January 4th 1941

January 4th 1941

Daddy left home at 8:30am on the first stage of his journey to the Near East. Poor darling Mummie. He leaves Liverpool tomorrow or Monday.

This is the last 'proper' entry in Lorna's diary. Lorna's decision to stop her commentary on the war is perhaps not surprising given her musings of 31st December 1940. Her final diary entry for the year just past included the sentence: 'Perhaps one shouldn’t write diaries, at least not the moralising kind, nor as a peg to hang a war on'.

Lorna also remarked on 4th November 1940 that 'The peculiar thing about this diary is that the more pressing the need becomes to record events, the less they are recorded'. After several months of effort, she may have been beginning to doubt the value of her journal.

Tomorrow we will blip the last few words that Lorna wrote at the back of her exercise book. These point to a further reason as to why she abandoned the writing of her war diary.