To put it crudely, most of his patients were too ill to do more than lie on their beds or, when the weather was as warm as it was now, relax on the long chairs in the garden soaking up the sunshine. Verity was unable to stay still for more than a few minutes at a time. The sight of patients iller than she made her depressed and angry. She would not be one of those etiolated wrecks – that she swore. She read quite a lot. Mrs Woolf had delivered on her promise and sent her a pile of books. She and her husband, Leonard, ran the Hogarth Press which published books about social issues as well as poetry and fiction. Verity was particularly interested in one book they had published the year before called The Roots of War in which some of the great and the good explained how Britain had come to this pass and berated the Prime Minister for his policy of appeasing Hitler. Verity thought wryly that their complaints came rather late in the day. Her friends visited her but she suspected – probably unfairly – that they must resent having to travel out of London to see her and that she was being a bore.
