BUNNY

(January 1941)

Can it be true that actually there is a girl of 19,
called Bunny Thunder, with whom my own child yesterday and
Saturday, drove, in a huge mobile canteen, into the devastat-
ted city?

"How did you manage to get in?" I asked her at tea-time,
remembering our own journey through traffic-jams and bottle-
necks, back from Liverpool Street Station this morning. "O,
they let us through," she said, "past the dynamite and demoli-
tion squads and everything." "O - ye-es - and Bunny
Thunder? if that really is her name -" "O - Thunder is.
Her first name is Bertha or Bertina or something like that, she
hates it -" "Of course. So they just call her Bunny -
with the Thunder - a slight contradiction, I mean, in terms -"
saying anything in an inane way, just to carry myself over the
emotion, to bridge across this chasm, just to be ordinary, for
that surely is what they need, if these child Valkyries need any-
thing of their somewhat astonished and not a little shattered
mothers.

But the girl does not appear to notice any gap or gasp
and chats on in her breezy fashion, as if there were no chasm
(and possibly there is no chasm) for which any bridge of words

2.

is needed. She needs no bridge. She springs with winged heels.
"I asked Bunny to spend the night last night, as it was her
night off." "O, that was nice -" "But she said she never
took her night-off, she might miss something." "I see. They
must have been pretty busy, what with this and what with that,"
being inane, "this week-end." "Yes. But she gets tired, she
says, waiting for the night and things to happen at her fire-
station, and asks for day-work. That's how she happened to be
sent along to help me with my van."

-----

So have you anything to say? I haven't. I have nothing
to say who would say a great deal; whatever I say would not,
can not touch the core of my real meaning. Words may wrap round
a sentiment, a flame/, but I can not put into prose or poetry -
who can? - just this, "she gets tired waiting for the night-
bombing, so she asked for day-work and they sent her to my van.
She wears blue pants." A girl called Bunny in blue pants!
"Tough?" I murmur, "a little bit on the tough side?" I mean it
in admiration; the girl knows what I mean; her eyes quirk
shut in her sort of way of answering a smile, "it's funny, you'd
think she'd look tough, but she has curls pushed under a cap."

3.

O, I dare say, I dare say, I dare say. One might have been
spared the curls under the cap. We are spared nothing.

"A little tough - Bunny?" We understand, we of the
inner circle. I would rather a flaming wall did not totter
down on that particular mobile canteen. And that means, that,
just that. Do you without the walls, know what this means?
Why try to get across anything, in words. You may find words
for this, when this is over. But we watch them as they stride
across barriers, marked clear for all to read, no admission,
dangerous, land-mine or time-bomb or just demolition squad and
dynamite.

They are pushing out the borders, they enter the inner
rim, not in any "feminine rights" manner, but in some heroic
way that has nothing to do with their blue pants, they take them
pretty much for granted. The blue pants and those pretty legs,
they walk in and through the flames, they have crossed the circle.
Outside in life, every day, all day, in the black night, all
night, those pretty feet are pushing forward in a new dance, a
cosmic dance of heroism, such as the world has never seen nor
dreamed of.