A Different Blitz Memoir
Joan Wyndham, Love Lessons: A Wartime Diary On Monday, 27 th May 1940, 17-year-old Joan Wyndham confided to her diary: The Germans are in Calais. I don’t seem to be able to react or to feel anything. I don’t know what’s real any more. I don’t think I’m real or that this life is real. Before this last winter everything seemed real, but since then I seem to have been dreaming. I wanted to mix with artists so I rented a studio, and because of the studio I’m pretending to be an artist, when I don’t even know what painting means. Ever since then I’ve been listening to people talking a new language, filth and blasphemy, and heard myself talking it too. I see myself acting like a tart, and men hurting me and sponging on me and trying to make love, and asking if they can pee in my sink, and telling me to take my clothes off and I really don’t know whether I’m awake or asleep. The bombs, which I know must come, hardly enter my fringe...