Diaries: without benefit of hindsight

Patricia and Robert Malcolmson
Opinion - Books Tuesday, 19th July 2022

Patricia and Robert Malcolmson, editors of A Nurse's War, on the unique insights that diaries can provide


Diaries have lots of appeal. The diaries of Nella Last of Barrow-in-Furness (four volumes have now been published) reveal a great deal about one woman's marriage and housekeeping and relations with her friends and neighbours; and Kathleen Hey's The View from the Corner Shop (2016) offers vivid details on the ins and outs of a Dewsbury grocery shop in wartime and the lives of the working class people who shopped there.

Our most recent edited diary from the Mass Observation archive in Brighton is Kathleen Johnstone's A Nurse's War: A diary of hope and heartache on the home front. It is rooted in her daily experiences of work in a hospital in Blackburn, Lancashire, and her days-off spent mainly at the home of her parents in the beautiful village of Downham, near Clitheroe.

A key value of most diaries is that they capture the moment. There is a sense of immediacy - a passing emotion (which is likely soon to lose intensity); vivid details that will quickly fade from mind; a fleeting thought, perhaps soon to be forgotten; a conversation overheard on the bus; a short-lived irritation or frustration that had at the time importance in a person's mind. A diary may be like a camera constantly at work, recording passages of time that would otherwise not be remembered, since new feelings and experiences will tend to erase them - or largely erase them - from consciousness.

Of course, we assume a diarist who is both observant and able to write well, putting pen to paper soon after incidents and experiences occurred. In A Nurse's War we get a real feel for packed trains, deaths in hospital, a patient having nightmares, ill-fitting shoes, workplace mishaps, unflattering uniforms, petty regulations, miserable working conditions, raucous VE-Day celebrations, and the diarist's worries about the fate of her POW fiancé in Germany.

As long as a diary is not later tampered with - "improved" or massaged or censored - there's a good chance that it will be mostly truthful, or at least as truthful as possible at the time of writing. Mass Observation diaries, once they were sent off in the post, were out of the diarist's hands. Angry sentiments or nasty prejudices could not be expunged, or ill-conceived opinions withdrawn. A few MO diaries contain anti-semitic comments that their authors, in later years almost certainly, would not have wanted to be preserved for posterity. The most valuable diaries are unsanitised, even if subject to a degree of self-censorship.

Of course, some diarists were less inhibited than others. Some were more self-revealing than others. Still, whatever the style, most of the best diarists wrote about what was on their minds then and there - and this (in a sense) first draft of experience could not be later revised.

Diaries, then, convey a sense of full immersion in living, in the spirit of scenes set by a good novelist. The diarist is close-up to what she is writing about; the distance in time is minimal. This is a closeness that is less evident in other forms of writing - in most letters, for example, which may be written days or weeks after the events described, and certainly in memoirs, which are usually written years later and with the benefit of maturity and knowing much more about how life actually unfolded.

Diarists are moving backward into the future, and this, as we all know, is consistent with the ways much of our lives are lived, full of uncertainties and surprises. Diarists cannot construct reality with the benefit of hindsight, as the writers of memoirs can do. They may ponder what (they expect) is to come, but their predictions and expectations are often wrong. Diaries testify to the messiness and muddles and blunders of living, which can so readily be concealed or distorted, softened or muted, by testimony given well after the facts.

A Nurse's War edited by Patricia and Robert Malcolmson is published by HarperNorth on 21 July.