A Surprisingly Good Book Find

 This is a book I picked up at the Sibton church book sale back in May. At first glance I thought it was fiction as the front cover is very similar to many of the recently written wartime fiction books, but on reading the back cover I found it was a proper wartime diary, covering the years 1935 - 1947, so it came home with me.

It's actually quite a treasure and different to any other WWII diaries I have. There are plenty of wartime diaries by people living and working in towns and cities, through the blitz etc or by people in the forces but I've not come across another one by the wife of a soldier.

Evelyn Shillington was an army wife, married to Rex who was a career soldier, working in Army Ordnance (now called Logistics) and retiring as a Brigadier. They had no children and all her married life she had moved wherever Rex was posted, either living in rented accommodation, married quarters, hotels or with friends.

The diary starts in 1935 when Eve (then aged 42) and Rex are just returning, by boat, from Hong Kong where Rex had had a 3 year posting. During their time there Eve's mother Emlie Clifford (a well known playwright of the time) in England had died and Eve is dreading the return home without her mother being there. Evelyn is one of those people who is able to make friends anywhere she is and will keep in touch with all she befriends forever. Consequently many entries in the diary are about friends made from many parts of the country and overseas, relations and friends of her mother but luckily there's a list at the front of 'Evelyn's People'.

As well as the book being interesting with a well informed view of life during those years -from the abdication of Edward VIII to the end of the war, it also has an complicated and equally interesting story of how it came to be published.

After Evelyn's death in 1981 a trunk of papers and the diaries were left to a much younger cousin - Elizabeth and after Elizabeth's death in 1997 they were inherited by her daughter Jacy Wall.  Jacy remembers meeting her mother's cousin just a couple of times in the 1970's.

In  the early 2,000's Jacy was contacted out of the blue by someone researching the history of Roger Quilter who had written the music for Emlie's (Evelyn's mother) best known play Where The Rainbow Ends and had tracked down Jacy as a relative of Emlie. This makes Jacy rummage through the trunk of papers that had been stored in an attic for many years but she didn't take any notice of the diaries. 

A few years later Jacy is moving house after the death of her husband and decides to send the trunk of papers off to auction.

Luckily at auction the papers were bought by Shaun Sewell, an author who had an interest in old diaries and he realised what a treasure they were. He managed to track Jacy Wall and an editor - Barbara Fox, who had also published books about wartime and together they were able to edit and publish the diaries in book form in 2017.There is also a page at the end of the book telling what happened to Evelyn and Rex after they returned to England and Rex retired.

A really good story.

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