A Diary Without Dates

by Enid Bagnold

Enid Bagnold's account of her experience as a nurse during the First World War, was so critical of hospital administration that the military authorities arranged for her dismissal. Determined to help the war effort she went to France and worked as a volunteer driver.

Genres: World War I, Nonfiction, Memoir, History, Biography Memoir, 20th Century, Biography

84 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1917

About the author

British writer of novels and plays, best known for National Velvet and The Chalk Garden.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enid_Bag...

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enid Bagnold’s best known for her children’s book National Velvet which became a popular movie in the 1940s, and remains in print even now. In the years before WW1 Bagnold’s plan was to become an artist, she attended art school and trained under the renowned painter Sickert. Her lifestyle was quintessentially bohemian, she became part of literary circles that included Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West, and her later novels apparently unnerved Virginia Woolf enough to label her “a scallywag who married a very rich man.” But before this stage of her existence, still in her late twenties, her vision for her future was derailed by the outbreak of WW1 and, like many similar women, she volunteered to nurse the wounded. A Diary Without Dates is her unconventional memoir of her time at the Royal Herbert Hospital in the suburbs of London, covering part of 1916 and the early months of 1917. It’s a well-realised piece, imaginative, poetic, vivid and impressionistic, sometimes drily funny. Bagnold displays an attention to the minutiae of her surroundings that perhaps tracks back to her training in visual art; interrupting passages of lyrical descriptions with arresting, graphic images of the men inhabiting her wards, often in desperate pain or horrifically disfigured, bodies fractured, or limbs severed.

Bagnold’s everyday consists of dodging the authoritarian, more established nurses and officious hospital management. She works long hours in cold, inhospitable surroundings, trudging home through unlit woods and lanes filled with lovers, identifiable from the rosy gleam of their cigarettes as they huddle together in the shrubs and bushes. She’s often unforgiving in her assessments of the people she encounters at the hospital; despising the rich, frivolous women who visit purely to boast about their philanthropy; and shocked by the brusque, routine-obsessed, hospital staff. I wasn’t surprised to learn Bagnold was fired after this was published, it’s so openly critical, a far cry from the kind of patriotic spiel expected from women of her background. Bagnold herself is quite a difficult character, sometimes deeply compassionate and sympathetic, she can also be appallingly snobbish as well as prejudiced – her portrait of the hospital’s only Black patient Henry makes for deeply uncomfortable reading. Yet, overall, her recollections have a wonderful immediacy, incredibly effective both as narrative and social history. Although I don’t think this is likely to be as memorable as Vera Brittain’s much longer, far more comprehensive Testament of Youth; and I didn’t find it as viscerally gripping as Helen Zenna Smith’s (Evadne Price) Not So Quiet.

Rating: 3.5

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

They might have been the words of a young woman anxious about her lover, but they weren’t. They were the words of a nurse, who couldn’t shake off her concern for a gravely ill patient when she left work.

Enid Bagnold came from a very privileged background, she had been to art school, she had worked as a journalist, and when the Great War came she became a VAD, trained in first aid and simple nursing care in to work in military and convalescent hospitals.

‘Diary Without Dates’ is her account of the time she spent in one, unnamed, hospital. It’s not a diary in the usually expected form. There are, as the title suggests, no dates and no real clues to the passage of time; it is a simple, ongoing account of her experience; almost a stream of consciousness.

And so the background is a little fuzzy, but that is all to the good as it brings the details, the observations into sharp focus.

With limited skills, and limited resources there is not a great deal that Enid can do, but she takes care to do whatever she can and she enjoys the camaraderie that she finds with many of her colleagues.

She is critical of the professional nurses she works with finding them heartless, confounded that they seem untouched by the death and by the terrible injuries that they see. In time though she begins to understand the need to keep some degree of reserve, the need for self-preservation, but she never quite forgives what she sees as their lack of compassion.

She never loses her compassion for the men she looks after, never forgets that each man is an individual, with a life, a story, a family … And she finds herself horribly torn, between wanting more to do and not wanting to see more injured bodies, injured souls.

And that compassion makes her critical. Of the effort put into keeping up appearances for wealthy visitors. Of the differences in treatment for officers and enlisted men. Of the offhand treatment of many concerned relations …

But this isn’t a diatribe: it is a full account of one woman’s experience, one woman’s war.

Easier for her to speak out than some maybe, because her future was assured whether she had the job or not, because she could step out of the hospital into her old life at the end of every shift …

But it was brave to write what she did, while the war was still going on, and to take it to William Heinneman himself.

He published Diary Without dates in 1918, and Enid Bagnold was sacked for daring for it. She saw out the war as an ambulance driver, and then she married and found success as a novelist.

