Diary of the war by Platform to PlatformThis is episode 8 of Lorna Lloyd’s ‘Diary of the war’, also including contemporaneous news (courtesy BBC Archive, British Newspaper Archive/FindMyPast/British Library). This episode covers late December 1940 to February 1942.
THEME MUSIC
(full selection)
ANNOUNCER
On 1st September 1939, 25 year-old Malvern resident Lorna Lloyd started writing her diary of the war.
This is episode 8. It is December 1940.
LORNA
Tuesday December 31st 1940
The most curious feature of this diary are the gaps - as though when things are worst and most pressing to express, anything is practically impossible; and when things are better, the desire is less urgent. This is the last day of the most terrible, incredible year that anyone has been called upon to live since the world began. What glorious effrontery to be able to say that and mean it!
No nation on earth has ever stood up to what we have this year and survived as we have, and even managed to end up with a species of solemn optimism for 1941. Does it spring from a sure fore-k