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

them and we were showered with a plethora of Ministry of Food leaflets extolling the virtues of carrot soup, carrot casserole and carrot cake. Carrots, we were told, were particularly good for our eyes. It was because of the carrots they ate that our gallant airmen were successful in shooting down so many enemy planes. Woolton pie and brown Windsor soup featured largely on the menu of the British Restaurantsset up under the aegis of the Ministry of Food to provide inexpensive and healthy meals. In this I think they largely succeeded. Despite shortages and occasional real hunger the country was remarkably healthy.
    A red-letter day for us was the arrival of a parcel from India, where my husband, by now a qualified doctor, was serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps. It contained tea and some tins of unspecified meat, but the great joy was a round tin of butter. It was very pale, salt-less, and tasted rather like newly made farm butter. I suppose I should have doled it out over the days, but I couldn’t resist one glorious splurge. I would sit Jane in her high chair and we would feast on toast liberally soaked with butter.
    It was on one such day when I was feeding fingers of toast into Jane’s buttery mouth that I heard on the radio (which we then called the wireless) the news of the dropping of the atomic bomb. I can still recall the mixture of awe and triumph in the announcer’s voice when he said, “We have unleashed against the enemy the power of the sun itself.” I knew that the dropping of the bomb would almost certainly bring Connor home earlier and probably safely. But it was still, for me, a moment of horror and, looking almost aghast at my two happy, buttery daughters, innocently unconscious of the meaning of what we were hearing, I knew that for all of us the world had changed for ever.

TUESDAY, 19TH AUGUST
    Back from Cambridge to a very heavy weight of post which Joyce and I tackled this afternoon. This is one of the penalties, or at least disadvantages, of fame. I receive numerous requests for photographs, signatures, signed books to sell at auctions in aid of local worthy causes (this is becoming so popular that my stock of hardbacks is now depleted), advice on work in progress or help with a personal problem. There is an expectation that I am an expert on law, real-life murder, civil liberties and the constitution. Then there are requests to present prizes at school speech days, talk to writers’ groups or take part in a proliferation of literary festivals, here and overseas. Bulky packages arrive with depressing frequency, containing the manuscript of a novel with a request that Ishould either advise how to get it published, write a foreword or provide a quote for publicity.
    Some afternoons, like today, we tackle the dreaded “pending” file to which inevitably we consign the most difficult time-consuming letters in the hope that they will somehow answer themselves. Very occasionally they do. It seems churlish not to reply to kind and enthusiastic letters from readers or to refuse to help people trying to repair the church spire or provide books for their primary school, but it all takes up time I should be devoting to this memoir and I haven’t the ruthlessness—or perhaps I lack the courage—to follow the example of Nancy Mitford, who sent out postcards simply stating “Nancy Mitford is unable to do what you ask.” Meanwhile the fax machine slowly spews out its messages and the telephone rings.
    I pondered this evening that I couldn’t have foreseen all this busyness when
Cover Her Face
was published in 1962. But then I remembered that my first appearance in print was much earlier, in 1935 or 1936 when I won a short story prize at the Cambridge High School for Girls and my winning entry was published in the school magazine. I wish I still had a copy. As far as I remember the action took place on a South Sea island where a group of characters were marooned. How? Why? When? Memory is mercifully