"I’ve written a diary every day since I was 14. What does that say about me?"

From theguardian.com

By Anna Tims

"Hello! I said to myself today that if I do five handstands and flip over it will be an excellent year and I did!” Thus, unceremoniously, began the 41-volume (and counting) story of my life. It was 1984 and I was 14, fumbling through adolescence in a scarlet beret. My likes, according to a list on the front page, included jacket potatoes and graveyards. My new year resolutions were to “see how long I can go without cake” and “improve my character.”

I haven’t missed a day’s entry since that 1 January. My past crams two bookshelves in rows of page-a-day journals. It’s startling how little four decades seems when it’s represented by slim, stacked spines.

I have little idea of the tales they tell. Most of the entries have lain unread since I wrote them. Yet every morning, I hunt down my fountain pen (life must be recorded in a pen that takes itself seriously!) and write up the previous day. If ever I were to miss one, it would seem it had never happened; if my diaries were lost, I’d feel my foundations had buckled. Journaling is a chore and a panacea, and yet I still can’t fathom why I do it.

There are many reasons, according to Fiona Courage, director of the Mass Observation Archive that collects personal records of everyday life in the UK. “Some people want to leave something of themselves to posterity,” she says. “Some find it therapeutic. Virginia Woolf’s diaries were a way of practising her writing.” Courage says that the habit soared during the Covid lockdowns as people realised that they were living through history. “Diaries give you the ability to distil your experiences and make sense of them,” she says. “For historians they are priceless as they record social trends, layers and details that wouldn’t make it into the history books. They plug a gap in the everyday.”

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) wrote diaries to practise her writing. Photograph: Alamy

I had no inkling of what I’d started when I recorded that first New Year’s Day. My mother, a local historian, had nagged me for years to keep a diary so that future generations might learn what a 20th-century teen did for fun and ate for dinner. It was more an urge to write that motivated me to begin. I did not, I had sadly discovered, have a novel in me. There was a point, I like to think, when it dawned on me that life is its own story. A series of chapters, an evolving cast of characters, a thickening plot and an unguessed ending.

Those future generations will have a very misleading idea of the 20th-century teen. Doris Day provided the soundtrack of my youth. My recreation was climbing trees. While classmates danced at discos, I was in bed with Anne of Green Gables. Adolescent passion passed me by entirely. My heart was broken by the deaths of pre-war film stars, announced in lurid felt tip in the page margins, rather than boys.

Over the years, the entries evolved from a record of school lessons and domestic routines to confessional and reportage. And I can chart my startled ageing: “I’m much too young to be so old so soon,” I marvelled on my 21st birthday.

On my 30th: “My face is lumpen, my body stale and my hair like tinned sardines. Feel every inch of 30.”

When 40 arrived: “My haemorrhoids are growing and my brain is shrinking. However, I am quite contented to be 40, if a little awed by my antiquity. I have always known that middle age would suit me and feel qualified now to march about in large hats berating miscreants.”

Fiona Courage, director of the Mass Observation Archive, says: ‘Diaries give you the ability to distil your experiences and make sense of them’. Photograph: Roger Holfert/Alamy

Now, when I look back on them, those volumes do read like a story. A chronicled life seems more like a plot with a sense of direction than a puzzle of random events. The darkest times – the night my mother was run over and the long years of her recovery; two unexpected redundancies – are, reading back, no longer isolated intrusions, but part of a developing narrative. I can read the chapters with a God-like omniscience. I’ll know, if I follow that misfit teenager through four years of school, how things turned out. Which hopes came good, which friendships lasted; how, now and then, foes became benefactors.

