How My Day Passes...

A delightful article by the well-known English writer Daphne du Maurier, which we came upon in the magazine "Vogue" and chose to reproduce for the pleasure and profit it contains.

A short while ago I was on a brief visit to London. There I met a lady I had not seen for years. We began talking of various things, such as family and friends. And as we were about to part, the lady asked me: "Tell me — when you are not busy writing, how do you spend your time in Cornwall? Do you know many people in that village?"

I answered her: "I keep to my house, I rarely go anywhere, and I know no one."

She said: "So you pride yourself on being the mistress of a house, and a slave to your children."

I answered: "Not at all! The house looks after itself, and so do my children!"

She looked at me in wonder and astonishment and cried: "Then what do you do?"

And so we parted, she doubting what I had told her. The truth is, I do nothing, and I am delighted by it, and I hope to go on doing nothing to the end of my life. But delight in idleness is not a blessing granted to just anyone, for whoever can take delight in idleness must be endowed with dullness — the dullness that breeds in the soul a distaste for pleasure and unbridled gaiety. And few are they who confess to their dullness; dullness, after all, is a deadly sin — and one I am proud of. But let us come down to fact: the day is, ordinarily, twelve hours. How does one spend them if one does, in fact, nothing?

Suppose it is one of the hot days of summer. The sky is blue, and the sun crowns the treetops in the garden. I rise at nine o'clock, rub my eyes, stretch out my arms, look at the hours of the day before me, and remember that I have no appointment with anyone — nor, indeed, with anything. Were it not for the half hour I spend every two weeks at the dentist's, the calendar before my eyes would be white as snow. Then I take my breakfast, and the children come to wish me good morning and say good-bye before pouring themselves into their lessons. It delights me to know that my youngest child is now five years old, and yet, young as he is, enjoys individuality and independence! I like, over breakfast, to think, and to sink deep in thought. Nothing cuts the current of my thinking but the summons to the bath. I answer the summons, then put on my clothes, and sit down at my desk to pen an article for The Times — never published — on the subject of "birth control." The birth rate is falling, and I know the reason; so does every mother of our present generation. The reason is not social anxiety, nor fear of the atomic bomb, nor the moving pictures. The reason, in truth, is that we do not want to bear many children. And had the woman of the past found effective means of preventing conception, she would have done the same.

Here the post arrives, and in it I find a check from France. This check holds a quantity of francs enough to keep an entire family for six months. And the Ministry of Finance will not allow me to send a single piaster to a friend of mine in France. I have no need of money here, but that friend is in urgent need of a little of it — and yet I cannot help her. What is this world economic order whose secrets I have never managed to understand??

Then I set about making my bed and putting the room in order. Hardly have I finished when I take up my basket and my shears and go to the garden. I cut a few flowers for my study, as rich ladies used to do a hundred years ago — though they wore gloves and broad hats, unlike me. And so I spend some twenty minutes gazing at the lovely blossoms and roses and cutting whichever please me. My thoughts wander off to the question of which of the two is the more appealing: the modern woman who sits alongside men on committees, or the woman of the bygone Victorian age, whose world was as her husband defined it, and whose one pleasure was found in gatherings and drawing rooms?

I have finished setting the flowers in the vase, and it remains for me to cut some dry branches for the hearth. I say to myself: "Truly, our problem with the mines is the very same as our problem with the birth rate: women do not care to bear children, and men do not care to work in the mines, though all the temptations of the world conspire upon them."

Work in the mines is hard and grueling, and its wage is small. That is why our young men prefer positions in offices, or buying and selling in the shops. Who then, one wonders, is to do the manual work the world needs? And I have observed, in cutting my firewood, that manual work is good for every human being — but ... in small measure.

And so I feel a slight ache in my back as I creep toward the lunch table. Roast veal once again, and boiled potatoes too. And it is irony indeed that in the middle of lunch I should receive a cable from America telling me that the last copy of the million printed of my latest book has come off the press — whereupon I look at my dress and find it a leftover from before the war, riddled with the holes the moths have made in it. I have twelve coupons left in my clothing ration book, enough for just two dresses or a single jacket. I think of the beautiful clothes I could buy on Fifth Avenue in New York, and I remember that not one cent may be spent across the Atlantic before it is brought over to England, where it turns into "pounds" and has such taxes levied upon it as leave of it a few "shillings." And that, upon my life, is exactly the thing to spur a person on to greater effort.

The slice of roast meat has been concluded with a cup of coffee. But the sun is still shining. Here I am, sinking into my beloved chair that faces the sea. And who could hope to wish for more than this? I have no desire to look farther than the headland that runs some ten miles out into the sea. Does travel broaden a person's mind? That is what puzzles me. And is there anything more wearisome than that landbound Sindbad who says: "I remember when I was in Baghdad in 1921"? What, I wonder, was I doing in that year? I was fourteen years old, and lovesick over the actor Basil Rathbone, who came one day to Hampstead to play tennis with my father.

Do you change every seven years? Or is that an illusion? I believe it is the truth. I glimpse the phantoms of the past dancing before my eyes in the sunbeams: the bashful child, the restless adolescent, the mocking, scoffing young woman, the bride eager to please, and, at last, the bewildered mother. And now? Ah — the middle years of a person's life have an air all their own. Gone is that question, "What does the future hold for me?" — gone every other question about the secrets of life. "Wait until you are forty," my father once said to me; "you will not find it easy then."

My daughters are playing in the garden now, and my only son comes toward me carrying a little monkey in his hands. "What is this?" I asked him, teasing. "It's God," he answered without hesitation! ..

And why, upon my life, do we find the churches empty? Because modern war has accustomed us to incendiary bombs, and we no longer fear the fires of hell! Was it fear of hell, then, that used to bring people to church every Sunday morning? No ... the essential factor that brought people to church was nothing but boredom. In the past, the church was the one social meeting place in which the poor among men and the rich alike could find solace. And the parson, with his weekly sermon, gave consolation to anxious hearts; in these days, the owners of those anxious hearts flock instead to the psychologists! Shall we, I wonder, be granted a return one day to organized religion? No — not as our forefathers knew it. The churches will become museums for the historians, and the Bible, too, will become a literary refuge for the scholars. There is one message that can endure, and fit itself to this atomic age, and it is this: the kingdom of heaven is within you.

And now the sun has gone down behind the trees of the garden. Tea calls us into the house. After tea one must turn to reading books, and looking through the evening papers; then supper, and the remainder of the night spent listening to classical music. Here I feel my eyelids growing heavy .. I feel a blissful peace ... I shall go to my bed, to greet tomorrow another day ...

And so my day passes ... and in the course of it I have done, as you see, nothing worth mentioning.