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| The Girl from Station X: My Mother's Unknown Life by Elisa Segrave – review | The Girl from Station X: My Mother's Unknown Life by Elisa Segrave – review |
| (2 months later) | |
| When Elisa Segrave was sorting through her elderly mother's possessions, she found a hoard of diaries, dating from the 1930s until the 1950s, which she had no qualms about reading. "Not one had the word 'private' on the cover," she reasoned, and her mother, Anne, who had Alzheimer's, wasn't cogent enough to be consulted. As she read, she became gripped by the utterly unrecognisable personality behind the words, but also by a surprising sense of having received a gift: the diaries allowed her for the first time to hear the "true voice" of a woman who had never tried to communicate with her daughter in person. | When Elisa Segrave was sorting through her elderly mother's possessions, she found a hoard of diaries, dating from the 1930s until the 1950s, which she had no qualms about reading. "Not one had the word 'private' on the cover," she reasoned, and her mother, Anne, who had Alzheimer's, wasn't cogent enough to be consulted. As she read, she became gripped by the utterly unrecognisable personality behind the words, but also by a surprising sense of having received a gift: the diaries allowed her for the first time to hear the "true voice" of a woman who had never tried to communicate with her daughter in person. |
| Anne Hamilton-Grace came from a privileged family – they had money, nannies, idyllic Sussex and Berkshire homes. But a tragedy in 1955 – the drowning of Elisa's younger brother – marked the end of normal family life. The dead son was mourned and idolised while the three remaining children watched their mother slide into alcoholism: even aged five, Elisa's most regular contact with her parent was taking her a morning Alka-Seltzer. | Anne Hamilton-Grace came from a privileged family – they had money, nannies, idyllic Sussex and Berkshire homes. But a tragedy in 1955 – the drowning of Elisa's younger brother – marked the end of normal family life. The dead son was mourned and idolised while the three remaining children watched their mother slide into alcoholism: even aged five, Elisa's most regular contact with her parent was taking her a morning Alka-Seltzer. |
| By 1991, when Elisa faced the double crisis of marriage breakdown and breast cancer, her mother's indifference became too hard to bear and she signed off emotionally, watching Anne's decline from addiction into senility with a degree of detachment. The discovery of the diaries allowed her to reverse this disturbing process. The "vague old woman in slippers" was replaced by a vigorous and resilient person "becoming more and more visible as I immerse myself in her past, her inner mind". | By 1991, when Elisa faced the double crisis of marriage breakdown and breast cancer, her mother's indifference became too hard to bear and she signed off emotionally, watching Anne's decline from addiction into senility with a degree of detachment. The discovery of the diaries allowed her to reverse this disturbing process. The "vague old woman in slippers" was replaced by a vigorous and resilient person "becoming more and more visible as I immerse myself in her past, her inner mind". |
| The teenage diaries held relatively few surprises. Anne's youth was one of travel, hunt balls, shopping and breathless crushes – all on girls. Though she was fixed on finding a husband, Anne discovered she didn't really like men at all: "Isn't it odd?" Then the war broke out, and Anne was quick to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. One wonders how helpful to the nation she was at first: aged 25, she had never boiled a kettle or washed her own hair, but soon was performing tasks "very similar to those of her family's two chauffeurs", as Segrave wryly remarks. After training in codes and ciphers, she was given a series of posts in intelligence, at "Station X" (the Bletchley Park decryption headquarters), at Bomber Command and later in Germany just before VE Day. | The teenage diaries held relatively few surprises. Anne's youth was one of travel, hunt balls, shopping and breathless crushes – all on girls. Though she was fixed on finding a husband, Anne discovered she didn't really like men at all: "Isn't it odd?" Then the war broke out, and Anne was quick to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. One wonders how helpful to the nation she was at first: aged 25, she had never boiled a kettle or washed her own hair, but soon was performing tasks "very similar to those of her family's two chauffeurs", as Segrave wryly remarks. After training in codes and ciphers, she was given a series of posts in intelligence, at "Station X" (the Bletchley Park decryption headquarters), at Bomber Command and later in Germany just before VE Day. |
| This is the part of Anne's life that her daughter knew almost nothing about and that makes her feel "proud – almost triumphant". Though Anne doesn't write much about her day-to-day work in naval surveillance at Bletchley, the physical conditions are vivid: the food, the mess rooms, the "continuous running between the watch and our room to check up on maps and cards". She was able and reliable, despite feeling "strung up emotionally" the whole time. "Was this young woman leading a parade past the King really my mother?" Segrave muses, with a mixture of admiration and envy. | This is the part of Anne's life that her daughter knew almost nothing about and that makes her feel "proud – almost triumphant". Though Anne doesn't write much about her day-to-day work in naval surveillance at Bletchley, the physical conditions are vivid: the food, the mess rooms, the "continuous running between the watch and our room to check up on maps and cards". She was able and reliable, despite feeling "strung up emotionally" the whole time. "Was this young woman leading a parade past the King really my mother?" Segrave muses, with a mixture of admiration and envy. |
