“I went to the Coliseum to see Her Barrier was objectionable enough to complain to the theatre committee about – Miss Doyle had been telling D. – it was awful. It was rather beastly, & such rot! But there was a comic one before it where three men were killed & went to hell & were shut into a pit of fire by devils with huge red hot pitchforks, which was lovely.”
NLI Call Number: MS, 3582/37
NLI Catalogue Link can be found here
Date Range of Diary: January 27th 1920 – October 26th 1920
WEEK 131: 17th – 22nd May 1920
Monday 17th. – Wet morning. I spent the afternoon at the meeting house with Aunt Nannie, watching her furniture arrive & checking the list & tipping the men. A horrible piece of work. Dorothea came in to watch. There was a lot of furniture. The thing lasted for hours. We came out on a car.
Tuesday 18th. – Wet again. Aunt N. & Aunt Is. went over to the John’s Hill house in the evening, after, of course, a very fussy day. Louis still queer in his appetite, refusing to drink anything.
Wednesday 19th. – I went to visit the aunts & to see the house. The parlour is bigger & better than the rest of the house would read as you expect, the kitchen & passage
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very small, the upstairs rooms 2 very small &
one decent one, & a ladder up to quite a big garret. The Pipers had left it
without a whole lot of necessary things; they seem as Aunt H. said in a letter,
a sort of savages. Mrs Kinsella was there, & seemed fairly pleased with it.
It was very curious to think what the house was, it made gave me feel
the same of being a ghost as Mamma used to have when she went to Dunmore
towards the end of her life. The garden was quite big, with 2 steps up to it,
& a lilac tree in flower, but most of it was potatoes. Aunt N. was fairly
cheerful, Aunt Is of course distracted over the insufficiency of things.
Thursday 20th May. – I visited Mrs Conde & told her my ideas about relief work. She said Janie Bell was very over worked & I might help her! She says her sister Ethel also is very over-worked.
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Mrs Rowe is just fretting herself to death – doesn’t want to live & is getting weaker. They are not going to Strabane now – don’t know where they will be sent. I went to the Coliseum to see Her Barrier was objectionable enough to complain to the theatre committee about – Miss Doyle had been telling D. – it was awful. It was rather beastly, & such rot! But there was a comic one before it where three men were killed & went to hell & were shut into a pit of fire by devils with huge red hot pitchforks, which was lovely.
Friday 21st. – I went to the hotel in the afternoon & had tea there, with a lovely iced cake. Tash & Mrs P. had just come back from Droitwich Mrs P. must benefited, & Tash talked a lot abut the journeys, á propos of my going to England the next week. They were very well treated by the
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conductors because they tipped them, and this proves that the English care for nothing but money. To me it seems more to indicate that they are willing to give value for the money they get. Tash didn’t look too well, I’m sure it was too much for her to have the care of her mother all the time.
Saturday 22nd. – I went to town & bought shoes etc and visited R. Butler in the evening with eggs & a little loaf. She had been very stiff from the chilly weather lately.