But this little book remains: one woman’s account of her war, written as she lived through it.

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

An almost dreamlike stream-of-consciousness journal of thoughts and brief descriptions. Enid Bagnold wrote it while working as a young VAD in a hospital near London during the Great War. A book I shall go on thinking about, I suspect, and an interesting contrast with Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth".

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not certain how much this truly was a diary and how much it was written purely for publication, but it has the feel of a diary, a woman of the middle classes nursing during WWI and musing over the experience of it and trying to figure out just what she thinks about it all. She was 24 when the war started, not so young or inexperienced, but the writing gives the impression of privilege and that she had not grappled much with trauma and death before she became a nurse. I liked it very much, although I missed the 'criticism of hospital administration' that got her fired -- perhaps by modern standards it was so mild it did not register for me?

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) · Rating 3 out of 5]

A curious little booklet. Judging by the "dedication" it was written more in anger than in sorrow. Apparently while working as a VAD in a hospital near London, she wrote voluminous letters to at least one friend who waspishly replied asking her why she didn't keep some of that for herself! Therefore this pamphlet of jottings.

Bagnold is best known today for National Velvet, which in spite of my love of children's books I could not finish. Twice. Few fans of that book probably know that she saw herself as the quintessential New Woman of the early part of the century, and yet she managed to fall into the same old traps, such as allowing an unattractive older (but rich and influential) man to "have the ultimate favour" in a private salon of London's Café Royale. She saw herself as a member of the Bloomsbury Group, but Woolf and other key members mistrusted her. Going by what she writes here, that's understandable. Katherine Mansfield she isn't.

Bagnold was very obviously writing for publication, or at least public consumption. I recognise the style from my teens; rather than a spontaneous outpouring of thought and emotion, you can feel that she hoped someone was reading over her shoulder, ready to be impressed--or at least struck. Which is the quickest way to turn prose brittle and false that I can think of, but there we are. She was also a strange mixture: on the one hand she loved the routine and order of hospital work, on the other she liked leaving and returning to her wealthy London friends' homes where servants draw her bath and she is treated like what she obviously really was--a member of the upper classes, used to every comfort and luxury. Not for nothing did she eventually become Lady Jones. She must have had some of her hospital writings published during the war, as apparently they caused her dismissal from the hospital (though I should think playing patty-fingers with one of the officer-patients probably had more to do with that.) Toward the end she speaks of all the nurses and sisters as "her enemies" in spite of how eager she was to please them at the beginning of her time there. She thinks no one can see that while sewing splints in slack periods, she spins out the work so she can sit there and...sit there. I bet the ward sister knew exactly what she was doing, though--they usually do. Of course her sewing is faaar superior to everyone else's--of course it is. In those days, that's what you were taught in finishing schools.

An interesting document of its time, but hardly representative. Her inherent feeling of superiority to everyone around her deadens the text for me. If Decca Mitford had been a VAD and written about it, I can imagine the result would have been something like this. I would much sooner recommend Testament of Youth. There is some good writing here, but sadly only loose threads and patches, nothing cohesive.

[Mirachil27 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Young Nurse in WWI Hospital

I was interested to read early work from Enid Bagnold, British author and playwright, most famous for National Velvet. The short work is written in a personal diary form which tells the inner feelings and impressions of a young nurse working in a military hospital during World War One. My favorite quote, appears as the nurse questions why the Sisters (Nursing Nuns) are so seemingly unfeeling in their treatment of the wounded soldiers. "How was she to live among her fellows?
Can one afford to disdain them? Can one steer happily with indifference? Must one, to be "liked", bend one's spirit to theirs? And, most disturbing question of all, is to be "liked" the final standard?
Whether to wear, or not to wear, a mask toward one's world? For there is so much that is unripe to show - change and uncertainty....." She is watching the Sisters and wondering if she too will have to be harder to survive in such a place.

Anyone with an interest in WWI, nursing, British authors of the 20s to the 60s will enjoy this book.

[Gabi Coatsworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chicago Jun 1979
A short, beautifully written, book about the author's work as a nurse in a military hospital in World War I. Her eye for detail, her longing to make a difference to the men she's caring for, and her knowledge that she can't always do so, make this a valuable contribution to the WW I canon.

[Moppet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exactly a hundred years ago, in the middle of World War One, Enid Bagnold was nursing wounded soldiers in a Victorian hospital near London. A Diary without Dates is a short, first-person, present-tense account of her experiences from the autumn of 1916 to the summer of 1917.

