page 102 — May 1941

May

Thursday 1^st

… Great excitement before breakfast when I saw a (supposedly) migrant pair of ring-ouzels. I tidied up my house in the morning and locked it up—it’s an awfully nice little house. zwl zdc

Mummy, Daddy, Margaret, Tinker and I went for a lovely walk to the wild valleys. On the way back I scraped off part of my nose while climbing a beech to investigate a nest … zwk zac

The news is not, to say the least, exhilarating. We have anyway got 80% (48,000 men) of our Greek force away, the Iraqi army are being a nuisance to our troops, and threatening one of our big ‘dromes, the enemy has penetrated into Tobruk, where there is fierce fighting. I got a nice letter (March 10) from John in the morning—written in a Libyan  harbour. His ship was half-lifted out of the water by two bombs and the Germans or Italians claimed in [their] English bulletin to have sunk them! zwe zlb zwf zfl zda zar znb zsl

Last day of a lovely holiday. zem

to Newquay

Friday 2^nd

… Daddy came to Paddington and we had some coffee—he stayed till about two mins before the train went. I was a little miserable but being in a crowd it was all right. … The journey was uneventful until after Exeter, when we shot up North on the west side of Dartmoor using a ztv zem