ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns both the diary and the memoir in the telling of a life. It discusses two accounts of civilian evacuation during the Second World War. The chapter treats the diary and memoir as two distinct kinds of documents of life in order to explore constructions of self and identity in the two narrative forms in relation to the wider social discourses of wartime Britain. The memoir, written in 1998 when Harry was 72, is entitled somewhat ambiguously No admission and dedicated to his four children, not as a confessional account but as a record. In February 1940, Mrs Maxwell, the diary says, went to stay at Balgeddie. Gass's contention that the private diary, being not for publication, is likely to be 'more truthful' is called into question by Harry's memoir. Materiality is bound up with notions of authenticity and the sense that the artefact constitutes a 'tangible link between the past and the present'.