The lives of nurses at this time were very strictly regulated. They had very little free time and might be sent anywhere at any moment, as might the patients. Bagnold described hospital life as "an everlasting dislocation of combinations" and commented that "Like nuns, one must learn to do with no nearer friend than God."

Yet she found freedom in institutional life. The repetitive activity of laying trays or sewing splints helped her achieve what we would now call "mindfulness." And astutely she observed:

So long as I conform absolutely, not a soul will glance at my thoughts - few at my face. I have only to be silent and conform, and I might be in so far a land that even the eye of God had lost me.

Certainly the hospital had no idea that she was writing this book, and dismissed her as soon as it was published. They did not appreciate the critical eye Bagnold brought to her workplace. Moving from an officers' ward to one for "Tommies" (private soldiers) she noticed how differently the lower-ranking men were treated:

The thing that upset me most on coming into a "Tommies'" ward was the fact that instead of twenty-six lemons twice a day for the making of lemonade I now squeeze two into an old jug and hope for the best about the sugar.

She also noted that "there isn't that mystery which used to surround the officers' illnesses" - in other words, lower social status meant less entitlement to confidentiality. In one respect, however, officers and men seem to have been treated alike: they got very little pain relief in the daytime, although they were given something to help them sleep at night. Bagnold was frequently distressed not to be able to do more for them.

At the hospital Bagnold could see soldiers training in a nearby camp, and sometimes heard the noise of the guns across the Channel:

Now a lull and now a bombardment; again a lull, and then batter, batter, and the windows tremble. Is the lull when they go over the top?
I can only think of death tonight. I tried to think just now, "What is it, after all! Death comes anyway; this only hastens it." But that won't do; no philosophy helps the pain of death. It is pity, pity, pity, that I feel, and sometimes a sort of shame that I am here to write at all.

Bagnold's capacity to convey emotion and atmosphere with a few brilliantly chosen details reminds me of Sylvia Plath's journals. As the title suggests, the diary entries are undated, although her description of the aftermath of the Silvertown explosion of January 1917, and vignettes of the changing seasons, provide some landmarks. Her portrayal of hospital life is made up of a series of moments, vividly described and often centred round objects - the ladyfinger she slips off to eat in a dark corner during a long shift, the pillows which all have to be arranged the same way to impress visitors, the flag which covers a dead man being taken away on a stretcher.

She never mentions the name of the hospital, but Google revealed that it was the Royal Herbert Hospital, built in the 1860s in Woolwich and converted to flats in the 1990s. I found a plan of the hospital which helped explain her many references to "the long, the dim and lonely, corridor." This corridor was an important innovation in hospital design and was intended by Florence Nightingale, who helped plan the Royal Herbert, to provide air and light to the wards. In Bagnold's descriptions it takes on a Gothic, almost ghostly aspect, with its "blue gas-lamps hanging at intervals down the roof in a dwindling perspective." The lamps don't seem always to have been functioning, as she refers elsewhere to "the long walk down the corridor in almost total darkness, the vapour of the rain floating through every open door and window."

Despite all the gloom, there are moments of humour. Bagnold, who like many of the voluntary nurses had a well-to-do background, noted with amusement the role reversal when she went from drawing baths for patients to having one drawn for her by a maid: "It's like being turn and turn about maid and mistress." She captures the nurses discussing one particularly troublesome visitor:

We had a heated discussion today as to whether the old lady who leaves a tract beneath a single rose by each bedside could longer be tolerated.
"She is a nuisance," said the Sister; "the men make more noise afterwards because they set her hymns to ragtime."
"What good does it do them?" said the V.A.D., "...and I have to put the roses in water!"
I rode the highest horse of all: "Her inquiries about their souls are an impertinence. Why should they be bothered?"

Meanwhile the old lady toddled home, no doubt feeling she had done a good day's work. I could go on quoting this book forever, so suffice it to say that I recommend it to anyone who would like to travel back in time a hundred years for an hour or two.

[Mgb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tells a lot about war without mentioning any battles or politics. It is almost haunting in its simplicity. The author was part of the Voluntary Aid Detachment, worked nursing duties in a hospital during WWI, was fired(for publishing this diary?), became a driver for the military in France, and then went on to write National Velvet. Enid is fascinating.

[Jim Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a whole subset of books written by woman during WWI detailing their experiences. While they were not allowed to fight, they often saw the worst of the fighting’s aftermath. Their view is no less vital than the memoirs and novels written by the men at the front. Bagnold’s “Diary without Dates” is captivating because she is obviously not 100% behind the war effort and her work in a military hospital outside of England is laced with resentments against the other “sisters” and the damage and treatment of the men. It was written when she was 19 and includes a lot of teen angst, which somehow makes it more relatable and modern. It’s a quick read (It can be done in a few hours). It's not only a lovely piece of writing (for all its scatteredness), but also an important chronicle of the war years.

