Margaret's Diary

by Jonathan Simons

Olive showed me photocopies of some pages from Margaret's (Clements) Diary in which she recorded the births and deaths of her children. Olive also showed me pages from the diary of births and deaths that Floss, her own mother had kept, in which similar dates were recorded. Olive had kept it up and she had written the date when my father, Vic, had died. When I saw the diaries it seemed a curious and somewhat macabre thing to do and I wondered if people generally do that nowadays. Should the last entry in such a diary be the date of the diarist's own death, written in an unfamiliar hand? But perhaps it's quite a natural thing to do, to chart lives in that way - after all am I not doing much the same thing in this web-site?

floss's diary

To get back to Margaret's diary: Olive remarked that it was curious that all Margaret's children that died seemed to have foreign names whereas those that survived seemed to have English names. It seems to me that those that survived must have anglicised their names.For instance, Bernard seems to have been christened 'Bardonicus Laurence Simons'. Margaret seems unsure of the spelling of 'Laurence' as we see the name spelt 'Lawerance' more often than not.

15/10/99 - Jonathan Simons