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. On the sidewalk lay pieces of furniture, of sofas, curtains and other things and a gold winged chair looked out rather forlornly from the midst of the rubble. The stairs were intact and led up and up into nothing at the top.

She’s constantly going on adventures and falling in and out of love with both men and women. She’s bored and depressed by Bletchley Park, where the other people are weird, but finds that she’s rather good at the job. Her account of Germany in the aftermath of the war is fascinating.

Segrave falls upon the diaries, devotedly studying the woman she might have loved if things had turned out differently. Reading fond descriptions of herself as a baby ‘was as though my mother was passing me a bowl of cherries.