I could trace how becoming a university sacristan at 20 to please a dishy chaplain began a chain of events that led, seven years later, to my husband. Or, further back, how a crush on my new German teacher at 14 inspired me to study German at university where I encountered that dishy chaplain. I know that the self that celebrated the arrival of 1996 as a sorry singleton (“While the others waltzed, J and I washed up and reflected mournfully on our unloved state. It’s a condition that has landed us the worst bedroom behind the wellington boot depot. No one brings us tea in bed and no one dances to the Pogues with us”) would meet at a ceilidh, before the year was out, the man I was to marry: “I found myself paired with a priest. I was instructed to ‘grab his left’ and do a Doozy Doo. He kept coming back for more, so we ‘stripped the willow’ successfully together and later I found myself contemplating the pros and cons of marriage to a curate.” And I can confirm that five handstands and a flip ensured that 1984 was “not at all bad, despite Orwell’s ominous predictions.”

You pay more attention to the world when you know you’ll be writing it up. I pen character sketches of strangers I meet – a pony-tailed sheet metalworker from Avonmouth who revered Prokofiev, the substantial matron in a waiting room “who described to me her knicker situation”. I want to do justice even to the dullest day because life is a privilege and the mundane of today will be tomorrow’s history.

I recorded my first sight of a mobile phone, wielded from a pulpit as a spiritual aid, in 1985: “‘Can anyone tell me what this is?’ asked Father R, holding up what looked like a bendy grey banana.” In July 1996, I sent my first email “all on my own”: “This,” I marvelled, “could become an addictive device. [My colleague] and I spent the morning pinging simpering messages to each other across the desk like toddlers with toy phones, but they take up to an hour to arrive so I shall still prefer faxes.”

                            Dear Diary… Anna Tims with her life’s work at her desk. Photograph: Alun Callender/The Observer

In the privacy of a diary, ego can take precedence over world events. Wars raged, governments came and went while I focused on domestic headlines. “Today, I threw out the old Boden catalogue,” began 20 January 2009. “Barack Obama was inaugurated president also, so one had a vague sense of historic-ness as one flossed and hoovered, but the former event seemed to me more significant!”

It’s never too late to start a journal and a life is never too dull to record. As the years pass and memory fades, I find it a comfort to know that I can dip at will into childhood or child-rearing and that milestones are preserved. I imagine my future self in a care home, faculties slipping, reliving my first property purchase: “I examined my feelings at being a flat owner, but it didn’t seem real. I must buy some hyacinths and cats.”

My first date: “I wish I hadn’t said my beer tasted of pus; he must now think I suck boils!”

My first born: “All of a sudden E was holding a large, pink, alert baby of a size quite unfeasible given the manner of exit. It didn’t seem remotely real that this was mine.”

I feel that if I were to read from the first entry to the last, I might find an answer to a question I can’t articulate. But time travel can become unhealthily consuming so I do it sparingly. The past still lives on in those pages and I can feel it closing over me if I linger there.

In lockdown, I read every day of my university years. It was like reading a novel about someone else. I read in suspense of predicaments I no longer recalled and of dramas whose endings I’d forgotten. Unremembered griefs were disinterred; dormant grievances rekindled. Long-lost friends jived to Abba in my student room and long-dead voices spoke again. When I closed the volumes, I emerged blinking into a different century, a different home and a different family and marvelled at the chain of successive days that had brought me here.

But some things are constant. It’s simultaneously reassuring and dispiriting that I remain recognisably the same me from 40 years ago. I continue to transcribe my likes at the front of each diary and jacket potatoes and graveyards reliably top the list. I remain faithful to Doris Day and still wear a red beret.

It’s a weighty business recording a life, yet it’s taught me not to take myself too seriously. When painful moments are written down I can more easily let them go. Seeing life as a story with an unknown number of chapters left to write is both exciting and daunting. My children are already alarmed at the space my life will take up on their shelves when it’s over, but I plan to chronicle the days until I can no longer hold a pen. The only part of the story I’ll never get to write is the ending.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/nov/24/ive-written-a-diary-every-day-since-i-was-14-what-does-that-say-about-me

