This book makes me so proud of my mother

KATHY LOWE, the youngest daughter of Mary Morris, says she recognises much of the strong woman who raised her in the diaries of the young rebel nurse. ‘She always made us think for ourselves and not just follow conventions, and I can hear it all in there in the voice of her as a young woman, and it’s wonderful,’ said Kathy.

Her unconventional ways didn’t always go down well with her children, however. ‘You know how as a teenager you’re meant to rebel against your parents? Well she was always more rebellious than us,’ Kathy said.

For all her flagrant disregard for rules and regulations, it was Mary’s humanitarian instinct, displayed so clearly in her writings, that marked her out as an extraordinary individual throughout the rest of her life. ‘She was forever doing battle, helping people out, campaigning on their behalf if she saw something wrong.’

However, recognisable as this younger self is to her daughter, the realisation of the horrors that her mother witnessed in her years at the front came as a shock. ‘I knew she’d been in Normandy, and I knew that she’d been a nurse. She’d told me a few horror stories, but I hadn’t realised how relentless the stress was.’

After the war, Mary – caught up in the whirlwind of family life – didn’t like to dwell on her experiences. ‘I didn’t ask her enough, and I wish now that I read the diaries while she was still alive and then I could ask her. It was a very, very extraordinary time in history, and she was in an extraordinary position to be able to observe it.’

Kathy is particularly proud of the way in which her mother expressed her own outrage at the way German prisoners were treated by the British in the aftermath of the war. ‘She speaks about the anarchy of war and how people held in British prisoner of war camps were also starving and had dysentery. It wasn’t just in Germany. I was quite moved by that, that she was wanting to speak out about it, but of course you couldn’t – it was all censored, everything you wrote.

‘But she’d write it in her diary, so there’s a record there, that it did happen. I feel very proud of her, that she was always ready to stand up for the underdog, no o matter what nationality. She’d always look for what was naturally just rather than going on with conventional thought. I was very proud of her for objecting to that.’