The Henson Journals
Tue 9 September 1930
Volume 51, Pages 18 to 19
[18]
Tuesday, September 9th, 1930.
We arrived at Carwood, Biggar, Lanarkshire about 6 p.m. and were kindly welcomed by Mrs Mitchell who might have fairly been resentful as she had gathered in numerous company to welcome us at tea, & had had to announce our absence! The house has been enlarged & equipped with electric light. Also many of the trees have been cut down, so that the place is better lighted & ventilated than it was when we came here some years also.
Mine hostess told me rather to my surprise that we are 850 feet above sea level. That ought to guarantee a healthy & bracing air. There is staying here a Papist lady who has recently returned from Italy. She gave an unfavourable account of the Mussolini régime.
It is said that no less than 300 arrests were made daily in Rome in the interest of the Dictator's personal security. The arrested are soon released, but the situation must be distinctly "electric". She says that the population is evidently held down by fear. The Socialists who wear 'Black Shirts" are in their hearts Socialists still.
[19]
Tuesday, September 9th, 1930. [sic]
We left Daljarrock and motored to Fairlie by a pleasant road which ran along by the sea. Everywhere the crops are in the fields, steadily worsening under the constant rain. "The economy of Heaven is dark" writes a XVIIth century poet, and certainly it never was a darker than at present. A good harvest would have done something to mitigate the general distress, but now, though the crops were said to be abundant, the harvest will be anything but good.
We found Dorothy Low with her sister and her child at Fairlie House, the rest of the house partly having left yesterday. I found the "Times" and read the 2nd portion of Montague's Indian Diary. It is written with a freedom, recklessness and inconsequence which, while legitimate in a strictly private journal, to which, indeed the charm of that kind of composition is largely to be attributed, may be extremely unfair & inadvisable in a public document. I fear that the main effect of this publication will be to weaken the hands of the Government of India by lessening its credit, & holding it up to the contempt of the public both in India & in Britain.