Edna’s Diary: the background

Sometime in 2012 Harvey Pitcher asked me if I would give a talk the following March to Sheringham Stroke Group, of which he was Secretary. It was an attractive invitation, especially as there is a history of Stroke on my mother’s side of the family. However, there was a problem: Harvey wanted me to talk about growing chrysanthemums and bring some blooms along for distribution afterwards, but by March even my Christmas varieties would be over! What to offer as a subject instead?

My mother had died in 2009, I had just finished sorting her papers, and I decided to talk about ‘My Mother the Writer’. As a child, she had wanted to be a writer and she felt she could have become a professional writer. Her aspiration, however, suffered a devastating discouragement at school: she was always looking for original approaches to the essays set but on one occasion the teacher savaged her essay in front of the class, tore it up, and binned it. My mother told me that after that she only wrote ‘to order’, as she was taught and expected to; and she got high marks…

Between the ages of thirty and seventy she had occasional letters and small notices published in the national and local press, but as far as I know she did not write anything else. For instance, she certainly did not keep a diary, never had done, and found the whole idea boring. Things changed radically in 1999 (when she was seventy-nine), because a local history project in her home town of Sandwich encouraged her to compose her memoirs. These were well structured, written with terrific narrative confidence, and as she finished the chapters she sent them on to me in Cambridge, where we read them aloud round the kitchen table and were delighted.

I thought the members of a Stroke Club might be interested by this story, amused and moved by excerpts from my mother’s memoirs, and I could finish by quoting from the article ‘My Hip Operation’ which she wrote in hospital in 2002 and published in the magazine Yours, as well as from the diary she kept for six years after completing eighteen months of language therapy following her stroke at the end of 2002.

I’m glad to say, the Stroke Group audience did enjoy the extracts that I read from my mother’s memoirs — partly, perhaps, because many of them were not much younger than her and their experience of pre-War Britain chimed with hers. We had a good discussion afterwards, during which I got to know all my listeners and the circumstances of their stroke (sometimes assisted by the carer accompanying them). Stroke Clubs, however, are a network, loosely coordinated by Stroke Association UK, and in next to no time I found myself invited to give the talk to six others in East Anglia.

It may be because ‘My Mother the Writer’ ended with very short, humorous extracts from her post-stroke diary, but I began to feel that the passages I read out from my mother’s memoirs were too long for all of my audience to assimilate, and that what she wrote following her 89% recovery from aphasia was of greater interest to them. When I was invited back to four of the clubs, therefore, I decided to give a talk entitled ‘Edna’s Diary: The Story So Far’, based on my reading to date of half of the total 335,000 words. This talk rollicked along. The story of my mother’s fight to recover her communication faculty, involving both an NHS language therapist, Fleur Taylor, twice a week, and her family and friends the rest of the time, was of great immediate interest to Stroke Club members. I perceived that my mother’s post-stroke diary could be an inspiration to others.

In the intervening seven years, I have often thought about how I would publish a short selection from the diary, but it was lockdown that forced my hand. It is awful that despite all my efforts I have been unable to trace Fleur Taylor and invite her to write the preface, as it was she who proposed the diary to my mother and was my mother’s first editor. However, the Stroke Association have supported the project and here we now are: it is on sale through Amazon for £5, all proceeds will go to the Stroke Association, and publication serendipitously precedes National Aphasia Awareness Month (June).

The image above is of the frontispiece to Edna’s Diary. It is the most vibrant photograph of my mother as a young woman that I know, and it has its own story. It was taken by Erich Reisfeld, but I abbreviated his forename because I thought he might be confused with the ‘Eric’ who features in the first entry of the Diary. Erich Reisfeld was a Viennese Jew born in 1917 who just escaped the Reich before war was declared. He spent several months at the Kitchener Camp in Sandwich with 4000 other Jewish men before moving to his desired destination, the United States.  The young people of Sandwich, including my mother, made many friends amongst these refugees. In 1958 Erich Reisfeld returned to Sandwich with his wife, visited his old friends, and took this photograph of my mother (I remember him well). Earlier this year, I discovered on the Web that his papers from 1936-39 are held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.