It is the sort of opening to a diary that most of us will be familiar with, and what follows is a mix of social events, the mundane trivia of army life and an intense record of the young man’s feelings for a woman.
The diary was a present from his mother for New Year, is the size of one of those old driving licenses and went with our young man all the way to Egypt.
Now I know his name and think I have tracked down a little of his life, but that I shall not reveal.
It was was passed to me by a friend who knew him well and thought something of the detail in its pages would shed some light on life in the 1940s.
And over the next few weeks that is what I intend to do.
The opening pages vividly record army life, from the cleaning of equipment, to inspections, and plenty of marching exercises, interspersed with going to the cinema, listening to the radio and trying to get into dances.
It is I guess the everyday preoccupations of a young man in the services.
But running through the first part of the diary is that sad reference to the woman he had fallen for. In early January he writes that “I still love her” and this remains a a constant through the early part of the diary, getting shortened to “I.S.LH” and although she went off and married someone else she remained special to him.
Now there will be those who argue this is an intrusion or that these are too trivial to warrant a story.
But I disagree, no where will names appear, the identities of everyone will be kept secret and the focus will always be on how a young man away from home got on with life in the army in the years directly after the last world war.
Picture, from the diary January 1946
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