‘Don’t we live well,’ Terry said a little later when she had looked at our eggs for the twentieth time. ‘How many people in houses live better?’

Our thoughts went out, we could not for long forget that world of houses where men lived, which we had fled to escape.

28 MAY

IT DAWNED ON me suddenly that this is Term day. We ought to pay our rent. I have avoided Terry all morning in case she saw how preoccupied I was, for when she begins to ask me questions I can’t hide what I am thinking. It would distress her if I told her that our rent would soon be overdue, and that if it was not paid our belongings would be turned out of the house. I know our landlord and I have little hope that he will be patient. I should have paid our rent for a year in advance. Our exile cannot possibly last more than a year. It would break Terry’s heart to think that our house was taken from us, and our stuff flung out to rot in the open, or be stolen by every petty thief in the neighbourhood, and the rooms where we were happy occupied by strangers.

But there may be no house now standing where we lived, no house, no landlord, nothing. How strange it is that I should think of the world we have left as if nothing had happened there; and all the fears which drove us here are so remote that the deepest grief my present mind can accomplish is because I forgot to pay our rent.