Among You Taking Notes...: The Wartime Diaries of Naomi Mitchison 1939 - 1945

Memoirs and Diaries #3

by Naomi Mitchison, Dorothy Sheridan (Editor)

Naomi Mitchison, Scotland's grand old lady of literature and celebrated left-wing political thinker, kept a wartime diary at the request of Mass-Observation, a social research agency. From the day Hitler invaded Poland to the day America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, she recorded this picture of how one (extraordinary) family and their friends lived...and what actually happened.

"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which...comes by grace." - Times Literary Supplement.

"...as in a good novel, the people, their feelings and reactions are instantly recognizable and as fresh and immediate today as they were then." - Emma Tennant, Guardian.

Genres: World War II, History, Memoir, Diary

350 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Naomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland and traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.

Praise for Naomi Mitchison:

"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer

"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly

"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement

"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts

"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation

Reviews

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a terrific book. It gives a real insight into ordinary life during the Second World War. Often it shows how people's feelings about the war were not so uniform as current media presentations would have you believe. There were real differences of opinion about the conduct of the war and about those leading the country. Mostly however it is a record of the trials of ordinary life. Although the Mitchisons were of a higher social class than their neighbours who were largely poor fishermen and farmers they did make an effort to support the local community because of their left-wing politics. Perhaps such an effort was doomed to be misunderstood but they did try to make a real difference to social relations.

[Pancha]

I was really looking forward to reading this after I read her SF book Memoirs of a Space Woman, but found it hard to get into the text. Interestingly, the author herself wrote in the Intro that she doesn't like the person she comes across as in the diary.

[Ian B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was pleased to get this for a pound from the charity books table at the supermarket. I think it’s the sixth volume of 1940s diaries I’ve read from Mass Observation, and I’ve enjoyed them all. Novelist and intellectual Naomi Mitchison spent most of WW2 at Carradale on Kintyre, and her diary is half-left wing politics, half-personal interactions with friends and family. The first category didn’t always fascinate me; I much preferred the second. As suits a journal, the style is functional rather than writerly, although now and again a lovely turn of phrase appears:

[The bullfinch] was singing while it ate the buds, and then I shot and it came tumbling down in a small cloud of falling blossom like something in one’s heart.

When the sheep were half sheared they looked like ideas coming into words.

She has an admirable gift for friendship, but perhaps not the strongest sense of humour; the few funny bits feel accidental (‘To tea with Dorothy and her psychologist, Miss MacIntosh, a very tough looking lady in a Well of Loneliness hat’). The anxiety of Leftists of the era, that the Soviet Union might do something to betray their faith, is apparent; that was interesting. There are some tremendous set pieces: dressing up at Hallowe’en, weddings, ceilidhs, a blazing row with the sanctimonious wife of the local minister, a poaching trip with her fishermen pals, V Day in London. By far the saddest is a mercy dash to Glasgow to search for the son of a couple from the village, missing after the house he lodged in was hit by a bomb; I cried.

For me, the book is encapsulated by two entries at opposite ends of the war: in September 1939, Mitchison notes that ‘we talked about parties we’d have in winter, and what we’d do at Hallowe’en. There should be plenty of new ghosts by then’ (my emphasis). What a chilling phrase! – but then in May 1945, a note of hope on V Day in the Temple Gardens:

It was amazing how the half blitzed trees had sprouted again.

[Rae O’Shea · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s interesting to me that the two diaries I’ve read by actual writers are not half as good as ones by non- professionals. This was actually a bit of a slog and I can’t say I much liked the writer- she didn’t like herself in this diary either. Still, it is yet another point of view about the war and English/Scottish society in general. The Soviet of Scotland was her dream but she, of course, would stay in the ruling class and make sure her children did too. Sometimes I wonder if their dreams had come true, would they have been any happier-somehow I don’t think so

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a diary written by the political activist and feminist during the Second World War. It's an interesting reflection of how people felt at the time which sometimes contrasts with the historical consensus that I was familiar with. Some of her personal comments about being a woman trying to have an impact in politics, while also being expected to be responsible for family and housekeeping issues, are striking although not unfamiliar. The format means there is not much of a narrative and I wasn't gripped all the way through, but it's an unusual book and one that's worth reading.