This is very important documentation and will have tremendous appeal to those who have an avid interest in the effect of the war on ordinary Britons.
Ruby’s personal reports are very direct and candid, because at the moment Ruby could not have imagined that her diaries would ever be read by outsiders from later generations. With these journals she had started years earlier in order to give expression to her marital problems, because she could not share those problems with anyone else.
Ruby gave for instance an impression of the daily worries, at the same time she wrote how the bombings disturbed everyday life. The sheer terror and exhaustion she felt as the bombs started falling for seemingly hours on end, day after day is hard for us to imagine. The only way out for Ruby was intellectual freedom to the mind, the many books that she read about art, literature, history and theosophy.
Between the war descriptions the reader is witness of Ruby’s drive towards independence. Also some things were suddenly no longer so obvious during the war. For example Ruby could no longer write everything in her letters to her sons in America as she used to, due to censorship. Thanks to her talent for writing and her keen insight Ruby was able to depict an interesting image of time in these diaries, both of the Second World War, as of the prevailing society.
The fear of being hit during a bombardment and the care for her family became tangibley larger as the hostilities of war increased. She describes her feelings; like the fear of her fate and that of her family and the anger due to the war.
The first journal begins on September 1st, the day on which Poland underwent the first German bombardment.
Volume II the war receives more attention. Ruby did not only report on the bombing of England in her diaries, she also described what she learned about the invasions in other countries such as the Netherlands, France and she even wrote about the attitude of Germany.
