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How it was handed down
Apparently, even as a child, Jeanne Preston had wanted to be a writer, something Michael Croucher recalled from his interview with Molly Preston, in one of his book introductions. He says that when Jeanne came to transcribe the diary for publication, in order to pad out the story for serialisation, she combined the original manuscript with old stories told by the nurse; and to the cooking recipes already in the manuscript, she added others from her grandmother's old cookbook.
We mustn't forget that Michael's information comes from Molly and that Jeanne had died by this time.
Michael's account of Molly's memories are that the old nurse gave Jeanne not only the Diary but, along with it, gave her the necklace of red stones bequeathed to Anne Hughes by Lady Susan. Jeanne donated the necklace to be sold in one of the auctions in aid of the war effort. A photograph of it, retained by the family, does not seem to have survived, or it may have been lost.
So how did the old manuscript diary pass down the generations? It seems possible it was valued most by female family members and was, perhaps, passed down the female line, changing families along with surnames as it went. This might account for the difficulty in tracing it. Or, it has to be said, Jeanne may have changed Anne's surname and, if she wanted to throw readers off the scent, Hughes would be a good name to choose. The effort to trace the diary's passage through to Jeanne's time is rather like doing a jigsaw puzzle. But it is a matter of trying out different pieces from a box containing many similar pieces from many different but similar pictures and with a great number of the pieces missing. But like jigsaw puzzles, it is rather an addiction.
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