How a Young Sylvia Plath Found Her Literary Voice Through Diary Keeping

From lithub.com

Carl Rollyson on the Teenage Years of One of America's Most Famous Female Poets

For two weeks in July 1944, Sylvia Plath attended Camp Helen Storrow at Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, averaging a letter a day to her mother, reporting on her swimming and hiking and her enjoyment of arts and crafts and of shows, masquerading with charcoal on her face as a “pickaninnny.” The world was white, although for purposes of play you could be Black. Nowhere in Plath’s comments on people she called Negroes is there evidence of any significant engagement with racial issues, or even much empathy for Black victims of discrimination. She grew up in the era of civil rights protests (for example, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1956) but showed no interest in the marches for equal treatment under the law. She read newspapers but did not comment on the plight of minorities (except for Jews). She lived in a white World.

Near the ocean, the all-white camp revived her memories of an early childhood by the sea. She made a ninety-page book listing her favourite actresses (Shirley Temple, Margaret O’Brien, and Elizabeth Taylor), her schedule at camp, the enormous quantities of food she consumed, the length of her walks, and other camp activities.

At an early age, Plath realized you could incorporate yourself in a medium.

Sylvia’s diaries, meticulously kept for almost every day from 1944 to 1949, reflect her early realization that you could broadcast your own life, as Jack Benny did on his radio show (another of her favourites). The show dispensed a running commentary on his funny failings, his desire to get ahead, and his preening, and had a cast—including Rochester, the faithful, if not uncritical African American factotum—that became Benny’s retinue, commenting on his every mercenary move.

Later, in London, in the last years of her life, Plath would speak of a desire to create a salon of writers, a following that would situate her at the centre of literary life. At an early age, Plath realized you could incorporate yourself in a medium. You could reach out to the public and command a hearing. She would later exploit this medium in her appearances on BBC radio. Her best poetry, she would come to realize, should be spoken aloud, perfected in a voice that she worked on, transforming a regional New England accent into a broader Anglo-American style of speaking that reflected her transcontinental ambitions.

These early diaries show a sensibility already well formed and with a presentiment of destiny, which she defined in her diaries by setting down certain markers:

January 20, 1944: Today is the biggest day of my life. I had a dreamless sleep and woke as fresh as dew on spring buttercups. All day I was in another world, far better than this. I took the bus to Boston with mother and Warrie to see Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” at the Colonial Theatre. It was too perfect for words. I am keeping the program as a souvenir. We took the train to Wellesley and there were no separate seats. I sat next to a young sensitive boy from the navy. He had blond wavy hair and blue eyes. In all my life I will never love anyone as I did him. Our talk was of travels, life, Shakespeare.

Later, her marriage to Ted Hughes would seem impulsive and hasty, but in fact she had been looking for just such a man almost as soon as she could write. She had a sense of the transcendent, of how art can supersede all else, before she turned twelve.

Wayne Sterling remembered that sometime in 1944, when Sylvia was twelve, she initiated a conversation about what it was like to be Jewish. She had no contact with Jews in Winthrop or Wellesley, so Wayne couldn’t say what prompted her interest. Her diary entry for January 15 mentioned “trying to make a crazy statue of Hitler in the snow with no success.” Perhaps that swastika on the flagpole in Winthrop had caught her attention. Her diary entry for November 25, 1945, recounted a “very interesting” Sunday School talk by a Jewish girl about Jewish customs and beliefs. “She promised to take us to a Jewish Synagogue in the future. I had a beautiful time listening to her.” On January 25, 1946, a neighbor, Mr. Norton, took her to the Temple of Israel in Boston. The light in the shape of the Star of David entranced her, as did the impressive white marble pulpit and the Torah in the ark. She listened to a rabbi explaining Judaism. She was impressed. “I had a beautiful time,” she confided to her diary. She drew a kiddish cup, challah, and a Star of David.

