Tuesday
Wakened by the howling wind
driving the snow against the window.
Quite 3” fell during the night.
Lay listening to the chiming of the clocks in the church and the Institute, the two mingling together every quarter hours. At last dragged myself out into the cold at
8.30, rather later than I intended.
Found we all have breakfast in the basement kitchen, with no fire.
Busy all day, typing and trying
to make sense of the old library catalogue.
Heavy showers of snow, with intervals of clear sky. A few ‘planes going over.
Not a soul came in all day. Bitterly cold, but we cannot have the furnace
on because the damper has broken.
View from the windows is one of
breathtaking beauty – the pure white untrodden square, the lovely sweep of the
Crescent, the churchyard, where each tombstone and tree is lined with snow, and
snow sticking to every crevasse of the church itself, white over all and a fine net
of the falling flakes, falling softly, silently, and seemingly everlastingly. Once again remembered the old rhyme of
childhood days:
Faster,
Faster,
White
alabaster.
Nobody about except an occasional
hooded figure hurrying with silent steps through the churchyard.
Called at the “White Lion” and
got the man who is mending the boiler there to promise to do the Museum boiler
as soon as he can. Back to the Crescent
to tea. Conversation rather difficult. The daughter here teaches dancing in a sort
of bicycle shed in the back yard.
Back to the office until 9. Still snowing hard.
[Pasted into Rudsdale's Journal for this day, was a letter received from Colonel Round, Chairman of the Essex War Agricultural Committee for Lexden and Winstree, congratulating him on his appointment as Curator of Wisbech Museum and thanking him for his work for the Essex War Agricultural Committee. Colonel Round wrote: “A Tiger cannot change its spots” with reference to Rudsdale's wish to resume his museum career.]
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