The Girl from Station X, by Elisa Segrave – review

On her seventh birthday, Elisa Segrave’s five-year-old brother Raymond drowned in their grandmother’s swimming pool. From that day onwards, her mother Anne was emotionally detached and alcoholic. ‘My mother was only 42 when I, my father and my two remaining brothers lost her — to grief.’ Rebuffed by her mother in the days after Raymond’s death, Segrave writes chillingly of the moment she began to hate her dead brother.

Years later, when Anne was suffering from Alzheimer’s, Segrave came upon her diaries and discovered that her mother had been one of the highest-ranking women at Bletchley Park, had worked in bomber command and had visited Germany as part of the British reconstruction team in 1945. She had also turned down more than 20 offers of marriage.

Anne had a correspondent’s eye and her diaries are absolutely great:

In Eaton Place, there was a house on the corner which had had the whole of one side removed by a bomb.