Mrs Milburn's Diary

I thought I’d have a slight diversion from writing about France.

The book the Fox took to read on holiday was “Mrs Milburn’s Diaries”.  When I’d finished the book I was reading, Anne Tyler’s “Digging to America” followed by a bit of Sherlock Holmes in the “Sign of Four”, I progressed onto the Fox’s book.

Mrs Milburn wrote her diaries from the outbreak of War in 1939 & continued them until the return of her son from prisoner of war camp May 1945. In the diary she keeps a record of daily life in & around Coventry during those years.

For me, this book brought back memories of my mother & her tales. She was a Coventry lass. She spent her youth around the Kenilworth & Leamington that Mrs Milburn wrote of. Although my mother was married by the time of the war, she spent some of the time in Bubbenhall, near Coventry, where her widowed mother still lived. She’d told me about the bombing of the cathedral, seeing it burning across the fields.

Mrs Milburn also told of the anxiety when her only son was lost at Dunkirk & the relief when she finally discovered he’d been wounded, treated & was now a prisoner of war. I can’t help thinking of the anxiety my family must have felt when one of my uncles went missing in action to eventually turn up in a prisoner of war camp. It must have been quite a relief for them.

The other thing I found is that reading the book put some of the chronological battles a bit more in order. So often I knew them only through films. So I realised for the first time that the “Graf Spee”, memorably portrayed in “The Battle of the River Plate”, happened in the first few months of the war.  The moment I read of the invasion of Italy I immediately saw Robert Mitchum going around Rome in “Anzio”. The D-Day landing was “The Longest Day” & the problems at Arnhem evoked “A Bridge Too Far”.

My interest rose with the losing of Tobruk (my father was involved in that) & the later retaking of Tobruk (another uncle was involved in that).

As for when we were finally in Germany, I saw in my mind’s eye Cologne, visited on our Rhine cruise a few years ago. Just as I did at mention of the crossing of the Rhine by the Remagen bridge (“The Bridge of Remagen”).

So many films, so many stories from my mother… This book brought home, too, the sheer joy of being able to take down the blackout curtains & use headlights when driving at night, the long drudge not knowing when it would all end. It confirmed my suspicions that that life was so dire on rations itself but that rather, more often than not, not everything was in the shops to buy with the rations so often you had less than allowed or went to the black market.

I was surprised, too, by how cushy life seemed in the camps. Her son wrote of going into town, of going to the cinema. I’m telling myself that probably he was trying to make light of the deprivations to not worry his family unduly.

The other surprise is that I hadn’t realised that weather forecasts stopped being broadcast until long after D-Day. It quite thrilled Mrs Milburn to hear them again.

One thing that did strike me was that Mrs Milburn was around my age at the time, her husband a few years older. They both seem to spend a lot of time in bed ill. The cause wasn’t always mentioned, though some of the time it was clearly for nothing more than a cold or flu, or a strained muscle. I am reminded that few people reached pension age, 60 for women, 65 for men, in those days. This couple kept going, but then they were fairly wealthy (few people would have had 3 cars in those days!) & very middle class. They could afford to pay for medicine in the days before free treatment on the National Health. Today you would expect someone of that age to be in better health unless they’d had a very hard life or were disabled.

It was interesting read.