A Diary Without Dates

“I have said before that the long corridor is wonderful. In the winter afternoons and evenings, when the mist rolled up and down over the tiles like the smoke in a tunnel, when one walked almost in darkness and peered into the then forbidden wards, when dwarfs coming from the G block grew larger and larger until the A block turned them into beings of one's own size, the corridor always made a special impression on me.””

— Enid Bagnold

“Sometimes in the late evenings one walks busily up and down the ward doing this and that, forgetting that there is anything beyond the drawn blinds, engrossed in the patients, one's tasks - bed-making, washing, one errand and another - and then suddenly a blind will blow out and almost up to the ceiling, and through it you will catch a glimpse that makes you gasp, of a black night crossed with bladed searchlights, of a moon behind a crooked tree.The lifting of the blind is a miracle; I do not believe in the wind.””

— Enid Bagnold

“By seven o'clock even the long corridor was as dim as the alley outside. No one thought of shutting the windows - I doubt whether they will shut...and the fog rolled over the sill in banks and round the open glass doors, till even the white cap of a Sister could hardly be seen as she passed.””

— Enid Bagnold

“After a wet and muddy day in London I've seen the trains pull into Charing Cross with snow piled on the roofs of the carriages, and felt a foot taller for joy that I was one of those fortunate who might step into a train and go down into a white countryside.””

— Enid Bagnold

“When a man dies they fetch him with a stretcher, just as he came in; only he enters with a blanket over him, and a flag covers him as he goes out. When he came in he was one of a convoy, but every man who can stand rises to his feet as he goes out. Then they play him to his funeral, to a grass mound at the back of the hospital.””

— Enid Bagnold

“The Mess went vilely tonight. Sister adds up on her fingers, and that's fatal, so all the numbers were out, and the chef sent in forty-five meats instead of fifty-one. I blushed with horror and responsibility, standing there watching six hungry men pretending to be philosophers.The sergeant wolfed the cheese too. He got it out from under my very eyes while I was clearing the tables and ate it, standing up to it in the pantry with his back to me when I went in to fetch a tray.””

— Enid Bagnold

“Far down the corridor a slim figure in white approaches, dwarfed by the smoky distance; her nun-like cap floating, her scarlet cape, the "cape of pride," slipped round her narrow shoulders.How intent and silent They are!I watched this one pass with a look half reverence, half envy. One should never aspire to know a Sister intimately. They are disappointing people; without candour, without imagination. Yet what a look of personality hangs about them....””

— Enid Bagnold

“Sixty-five trays. It takes an hour to do. Thirteen pieces on each tray. Thirteen times sixty-five...eight hundred and forty-five things to collect, lay, square up symmetrically. I make little absurd reflections and arrangements - taking a dislike to the knives because they will not lie still on the polished metal of the tray, but pivot on their shafts, and swing out at angles after my fingers have left them. I love the long, the dim and lonely, corridor; the light centred in the gleam of the trays, salt-cellars, yellow butters, cylinders of glass...””

— Enid Bagnold