Clues
Box 5 arrived at my reading table in the manuscripts room and the librarian gave a little gasp of delight as I lifted the heavy brown cardboard lid. The steel grey woman in a wheelchair working nearby on a pile of delicious  correspondence - black copperplate on dense parchment - glanced over at my box with that almost greedy expression that researchers develop. What had I got?  There were dozens of tiny black, blue and red leather appointment diaries,  most bearing the ancient symbols of Cambridge University. Bits of paper, stamps, drawings, receipts, fragments of poetry and translations had been folded into the pockets and elastic safe-keeps of the diaries.
 The diaries date back to 1900 and the pages are sometimes crowded with almost illegible, minute, and  impersonal notes of appointments, visitors, dinners, speeches.They belonged to my subject and her husband.  These people have not expressed their concerns in the careless way that we might in the 21st Century. The clues are subtle.

I know enough about these people to be able to decipher their friendships, their families, the places where they lectured and dined and presided over committees.I am surprised by how much of this is clear to me.

The diaries do not run in the traditional way, January to December. They are quarterly diaries organised in an ecclesiastical pattern of feasts and holidays,  Michalemas and Lent terms. These religious festivals are important for my subjects as well, and they inset the appropriate Jewish observances: Purim, Tabernacles, Eighth Day.

It is not hard to read behind some of the brief notations: Baby born dead is announced abruptly  at the end of a pregnancy noted only by the letter M circled once, and 28 days later, the same letter M circles with -1.

But it is the word HOME that is so poignant and painful and pregnant with meaning. Her children are so young and she has a cancer that will soon end her life. She has been away for months in a nursing home following painful surgery. What was it? A  mastectomy in 1920? Her recovery is charted by the daily list of names of her friends, sisters, mother and mother in law who visited in rotation for 45 minutes each.

Her husband is rarely there but when he does come, his initial is circled firmly. Her children come rarely and by appointment. She sits up for ten minutes. She sits up for an hour. Finally, she is home and the significance of that word is conveyed only by its clarity on the page, and the uncharacteristic underlining.

As she wars with her cancer over the coming few years, small Hebrew phrases appear in her diaries. I have photographed these, because I can hardly grasp what she is saying. She was a Hebraic scholar. Hebrew is her emotional home. Her Jewish faith is the poetry  and purpose of her entire life.

I have read family accounts of this woman. The small children in this story grew up to remember only a mother who was rarely there, somewhat remote. But as I follow her long illness through these diaries, little marks and phrases, nothing made clear, I wonder if it was this very struggle to hold onto life and home that made her seem distant. Her heart was always at home even when she was not.