[1] From the age of thirteen, on the eve of the Great War, Millicent King keeps her journals in a series of exercise books.

The diary records the dramas of everyday life in an ordinary English family touched by war, tragedy, and money troubles in the early decades of the century.

She has proposals of marriage and secret lovers, ambition and optimism, but then her life is turned upside down once more by wartime deaths.

Helen Falconer writing in The Guardian concludes "Millicent never lived, this diary is an authentic record of how a century of English women were shaped - or, rather, distorted - by war.

Anyone who cannot understand their mother or grandmother's generation can discover here what caused their emotional restraint, their passion for collecting short pieces of string, their chronic inability to cook, and above all their commitment to us, our families and our children's futures.