There was terrible misery again because I had to stay at home two days from school owing to ´flu, which is now spread all over Europe in the form of a mild plague. My distress in passing the day without routine work shows what a reactionary ((´Reactionary’ is used here, as later in the text, in the sense of reacting over-sensitively to changed circumstances.)) character I am. My music exam. work is improving, both practical and theoretical. Stamps are forsaken completely. Only ´Lands and Peoples’ and Oman’s ‘Seven Statesmen of Rome’ prescribed from school occupy a few mins. a week.
The position in China is critical. Anti-British feeling is massing the different factions together, and troops are leaving England in haste to defend Shanghai. America and Japan seem to be negotiating with China on their own, so that Britain is feeling ‘shaky’. Let’s hope they get what they are looking for, but that the ‘yellow menace’ is not starting.
Mum has got a fine new bed, and I am deported to the top of the house. The first great break with ‘die Jugend’ [youth].
