It was a rotten business working a telephone switchboard with a gas helmet on

Have a post! It's seven months late; I am aware it will be read only by that subset of my friendlist which is not already in transit to Readercon, but I was describing the book to derspatchel the night before last and it just became silly that I had never posted about it, considering how much I remembered writing and then never getting off my desktop. Therefore, read on. The disclaimer paragraph is also from December. I decided to keep it.

One of the reasons I know I haven't been doing well for some time is that my desktop is full of random notes that were never elaborated into posts or thrown out entirely. All that should be visible on there is my hard drive and a couple of alias folders; instead it looks like a cork-board, only without the attractive collage and tactile value. This cannot be helping my state of mind.

I have been meaning to recommend Sapper Martin: The Secret Great War Diary of Jack Martin (2009), ed. Richard van Emden, for two whole years now. I should have taken the opportunity on Armistice Day, but I think I was watching Derek Jarman's War Requiem (1989). I haven't written that up, either. The book is exactly what it sounds like, although the subtitle is slightly a misnomer. Both enlisted men and officers during the First World War were forbidden to keep diaries, which didn't stop everybody and Siegfried Sassoon's brother from doing it—there was nothing unusually clandestine about the pages written by Albert John "Jack" Martin (3 September 1884–24 April 1970) between 1916 and 1919, unless you find it of interest that they were discovered almost thirty years after his death, literally in a trash bag in the attic. He had not told his family they existed. He had rarely spoken about the war. His enlistment and discharge papers were gone, casualties themselves of the bombings of the Second World War; he is known to have received medals, but they too have disappeared. His son suspects he simply threw them out. "It was an aspect of his life that he had not exactly turned his back on but wanted to ignore, to forget about . . . He could just close the door on that part of his life," and he held the door closed until he died. And yet: he didn't destroy the diaries. He left them as much to chance as to his heirs, but shortly after he was demobbed he went to the trouble of transcribing the original documents (from some kind of code, the editor speculates; he mentions using one in some of his letters home) so that decades later his son could ring up an interested historian and we could have a fascinating record of life on the Western Front which does not suffer, like most first-person material of the time, from a need to get by the censors, internal or external. It's not an unbiased account. What good would that be? It's as close as we're ever going to get to the inside of Jack Martin's head at the Somme and the Armistice and that lovely afternoon drying the washing in Crocetta del Montello, and that's worth reading.

( Received from Elsie copies of the photographs I had taken on leave. They are quite good but I shall never look really martial. )

Everyone makes narratives inside their heads: I believe that Martin meant it wholeheartedly when he wrote on 3 February 1919, "Oh, it is good to be home once more," but it is also the last line of the diaries. He does not write about being demobbed. He does not write about reintegrating into civilian life. He does not write about his marriage or his son or his jobs as, initially, a clerk for a motor company and later a self-employed accountant. The twelve diaries were for the war: he closed their covers and closed the door. In some ways, that interests me as much as the fact that he started keeping them at all.

But I'm glad he did. And didn't get rid of them with his medals. And his son didn't just throw the trash bags out.

I am off to Burlington.