Secret diary of a cour who survived WWII,
Mary Morris broke the rules by keeping an extraordinary – and very rare – f irst hand account of one of history’s bloodiest conf licts
IN 1939, having left her native Galway and everything she knew at the age of just 18, Mary Mulry (later Morris) arrived in a London on the brink of war. For the next eight years, Mary would be at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts in history, as both a nurse in the British Army, and a secret diarist.
Due to the extreme censorship of the time, 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 writings, but a deep sense of duty to the injured soldiers who shared their experiences with her.
That is certainly how Carol Acton, the academic who has now put together the stories for publication, sees it. Sharing the stories of others was in her opinion ‘very much part of that. “I’m going to tell these people’s stories because maybe they won’t tell them themselves, and I want people to know what it was like”.’ The result is a rare, insightful account of World War II from the unusual perspective of an Irish nurse who witnessed it first-hand.
Understandably, this was an exciting find for Ms Acton, the Meathborn professor of English who stumbled upon the diary in London’s Imperial War Museum. The Trinity College graduate, now based in Canada’s University of Waterloo, had been hoping to explore WWII from an Irish perspective. What she found surpassed her expectations in every sense.
‘I knew the diary was important because there are so few. I hadn’t come across any other diary that has this kind of systematic writing where she’s recording all the way through. You’ve… got the nursing and the war and you’ve also got this return to Ireland – a neutral country, and her father’s background which is republican. This was everything I had sort of hoped for in one fell swoop!’
Mary’s diary begins in 1940 when, having been moved from her training hospital in London to a hospital in Kent, she is confronted with the terror of war for the first time. The arrival at the hospital of survivors of the Dunkirk evacuations prompts the stark opening line, ‘The real war started for me today.’
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.
Particularly astonishing is the account she gives of the bombing of the Alexandra hotel in London, where she had been staying while on leave. Throughout the stress and intensity, however, Mary sustains herself with a dazzling wit and remarkable good humour. Her cheeky telling of a forbidden rendezvous with a patient is a particular highlight: ‘We are not allowed to go out with patients, or even speak to them on matters other than their treatment. Pierre is charming. I shall go out with him. No one need know about it.’
However, Mary also had a strong sense of justice, and was remarkably forward thinking in her views. While on a women’s ward she bemoans the stigma attached to pregnancy out of wedlock, having been forced to watch a young woman die after a botched abortion. Her radical thinking is made all the more noteworthy when one considers her youth at the time, a fact Prof. Acton is quick to point out. ‘Even when she first starts nursing the casualties from Dunkirk she’s only 18, the same age as the men coming in.’
Her ability to see beyond prejudice and empathise would become the hallmark of her writing once she had enlisted and gone overseas, which she did almost immediately after passing her nursing exams. However, her donning of the British uniform did not go down well with her family in Galway. Mary’s father, a veteran of the 1916 Rising, harboured strong anti-British sentiment and was none too pleased with his only daughter’s actions.
However, Mary brought an open mind unburdened by prejudice to the field hospitals of Normandy, and subsequently Belgium, where she treated Allied soldiers and German POWs alike. Indeed it may have been her Irish background that allowed for her egalitarian approach to all her patients. Prof. Acton certainly thinks so. ‘I think her Irish background helps with that, because she does have this other view. Obviously she wants to go and be part of the war, but even when she’s in England she can be quite critical of the English.’
Unwedded to the crown, Mary follows her humanitarian impulse towards an empathy for all the victims of war she encounters: ‘[T]hey are all patients, rank and nationality do not count. I suppose that makes us neutral territory.’
Prof. Acton points out specifically how she ‘humanises the German soldiers’, and indeed how she does posterity a service by recording the mistreatment of POWs in a British refugee camp. ‘You have prisoners who are being brought in from a prisoner of war camp, just after the war, and they’ve been starved, and they’re dying, and they can’t save them. Those are the stories that we don’t really hear.’
Meanwhile, through all the trauma Mary’s own story emerges. Her strikingly original personality appears as rare a find as the diary. It was this that ultimately attracted Prof. Acton to the project.
‘You like her, especially when she does things she’s not really supposed to do. I wanted to get it out because I just thought this is something that people would like to read.’
A Very Private Diary: An Irish Nurse In Wartime by Mary Morris, edited by Carol Acton, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson on June 12, priced €19.30.