School assignments like a “problem paper” on “Roman People’s Places, and Things” and the work for her Scout “World Knowledge Badge” meant that as she entered adolescence Sylvia Plath was already attuned to the history and geography that propelled her later work. By the age of twelve, Plath’s school curriculum included a social studies class that covered, for example, units on the Albany Plan of Union (an early effort to unite the American colonies in a common defense) and General Braddock’s North America campaign against the French during the Seven Years War. She drew several maps of the United States and mapped out important historical events like the Louisiana Purchase and the issuance of the Monroe Doctrine.

At twelve, Sylvia measured five feet three and one-half inches, weighed about ninety-five pounds, and was athletic, participating in volleyball, baseball, field hockey, and basketball, where she played the position of guard. She collected stamps from all over the world and exulted in a trip to  to purchase a stamp album at the Harris Stamp Company. She tended her own garden and marvelled how in the spring it looked “lovely as it is full of sprouting green leaves and sweet smelling, fresh overturned earth.” She watched birds. “I saw the most beautiful bird today,” she wrote in her diary. “It was a little smaller than a robin and had the most beautiful blue plumage and red breast. I found out later that it was a bluebird and the first I have seen this spring.”

On March 27, 1945, her class visited the Christian Science Monitor building where she saw the printing room and watched how the newspaper was cut and printed, an excursion she meticulously documented in her diary entry about a “magic afternoon.” Some of her first articles would be published in the Monitor. Her own diaries, profusely illustrated—sometimes in color—suggest the importance of book making to her. In the eighth grade, on the staff of her school publication, The Phillipian, she was determined to put out a “super magazine.”

*

The war was an ever-present part of young Sylvia’s life. She played a game called “Russia” about the German invasion of the Soviet Union. On April 11, 1945, she mentioned she was put in charge of Defense Stamps at school. The next day she recorded her shock: “ROOSEVELT DIES!,” adding: “He died, like Lincoln, soon—very soon before the peace treaty and end of a long, cruel war!” On August 8, 1945, Sylvia wrote in her diary: “Atom bomb!” She read that 60 percent of Hiroshima had been destroyed, but made no comment other than to report President Truman’s statement that nuclear energy could be used for both destructive and constructive purposes.

On August 14, at 7:00 p.m., Sylvia heard on the radio the “official word…that Pres. Truman has received the note from Japan saying ‘We surrender unconditionally.’ The end of World War II!!!!!! How the people shouted! How the whistles blew. At night we set off firecrackers and rockets. We all thank God for answering our prayers.” The war penetrated her consciousness in other ways too. DPs, as displaced persons were then called, appear in a diary entry describing how she joined a group of girls dressed in “old rags” who “went to one house to pretend we were refugees, but, fortunately, (for us, probably), no one was home.” Does it make too much of this early effort to say she was already impersonating the persecuted, even if others would be offended and would call a poem like “Daddy” a despicable act of appropriation?

Sylvia read widely in teen and young adult novels that exposed her to many different cultures and to European and world history. On September 23, 1945, she mentions finishing A Sea between Us, reviewed in Commentary. This novel, by Lavinia R. Davis, struck close to home: “The heroine encounters the dragon of anti-Semitic prejudice early in the story during a visit to her fiancé’s family in a locality resembling Cape Cod.” The reviewer concluded: “For the problem of anti-Semitic prejudice, long underground in American life, to have forced its way through the pasteboard walls of a story for girls probably indicates that its pros and cons are more largely discussed today than many of us realize. It is comforting to learn even from a young ladies’ handbook that our society’s mores still denounce discrimination against Jews as unfair and undemocratic.”

*

Wayne Sterling remembered a bike ride in which he discussed with Sylvia the suicide of a Wellesley student who had hung himself from a tree. Sylvia seemed mainly concerned with what it would be like to be “almost dead”—a curious phrase that calls to mind her later interest in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Man Who Died,” about a resurrected Christ-like figure, and also, of course, her own “Lady Lazarus,” which suggests the speaker has a gift for coming back from the dead. Was Plath, with the early death of her father, already drawn to near-death experiences and beginning to think of life as a series of resurrections? This is the premise of Connie Palmen’s biographical novel about Plath and Hughes, Your Story, My Story.

