I have always said everyone has a story to tell. My belief was cemented when I worked at a nursing home for four years. When time permitted (which wasn’t often), I loved to sit with the residents and talk to them about their lives. The men sometimes talked about their time in the service and the ladies talked about raising children, baking cookies for the neighborhood children and everyday life. Some residents had remarkable stories of trial and tribulation about living through the Great Depression.

It always made me sad when residents died, taking with them stories and memories of their lives. Their lives weren’t just their lives, they were a tidbit of our history, told by those who lived it.

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Pauline Aikman of Kennebunk. During World War II, when she was 19 years old, she lived just outside of London with her family. Pauline’s life is chronicled in tiny diaries she wrote in for five years. She wrote enough diaries to fill a shoebox, which she kept for more than half a century.

A few years ago, Pauline began thumbing through her diaries. The entries were often only one or two lines and sometimes several days passed between entries. The entries are simple, yet powerful. They lack colorful descriptive words and are void of deep emotion. They are matter-of-fact.

“Two planes collided and fell in flames over Croydon Way. That was an awful sight,” she wrote.

I think “an awful sight” is an understatement.

I can only imagine what it must have been like to see the wreckage of two planes plummeting to the ground. My mind is left to fill in what it must have sounded like. I can only imagine the fear as people stared skyward and then scrambled for cover.

Each day, through air raid sirens and bombs falling, Pauline and her family tried to carry on with life as usual. They took vacations and Pauline attended school to learn dress design. Sketches of her 1940s dress designs are now matted and framed, ready to be displayed at the Wells Public Library during the month of April.

Using the old diaries, Pauline rewrote her memoirs into a condensed version called “Dairies, Letters and Memories of Pauline Laverick Aikman in Sutton, Surrey, England.”

The pages of the newly written memoirs, safe in plastic sleeves and bound in a white binder, are accompanied by black and white photos of her friends, family and the home she lived in.

Drawings and maps outline where the bombs fell and where the “Doodlebugs” wreaked havoc in her neighborhood, making the reader very aware of how much danger her family was in.

In the binder is a copy of a letter from a friend that recounts, first hand, the Invasion of Normandy.

Pauline trusted me enough to allow me to take the precious binder home. After dinner, I sat at the kitchen table and, through the words in the binder, immersed myself in five years of Pauline’s life.

The friends she wrote about became my friends. I came to love her dog Benno and the cats, Nibby and Jeepers. I worried about John and Peter who were off at war.

Pauline wrote about the dances with the American soldiers and going on adventures with friends. Although they were in the midst of war, the times seemed simpler and safer. It was a time when a young woman could “go to the city” with friends and come home safe.

Pauline’s memoir ends when she recounts the “Fancy Dress Ball” on New Years Eve 1945, a celebration of the end of the war and renewed hope for a new year.

An epilogue entitled, “What Happened to Them?” told me what happened to the people I came to know through her words.

After I closed the binder, I stared out the window, lost in thought.

But for one, her friends led successful and productive lives following the war.

Pauline wrote that Benno and the cats, which also lived through the bombings and air raids, died of old age. I found great comfort in that. I guess that’s what we all hope for – that simple old age will take us, no matter what life tosses our way, no matter what we have to endure.

Pauline’s memoir ended there, but her memories didn’t.They have lived with her, or she with them, for 68 years. She told me she still cringes when an airplane flies over.

  I can only imagine.

– Renee Worthing