Recently I've been interested in World War Two diaries, especially those written by women. It's incredible when you consider those six years in (I'm mostly focusing on the British experience) history. There were as many stories as there were people and they varied hugely by location and class. Joan Wyndham's story is really interesting but not really typical She was an artsy, upper class teenage girl in 1939: the daughter of two divorced eccentrics, her roguish father was separated from her mother who was living with her lesbian lover. Wyndham was planning on becoming an actress and attending RADA but it closes due to the outbreak of war.
Wyndham falls into an artsy crowd, attends art school and her mother rents a studio for her at the age of seventeen. She has a huge interest in books, theatre, men and sex. The main thing that comes across is that while Wyndham was perceptive and bright, she was incredibly self-obsessed and not a little sheltered. The men she fawns over are awful and I'm not exaggerating- they steal money and cigarettes from her, they ply her with alcohol, they perve on her incessantly. I can't honestly believe they were the best she could hope for. The man she loses her virginity to, Rupert, gloats when it turns out that their friend has died abroad, he hits her, he continues to sleep with another woman (Squirrel), he gloats about raping women (I wish I was making this up).
I get that seventeen year olds don't always have the best judgement but my god. It's quite incredible to think of someone, quite bright, fawning over someone this disgusting. Something that a lot of reviewers have mentioned is that the war itself isn't actually mentioned all that often and it isn't until later on in the diaries that it starts to have an impact: their favourite haunts are bombed, they party during air raids, her male friends are drafted and eventually she joins the WAAF. But you could go for several pages and honestly forget that this was written during a war, which I suppose is accurate in a way. Not everybody was jolly and patriotic (the men in this certainly aren't, they whine like babies when they get called up). For a lot of people war was a nuisance rather than a life changing experience.
Something that makes this diary stands out is Wyndhams interest in men and sex (it's something that her diaries are known for) she was frank. I don't know (being several decades too young), if her attitude towards sex was normal by the standards of the time or not. She could probably afford to experiment more than the average working or lower-middle class girl of the era due to her privilege and access to sympathetic 'lady doctors' and of course she ran around in liberated bohemian circles. It's still a surprise to read a girl from the era of coy radio dramas and clipped voiced news presenters talk so openly about her desires, about 'poking' and volpar gels. I can only hope that her experiences of lovemaking improved during the war.
Overall it was charming but a little frustrating: a worthwhile snippet of wartime social history if you want to have some of your assumptions challenged.
I haven't read very many diaries of this kind before: I've started reading May Smith's 'These Wonderful Rumours' which is an account of a young schoolteacher who worked during the war and 'Nella Last's Diary'which focuses on the writings of a housewife. I also read (and hope to post a review of soon) 'The Sugar Girls' by Duncan Barrett and Nuala Salvi, which tells the stories of working class women who worked in the East End's Tate and Lyle factory and is partly set during the war. I absolutely love reading about the numerous different experiences people had and I was honestly surprised by both how mundane and horrific that time was.
I plan on uploading much more regularly now that the pressure of exams is over, so watch this space.
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