It wasn’t, after all, much of a possibility that if life caused you to pitch up in A&E with a broken jaw, that you would think to bring your diary with you and helpfully produce it to save them doing a blood test on you. But knowing your blood group meant you were the kind of conscientious kid who would grow up to own, every year, a freshly monogrammed black “leather”-bound copy of the Institute of Public Administration Yearbook and Diary, which preceded Google in knowing everything and having a killer index.
Before you got to that point, though, you owned a pocket diary with sections about horses, swimming, ballet, and ice-skating.
Generations of youngsters — particularly girls under 10 — got started on diary-keeping because they read Anne Frank’s record of her time spent hiding from the Nazis in a secret annexe in Amsterdam before she and her family were betrayed and — most of them — died in concentration camps.
Anne’s diary, a secret within a secret, recorded the pressures on the members of her own family and another clan, locked together in the kind of closeness that prevents peace and privacy.
Frank also did sweetly honest reflection on the joys and miseries of adolescence, which happen no matter what external horrors are going on.
Most of the early diary-keepers abandon the record-keeping task as hard work after a year or so. Pity. Because what a teenager writes with a hand curled around for privacy can be fascinating in its lack of guile — and present a startling disconnect with what is remembered by that same teenager when grown.
I found this out last year when researching my memoir, published just before Christmas.
My memories of childhood and adolescence are of me as a sweet-natured, talented, and popular, if somewhat under-appreciated, young person.
Reading (with difficulty) through three years of Enid Blyton diaries, honestly and illegibly written back in the day, didn’t match that at all. It didn’t amount to establishing a constant of me as Living Bitch, but a lot of Living Bitch was evident.
Diaries written by people who make their living as writers or politicians tend to be performative. An Alistair Campbell doesn’t keep a diary in order to reflect on and learn from what happens to himself and his boss, Tony Blair.
He keeps it in order to eventually publish it, seek to prove that all the right choices were made under duress and — rightly, in Campbell’s case — earn it bestseller status.
Here in Ireland, one former politician kept and continues to keep a daily record of their life. The volumes line up, year after year, decade after decade, and knowing of their very existence would scare the bejasus out of several politicians who served with the diary-keeper without knowing they were recording events with acerbic clarity.
As a first draft of history, these diaries are incomparable and would correct, in their neatly hand-written accuracy, many of the political myths of the diarist’s time.
It’s not going to happen, though. Destruction by fire awaits those precious volumes, because, says their writer, they were never intended for publication and not the biggest advance in history would persuade the author to make them public.
It's a wonder Samuel Pepys hasn't been named as Offender Zero of #MeToo, such is the abuse he disclosed in his diaries in the 1660s. Portrait: Hales/Hulton Archive/Getty
That’s a pity, too, because, by their very nature, political lives veer between what is important at the time, what is important in hindsight (rarely the twain meet) and the personal.
The combination tends to make for deadly good reading.
Although he was a public administrator rather than a politician, one of the most famous, not to say notorious, diarists, illustrates this mix in his work, which affords a startlingly vivid eyewitness account of some of the great historic events of his time.
The decade-long record is, in some ways, resonant with our own times, since Samuel Pepys watched the coronation of King Charles II and survived an epidemic of Bubonic Plague.
Pepys also observed events distinctly of their time, one of those events being the official kidnapping of men going about their business in the streets of London to work the British navy’s ships. When it happened, the wives of “press-ganged” men would gather on the wharves, watched, on one occasion, by Pepys.
“In my life,” he wrote, “I never did see such a natural expression of passion as I did here in some women’s bewailing themselves and running to every parcel of men that were brought, one after another, to look for their husbands, and wept over every vessel that went off, thinking they might be there, and looking after the ship as far as ever they could by moonlight, that it grieved me to the heart to hear them.”
(It’s worth pointing out that, if the force was with them and the wind in the right place, these men had a chance of getting back to their loving wives, which would not have been true of another cohort sent to sea: the British navy, facing a talent deficit, effectively raided old folks’ homes.)
Anne Frank sweetly and honestly reflected on the joys and miseries of adolescence, which happen no matter what external horrors are going on. Had she survived the Holocaust, Anne Frank would have turned 95 later this year. Picture: AP
Pepys was a smart and self-preservative human. He had so active and promiscuous a sex life as to make one wonder why #MeToo didn’t use him as Offender Zero, recounting as he did, in lascivious detail and coded English, how he managed to get a close female friend of the family to pleasure him in a carriage shared with his own wife and the other woman’s husband.
The coded sections of the diaries show him to have been a dirty old man of Olympic energy, relentless opportunism, and remarkable stamina. They’re also honest in a way which would make him a 21st century pariah, with their admission of “using a little force” to persuade one palpably unwilling woman to deliver what he required.
But today, as the new diaries are opened, it’s all clean white pages and a sense of glorious possibility.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-41299279.html
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