| The nature and importance of the work made relationships at the base particularly intense, even feverish. Anne was proposed to 20 times before 1945 but her female friendships meant most to her, especially fellow Waaf Millie; she found parting from her agonising. "I must write all this," Anne confided to her diary, "because I feel so strongly that I cannot talk about it to anyone … the world would think we were suffering from odd Freudian diseases and perhaps we are." Reading this years later, Segrave wonders about her mother's sexuality and the surprising passions that predated life as a highly conventional wife and mother. Apart from her "pure" and "perfect" feelings for friends such as Millie, Anne was constantly drawn to out-and-out "deviants" and had a strange, stifled relationship during the war with one psychotic sapphist who may or may not have pushed her other girlfriend down a lift shaft. | The nature and importance of the work made relationships at the base particularly intense, even feverish. Anne was proposed to 20 times before 1945 but her female friendships meant most to her, especially fellow Waaf Millie; she found parting from her agonising. "I must write all this," Anne confided to her diary, "because I feel so strongly that I cannot talk about it to anyone … the world would think we were suffering from odd Freudian diseases and perhaps we are." Reading this years later, Segrave wonders about her mother's sexuality and the surprising passions that predated life as a highly conventional wife and mother. Apart from her "pure" and "perfect" feelings for friends such as Millie, Anne was constantly drawn to out-and-out "deviants" and had a strange, stifled relationship during the war with one psychotic sapphist who may or may not have pushed her other girlfriend down a lift shaft. |
| The chance to go to Brussels with the RAF towards the end of the war came as a welcome change for Anne, who left an administrative job at Bomber Command in 1944 on the verge of a nervous breakdown (the cause of which isn't clear). Belgium and Germany seemed considerably less war-ravaged than London, and despite the shattered bridges on the Weser, the lorries full of displaced people, the knocked-out tanks and the burnt-out cars, much of life seemed to be going on as usual, with the women busy harvesting and someone ploughing with a donkey. | The chance to go to Brussels with the RAF towards the end of the war came as a welcome change for Anne, who left an administrative job at Bomber Command in 1944 on the verge of a nervous breakdown (the cause of which isn't clear). Belgium and Germany seemed considerably less war-ravaged than London, and despite the shattered bridges on the Weser, the lorries full of displaced people, the knocked-out tanks and the burnt-out cars, much of life seemed to be going on as usual, with the women busy harvesting and someone ploughing with a donkey. |
| Segrave presents these diaries with her own full commentary, rather like someone sitting at your elbow as you look through a photograph album: "My mother emerges well here"; "I was impressed here by my mother's forcefully expressed feminism"; "I was shocked – and excited". It is not surprising to learn that Segrave shared the diaries with her therapist, nor that she now considers some sort of reparation to have been made for the years of cryptic maternal silences. | Segrave presents these diaries with her own full commentary, rather like someone sitting at your elbow as you look through a photograph album: "My mother emerges well here"; "I was impressed here by my mother's forcefully expressed feminism"; "I was shocked – and excited". It is not surprising to learn that Segrave shared the diaries with her therapist, nor that she now considers some sort of reparation to have been made for the years of cryptic maternal silences. |
| This double layering makes the book a rich repository of missed and mixed messages – the natural reticence of parents and children to reveal their private lives to each other, the daughter's discovery of documentation, her mother's forgetting. Now that Anne is dead, Segrave is more naturally curator of her memories, but how strange to feel she had "rights" over them while the owner was still alive. "Well done," she said, on a trip to the nursing home following the discovery. "Well done for writing those diaries." One can only hope her mother didn't understand. | This double layering makes the book a rich repository of missed and mixed messages – the natural reticence of parents and children to reveal their private lives to each other, the daughter's discovery of documentation, her mother's forgetting. Now that Anne is dead, Segrave is more naturally curator of her memories, but how strange to feel she had "rights" over them while the owner was still alive. "Well done," she said, on a trip to the nursing home following the discovery. "Well done for writing those diaries." One can only hope her mother didn't understand. |
| What remains unknowable is whether Anne kept her record of these particular years deliberately, whether there was more diary than the 30 surviving notebooks, and who or what she wrote it for. Segrave is understandably impressed by the parts of her mother's life that had never been shared between them, the exciting wartime career, the youthful ardour, the unrecognisable liveliness and focus, but a disinterested reader might well have come across that pile of notebooks and read them quite differently – as a history of a torturedly closeted homosexual, for instance, or of changes in upper-middle-class life. Elisa herself recalls a former Bletchley intelligence officer telling her that Anne "had written some very interesting diaries". What is one to make of that? Who else had read the diaries, and for what purpose? Perhaps, when it comes to secrets, you neither discover nor keep exactly the ones you intend. | What remains unknowable is whether Anne kept her record of these particular years deliberately, whether there was more diary than the 30 surviving notebooks, and who or what she wrote it for. Segrave is understandably impressed by the parts of her mother's life that had never been shared between them, the exciting wartime career, the youthful ardour, the unrecognisable liveliness and focus, but a disinterested reader might well have come across that pile of notebooks and read them quite differently – as a history of a torturedly closeted homosexual, for instance, or of changes in upper-middle-class life. Elisa herself recalls a former Bletchley intelligence officer telling her that Anne "had written some very interesting diaries". What is one to make of that? Who else had read the diaries, and for what purpose? Perhaps, when it comes to secrets, you neither discover nor keep exactly the ones you intend. |
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