September 14th 1939

Thursday September 14th

It will be a fortnight tomorrow since it all started and it seems an eternity. Already we have lived a lifetime of hopes and fears "and imaginations as one would and the like"*.

One thing emerges for me. I thought in all the long days when war was coming, and must come inevitably - unless a miracle happened, that when the catastrophe came I should have no heart for music and poetry, that I should feel as if everything I held dear had deserted me in the blazing madness of war. I don’t.

I know that - even in the thick of it when I scarcely dare to think what is happening and is going to happen - these things remain. Nothing Hitler can do can destroy the will of Man to build again, to cultivate the arts and to burst out in music when he feels, and is, great.

Last year at Worcester I had a feeling that the words of Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Paceui were prophetic: “ We look for peace and no good came and for a time of health and behold trouble”.

But prophetic too was a sudden shaft of sunshine that slid down from the tremendously high windows of the south transept during the singing of “I know that my redeemer liveth”. Out of the shadow into the sunshine. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death”**.

There is no decisive news of the Poles. God help them.

* Observations of the life of Dr Thomas Wilson
** Psalm 23iv