Book info

• Title Betty's Wartime Diary
• Author Betty Armitage
• Year 2002
• Genre Memoir

Some years ago, journalist Nicholas Webley stumbled across a remarkable find during a routine investigation in a small house in Norfolk – a diary. The diary was kept during the war years and scribbled for the most part in school exercise books and on scraps of decomposing paper. It was written by a seamstress born in the 1880’s. Betty Armitage, the seamstress, was a theatrical dresser during the first part of the century and moved to Norfolk before the war. Her diary is unusual, as it views the events of the war through the eyes of someone born around the time of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. So many accounts of the war are based on military experience or life in cities during the Blitz; here the great events of those years are viewed from the country: privation relieved by the occasional poached pheasant, upheaval as thousands of bright young US servicemen ‘invade’ East Anglia, quiet heroes and small-time rural villains. A time which seems familiar to us today through film, but which was really another age, springs to life in the pages of Betty’s Diary; funny, touching and unaffectedly vivid.

Thoughts

With the 80th annivery of D-Day this past week, there’s been a lot of remembrance and commemoration of the Second World War, so I dug this diary out of my to-read list and whizzed through it. Books like this are always fascinating, to read about the daily life of those just trying to get through the war - not on the front line, or necessarily in the thick of it, but still struggling day by day. The structure of the book was good with each month given context of the wider war picture, but some of the formatting went a bit wonky, and there were some significant gaps in the entries. But what was there was good.

Rating: 4 / 5