Happier

I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards. Like other great men under reverses,” he added, with a smile, “I must endavour to subdue my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.”

-Jane Austen, Persuasion, Chapter 23

"Lord, I Thank Thee - "

IF IT were not for the war,
This war
Would suit me down to the ground.
There are things about it which pander to my worst instincts,
Flatter my weak points,
And make me a prig and a Pharisee.

I have always detested travelling,
And now there is no travelling to do.
I need not feel that I ought to be improving my mind
By a visit to Rome, the Pyramids, the Pyrenees,
New York or New Guinea,
Or even Moscow;
I have never really panted to contemplate Fuji-Yama,
And now I need not bother about it;
I need not feel abashed by people who take their holidays on the Mattherhorn
Or navigating the Fiords;
I can sit quietly in Essex and feel superior
When my friends complain
That they cannot get on with a sea-voyage or sea-bathing,
(I abominate cold water),
That they feel stifled
Without a breath of mountain air.

I was born in a hollow
At a confluence of rivers,
I was brought up in a swamp
Carved, caged, counter-checked like a chessboard
By dyke and drain,
Running from the Great Ouse to the Wash,
Where the wind never stops blowing;
I know all about the smell that comes off the drowned land
When the waters turn home in the spring
(A peculiar smell - and I have encountered something like it
In Venice
In the piccoli canali in the moonlight,
Where it is considered highly romantic);
I can say to the gadabouts:
"If you must have dank smells, you can get them in the Fens of East Anglia;
If you must break your necks on a precipice You can do it with perfect discomfort
In Cumberland;
And there are apple blossoms in Kent,

Blue seas on the Cornish coast,
Conifers in Scotland;
But I shall stay at home,
Indulging my natural laziness,
And save petrol and coal for my country;
And if anybody requests me
To deliver unnecessary speeches in remote parts of the country,
I can plead the difficulties of war-time travel,
And suffer no pangs of conscience.

I detest bananas,
A smug fruit, designed to be eaten in railway carriages
On Bank Holidays,
With a complexion like yellow wax
And a texture like new putty
Flavoured with nail polish.
Yes, we have no bananas,
Glory be!
And the hygenic people
Who eat prunes and grape-fruit for breakfast
Are cast out into outer darkness
Gnashing their dentures.
Why should anybody eat breakfast
For its edifying qualities,
Or its slimming properties,
Or its improving influence
Upon the skin and the bowels?
Behold, the moral has put on immortality,
And the last shall be first
In the economy of managed consumption.
I do not take sugar
In tea or coffee (even black coffee);
I can give it away to my neighbours,
Purchasing their grateful affection
At no cost to myself—
If everybody was made like me
The Ministry of Food would rejoice.
I need not buy new clothes,
Or change for dinner,
Or bother to make up my face—
It is virtuous to refrain from these things,
I need not shiver in silk stockings;—
I had a hunch about wool before it was rationed;
Now I have knitted myself woollen stockings
That come a long way up.
They are warm and admirable,
They do not ladder or go into holes suddenly.
I can boast quietly about them
And smirk while others admire my industry;
As it happens, I like knitting
And nothing gratifies one more
Than to be admired for doing what one likes.
In London there are still shops
With silk stockins in the windows
("Positively the last release");
I see the women and the girls
Check in their stride, stop, gaze in hungrily,
Fumbling with handbags, calculating coupons,
Yielding to temptation.
Poor souls!
They will never be able to walk through the rose-garden
Or play with the kitten
But anxiety will gnaw at their hearts like a demon rat;
The crack of a snapping stitch
Will sound in their ears like the crack of doom.
But I shall walk cheerfully in woollen
This winter, and the next, and the next,
Hand-knitted without coupons;
And the old lisle stockings will do for the summer—
If there is any summer.

It is jolly to take up a newspaper
And find it so thin!
The ruthless restriction of twaddle
Is a rare, refreshing fruit
Better than many bananas.
The Woman's Page,
The Sports Page,
The Feature Page,
The Page of Bathing Beauties,
Are clipped as close as Samson's skull,
Together with the Comic Strip
And the God-wottery Corner for Garden-lovers.
The blare of the advertisements,
Imploring, cajoling, stimulating, menacing, terrifying
An apathetic public
Into buying what it neither needs nor desires,
Has dwindled into an apologetic murmur.
Regretting the shortage of supplies,
Whispering pathetically, "Forget-me-not,
Forget me not when good times come again!"
We are not electrified every other day
By the bursting into the world,
With the accomplishments suitable to the advent of a long-promised Messiah
Of a new soap.
Soap is rationed.
(I always thought we washed far too much anyhow—
Animals do not wear out their skins
And destroy their natural oils
With perpetual washing;
Even the cat despises soap,
And whoever heard of a cow washing behind the ear?)
There is very little room these days
For the misreporting of my public utterances;
Soon they will not be reported at all,
Thank goodness!
And, curiously enough, books and plays seem to do better
When nobody reviews them.
Also, owing to the lack of paper
The demand for books exceeds the supply—
A thing that has not been known
Since they started all this popular education and cheap printing.
Nobody ever wants a thing
Until it is taken away—
We used to have far too much of everything.

I can now enjoy a more glorious victory,
More exultation of spirit,
By capturing a twopenny tin of mustard
Or a packet of hairpins
And bearing it home in triumph
Than I could have achieved before the war
By securing a First Folio of Shakespeare
At vast trouble and expense
In the sale-room [.]
The local chimney sweep
Keeps hens.
He takes the scraps from my table, the kitchen scraps,
And the hen returns them to me,
By a beautiful economy of nature,
In the likeness of eggs.
A new-laid egg
Will bind a friendship
Faster than it binds a cake;
A string of onions
Is a gift more gracious
Than a string of pearls;
I am better off with vegetables
At the bottom of my garden
Than with all the fairies of the Midsummer Night's Dream.
If it were not for the war,
This war
Would suit me down to the ground.

- Dorothy Sayers