Long talk with Aunt Blanche occupies most of the afternoon. She has much to say about Pussy – old Mrs. Winter-Gammon. Pussy, declares Aunt Blanche, has behaved neither wisely, considerately nor even with common decency. She may look many years younger than her age, but sixty-six is sixty-six and is not the proper time of life for driving a heavy ambulance. Pussy might easily be a grandmother. She isn’t a grandmother, as it happens, because Providence has – wisely, thinks Aunt Blanche – withheld from her the blessing of children, but so far as age goes, she could very well be a grandmother ten times over.

Where, I enquire, are Mrs. Winter-Gammon and the ambulance in action?

Nowhere, cries Aunt Blanche. Mrs. W.-G. has pranced off in this irresponsible way to an A.R.P. Station in the Adelphi – extraordinary place, all underground, somewhere underneath the Savoy – and so far has done nothing whatever except Stand By with crowds and crowds of others. She is on a twenty-four-hour shift and supposed to sleep on a camp-bed in a Woman’s Rest-room without any ventilation whatever in a pandemonium of noise. Suggest that if this goes on long enough old Mrs. W.-G. will almost certainly become a nervous wreck before very long and be sent home incapacitated.

Aunt Blanche answers, rather curtly, that I don’t know Pussy and that in any case the flat has now been given up and she herself has no intention of resuming life with Pussy.