Diaries … Philip Rundall
I
n front of me as I write is the very first diary I ever bought, the Open Road Diary for Walkers: Cyclists: Motor Scooter Users: Motor Cyclists: Motorists and Caravanners for the year 1962. At that time I was 15 and, it being a pocket diary, there is only space for 20-30 words per day, but enough to trigger many memories. So, the idea of keeping a diary clearly struck me early on as being important, but it was only in 1973*, the year I joined the Homerton staff, that I began to keep a page-aday diary – and I’ve kept it up ever since.
reacted on a daily basis to his unfolding reality. He couldn’t stand hearing Hitler shouting over the radio. What was it like to be an academic in a university where one’s status was being steadily eroded week by week and one’s colleagues taking advantage of this? He had particular contempt for them and he wrote that there wasn’t a lamp-post high enough from which to hang them. Being a Christian convert from Judaism and married to a Roman Catholic, he escaped being transported to a death camp until the very eve of the bombing of Dresden, which in fact, saved his life. His is an extraordinary story. Back in March 2020 it was clear we were entering something beyond anything else we’d experienced during our lifetimes, so I began to write a parallel Coronavirus Diary in a rather beautiful Flame Tree Notebook that I’d purchased some months earlier at a garden centre. It was a very attractive notebook with a detail from the glorious Wilton Diptych on its cover. It was such a lovely book that I dared not use it – it was just too beautiful! With the pandemic hitting us like a wave it felt entirely right to enlist the help of its angels along with Mary and Jesus.
My first diary I have read Samuel Pepys’ Diary and also John Evelyn’s, both I found fascinating, but the diaries that most moved me were those of Victor Klemperer, a cousin of the famous conductor, written in Dresden throughout the Hitler years. It is the immediacy of his diaries that is so striking, written at the end of each day, not with the benefit of the long view with the time and opportunity for further research, reflection, re-writing or editing. There is no going back on what you’ve written, a diary reflects your tiredness, your moods, your poor punctuation and contains the odd spelling mistake as well as your story. Of course, Pepys’ diaries are particularly revealing as they were written in code, whereas Evelyn’s were written with an audience very much in mind. So they are very different. For a start, Pepys’ writing is a lot funnier. For me, Klemperer’s diaries tell me more about his daily life than anything he might have written had he written an autobiography long after the war had ended. It’s a period of history so closely related to my own and I was fascinated to know how a particular German civilian
First page The great advantage of a notebook is that it allows one to write more than just one page a day (my older diaries contain around 17,000 words per year on average), and I had a lot more to say during 2020. I began on 16th March and one year on I’m currently on Volume 5. I have really enjoyed the freedom to write more, and after a few weeks I gave up writing my regular diary as it was just a waste of time and effort writing both, and I will continue with the notebooks.
rsma newsletter september 2021 page 7
