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In the Second Year
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Dieser Artikel gilt, aufgrund seiner Grösse, beim Versand als 3 Artikel!
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CHAPTER I THE HOUSE was built below the disused quarry on the edge of the heather. Last summer moor fires destroyed the trees on the slope of the quarry and burned the heather as far as the road. From the house the road was not visible it lay at the back, across half a mile of moor, and in a dip of the land. The front of the house looked across the valley to the farther hill the road from the south, from the town, descended this in a great curve, clearly visible from the windows. From the upper win dows on this side, you saw the sea, a great way out. Very seldom, a ship passed, its smoke a brown smudge on the sky after it fell from sight. There were fewer ships all the time. Lotte had told me that the Tyne was a derelict place, with piles of rusted iron where the yards had been once, but I had not seen this for myself. It was hard to get into the derelict areas that is, it was hard to get a pass for them with no excuse but that one wanted to stare. It was two months since I left Norway and came home. So far I had seen nothing of England except the first sight of it from the aeroplane, then London, and then the jour ney up here by road. But it was clear enough, even with out the little I knew from the Norwegian newspapers but it was more than I found in papers at home that things were not going well. There was hardship in Nor way, with the closing of so many trade routes, but there people were never very rich. To be a little poorer than before meant less to them than it means to people here. 4 IN THE SECOND YEAR London seemed normal except for the beggars. During the whole of the weeks I stayed there with Lotte and Richard I never became used to them. Lotte, who had been in Germany a fewyears after the war of 1914-18, when she was just married to Richard, said it was not much worse here now than then in Berlin with decent women offering themselves after dark, and a man who looked like a gentleman would suddenly ask you for a coin, anything, a sixpence, if you looked like a foreigner. I had not seen that, and what I saw in London horrified me. In Norway it would have been inconceivable. What struck me more than the beggars themselves was the atti tude of the other people to them indifference or impa tience is the gentlest treatment they get. I can tell you I was glad to come up here where there was plenty of grumbling, and the farmers burying part of their food and the fisherman keeping back a third of a catch and so on and afterwards selling it from house to house or exchanging it in the shops almost under the noses of the marketing officers, who are afraid to go too far with our quick-tempered fishwives and their men, and there was plenty of poverty too, but nothing like the feel ing in London where it smelled to you from the pave ments. Last night, when we came here, Lotte said Now youre home, Andy. 7 It feels more like home, I said. She sat at the table in my room, her elbows on it, her cheek on her hand. I thought she was tired, but her eyes, grey-green and bright, were inquisitive and merry, as always when she asked me what I thought of things. In growing old she would be forty this year Lotte had kept the face of a schoolgirl above her small stocky body... |
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