I had read "Alone in London" stories, rather wonderful, poignant things. I remembered two, one by Horace Newte and one by Peggy Webling. They had gripped me at the time. I had been so lonely in my real life that I always found it easy to get inside the skin of the heroines I was reading about, and for days my lonely walks with Pomp and Circumstance across the wet moors and through leafless lanes were no longer lonely or desolate—they had become the streets of the greatest capital in the world.
If you have sufficient imagination and a cheap lending library near you your world is never unpeopled. I often think that the library is the one thing that prevents prisoners going mad—you couldn't go mad if you were allowed O. Henry once a week and Jane Austen to read yourself to sleep with.
Two things I hadn't expected about London happened: it was radiant with sunshine when I arrived, and no one took the faintest notice of me.
I was a little nonplussed; then I found a boarding-house, not in Bloomsbury, where the wallpaper was not flowered and the atmosphere was not cabbagey; the landlady neither stared at me nor asked questions, and the maid was fat and brisk and efficient; and there was a parrot in the basement who said "change for 'Ighgate" all day long; nothing could have been less sinister or more normal and cheery.
I cried myself to sleep the first night—it seemed the right thing to do; but I left off in the middle because I couldn't think of anything more to cry about.
I had a dear old lady in the room next to mine. She knocked at my door just as I was falling to sleep.
"My dear," she piped, "if you should hear a raid warning, if you would just tap the wall. We all go down into the cellar—and one likes to prepare a little."
"Prepare?" I said.
"Hindes," she whispered apologetically, "curlers—you know—one doesn't like——"
I fell asleep smiling on my first night in darkest, dreadfulest, naughtiest London.