Mum's Secret Diaries - by Alison Stewart-Reed

Book Synopsis

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.