterious as any star-cluster. I do not remember the name of the
constellation or even if in the dream I identified it, but I feel
the name of the special cluster or constellation would hold some
key or clue. However the great cluster vanishes and we are looking

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into the normal, distant powder-dust of small stars. Then I seem
to say to myself that the stars really had manifested in snow-form,
that the dust of stars and the snow are the same.

It is a dream of peace and hope. It seems to indicate that
though our houses and our minds have been sliced open by the at-
tacks of the enemy overhead, that, overhead is as well, the great
drift of stars, and those stars found entrance into the shattered
house of life.