My mother was a great jotter, perhaps a frustrated writer. In these pages I have scanned in and transcribed what survives of her diaries and notes.
There are three sources for this material:
- A notebook/diary called "The Everything Book" that Mum apparently purchased in
June 1979 and used until June of 1994. She used The Everything Book for, well, everything: shopping and to-do lists, lists of birthday and Christmas
cards, and so on, but also for occasional diary entries when the spirit moved her. I have only transcribed the diary entries, not the lists (except
where a diary entry shared a page with a list).
- Some autobiographical notes she made on 33 loose-leaf sheets of paper while partly
disabled and totally bored at Lister House, the residential-care home where she spent her last 8½ years. The date range here is from February
to October of 1992.
- A diary she began to keep in "The Wild Flower Notebook" when my daughter Nellie was born in January 1993. The first 64½ pages of entries, through to September 8th 1996, are all addressed to Nellie; then there is a 3½-page note to me dated November 17th 1996.
—————————