Drums in the snooker room.

Wandering again in the root cellar of Saint Feasance's hospital. My slippers were not made for such excursions. My breath is grey and visible; my dressing gown no longer proof against the increeping damp-cold. I chanced upon a kettle, several galleries back, but as yet have found no tap from which to fill it, nor gas ring upon which to set it a-boiling. Also and alas, a quick dip into my pockets yields up the knowledge that I have forgotten to bring my usual spoonsful of tea, habitually kept safe in a re-used envelope. But not today.

Some of the tools observed covered in dust in certain of these lower galleries reveal that Saint Feasance's was once a hospital that admitted ladies as well as gentlemen.

Which starts me thinking that the other patient I've been hearing crashing around the premises in the small hours might not be a chap at all.

Certainly, whoever it is, it's safe to venture that they seem to attain a certain consummation from breaking things.

Lipstick. Several shades.

It's on evenings like these that the fish and chip men make their fortunes, observed the Group Captain, as the golden hour lit up the examination room and the music of Jack Hylton wafted in through the cod-French windows from the radiogram in the Bren Carrier outside.

Marcella Purcell ventured so far as to open a bottle in memory of her musical ancestor, as the selfsame light made highlights on the lenses of her goggles. Her gloves were on the telephone table; her mind was on the events unfolding in the small room upstairs.

Eventually Crawfax, the base surgeon, made an appearance, apologising and insisting that any of us might have made a better job of the procedure, while at the same time not a little proudly displaying the results of his labours. Three eggs, intact, with faces already visible through their gelatinous outer skins.

He flopped down on the settee, tired out, and accepted a drink.

"She bit me," he said.

Checking the boots of my mind for scorpions

The wax cylinders I found in Professor-Doctor Nyfenfork's study continue to yield up secrets, however slowly and unwillingly. The real coup now would be to find a device capable of playing them. The labels, however, present some problems. If the information thereon is correct, then the good Nyfenfork has been chief of crypto-alienist syllogistics at Saint Feasance's for...eighty-two years?

Goodnight, Alida

"There's a long, long trail a-winding"

A bathing hut, I suppose you'd call it. Concrete. On the rocks ten or so feet above the water's edge with two sets of steps leading down to your choice of two jumping-in places.

We sat there, Charteris and I. The poor sod was still moon-burnt and would never recover the use of his hands. his eyes, as is the pattern with these things, were white.

Water lapping. Hint of a breeze. Was there tea? I think there was a flask of tea. Voices in the distance. Could have been from anywhere. They passed. Probably kids, higher up on the hill, near the obelisk.

So. Yes. Charteris. He took off his glasses and regarded the water. This had been a favourite swimming spot of his, I heard later. He named girls, and the naming lit up his face a little. Night swims, years ago. I held the flask cup for him while he sipped a little tea.

Such is the nature of the bay that he was able to point out the houses of old friends, a few hundred yards across the water but made all but inaccessible by the tide in its current humour. Dangerous around here, he observed. Unless you know the water.

Three times he tried to trick me into leaving the spot to get cigarettes or sweets or a bar of chocolate. But I wasn't turning my back on him.

He succeeded later, on another day, after his legs had gone. Logan, I think it was, brought him down to the bathing place that day. Just to sit and look, he said. Fibbing that he'd left his glasses in the car, he sent poor old Logan back up the hill and across the train tracks to get them.

There was a note in his desk, back at the Fen. He said he loved us and we were not to blame ourselves.

'No "salad" here, guv. Where d'you think you are- in a flippin' Lyons Corner House?'

Sleeping a lot better since I took to wearing my helmet in bed. It's worth enduring the tuts and the occasional wryly heavenward looks of the nurses in order to significantly reduce the risk of something frightful happening to my head during the night.

There's poetry too, of course. 'Don't get rid of your freckles.' Who was it said that? Was it even in the context of a poem? Did I say it myself?

I don't know. But I know to whom I said it.

Find me something to write on.

Why do my pyjamas have an inside pocket, as if to keep a wallet in? Why is there a faint but very clear sound coming from inside my foot? What does the nurse mean when she says it will soon be time to remove my "other" appendix? Why did I not recognise a single food item on my breakfast tray this morning?

Next train's gone

Only these notes survive the evening

Programme for harmonium recital by Professor-Doctor Hjalmar St.John Nyfenfork, held last night in the "Berryman" room at Saint Feasance's Hospital on a date to be established as soon as possible.

1. Blue Skies (Berlin)

2. Lamentations of Jeremiah (Tallis; harmonium setting by H. St.John Nyfenfork)

3. Who's Been Polishing The Sun? (Noel Gay)

Intermission. Tea and cakes served by the ladies of the Arpington-on-Sea Gas Precautions detachment. 15 mins.

4. There ain't no "maybe" in my baby's eyes (Donaldson, Kahn, Egan)

5. Lachrimae Antiquae Novae (Dowland)

6. Toward the Unknown Region (Vaughan Williams; setting of a poem by Walt Whitman)

Old photographs, and the way they turn up when one least expects it.

This one fell out of a book I was reading (Bladderwrack's "Tomb of Reason", if you're interested) and I immediately forgot the matter at hand.

Caroline Vickers was her name. "Vick" to her pals. Started as a service pilot, I think; ferrying the big four-engine jobs to stations all over the south-east. Somehow or other she fetched up in Trollenberg, after the wind-up, when we and all the other scientific units were scurrying about trying to get our hands on anything and everything before our (former and until very recently) "allies" could get their greedy paws on it.

She stayed attached after we brought a shipload of rocket parts in varying stages of completion or disintegration back to Penda's Fen, from where we could shoot off a few of them across the flatlands without disturbing the locals overmuch.

Lovely girl. She's buried on the moon.

Oh, for the days of the trucks roaring up and the land girls piling out.

It seems that the only way I may get an audience with Professor Nyfenfork will be to buy a ticket to his harmonium recital in the old upstairs basement tonight. I had planned a far different evening for myself, needless to say, isolating in advance certain memories as the base notes for a performance of my own, to be conducted after cocoa and biscuits; around a quarter to eleven.

All up in smoke now, of course. But at least the night holds the promise of the possibility of finding out from Nyfenfork- from the Professor's own lips- just how long he intends to confine me to the entropic precincts of Saint Feasance's hospital.

I'll wear my medals, I think.

Bugles

A battery of artillery paused outside my hospital room this morning. It was the smell of their campfire that first alerted me to their presence. I thought I was imagining things until a personable young bombardier stuck his nose around the door, looking for somewhere he might obtain water for the horses.

They were bound for the front, although naturally not at liberty to confirm any such thing in the presence of civilians (loose lips sink etcetera). Before they set off again, many of them pressed little notes upon me, intended for sweethearts, mothers and families, all addressed in careful schoolboy handwriting.

The bedside locker is full of the letters now, and with each shell-blast heard in the distance this evening I wonder how many of the pitiable things I will need to somehow commit to the mails tomorrow morning.

Otherwise a quiet day. Stitches healing apace.