The Girl from Station X review all about her mother

Elisa Segrave knows her mother only as a self-indulgent drunk until she discovers a cache of wartime diaries

"All the members of my immediate family," writes Elisa Segrave, "including my deceased father, were alcoholics." So, unfortunately, was her mother. Segrave spends much of the book and her own life in bitter combat with a liquid, furious with her mother, Anne, for drinking and the excuses for that drinking the death of her husband and two of her children. It isn't until Anne is carted off to a retirement home and Segrave goes through her possessions that she finds a cache of diaries detailing her mother's life before, during and after the second world war.

Anne was raised in a grand house in Sussex called Knowle (to differentiate it from the even grander Sackville-West Knole), spent her adolescence travelling around the Balkans and Russia, and then enlisted in the WAAFs when war broke out. By May 1941 she was at Bletchley Park, indexing information decoded through Enigma decryption and ensuring it reached all the relevant section heads.

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