All gone and she a widow. What is one to say to a woe like that? Where is compensation to be found? There will have to be something very satisfying over there beside the river of God to make up for the roll of the whelming billows here.
I went on from Glasgow to Dundee to speak to two thousand women about the necessity for saving food. The situation is becoming acute and it has to be explained to the people. I have come to the conclusion that food is the supreme test. They'll give almost anything more cheerfully, go into small houses, wear old clothes, economise anywhere but on what is vulgarly called their "inwards."
Then you see our industrial population was never better off. In the shipbuilding districts, the munition areas—the great textile neighbourhoods, they are simply piling it up. Of course they want all the things money can buy. I am sure I should, if I had been cheated out of them for a whole section of my life.
So you can't blame these people for buying salmon at four shillings per pound, the best beefsteaks and prime cuts from the joints, when they can get them. But the trouble is they can't now get them, so there is grumbling and unrest. They have got it into their heads that the government is hoarding the stuff and that favour is being shown. So labour has said that it will go short if capital goes short with them.
It is a perfectly reasonable proposition and the sooner the card ration scheme comes into operation, the better. It will not solve the whole problem, of course, nor yet increase incredulously or automatically the available stores. What it will do is to ensure equal distribution.
I, for one, hope Lord Rhondda won't lose any more time. I am afraid my letters are getting less and less interesting.
What you asked for was a plain, unvarnished record of war conditions here, which you want to keep, and I am setting them down as simply and faithfully as I know how. We are getting bit by bit down to the sordid bedrock where we are face to face with the hideous nakedness of war. There are things that the glow and glory of our Pentecostal sacrifice can hardly illumine.
In my deep heart I feel that we are coming to them soon, and that we shall need more different kinds of courage than at any time during those searching, aging, interminable years.
I got back to find that the war office has commandeered our "substitute" for active service. There is no one else to be got, so the door will have to be shut. It means that our living is all gone except what Cook calls "the Capting's pay." Cook himself is working at munitions now after having successfully planted the potato patch. So there is only Florence and me left, and we don't eat much.
Life truly is shorn for me of much of its dignity, and the amazing thing is that one doesn't mind—we are not our own any more, but bought with a price.