Plath’s early diaries (1944–1947), studded with exclamation marks in many entries, and her letters and postcards from camp to her mother and Warren express an exuberant personality, eager to share her adventures and pleasures with her family. Warren and Aurelia reciprocated and Sylvia rejoiced in their “fat” and “meaty” letters that other campers envied. She made going to camp seem like a family enterprise, and that dynastic delight carries through right to her final days in England, when she wrote home wishing that newly married Warren or his wife could join her.

Her desire to assemble a salon, a group of likeminded souls, is reminiscent of her days at camp when she celebrated in letters and diaries the new friends that formed a circle around her. She began diary entries “Dear Diary,” as if addressing an alter ego and putting her life in order. “Dear Diary—you’re one of the ‘musts’ for peace of mind,” she wrote on October 11, 1945. Sometimes she wrote as if addressing a future self: On April 29, 1946, she announced: “Today the most wonderful thing happened!” She had sent in a “picturesque speech” to The Reader’s Digest: “A milkweed parachute hitchhikes on a passing breeze.” To her diary, she confessed “It may sound amateurish to you later, but to me it sounded pretty good.”

Entering her teens, diary entries no longer are studded with quite as many exclamation marks. She was developing a remarkable vocabulary, composing a poem, “A Winter Sunset,” that describes a sky of “copen shades.” Ice on the trees shimmers like diamonds. Teachers noticed her talent. Mrs. Warren told her she had a “flair” for English. “She firmly believes I have a talent for oral talks,” Sylvia recorded in her diary for February 12, 1946. A month later, Mrs. Warren took her aside and told her any professor would regard her work highly and she could apply to college as a scholarship student. But like most students, she tired of the school regimen: “Ugh! I am getting very eager for vacation,” she confided to her diary on March 25.

Was Plath, with the early death of her father, already drawn to near-death experiences and beginning to think of life as a series of resurrections?

Some days were just ecstatic. Coasting with Warren on the playground: “We had a super time. The hill rose shining, white and vacant. We flew down and the stinging wind brought tears to our eyes. It was glorious!” She drew a picture and wrote: “I’ll never forget the feeling of those silver runners slashing through the crusty snow!” These early revelries in snow would in just a few years dissolve into the symbolism of a numbing snow/cold that would haunt her later letters and depressions. In “Tulips at Dawn,” a poem written on the cusp of 1947/48, she speaks of plunging into the “depths of austere whiteness,” and of “white flashes of cold” lancing her wings, a “captive / Of white worlds.”

Sylvia liked to write about cooking in Food class—quite a variety of desserts, sandwiches, and main dishes—not to mention making her favorite molasses cookies at home (“yum yum”). She also took up knitting. On January 28, 1946, she recorded a visit to an Observatory: “I will never forget my first view of Saturn through the telescope! I expected a little point of light and gasped as I saw the three rings of moonlets whirling about the silvery planet.” Like other bright young girls of her generation such as Susan Sontag, Plath enthused over Richard Halliburton’s travel books: The Royal Road to Romance, The Flying Carpet, The Glorious Adventure, and New Worlds to Conquer. “They’re full of lovely expressions and descriptions,” she wrote to a friend. When a schoolmate lent her Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels with a picture of him on the back, she confessed: “I am in love with him. I feel as though I understand him. (Being on his fourth book.)”

But another kind of adventure also appealed to her. On April 8, 1946, she had her first dream about the “lives and works” of American artists. Her imagination took another turn with mystery-horror stories like “The Mummy’s Tomb,” which began: “[A] gloomy atmosphere of foreboding pervaded the chill air.” She added a sentence to her friend Margot’s horror story: “The delicious smell of frying flesh reached my nostrils.” She hoped that after camp was over, she could spend part of the summer with Margot: “Can’t you just see us lying on soft pine needles,” she wrote to a friend who also wrote stories, “and writing best-sellers in the quiet serenity of the woods?”

