My third is a wife makes her husband my first And keeps him away from my second: My whole is a town, though with Temperance cursed, Where wives by the dozen are reckoned.
Then there is a characteristic scrawl: “Thank God, they taught me how to write at school. Otherwise I should be in a hole. Tommy Lieberts.” But I must not go on wearying my readers with all these trivialities. Let me finish with Lord Hopedale’s quotation, some clever lines from Mainwaring, a poet who was hardly known at the time when they were copied in my Visitors’ Book.
The world goes on; whither, we do not know; Whence, we’ve forgotten, it’s so long ago: Scientists ask “Since when?”; the Blessed cry “Till when?”—God knows, and only God knows why.
Or, stay, there is one other extract I must record, if only to show that my roof has housed an Archbishop of Westminster. Cardinal Smith came just after Lord Hopedale, and he wrote what I think he said was the motto of some Elizabethan Catholic: “Praeterit figura huius saeculi; fides Catholica manet.”
It was on the 18th of June, 1963, that my great loss fell upon me—so great, that I do not even yet know how to write about it. My dear husband set out on his helicopter for France, expecting to be absent for about a fortnight. The day was somewhat threatening, and in the afternoon a thunderstorm, which in some unaccountable way had not been predicted by the Weather Office, swept across the Channel. It must have interfered both with his engines and with his wireless; and no doubt the descending apparatus, which in those days was very imperfect, was unreachable or unworkable. No word was ever heard of him, no trace ever found of his descent. I felt inconsolable in my loss. In all the nineteen years of our married life my husband had never been away from home for more than six months at a time; I had depended, perhaps more than I knew, upon his strong presence and his unfailing interest in my affairs. He left behind him two sons, neither of them destined by Providence to survive the Great War. When these were taken from me I was, I thank God, in a better position to bear the blow: I knew more, by that time, both of what is meant by suffering, and of what God meant a man and a woman to be to each other. _Beatus vir qui implevit desiderium suum ex ipsis_—if I had known that, I might have children now to comfort my grey hairs.