A VERY PRIVATE DIARY

Scrupulously edited by Acton, A Very Private Diary conveys a woman s role in wartime with integrity, humour and pity. As well as being magnificently absorbing, the diary serves as a tonic, so unlike outsized histories of war by academics and others who had not been there. - Irish Times It was flagrantly against the rules for a member of the Armed Forces to keep a diary - but then Mary never had much time for rules. However, it was not just a rebellious spirit that drove her to her secret writing but a deep sense of duty to the injured soldiers who shared their experiences with her. - Irish Mail on Sunday Mary is a talented writer and a humane observer of her remarkable experiences. Her diary is full of vivid, sometimes shocking vignettes. - Daily Mail In pithy, occasionally sardonic entries, Morris builds a picture of the pity of war and, above all, the moral and material ruins of post-Hitler Germany, where she danced the nights away in Allied officers clubs but also got to know the stench of diphtheria ( so foul and sickly ) and gangrene. The scenes of horror and distress she recorded are leavened by childhood reminiscences of the Connemara coast and the glories of whiskey fruit cake. - Irish Times On the so called Home Front in the time before her enlistment, Mary records the struggles of civilian life as a nurse in a country at war. From dodging bombs throughout the Blitz to single-handedly looking after wards full of seriously ill children, the daily battles of life in England are by no means diminished by later tales of Normandy and the Front. - Irish Mail on Sunday The impulse for adventure that sent Mary Mulry (later Morris), a young Irish woman from County Galway, to train as a nurse in England in 1939 would see her landing in the heels of the Normandy invasion as a member of the Queen Alexandra s Imperial Nursing Service Reserve (QAs) in June 1944. Mary s diary gives us vivid stories of nurs