In a minute I walked on. There was something
bother-big me in the back of my mind. And then I thought, ‘Sure that’s what it
is, no blackout curtains.’ I hadn’t seen a light coming out of the window at
night for ten months—that’s how long I’ve been over. I was going to go back and
tell that woman to pull her blackout curtains in case some country cop came
along. She’d get a stiff fine. I turned around and looked back. I couldn’t see
the cottage, but I could see the light shining out in the road. Well then, I
thought, ‘What the hell, maybe no cop will come by.’ It looked so nice, the
room and the fire that you could look in on. You get awful tired of the blackout.”
The sergeant picked up a little twig, dug at a
grass root with it. “I walked along, but there was something that kept ticking
away in my head, something I couldn’t get hold of. It began to sprinkle a
little bit of rain, but not enough to hurt anything. I thought about the work I
had to do, but I couldn’t get away from the feeling that there was something
wrong with something.”
He dug out his grass root, and it came up with
a little lump of soil in it. He shook the dirt out of it. “I was just about to
turn into the camp when it plumped into my mind. Now, this is what it is. And
I’ve been thinking about it, and I can’t figure it out. There isn’t any cottage
there, just four stone walls all black with fire. Early in the blitz some Jerry
dropped a fire bomb on that cottage.”
His fingers were restless. They were trying to
plant the grass roots again in the hole they had come out of. “You see what
worries me about the whole thing is this,” he said. “I just don’t believe stuff
like that.”
GROWING VEGETABLES
LONDON, July 15, 1943—On the edges of
American airfields and between the barracks of troops in England it is no
unusual thing to see complicated and carefully tended vegetable gardens. No one
seems to know where the idea originated, but these gardens have been constantly
increasing. It is fairly common now that a station furnishes a good part of its
own vegetables and all of its own salad greens.
The idea, which had as its basis, probably, the
taking up of some of the free time of men where there were few entertainment
facilities, has proved vastly successful. The gardens are run by the units and
worked by the groups, but here and there a man may go out on his own and try
and raise some strange seed which is not ordinarily seen in this climate. In
every unit there is usually some man who knows about such things who advises on
the planting, but even such men are often at a loss because vegetables are
different here from the vegetables at home.
