Alan Beardsley

What an interesting wartime diary of an adolescent young man, trying to navigate his way through the turmoil of the blitz, bombing, fire, rationing, the loss of life and ultimately, his own grief and losses throughout World War Two. For one so young, Mike Rogers first hand observations and experiences provide an exceptional window into life for London’s children, not only how the initial excitement of seeing all the soldiers and their weaponry, and his ‘playing’ soldiers, soon dissipates as life is turned upside down. His narrative works well, especially when highlighting important glimpses into those brief times, such as going to the movies with friends, ad hoc get togethers, New Year’s Eve parties and so on, lets them all forget the horrors of war all around them, and for a moment, at least, from the harsh realities of wartime life. When the blackouts, air raids and all the rest of the war confusion falls, it’s interesting to see how the young Mike turns to looking at war news on the outside of Britain. How the radio provides him with a lifeline to what else is going on such as in Poland, and within a few short years, on the other side of the world with Japan. When he finds out about the Fall of Singapore, almost around the same time he finally gets his first new pair of long pants, his simplistic but highly emotive diary follows his transition from boy to youth, and shortly, to young man. Despite some of the worst of the reporting of how badly war is progressing for the Allies around the world, his own writing shifts into a different style, when it seems he is realising that nowhere is safe when his personal preoccupation with Allied losses and wins, begins to take centre stage. When he begins learning to drive in 1943, it is an early attempt to try and find some semblance of normality, in an abnormal wartime existence. For Mike, this is a seminal turning point in his wartime experience, because as time progresses, and the Cairo Conference is held, he sees some hope of peace on the horizon. It’s against this background now younger man Mike who is undertaking RAFVR training, only to be cut short when he loses his left leg in an air raid, abruptly cutting short any of his own personal aims and aspirations of doing his bit. What now pervades his diary entries is something darker. When his snapshot of life really is highly dependent on staying calm, supporting the war in any way he can now, but the reality is also he seems to be suffocating under the weight of it all. By the time war ends in both Europe and the Far East, Mike’s realisation soon takes on another poignance, when he now realises as a nineteen-year old, that not only has he lost his own seminal growing up years into early manhood, his friends, family, community and so on, there’s yet another salient change on the horizon. Mike’s final diary entry reveals that he, alike everybody else in London, and indeed around the world, now has to come to terms with the new reality, that the world is at peace again.