Starting a diary on January 1st 1918

Now I have never been good at keeping diaries.

I would start with good intentions but never got past January 15th.

Of course the great diaries of history reveal much about life in the past and with that in mind one day I shall visit the unabridged writings of Samuel Pepys.

But diaries come in all shapes and sizes and do not have to be written by the great and the good to offer up insights into the past.

Last year my friend Elaine passed over a small diary written by a neighbour covering the single year of 1946.

It was a present from his mother and is the size of one of those old driving licenses and went with our young man all the way to Egypt.

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.

I promised myself I would read the whole diary and in the fullness of time write more about his experiences of life in army in the 1940s.  Of course I didn’t having got distracted by other projects but I rather think it is time to do so.

And this is partly motivated by my friend Ann who has passed over this image of another diary and who I am hoping will tell me something about the person who owned it.

Picture; diary from 1918 courtesy of Ann Love

* The lost diary ............ life in the British Army in 1946, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/the-lost-diary-life-in-british-army-in.html