Diary

Rosemary Dinnage

In 1943, victory for the Allies being in sight, I was in Princeton, after three and a half years in Canada as a wartime evacuee, waiting for a passage home on a safe neutral ship. My temporary host was principal of the Institute of Advanced Study; he and his wife lived in one of those 19th-century clapboard houses that are the pride of American suburbia. Down at the end of the straight path to the Institute buildings, Einstein could often be seen shuffling gently about, distinguished by his wearing of sandals with no socks and, of course, by the wild white hair. The socklessness seemed to amaze Americans, though one might think that socks underneath hot-weather sandals took away their point. I wore very clean white socks, for I was a bobby-soxer, a Frank Sinatra fan who brought his very earliest records back to England in my trunk unchipped, to my family’s derision. (Would that I had them now! He was never so good again.)