23. Still Part of Me

Chapter 23: Still Part of Me, explores themes of nostalgia and regret. The chapter opens with a discussion of Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, which moves backwards from the end of the war, showing her characters prior to revealing the events – love, desire, disappointment and loss – that shaped them. Waters echoes the many historical studies that focus on the lack of measurable change in women’s lives, despite the common myths about the war as a herald of liberation. The chapter then explores Danny’s reappearance in Norah’s later diaries in the context of her subsequent relationships. A central theme is the shame of being a single woman in a Fifties’ Britain, when being marriageable – and then married -- was central to a woman’s social value and self-worth. In 1978, Danny crops up again in Norah’s diaries, now in the context of her lonely mid-life with Eddy, the vaguely glamorous but war-damaged German she met in 1958. Disillusioned and deeply unhappy, Norah’s status as a common-law wife meant that she had no rights to the home she had helped to create; she is trapped. In 2009, the year she died, Norah again sought out Danny’s phone number in the context of her later-life loneliness and her growing nostalgia for her girlhood years.