The Girl from Station X by Elisa Segrave

the only person ever to be drowned there, I am glad I am not going there now.
    Luckily, the girls were scooped out of the sea at Bantham by two lifeguards, but others in my family had not been so lucky.
    When I tell friends and acquaintances that my mother has written over thirty diaries, eighteen of them about the six years of the Second World War, they express amazement. How
wonderful! Did she write them every day? How did she manage it? To me, this feat is nothing special, since I too have been writing diaries, like her, from the age of fifteen, without knowing that
my mother had done it before me. Maybe I am more her daughter than I had realised. What matters is that when I had thought it was too late, my mother has, unwittingly, thrown me a lifeline, linking
herself to me.
    I have no qualms about reading her diaries; not one has the word PRIVATE on its cover. Perhaps she did secretly want them to be read, even to be published. In that case,
who more suitable than I, her only daughter, a diarist myself, to be their reader?
    I feel that I have the right to scrutinise every word, perhaps because my mother has never communicated with me properly in person. I quickly discover that I feel so strongly about her diaries
that I know I would fight for possession of them, I would try to rescue them from fire, I would barter my other things for them. Instinctively, I know how important they were for my mother, as
important as my own diaries are for me. They are the one creation of her life that is really hers, the most personal thing, her true voice. And, unlike so many other aspects of her life, they
haven’t disintegrated.
    I am soon convinced that, like me, my mother wanted to be a writer, but she was too shy to talk of it and did not have the willpower or confidence to persist. However, it took determination to
write those entries nearly every single day of the war, besides doing a full-time job, often involving night duty. I find myself experiencing admiration, something new for me in connection with my
mother.
    When I visit her now at Camelot, I find a vague old woman in slippers, a semi-invalid who is given mushed-up food on a spoon. But in the diaries, I find a different person; first, a lively and
mischievous girl, then, before and during the war, a vigorous and dynamic young woman. At first, in these new guises, my mother is a stranger to me, but steadily she walks towards me, becoming more
and more visible as I immerse myself in her past, her inner life. I am aware that, had she not lost her mind, I would not be reading these diaries now. I would not be getting to know my mother.
    There are twelve war diaries, then three written in Germany after the war in Europe ended. I find three after that, in lined school exercise books, then others written in America, from May 1946
till January 1947. But, to my disappointment, there are no diaries following these, none about how my mother met my father, nor their courtship, nor their wedding. And I can find only one about my
early childhood in Spain. Dismayingly, this even starts in mid-sentence: . . . flowers that smelled exactly like heather honey. On its cover, inside a little frame of ivy
leaves, my mother has written ‘SPAIN Volume VI, Anne Segrave’. Unlike the other diaries, all with beige or black covers, this SPAIN diary is purple with a red border, and very long and
narrow. This, seemingly my mother’s only surviving written record of my very early childhood, at once seems sweet to me, like heather honey. But it turns out to have no entries about our life
in Madrid. Instead, it begins on 26 August 1952, at Comillas, that seaside village in the north of Spain. I read that, instead of returning to Madrid after that summer holiday, on 9 September 1952
Raymond and I were put on a ship,
La Reina del Pacifico
, at Santander and sent back to England with Doreen, to stay at Knowle. My father was winding up his job as naval attaché and
would return home after