When we first meet Millicent King, she’s a prickly, clever, self-dramatising 13-year-old. The year is 1914 and all around her are steadfastly averting their gaze from the coming war. Not so Millie. For her brother George’s 18th birthday, she gives him a pen. Why, asks George, looking somewhat nonplussed, when he has two pens already and doesn’t even care much for writing? So that he can take it with him to the War of course, Millie replies. “Mother burst into tears and Matilda said, Now you really have spoiled George’s birthday and you are very horrid and mean, Millicent. They are all against me.”
They didn’t even bother to see, Millie writes, that the pen is “made of steel and will not break even if a bullet hits it and it has a clip on it to clip on the pocket of his uniform”. If George is killed, Millie tells her diary, she hopes it will be returned with his Special Effects and then she will “keep it as a memento of him”. And write her diaries with it, no doubt.
Millicent’s diaries go on to span the breadth of a century, all with that same tincture of clear thinking and transparent, but occasionally temper-ridden, honesty. She takes us with her through the appalling wastage of World War I, London literary life in the 1920s, the threadbare 30s and the Blitz, right up until the anti-nuclear protests at Greenham Common. But this diary isn’t about Great Events – it’s about Millie. Quarrels and relationships, small joys and resentments often crowd out the “bigger picture”, but also illuminate tiny corners of it, while real tragedy is often met with a blank page.
If I have a criticism, it’s that Millicent’s life is, in a way, too emblematic, even a little bland. It’s so busy being representative, it seems to lose its individual depth. You suspect that Forster is sometimes simply pushing Millie to “where the action is”.
On the other hand, Forster is brilliant at understanding the historical “ecosystems” of her characters. She knows that people born in earlier times think differently from us because the forces that shaped them are so different. As the “unmarried daughter”, Millie’s future is always coloured by the fear that she may have to sacrifice her own independence to family duty. She doesn’t understand how her niece, Connie, can quarrel savagely with her one minute, then end the phonecall with a muttered “Love you” the next. “She is always saying that,” Millie writes. “I think I am supposed to say the same back but I never do. I won’t have love reduced to a banal pleasantry.”
Not a stunning book perhaps, and one that, like most of us, loses strength in its grip towards the end, but highly enjoyable all the same.
JANE HURLEY is a freelance writer living in the Wairarapa.