My secret recreational project revealed!

All families have ghosts: a suicide unexplained, a great uncle missing in action in World War I, a runaway cousin who never returned… In Mr hazelh’s family, the ghost is his great aunt Lorna. I have blipped a photograph of an old photograph today: it is 1926 in a Sheffield garden, and Lorna is 12 years old.

I can’t remember first hearing Lorna’s name. It is almost as if she has always been hovering in the background ever since I first become associated with Mr hazelh and his family in 1982. However, until July 2019, I knew just four facts about Lorna:

1. She was the sister of Mr hazelh’s paternal grandfather Theodore (Theo) Lloyd
2. She studied at Girton College Cambridge in the 1930s
3. She painted watercolours
4. She died young

This all changed 18 months ago when in July 2019 Mr hazelh’s Uncle Jonathan (Theo’s son) showed me an exercise book crammed with diary entries that Lorna wrote during the Second World War. I blipped an extract from this in my blipfoto journal on 7th July 2019. The quality of Lorna’s writing awoke my interest in her, and I wondered whether other people might also appreciate reading her wartime chronicles.

With the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II fast approaching, I came up with the idea of creating an additional blipfoto journal. Here I could post Lorna’s war diary entries against the equivalent dates from September 2019 onwards. Since Mr hazelh’s uncle had already typed up all the diary entries in Word, it seemed that little effort would be required to photograph the relevant diary pages to post alongside the copied and pasted transcriptions. Thus I started Lorna’s journal at http://blipfoto.com/LornaL on 31st August 2019.

To maintain the ‘authenticity’ of Lorna as an independent writer, I wanted to keep secret my identity as the person behind Lorna’s blipfoto journal. I have therefore been referring to this work here in my own journal as my ‘secret recreational project’ (even though, at times, I have been working on it in plain sight - see for example my blip of 3rd October 2020.)

The labour involved in updating Lorna’s blipfoto journal might have been as manageable as initially anticipated had (a) Lorna written up war diary entries every day without leaving any gaps and (b) my mother-in-law (Lorna’s niece) not passed on to me a huge archive of Lorna’s writing and artwork in November 2019, then added to this family scrapbooks from the early 1930s, plus some photograph albums that contain shots by/of Lorna’s family members that date as far back as the late 1890s.

By Christmas 2019 I was somewhat obsessed with my secret recreational project. Although always centred on the war diary, the coverage of Lorna’s blipfoto journal grew as I selected other material to blip between the dated diary entries - such Lorna’s other writing (poetry, short stories, plays, a novel) and artwork (water colours, lino/woodblock prints, drawings) - and I became more and more interested in Lorna’s family. Before long I needed a spreadsheet to schedule the material to be photographed for Lorna’s journal. I also created a directory of materials on the hard drive of my computer with everything ordered in a way that would allow Mr hazelh to take over the blipping should any calamity befall me!

Since autumn 2019 I have poured hours and hours into Lorna’s blipfoto journal - many, many more than are dedicated to hazelh. As a result, I now know more about Mr hazelh’s family than do he and his sisters (blipped together here on 12th September 2015). My understanding of the sequence of events associated with the Second World War (which I never studied at school) has also improved vastly, largely because I have followed up snippets of information supplied by Lorna in her writing (for example, see the entry for 26th August 2020), and I now also seek out broadcast documentaries about the war. Lorna’s work has even prompted me to compose poetry. This was in response to a question from Lorna in March 1931 ‘I wonder if, in a hundred years, someone will find my writings…?’ blipped on 23rd November 2019. My response was:

Almost a hundred years, but not quite
We found your writings
Half-forgotten, embers still smouldering

Many more of us than you could ever have imagined
Each day explore the traces that you left
Reaching into the light that you shed on your world
To illuminate our own

Some elements of Lorna’s blipfoto journal have demanded much more work than others. Perhaps the most difficult was the presentation of the summary of her illustrated novel The book of the duchess, written in 1938. I blipped this in one sequence from 4th October 2020. First I had to locate a gap in the war diary entries long enough to provide a good ‘run’ for posting the daily photographs of the illustrations to the story. Then I had to make sense of the individual pictures and Lorna’s critiques of them. This was hard work because they first reached me all jumbled up in the box that my mother-in-law passed on to us in November 2019. Once I had the pictures in order, I had to read the (dense) novel to match the illustrations to the action. Then I needed to squeeze the content of each episode into a short written account that did justice to Lorna’s original text, yet was concise enough to carry the plot forward in a digestible summary. I complained about all this in my journal here on 6th October 2020. The other tricky ‘episode’ has been Lorna’s death. Although she mentions her illness and hospital visits in her war diary entries in 1939 and 1940, I knew that it would come as a shock to her blipfoto followers that she died aged only 28 in 1942, a year after she gave up writing her war diary entries - see below.

I have made some rather unexpected discoveries in the course of the exploring Lorna’s life and creative outputs. These range from learning technical terms associated with medieval dress on 13th December 2020 and uncovering the tragic story of the writer Laurence Hope (see Lorna’s blipfoto entry for 20th December 2019) to connecting with an entire branch of my husband’s family that we found living within walking distance of our flat in Edinburgh. We met hazelh’s third cousin Guy, his wife Marzia and their son Enrico for the first time on 20th June 2020. Over the past few months Lorna even provided me with an excellent book recommendation (see her journal entry of 14th November 2020). It can’t happen here by Sinclair Lewis is as relevant today as it was in 1940, especially in the light of the events of the past week in Washington.

