A Very Private Diary: A Nurse in Wartime

'The real war started for me today,' So begins the diary of 18-year-old Mary Mulry, a young Irish nurse, newly arrived in London in 1940. Over the next seven years she witnesses many of the pivotal events of the war at first hand. In London during the Blitz she sees a young woman die after a botched abortion, narrowly escapes from the bombing of the Alexandra Hotel, and nurses critically ill children during bombing raids in Woolwich. In Normandy in 1944, arriving on the heels of the D-Day invasion, she nurses Allied soldiers and German prisoners of war. In war-torn Belgium, she records harrowing stories of casualties from the Battle of Arnhem. In these extraordinary diaries we see a young woman coming of age, falling in and out of love several times over ('I always seem to be saying good-bye to men whom I might have loved had there been enough time,' she writes). She eventually meets and falls in love with a young British Army officer and agrees to marry him two weeks later. The diary ends in Hamburg in 1947 with the birth of her son. Mary's distinctive voice, sharp wit, rebellious spirit and irrepressible personality make her diary entries feel just as immediate, dramatic and moving today as when they were first written 70 years ago.

About the Author :
Mary Mulry moved to London in 1940 to begin her career as a nurse and kept her diary in spite of strict rules against such diaries being kept while on duty. After the birth of her four children, Mary returned to nursing in Brighton in the 1960s. She and her husband Malcolm, whom she met at the end of the war, eventually settled in the Wye Valley and remained happily married for over fifty years until Mary's death in 1997. Her wartime uniform and diaries are now held in the Imperial War Museum, London, and are published here for the first time. Carol Acton is Associate Professor of English, St Jerome's University at the University of Waterloo, Ontario with a research area in war writing, especially autobiographical works. She is the author of GRIEF IN WARTIME: PRIVATE PAIN, PUBLIC DISCOURSE and WORKING IN A WORLD OF HURT, a book on medical personnel, war and trauma with Dr Jane Potter from Oxford Brookes University. She discovered Mary's diaries in the Imperial War Museum archives.

Review :
We know so much about Mary's war because she broke the rules. Keeping a diary was strictly forbidden while on active service, which makes Mary's remarkably complete account all the more exceptional Mary Morris's absorbing diary is a tonic to so many outsized histories of the second World War by those who had not been there. ....In pithy, occasionally sardonic entries, Morris builds a picture of the pity of war and, above all, the moral and material ruins of post-Hitler Germany, where she danced the nights away in Allied officers clubs but also got to know the stench of diphtheria ("so foul and sickly") and gangrene. The scenes of horror and distress she recorded are leavened by childhood reminiscences of the Connemara coast and the glories of whiskey fruit cake. Keeping a diary during active service was forbidden, so this book offers a rare insight into the important roles of nurses, both on the Home Front and the frontline during the Second World War from their own viewpoint. Diaries transport us back to the events they describe with a vividness other sources cannot match. This diary, recently discovered in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, was kept by Irish nurse Mary Morris to record her experiences during and after the Second World War. Her strength of character and spirit shine through. ....day and night she faced the grim experience of nursing battle casualties. The constant hunger from insufficient rations, catching diphtheria, and being injured by shrapnel failed to daunt her. Throughout it all, Mary's sense of humour and her high spirits rarely failed ... Mary is a talented writer and a humane observer of her remarkable experiences. Her diary is full of vivid, sometimes shocking vignettes ... [A] fascinating and deeply moving book A remarkable work ... [Mary] was a lucid observer of some of the most cataclysmic events in history