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Frances Partridge, born in London in 1900, began keeping a diary on January 1, 1940, "as a means of relieving the various emotions aroused by the Second World War, ranging from boredom to horror, fear and disgust." On that level, as on other levels, the diary was deeply successful-perhaps even lifesaving. Throughout the war Partridge lived with her husband, Ralph, and their son, Burgo (five years old at the start of the war) at Ham Spray, the cherished George III/Victorian house in Wiltshire once shared by Ralph, Lytton Strachey, and the painter Dora Carrington, Ralph's first wife. Ham Spray was close enough to allow them brief occasional visits to the increasingly devastated London, but also close enough to be vulnerable to daily and forcible reminders of the war: jarring sirens, indeterminate explosions, "quantities of aeroplanes" overhead, "gunfire very far away, like a giant dog settling down in its basket." That is only one of many evocative comparisons Partridge brings to bear (without ever repeating herself) in order to give substance and reality to completely new sensations and in order, as with the giant dog, to gain some degree of comprehension and even control. If those aims were sometimes achieved, they were just as often destroyed by the indispensable evening news broadcasts. And yet the salient and sustaining quality of the diaries is equanimity, a state of mind and spirit far more profound and attractive than the stereotypical stiff upper lip.
Day-by-day entries are rare, but the lapses seldom last more than a matter of days. Equally rare are entries in which no reference to the war occurs; still even the darkest news is nearly always...