Mum’s Secret Diaries

A strong and moving memoir which offers a captivating and extremely rare insight into the life of an ordinary girl growing up in a British working class family in the 1950s.Mary’s secret diaries discovered by her children, chronicle her early personal life experiences, successes, challenges and hardships in an amusing and delightfully innocent way. Mary’s first diary begins in 1952 when she is an impressionable fourteen-year-old, living in Berkshire, England and continues to 1956 when she turns eighteen. Through her eyes and subsequent diary entries, she recounts the fascinating dramas of a lively, sensitive young woman navigating her way through family life, finishing grammar school, entering the workplace at fifteen, all intertwined with juggling romantic interests and aspirational dreams.Witness her day-to-day trials, happiness, and emotional struggles in a world of boys and married men, as she juggles a string of admirers, her sister’s favouritism and independence leading to a shock elopement, being forbidden to sing with a band, taking her first holiday abroad with friends where she reveals all the details of what went on, along with many other of life’s firsts.Will she ever find ‘The One,’ or manage to resist buying those beautiful high heels?The charm and honesty in which Mary regales her private life and the pickles she gets herself into, is so engaging and powerful that you can’t help but be drawn into her remarkable and totally relatable world, which additionally enlightens the reader of a bygone era of innocence, simplicity, and glamour.

The author, Alison Stewart-Reed, grew up in the UK in the county of Berkshire within a close-knit family as one of six children. She keeps in regular contact with all her siblings but now lives with her husband in Devon, where she enjoys spending time with their grown son, who lives nearby. Alison has always enjoyed creative writing, something she shared with her mother, who was a prolific writer in her own right. It was Mary’s passing that moved Alison to produce her memoir, based on the secret diaries that her mother faithfully kept as a young girl. Written by her own hand, Mary wrote a factual and honest account of her daily life as an adolescent growing up in the 1950s. Alison hopes to evoke a strong sense of empathy in the reader as she opens a very private window into her mother’s young adult life, wanting to portray the wonderful person Mary was and, in doing so, preserving her memory in a rare and unique way for all the family.