Free Time to Be in Earnest by P. D. James Page A

hospital room and, beyond it, a claustrophobically close wall of grey London stone.
    I slept in the afternoon. There were letters unwritten and papers unsorted. Not a productive day, but not an unhappy one, despite the thoughts about death.

MONDAY, 18TH AUGUST
    Today I left for Cambridge by the 10:30 train from King’s Cross which took less than an hour. The service to Cambridge is now remarkably quick and comfortable. In my childhood the fast trains went always to Liverpool Street and the slower to King’s Cross, but the opposite is now true. The old Liverpool Street station was, for me, the gateway to London, a terminus of excitement and romance. I had arranged for a car to meet me at Cambridge, which took me to Swavesey to visit an elderly sick friend, Doris Wheatley, now chair-bound, and her friend and caretaker, Kay Harper.
    After lunch to Clare’s cottage in Orchard Street where I rested during the afternoon for an hour before a car called for me to take me to the BBC studios in Hills Road for the recording of a radio autobiography. The producer, Mandy Morton, had devised a programme in which I should talk about my life and work, interspersing those segments with illustrative readings from the novels. It was a long evening’s work, lasting from a quarter to seven to a quarter past ten, and I was grateful that the air conditioning meant that the studio was very cool.
    Mandy had brought with her a ration book and an identity card from the war to refresh my memory. They had been lent to her by a lady over eighty who frequently broadcasts about her life and the war years, and who had also written a note reminding me of the rations during the time of the worst shortages: two ounces of butter a week, six ounces of otherfats—usually four of lard and two of margarine, a quarter of a pound of tea. The system was that we all registered with a butcher and a grocer. This meant, of course, that the registrations and the address on the books had to be changed when people moved. This was one of the jobs I did during my time with a local office of the Ministry of Food in Christ’s College and I can remember a succession of extremely young, pretty girls, the new wives of Air Force fighter and bomber pilots, who came in with their ration books to be changed. I wondered how many of them were very shortly to be widows.
    Our lives in war-time, particularly those of us with young children, seemed to be dominated by food; where to get it, how to cook it, how to make the most of what was available. It was possible to register as a vegetarian, and those who did so received an extra weekly allowance of cheese. In large families, I remember, one or more members would register as vegetarians with general advantage to the family diet. There was a points system for tinned and other goods and things came on or off points as they were available. We would queue for fish, or for anything else which was not on the ration and which occasionally would be delivered to a particular shop. The news would soon get round and the queue would lengthen.
    From 1943 until the end of the war in Europe, I lived in a beautiful, now demolished, house at Chigwell Row in Essex, called White Hall. The owners, Dr. and Mrs. Price-Watts, had made a flat for their daughter-in-law which she now no longer needed and which I took over. There were tall elms in the garden, noisy with rooks, and the local butcher had the idea of shooting them, then selling the carcases back to Mrs. Price-Watts. Her cook did, indeed, make rook pie on one occasion, which I was invited to share. I can remember a tangle of extremely sharp and small bones and virtually no meat, but the gravy was excellent.
    And I can remember—which of my generation can’t?—the particular culinary horrors of war: Woolton pie, composed of vegetables and sausage meat more crumb than sausage, and brown Windsor soup which tasted of gravy browning. And we got very tired of carrots. At one time there was a glut of