But it wasn’t ever just a make-believe world for her: In a Memorial Day school assembly (May 29, 1946), a soldier spoke about “incidents of war and victory overseas, not forgetting to mention the long rows of white crosses filling the many green clearings holding the American and allied dead. It was really quite sad. Oh! but I do hope that there will be no more wars”—a sentiment she expressed many times in her diaries, and a few years later in an antiwar poem, “Seek No More the Young,” inspired by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, depicting the “iron men” who fall limp on “spattered stone” with “eyes glazed blind.” She felt “very strongly about the subject of world peace,” she asserted in an April 2, 1947, diary entry: “I felt as if I had suddenly come into contact with the turbulent political world outside when Carrie showed us the paper, among those distributed by the Socialist party…I was gripped by a cold, tense excitement that made me and my ideas an important part of the chaos in the world today.”

With only the chirping of purple grackles, and the sight of her Grampy’s “cheery pile” of “treasured compost,” she wondered how “murder and ugly quarrels” could go on in such a “beautiful world.” But then a fire engine came “screeching around the corner.” She would remain the same, more than a decade later, cultivating her own garden in her Court Green country home retreat, thrusting her hands in the soil while worrying about the strontium 90 radioactive fallout in mother’s milk.

Excerpted from The Making of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson, Copyright © 2024 by Carl Rollyson. Published by University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved.

https://lithub.com/how-a-young-sylvia-plath-found-her-literary-voice-through-diary-keeping/ 

Elizabeth II’s final diary entry revealed

From telegraph.co.uk/royal-family

Late Queen’s last words in journal, two days before her death, were typically ‘factual and practical’

Queen Elizabeth II kept a diary throughout her reign but said she had time only to record events Credit: Jane Barlow/PA

Elizabeth II was still keeping a private diary until two days before her death, with a “factual and practical” final entry, a biographer has found.

The late Queen, who died on Sept 8 2022 at the age of 96, recorded that “Edward came to see me”, in reference to Sir Edward Young, her private secretary, and made notes about the swearing-in of new Privy Council members.

She made the entry at Balmoral, where she held a final audience with Liz Truss, who was then prime minister, before she “slipped away” in her sleep two days later, said Robert Hardman, the royal biographer.

Hardman, who discovered the diary while researching updated chapters for his book about the King, said that the monarch was now following in his mother’s footsteps by keeping a factual diary.

The late Queen’s journal was famously a record of her activities, rather than laying out her thoughts and feelings. It was intended to jog her memory and keep a note of her working life for the archives.

Prince Charles, pictured at Highgrove in 1986, kept a more reflective diary before becoming King Credit: Tim Graham/Getty

She once told Kenneth Rose, the society diarist: “I have no time to record conversations, only events.”

“It transpires that she was still writing it at Balmoral two days before her death,” Hardman wrote in his new book. “Her last entry was as factual and practical as ever.

“It could have been describing another normal working day starting in the usual way – ‘Edward came to see me’ – as she noted the arrangements which her private secretary, Sir Edward Young, had made for the swearing-in of the new ministers of the Truss administration.”

Since becoming monarch, the book states, the King has followed his mother’s policy of not giving interviews and of keeping a practical diary.

“He doesn’t write great narrative diaries like he used to,” a senior courtier discloses, but “scribbles down his recollections and reflections” on the events of the day.

The new style, Hardman said, is “not quite as self-analytical, humorous and readable as the journal he kept as a prince”.

Some of those entries have already been read by the public, with an extract of his frank thoughts on the handover of Hong Kong leaked to a newspaper in 2006.

King’s cancer diagnosis

The new edition of the book also relays how Buckingham Palace reacted to the King’s cancer diagnosis earlier this year, suggesting aides were not so alarmed by the prognosis that they moved to update funeral plans.