These discoveries might have been greater had we been able to travel freely in 2020. We had hoped to make Lorna-related visits to see her last house (where she died) and hunt for her grave (and play games with Cheeseminer) in Malvern, and to see artefacts related to Lorna in the archive of Girton College, Cambridge. We were also forced to cancel meetings with a couple of Mr hazelh’s relations who have further items of Lorna’s writing and artwork at their houses in the south west of England. Here’s hoping that we will be able to make these visits in the future. Another destination on the list that is more accessible for us is Stirling: through a close examination of a set of photographs from 1918 and Google Earth images, on 7th June last year we convinced ourselves that Lorna’s family probably lived at 37 Snowdon Place for a couple of years after World War I. I have to say I found it slightly surreal discussing this with Tweedy a few weeks ago given that she and I correspond with one another daily through this (hazelh) journal!

It’s interesting that my 'secondary' blipfoto journal has been more popular than my own. I have been strangely envious of the amount of comments, stars and favourites that Lorna has earnt, especially on her milestones blips: the 100th blip on 28th December 2019; the 200th on 6th April 2020; the 300th on 15th July 2020 and 365 blips on 18th September 2020. 

I can account for the popularity of Lorna’s blipfoto journal in several ways - and not just because it benefited from attention when blipfoto shone a spotlight on it on 13th September 2019. First, to many blippers journalling is as important as the photography (indeed more important in some cases). Lorna’s followers have been fascinated by the ‘core’ of her blipfoto journal: a sequence of authentic contemporary entries about real events with which they all have a degree of familiarity, including major events such as the bombing of Coventry in November 1940, recorded in Lorna's diary on 14th of that month. I think Lorna herself would have been a blipper had she lived in our time.

Second, Lorna sometimes acts as a proxy for blippers’ own family members who are no longer with us, almost representing a collective memory for those of us based in the UK. She gives an eye witness account of a period of history that our parents and grandparents might have told us about (provided that they were willing to talk about the war, which many weren’t), if only we had asked when we had the opportunity. As Joyful said on 11th September 2020:  ‘I think you are filling a lot of empty spaces in people’s lives. We use Lorna’s story to act as a stand-in for the stories that we never got from our own loved ones’.

For others, Lorna’s writing evokes very early childhood memories, e.g. PatMacCan made a comment on Lorna’s journal entry for 14th September 1939 ‘This is my life too, even though I was only 4 years old’ or it reminds them of family stories e.g. Pxas commented on 17th September 2019 ‘My grandmother told me how she was hiding two Jewish people in her house basement afraid that her fellow Polish neighbor would tell on her to the Nazis’.

The quality of Lorna’s writing is also important. This is often poetic, even when presented as prose. Joyful put it neatly on 2nd February 2020: ‘ She’s got a reporter’s eye and a poet’s tongue’.

Another part of the appeal is that everyone who has read along with the diary is familiar with the big picture and the outcome of war. However, the future of Lorna’s family is uncertain. So England in wartime provides a backdrop to a more personal and intimate story of family life played out across the UK and France, centred on a single character. This means, for example, that at eighty years distance we (somewhat ridiculously) worried about Lorna’s mother when she was reported ill on 27th July 1940.

The current coronavirus pandemic adds a further dimension to a reading of Lorna’s diary. Some of Lorna’s observations about the early war years resonate loudly. For example, if you remove the words in square brackets from this line from 4th September 1939, you could be reading about adherence to mask wearing during the current pandemic:  ‘[Gas] masks are de rigeur [for wear in the democracies], carried about with great self-consciousness by about half the population; the other half resolutely leave them at home’. Equally these words from 31st December 1940 could apply to 2020 and 2021 ‘Whatever 1941 may have in store for us, it couldn’t find it easy to surpass what 1940 had for us, if we had known it’. As Wildwood said on 15th April 2020 ‘The circumstances are entirely different, but the one thing in common between Lorna’s times and our current situation is the uncertainty and how we deal with it as a collective group’ . More specifically, on 15th September 2020 billygoat compared the war time accuracy/exaggeration of politicians’ figures (e.g. numbers of German planes brought down during Battle of Britain raids) with more current claims for world class apps and coronavirus testing facilities.

Perhaps one of the advantages of the overlap of my work on Lorna’s blipfoto journal with the pandemic is that I have had plenty of time to dedicate to it (when not gardening - my other pandemic obsession). A quiet Christmas holiday period in 2020 certainly helped with dealing with the tricky task of working out how to break the news to Lorna’s followers that her life came to an abrupt and painful end in early 1942, just a few days after her 28th birthday. Some might say that this is akin to an author killing off a fictional character. However, this is so much worse: Lorna was a real person from the past connected to my present through my husband’s family. It makes me quite emotional to think that in her dying months, Lorna almost certainly held in her arms my mother-in-law as a tiny baby, knowing that she would never see her niece grow up. Yet, had Lorna enjoyed a normal lifespan, I may well have met this remarkable woman.

Having taken great pleasure in bringing Lorna to back to life in my ‘secret recreational project’, my sad (and often tearful) job over the past few days has been to return her to the past. Tomorrow, when I post an obituary for Lorna as the final blip at http://blipfoto.com/LornaL, my secret recreational project will be complete.

Exercise today: 10k run - my first run of this distance in a long, long time.