This  is volume two and is the diary of 1941. This year is the very terrifying heart of the war . There is night after night of bombing raids.  Ruby is sick with fright.  She says, “The raids are awful. I do not know yet what happened in Romford. One awful blast rocked the house and blew in our dining room window; it broke through bricks and plaster, and pushed out the frame, but not a pane of glass was cracked.” 

She is trying to live her life in between bombings. She is homesick for her children and her past life in America.  Ruby lives in a day and age in which she is beholden to the wishes of her husband who is a converted Catholic and quite fanatical.  Her diary is the only place she can reveal her true feelings. She has many thoughts and feelings that could not be expressed out loud in that day.  

“I’m afraid sometime I shall fly off the handle, and scream and scream. Ted is so impossible, and so unjust, and so censorious, I feel I want to fly at him and beat him.” 

Her feeling about men could not be expressed out side her diary. One quote is “All the men keep on talking; in the homes, in the pubs, in parliament; their self-righteousness is nauseating. Meanwhile the infernal destruction goes on and on.” 

“From Finland to the Black Sea both the Russians and the Germans are mobilized along the boundaries, more millions of men waiting to war on each other.”

Ruby sums up what her journals mean to her in this excerpt: 

“The trouble is I am the one who has been compelled to live against the grain all these years and I am so tired. These last seventeen years especially have warped me. Now these awful war years. It’s all too much. However, I do stay sane. These books are my safety valves, herein I say what I think, literally spill over. These books hold the worst of me. Outwardly I toe the mark, speaking and acting in all the required and expected ways; and so I shall go on doing I expect, go in being, Oh so politely! Mrs. Edward Thompson. “