From 1 September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, to 10 August 1945, when the Americans dropped the second Atomic Bomb, Naomi Mitchison kept a diary at the request of the social research organisation, Mass-Observation. But what she wrote developed far beyond the limits of a social document. Naomi's life during wartime, spent in the fishing village of Carradale on Kintyre, was crowded with incident, and her attitudes to events were always forceful, original, and honest. She records her thoughts as a poet, novelist, and left-wing political writer; as a hater of war who believed that the war must nevertheless be fought; as a working farmer, driving tractors and hoeing turnips; and, not least, as a wife, mother, and friend, coping with her husband's enforced absence in London and her children's departure for schools and the services, and running a houseful of evacuees, Allied ex-POWs, and villagers. Above all, she writes as a woman of striking individuality and intelligence, acknowledging the particular problems of being female during the confusion and uncertainty of the war years.
- ISBN10 184212093X
- ISBN13 9781842120934
- Publish Date 17 August 2000 (first published 1 June 1985)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 15 April 2008
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Orion Publishing Co
- Imprint Weidenfeld & Nicolson History
- Edition 2nd Revised edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 352
- Language English