Saving Private Diaries by Orkney Scriever Alison Miller

Thanks to Orkney Scriever, Alison Miller, for her reflections in this blog piece.

Would I like my personal diaries and letters to be read by other people when I’m dead and gone? Would I like them mined for works of fiction? It’s not an easy question to answer. Sure, while I’m still on the planet, the thought of somebody raking through private letters and journals feels somewhat uncomfortable. What did I say? What did I reveal about myself that I would rather keep hidden? Did I malign people? Was any of it actionable?

I could ensure this scenario never happens by getting rid of diaries and letters while I still have time. On the other hand, when I’m dead, I don’t imagine I’ll give a stuff.  

I recall a writer friend telling me she’d destroyed all her journals, written over decades of her life because she didn’t want her daughters-in-law to read them when she’s gone. The pang I felt when she said this was visceral. How could she consign years of details of her life, years of thoughts, years of trying to work things out on the page, so casually to the flames?

I had an aunt too who kept diaries all her life, the little pocket appointment kind with a very tiny space for each day, in which she recorded, not her thoughts, but significant events in the life of the wider family: births, weddings, funerals, houses lived in, jobs got and changed, achievements of sons and daughters, nephews and nieces. I asked her about them near the end of her life and she said she’d burned them. Why? She couldn’t or wouldn’t say. That was even more incomprehensible to me. In terms of checking dates of specific events, her diaries would have been invaluable.

But to whom? It’s some years now since I realised that I’ve appointed myself unofficial family archivist. It happened after my mother died when we discovered in the house a whole box of letters written between my parents before they were married. And another batch from a later date, 1967 and 68, when our family was complete and my father worked away in Stronsay and Westray for two periods of about six months. There were also two diaries, one from 1944, my mother still at school and the Second World War on, the other from 1967, the same era as the later letters.

From the moment I knew about the letters and diaries, I wanted to preserve them. Not necessarily read them. Not right away, at least. But we couldn’t reach agreement among my siblings. One of them thought the correspondence should be burnt because it was private. I made a unilateral decision at that point and removed the box of letters from the house, aided and abetted by another sibling.

Once I had them I immediately felt a responsibility. I typed up the letters written in 1967 & 68 – around eighty of them – along with the 67 diary, scanned all the pages and put all of it on to CDs for my siblings. This was not a straightforward task. None of the letters were dated inside and not all the postmarks on the envelopes were legible. But with a bit of detective work and cross-referencing with the diary, I managed to date most of them. It was almost a complete set, with only some of those written by my mum missing.

More recently, I started trying to sort the letters written before my parents were married – hundreds of them – when my mother was at university, living in digs in Aberdeen, and my father was an apprentice stonemason, sharing a room with another apprentice in Kirkwall. Again and again as I typed up each letter and tried to date it, I was struck by how amazing it was that the correspondence had survived to the extent it has. In my father’s digs, he not only shared a room, but a bed with the other apprentice. In one letter to my mother he wrote:

I went to sleep only to waken in the morning with Jim’s elbow sticking in the back of my neck. That’s getting a habit of his lately – it even wakens me up in the middle of the night. There’s a new saw of Andy’s in a box under the bed so if it goes on much longer I’ll get up some night and saw it off then present him with it in the morning. Imagine his surprise if I presented him with his own arm in the morning. I bet he would swear. 

So, no room of his own, no bed of his own and even the space underneath the bed was home to another man’s tools. Where did he keep the letters? How did he manage to have any privacy at all?

In a letter my mother wrote around the same time, she explains why she is writing in pencil:

I’m sorry for the pencil but just when I was taking off my clothes to go to bed E [landlady] came through to borrow my pen and dashed off saying she’d leave it through in the kitchen and I could get it the morn – afore I could say a word. And I can’t go through for it for M [landlady’s husband] is having a bath! So pencil it will have to be though I don’t like it.

One pen, landlady’s husband having a bath in the kitchen, landlady barging in on my mother undressing, though she at least had a room and a bed to herself, albeit in a small flat, no bathroom, belonging to a family with two young children. Not much space or privacy there either. 

The letters survived my mother’s return to Orkney to the dairy farm where she grew up, to the but-and-ben her family lived in, parents, four siblings and a servant lass. Her grandparents were dead by then. The correspondence resumed when she went to teach in the island of Rum and all of these letters were also preserved. They survived my father’s move to other digs. They survived the one room in Victoria Street in Kirkwall where they lived at the start of their married life, where they had the first three of their six children. They survived a chaotic big family, all eight of us living in a three bedroomed council house in Broadsands Road. One of my mother’s favourite words to describe life there was ‘pandemonium’.

My parents kept those letters through all the changes of address, all the difficult circumstances they lived in, right to the end of their lives. They had plenty time to destroy them if they wanted. But they didn’t. 

The earlier letters date from 1948 to 1951. I’m up to 1950. What I’ll do with them when they’re all typed up, I don’t know. That’s a question for another day…