Love and War in London: A Woman's Diary, 1939-1942 (review)

'A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.' Robert Malcolmson introduces the wartime diary of Olivia Cockett with this quotation from Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951). His choice is doubly apt: the novel is set in wartime London, like Cockett's diary, and evokes the tension, drama, and episodic experiences of the time. The quotation also points to the difficulties and rewards of placing a diary in historical context, of setting the minutiae of daily life against the backdrop of the sweeping international events of the Second World War.

The Second World War, or the 'People's War' as it was known in Britain, was the first in which the responsibilities of total war were felt immediately by the civilian populace at its outbreak in 1939. Food, and later clothing, were rationed; military service and labour were conscripted; night-time lights were restricted by the blackout; and schoolchildren, the elderly, businesses, and government offices were evacuated from areas at risk of aerial attack. Through Olivia Cockett's diary, we see first hand how those larger national bureaucratic decisions affected the daily life of an intelligent and thoughtful young woman. Her diary thus provides, as Malcolmson describes it, 'an intersecting of public and private realities.'

Olivia Cockett's diary fulfils these dual functions in part because it was written for a public audience. In 1939, the social research group Mass-Observation, which had been founded in 1937, sent out requests for people of all over Britain to write and send in monthly war diaries, to be read by the group as a gauge of wartime experiences and opinions, and to be archived for further study. Olivia Cockett's detailed three-year diary written between August 1939 and October 1942 is unusual is its length, its literary quality, and its level of detail and openness. In addition to his transcription of these handwritten diaries, Malcolmson has also included her responses to some of Mass-Observation's more specific questionnaires, called 'Directive Replies,' as well as extracts from her fascinating dream diaries, also held by Mass-Observation. Malcolmson has also incorporated excerpts from her three personal diaries which predate 1940, to illustrate the history of her love affair with the married William Hole.

Olivia Cockett's writing is vibrant and engaging, the work of someone who enjoyed putting pen to paper. 'To me, the apt word adds to any experience. Adds positively. I mean, it heightens joys and lessens sorrows,' she wrote in her private diary in July 1939. Her diary was thus meant to record her individual wartime experiences, and also to enhance them. She wrote openly and honestly about her observations and those of her family and lover. She writes of her physical, emotional, and intellectual reactions to the new dangers of war. She writes, as Malcolmson points out, not only of the facts, but of the feelings of wartime, revealing how public and private experiences were closely entangled, and narrating a life in which the mundane details of often-disrupted daily routines were set against the prospect of violent death from German bombers.