Status Updates From Love is Blue: A Wartime Diary

Meets Julian MacLaren-Ross at a hotel bar in Felixstowe

Friday, 7th July
Flying bombs on London now by day and night. My mother didn’t want me to come on leave, but I came anyhow, because I hoped Hamish might ring up before he was posted overseas. The devastation is dreadful, so many familiar places ruined and blackened. Ma is on night watch at Dovehouse Street, so I go along to help out. There are lots of casualties.

Monday, 5th June [1944]
Enormous excitement! . . . I am on night watch and there is tremendous activity, our carriers and gliders have landed behind the German defences in Normandy. Thousands of bombers are crossing the French coast. . . Everyone came in and sat around the wireless to hear it. It really was terrifically exciting, D-Day at last!

. . . what had Stefan had been saying to her.

‘He told me a lot of terrible things. It is much, much worse in the camps than we ever imagined. Do you realize what they are doing to children in Dachau?’ She went on to tell me stories, things I can hardly believe, but Stefan has seen it with his own eyes. It made me feel quite sick with anger. Later I could hear Oscar crying in the night.

Sunday, 22nd August [1943]
. . . a very nice man called Stefan Zeizel we’re staying in the house. He is a brilliant pianist, an Austrian Jew who spent three years in Dachau.

Oscar seemed totally fascinated by him, they spent an awful lot of time talking to each other in corners. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it seemed to have a strange affect on Oscar, who became very quiet and subdued. [Small wonder.]

Monday, 8th December
The [pejorative term for Japanese] have dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor, and now the Yanks are finally in the war! What a relief not to be on our own anymore.

Monday, 22nd September [1941]
. . . Germans forging ahead in Russia. . . Flight, who fancies himself as a student of history, says the buggers had better watch out as it’s beginning to snow there and look what happened to Napoleon.
[Prescient guy!]

Saturday, 10th May [1941]
The same night they had a huge raid on London and got the Houses of Parliament and the Abbey — but we got thirty-three German planes. I rang up Mummy and thank God she was all right.

There is not much you can do to make a WAAF’s uniform look sexy (apart from pulling your belt in till you can hardly breathe), but jumping up and down on your cap to loosen up the brim does help to give it a rakish air.