“Eyes are firmly on the present,” Hardman writes. “Though all royal funeral arrangements have always been routinely reviewed (by military and government planners) as a matter of course, it is both significant and reassuring to learn that there was no call to the master of such ceremonies, the Earl Marshal, at any stage during the dark days of early 2024.

“The King’s own valedictory arrangements have now, officially, been upgraded to Operation London Bridge, mirroring those of Elizabeth II.”

The new Prince of Wales has taken on the code name “Menai Bridge” from his father, replacing his previous Operation Clare Bridge, after the crossing over the River Cam, during his time as Duke of Cambridge.

On the future of the King’s beloved home of Highgrove, where he spent much of his time recuperating from cancer, one “close ally” of the King suggested it would make an ideal “Museum of King Charles III” in years to come.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2024/11/07/queen-elizabeth-iis-final-diary-entry-revealed/ 

On Being a Writer in Wales: John Osmond

From nation.cymru

John Osmond

If I were to offer one piece of advice to an aspiring young writer it would be simply this: Keep a diary!

I’m about midway through the second volume of a documentary novel about the period between the 1970s and 1990s, trying to explain how the overwhelming defeat in the 1979 referendum turned into the Yes vote that established the National Assembly in 1997, less than twenty years later.

If I had kept a diary during that period my task would be a lot easier.

As it is I’m having to rely a good deal on memory which is notoriously unreliable. For instance, if you were around do you remember what you were doing during March 1984? That’s an especially important moment for my purposes since it was the month that the Miners’ Strike began.

Defeat

In searching for reasons that explain what happened between the two referendums I’m convinced that the Miners’ Strike played a critical part. It was, of course, another defeat.

But in Wales the defeat was experienced very differently to the way it occurred in England and Scotland. But more than that, I believe it shifted attitudes fundamentally.

To begin with there was strong opposition at most of the Welsh pitheads in a show of hands, and with good reason. Striking in the Spring with summer ahead and coal stocks piled high was, to say the least, an inopportune moment.

More fundamentally, a year earlier when all 31 pits across south Wales had struck to defend threatened Lewis Merthyr in the Rhondda, there had been no solidarity from the richer English coalfields which voted against support.

Militant

Yet when the strike was fully underway, the Welsh coalfield proved the most militant, sending pickets in military-style operations across Britain. Moreover, miners in Wales remained solid when elsewhere across Britain they drifted back to work.

And then, in early 1985, when the strike became untenable, it was the Welsh miners who put the survival of their union first, and led an orderly return to work.

In all of this the Welsh miners acted in unison, but at the end found themselves abandoned as mass closures ensued.

It was a bitter lesson. When it comes to the crunch we only have ourselves to rely on.

For me the sentiment was summed up by a miner at Cwm Colliery, near Llantrisant some four miles south of Pontypridd. At the time I was working with HTV’s Wales This Week current affairs programme which followed the fortunes of Cwm during the strike. When it was over one of the miners we featured told us he had started learning Welsh. Asked why he said, ‘The language is all we have left.’

Resonant

His response stayed with me as resonant of the strike’s impact, not only on the mining communities directly engaged, but on Wales as a whole. If I had kept a diary I would surely have recorded this, and my feelings about it. I recall sensing in a somewhat inchoate way that the strike was a momentous episode. But, of course, living in the moment you have no idea of what is to come and how a train of events links the past and present to the future.

Delving into memoirs and archives forty years later, one is left grasping at fragments to support the conviction that the strike was indeed a turning point, the hinge on which history turned in favour of devolution.

Hywel Francis, who chaired the Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities in 1984-85, certainly thought so and makes the point in his account of the strike, History on our Side. But again his perspective is one of hindsight. Hywel died in 2021 so it is too late to explore his understanding in greater depth. If only I had kept that diary.

I did keep one much later for two short periods. The first was during 2006 in the period leading to the 2007 Assembly election. A small group of us in Plaid Cymru came together to propagate the argument that we should accept the need for cross-party collaboration if Labour’s seemingly perpetual dominance of Welsh politics was to end. If Welsh democracy was to be meaningful the electorate had to be presented with a realistic prospect of an alternative government.

