assistant on the phone and asked for a prescription for flu. The reply was that I could come and get the prescription any time between eight and nine in the morning. If you have a very bad attack of flu, the doctor comes to the telephone himself and says, ‘Put out your tongue, say Aah. I can hear all right that your throat is inflamed. I’ll write out a prescription for you to order from the chemist. Goodbye.’ And that’s that.” A fine practice that, run by telephone only.
But I don’t want to criticise the doctors; after all, a person has but two hands, and in these days there’s an abundance of patients and very few doctors to cope with them. Still, we couldn’t help laughing when Jan repeated the telephone conversation to us.
I can just imagine what a doctor’s waiting room must look like nowadays. A doctor doesn’t look down on panel patients any more, but on the people with minor ailments, and thinks, ‘What are you doing here? End of the line, please, urgent cases have priority!’
Yours, Anne
Thursday, 16 March, 1944
Dear Kitty, The weather is lovely, superb; I can’t describe it, I’m going up to the attic in a minute.
Now I know why I’m so much more restless than Peter. He has his own room where he can work, dream, think, and sleep. I am shoved about from one corner to another. I hardly spend any time in my ‘double’ room and yet it’s something I long for so much. That is the reason too why I so frequently escape to the attic. There, and with you, I can be myself for a while, just a little while. Still, I don’t want to moan about myself, on the contrary, I want to be brave. Thank goodness the others can’t tell what my inward feelings
are, except that I’m growing cooler towards Mummy daily, I’m not so affectionate to Daddy and don’t tell Margot a single thing. I’m completely closed up. Above all, I must maintain my outward reserve, no one must know that war still reigns incessantly within. War between desire and common sense. The latter has won up till now, yet will the former prove to be the stronger of the two? Sometimes I fear that it will and sometimes I long for it to be!
Oh, it is so terribly difficult never to say anything to Peter, but I know that the first to begin must be him, there’s so much I want to say and do, I’ve lived it all in my dreams, it is so hard to find that yet another day has gone by, and none of it comes true! Yes, Kitty, Anne is a crazy child, but I do live in crazy times and under still crazier circumstances.
But still, the brightest spot of all is that at least I can write down my thoughts and feelings, otherwise I would be absolutely stifled! I wonder what Peter thinks about all these things? I keep hoping that I can talk about it to him one day. There must be something he has guessed about me, because he certainly can’t love the outer Anne, which is the one he knows so far.
How can he, who loves peace and quiet, have any liking for all my bustle and din? Can he possibly be the first and only one to have looked through my concrete armour? And will it take him long to get there? Isn’t there an old saying that love often springs from pity, or that the two go hand in hand? Is that the case with me too? Because I’m often just as sorry for him as I am for myself.
I really don’t honestly know how to begin, and however would he be able to, when he finds talking so much more difficult than I do? If only I could write to him, then at least I would know that he would grasp what I want to say, because its so terribly difficult to put it into words!
Yours, Anne
