My Mother's diaries

For most of her married life my Mother kept a diary and these give an interesting insight into everyday life in English suburbia during the last third of the 20th century.

The first diary I have managed to locate is dated 1955. I was particularly pleased to find this one because I had been born in late 1954 so quite a few of the entries mention my early childhood. Sadly she stopped writing half way through the year and the next volume I have been able to locate is her Boots Diary for 1969. There is then an unbroken series of diaries covering her life right up to the time that vascular dementia kicked in - at which point she stopped writing regular entries.

The gradual decline of my paternal grand-parents is covered in poignant detail. They died aged 98 and 99 meaning that my father was 72, and so well into retirement, before he became an orphan. By contrast my wife reached this unhappy milestone when she was only 40. Both grand-parents said they were "ready to go" almost a decade before they actually died and the whole concept of them sitting around waiting to die is quite upsetting.

For many years my mother's closest friend was "Aunty" Chris. She lived in the same street as my parents and she and my mother had many interests in common - especially the Townswomen's Guild and its associated drama and poetry groups. The two of them would meet up two or three times a week and their respective lives were very much inter-twined.

Then Chris was taken ill and in a matter of a couple of months she was dead. My mother briefly mentioned going to her funeral and then nothing - she just put her sadness behind her and got on with her, rather more restricted, life. My mother was like that sometimes, some part of her emotional brain had been damaged by her very traumatic childhood and she was good at coping with sad events of this type.

It was noise that she couldn't stand. At various times in her daily dairy entries she would launch into a rant about the noise made by the boiler, the TV, the fridge or the school across the road. She would also worry about world events for a three week window just before the annual overseas holiday. Wherever in the world Mum and Dad were due to visit you could be almost certain that some related man-made or natural disaster would cause her to have sleepless nights.

If books had feelings some of mine would be crying today!

As my family will tell you I have lots of books. There are bookcases in my study (2), in the lounge, in the front hall and in the dining room (2) to say nothing of the many boxes of books that live in the utility room or in the walk-in wardrobe upstairs.

Once a book has been relegated to the boxes in the utility room they have little chance of every being read again. To slightly paraphrase my daughter, "I will store them there until I die, then somebody else will throw them away." Some of the boxes I looked at today had been sealed up for nearly 20 years which both amused and shocked me.

After many years of "living" in the dining room my set of Jennings books have been packed up and will probably not emerge into the daylight again in the foreseeable future. There are 23 novels in the series and it is a curious fact that although I have read some of the books many times there is one I have never seen, never mind read. Jennings at Large (#23) was an experiment by the author that didn't work according to many other enthusiasts and so I have never felt motivated to search for a copy.

The Jennings books are timeless in that the hero stays the same age throughout the series. This of course is a strength and a weakness but by the end of the 23 books all the best story lines have been used over and over again. Other series gradually allow the characters to age (The Lone Pine series does this) and the famous Chalet stories are spread out over many years and perhaps they benefit from this editorial decision.