Some years ago, journalist Nicholas Webley stumbled
across a remarkable find during a routine investigation
in a small house in Norfolk - a diary kept during the war
years and scribbled for the most part in school exercise
books and scraps of decomposing paper, written as it
turned out by a seamstress born in the 1880's. Betty
Armitage was a theatrical dresser during the first part
of the century and moved to Norfolk before the war. Her
diary is unusual, as it views the events of the war
through the eyes of someone born around the time of Queen
Victoria's Jubilee. So many accounts of the war are based
on military experience or life in cities during the
Blitz; here the great events of those years.
