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172:, Millicent King keeps her journals in a series of exercise books. The diary records the dramas of everyday life in an ordinary English family touched by war, tragedy, and money troubles in the early decades of the century. She struggles to become a teacher, but wants more out of life. From bohemian literary
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in the twenties, her story moves on to social work and the build-up to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London. She has proposals of marriage and secret lovers, ambition and optimism, but then her life is turned upside down once more by wartime deaths.
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concludes "Millicent never lived, this diary is an authentic record of how a century of
English women were shaped - or, rather, distorted - by war. Anyone who cannot understand their mother or grandmother's generation can discover here what caused their emotional restraint, their passion for
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collecting short pieces of string, their chronic inability to cook, and above all their commitment to us, our families and our children's futures. This is fiction; yet this is true".
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407:Categories
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200:References
368:talk page
185:Reception
170:Great War
67:Publisher
135:51914252
100:Hardback
49:Language
98:Print (
52:English
174:London
110:420 pp
39:Author
107:Pages
61:Novel
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354:stub
312:2016
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178:Rome
164:Plot
129:OCLC
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278:BBC
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