[Maud Van Keulen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read a book about the Great War in England. It shows another aspect of the war.

[Dimitri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zeker indringende impressies, maar zo onsamenhangend dat je naast de degelijke inleiding snakt naar wat Lynn MacDonald achtige context doorheen de bladzijden...

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

This debut book by Enid Bagnold was published in 1918. It really is a copy of her undated diary from time spent working in a hospital in England during WWI. She worked as a nurse’s aide, and saw all sorts of things that disturbed her about the hospital; things over and above the wounds the soldiers had received in combat. She didn’t like the cavalier attitude a great many of the nurses (‘sisters’) had toward their patients. In her opinion they didn’t seem to care if the men were in great pain or not, etc.

Enid was a woman of independent means, so she could afford to have this work published because it didn’t matter to her if she were then black-listed from the health care field. In fact, she went on to write many more books. Her best known work is National Velvet.

The diary entries were interesting slice-of-life snapshots of the inner workings of a WWI era wartime hospital. You could tell that the author got attached to some patients, and they to her. There were also some very nicely written descriptions about the scenery on her walks home, and interactions with other folks outside of the hospital. I’m giving it a 3 star rating. I liked it for what it was, a book made up of short sketches.

[Cera · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this non-fiction work much more than Bagnold's first novel, and found it much more sympathetic as well. It's an impresionistic, stream-of-consciousness diary about being a VAD during WWI, depicting the narrator's emotional struggles to remain balanced despite the misery around her. She is by turns sympathetic towards and frustrated with the Sisters (professional nurses) she works with. They are often callous towards the suffering, but as narrator (can one really say it is Bagnold?) finds herself growing untouched by the death and mutilation of the men on her ward she starts to understand the need for self-protection to avoid heartbreak. She finds herself anticipating a new convoy of patients with excitement, eager for additional work and new faces, only to catch herself as she remembers that each new patient is a man who has been wounded, who might die as she watches.

All of which sounds very depressing, doesn't it? But I didn't find it depressing, although sometimes it touched me very deeply emotionally. I loved the way that it caught the real difficulty of working with those who are suffering, how making healing the pain of others your vocation means a constant balancing act between heartbreak and numbness -- and all without ever spelling it out. I'm glad I finally read it.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a quirky, original work this is. Bagnold's sensibility sets her apart from other writers of that era. It's not surprising to read that Bagnold was dismissed from her post as a VAD, presumably after publication of this book. She's an intelligent woman who makes (what now seem very reasonable observations) about the wounded soldiers under care, the attitude of the medical supervisors and the ridiculousness and futility of war. Here is the last few memorable lines of the book:
'"But one does not say any longer, "What a strange thing is life!" For only in rare moments does the divine astonishment return."

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was, at the time I read it, so difficult to obtain that I mail-ordered a 1933 edition. It still has a library catalog card in the back from Barons Consolidated School District No. 8 (Alberta, Canada). It's basically a diary of a VAD driver in WW1 and apparently caused quite a sensation when it was originally published. Bagnold's sensibilities come through very well -- she was at most 18 when she wrote it -- and shows early stages of the marvelous talent she exhibited later in other works. This could also be viewed as something of a rehearsal for The Happy Foreigner.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just over a hundred small pages (5x8") and worth its weight in
whatever you value most. I knew her name, & didn't realize it was for "National Velvet," but this earned her place long before that, when she was 25 and a volunteer nurse for wounded soldiers back from France to the countryside near London during World War I. She wrote to keep herself sane, and what she wrote fits us now, all too well. The dedication suggests the unique flavor of her writing: "To that friend of mine who, when I wrote him endless letters, said coldly, 'Why not keep something for yourself!'"

[Cyndy Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting first-hand account of a hospital during WWII. Would have been easier to read if dates were included but I guess the title would then be different!

[Pascale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very well worth reading if you are interested in WWI. Personally it wasn't my cup of tea because I always find reading diaries rather tedious, but this one is mercifully short and gives a good idea of what it was like for an intelligent, observant young woman to tend to the wounded during WWI. The first paragraph summarizes Bagnold's motivation for volunteering for the job: "I like discipline. I like to be part of an institution. It gives one more liberty than is possible among three or four observant friends." Obviously, Bagnold relished the freedom that came with the anonymity of the uniform. She was puzzled by the behavior of the nuns, and compassionate towards the patients, coming up at one point with the despairing statement: "The pain of one creature cannot continue to have meaning for another."