It was, of course, controversial since it meant Plaid being willing to enter a coalition with the Welsh Conservatives, albeit that in those days they were a much more Welsh-aligned breed. And, for a fleeting moment in the wake of the 2007 Assembly election, it did seem that the so-called Rainbow Alliance between Plaid, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats might be possible.

In fact, a first edition of the London Times announced that Plaid’s Ieuan Wyn Jones was to be the new First Minister of Wales. In the event he turned out to be Deputy First Minister to Rhodri Morgan in a coalition with Labour.

                                                                                                                                                            John Osmond

Strategic

The second period when I began keeping a diary was in October 2018. I had just completed the first volume of my novel, Ten Million Stars are Burning, which took my story to 1979 when, totally unexpectedly, Adam Price asked me to become his Special Adviser following his election as leader of Plaid Cymru. I became immersed in a project Adam had to hand.

He convinced me that, given a fair wind and some strategic vision there was a chance that Plaid could lead a government following the 2021 Senedd election. This seemed important to inject a new energy into Welsh democracy, and was enough to entice me away from my novel.

The diary covers the six-month period of what Adam Price called our first hundred days. As they reached their end, it looked for a dizzying moment as if we were indeed on course to achieve our objective of leading a minority government. Adam’s leadership was established, and the party was doing well in the opinion polls, well enough it seemed to reach our goal.

Then the diary stops. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that subconsciously I realised that if it continued, I would be recording something completely different to the project we had started upon so optimistically six months earlier. Most immediately was the fall-out from Brexit, a maelstrom and calamity that sucked the lifeblood from forward planning.

Scarcely had that been settled, at least for the time being by the December 2019 ‘Get Brexit Done’ election, when we were overtaken by the Covid 19 pandemic. This was a further calamitous event, overwhelming in its impact. The combined effect was to throw the idea of a Plaid-led minority government completely off course. Somehow, we had to find an alternative, more realisable objective. Following the year-long production of our manifesto for the May 2021 Senedd election, this became the Co-operation Agreement.

This diary is a core component of my new book The Politics of Co-Opposition: The Inside Story of the 2021-24 Co-Operation Agreement Between Plaid Cymru and Welsh Labour.

Beguiling

In its own way the Agreement turned out be as a beguiling project as a Plaid-led Government might have been. Certainly, it introduced a completely new form of political engagement in the British Isles, in which opposing politicians co-operate on mutually agreed policies while maintaining their positions as government and opposition. Termed by academics ‘Contract Parliamentarianism’, it drew on precedents in Sweden, New Zealand and Malaysia.

It resulted in significant measures being introduced across 46 policy areas. These included free school meals for all primary school pupils, expanding free childcare to all two-year-olds, action on the second homes crisis blighting rural Wales, and reforming the Senedd.

The latter involved an increase in its Members from 60 to 96 and a fully proportional electoral system which will be used in the 2026 Senedd election. I’m not sure how much of this might have been achieved by a Plaid minority government, with an angry Labour Opposition resisting every move. Certainly, Senedd reform – which required a two-thirds majority – would have been off limits.

Looking back the episode fully justifies that brief period following October 2018 when I kept a diary, which gives an insight into the circumstances which persuaded Plaid’s leadership that they needed a new trajectory to take Wales forward. It’s also confirmation, to me at least, that I should have kept a diary for much longer, in fact for the whole of my working life.

The Politics of Opposition is published by the Welsh Academic Press.

It is being launched at a Wales Governance Centre event at the Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University, Cathays Park, Cardiff, at 6pm for 6.30pm on Wednesday 6 November 2024, in which John Osmond will be in conversation with Professor Richard Wyn Jones, Director of the Wales Governance Centre. Free tickets to attend the event are available here.

https://nation.cymru/culture/on-being-a-writer-in-wales-john-osmond/