Tuesday
Thick fog all day. Spent the whole time in the Museum. Among other things, there is a manuscript account, apparently by an eye-witness, of the trial of the Earl of Essex, found
among rubbish in a Wisbech lawyers’ office.
This evening got
talking to a very pleasant girl called Flood, (Veronica) a London school teacher evacuated here, and
took her to the cinema. She talked a
good deal about her life here. She is a Catholic, and told me of the incredible insults she had to put
up with on that account. Catholic
children from South London were treated
badly when they came here in 1939. A strong type of Calvinism is rampant here,
which makes life very
hard for strangers.
All this was said while we walked
along the river bank after the cinema, and we did not get back to the “Lion”
until 11.15, to find the whole place shut up and in darkness – the streets were
also in almost complete darkness by this time, too. Had some trouble to get in, being at last
admitted by a surly bad-tempered boot-boy.
Among other things Veronica talked of was the degree of illiteracy in Wisbech. She
says hundreds of children
can neither read nor write. This wants a
lot of believing, but may well be true.
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