Ordinary person historical memroirs

[RedRedWhiney]

Can anyone recommend any memoirs? Not famous people, I love reading about 'ordinary' experiences.
Loved Road to Nab End and Call the Midwife.
Angela's Ashes until I found out it was mainly made up....
Any recommendations like that please :)

I'm afraid that the Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe has taken on a whole new layer of fascination. There is much to recognise in terms of the years we have gone through recently. The points that really stuck with me were some of the information notices apparently used at the time (advice to air any public carriage for 24 hours before the next trip, for example), and a great description of people attending church services by congregating outside by the door to watch, while sucking 'preventive' sweets or holding aromatic hankies to their noses, with the effect that the doorway and the service takes on the smell of a chemist shop! There are some other harrowing parts, though.

Nevertheless, I'm on my second read through, and pre-Covid would probably not have picked it up.

Jb facey ‘ a fortunate life’. It’s extraordinary

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

Yay! @PickleLip! no one’s ever heard of Betty! I love her. My fave is definitely The Plague and I but they’re all brilliant

That sounds good.

They really are. The Plague was the first one I read when I was a teen and I love it - my mum had a battered old Penguin copy from the 50s or 60s she’d got second hand, and I read it a million times. Her writing style is so modern and relatable even though she was living in such different times to now

Lovely to see more Betty MacDonald enthusiasts. My favourite is Onions in the Stew, which I first came across as a battered paperback with a marvellous fifties style cover of a couple absolutely not coping with a burst pipe gushing like a fire hydrant. I read it so often it disintegrated.

But that prompted me to track down a sturdier hardback, plus copies of The Egg and I, The Plague and I (about her stay in a TB sanatorium) and Anyone Can Do Anything. She was so, so funny.

In a similar vein are My Sister Eileen and Far, Far from Home, by Ruth McKenney, another American writing around the same post-war period. They are both delightful and ridiculously funny family memoirs.

Yes to Betty McDonald! I love her writing. I love Anybody Can Do Anything
I had a copy from a charity shop years ago but I couldn't get into it at all

Have you read Black Diamonds? It's about the fitzwilliam family in South Yorkshire, made a fortune from coal mining. It's so interesting the life they lived.

'Diary of William Tayler, Footman 1837'
is a brilliant account of a domestic servants life. Particularly interesting in that the local historical society found a lot of further information on him abd his family.

Nothing can beat Victor Klemperer's diaries of being a Jew in Dresden in the Weimar then Nazi years.

War and turpentine by Stefan Hertmans, a memoir based on the diaries of the author’s grandfather who was a WW I veteran and an artist is heartbreakingly beautiful. Hands down one of the best books I have ever read.

Following!

have not RTFT so apols if already mentioned (i will go back to get recs, i love a good memoir)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows - set in Nazi occupied channel islands

Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey - literally the pre-internet version of mumsnet. All questions and answers by actual letter

All of Monica Dickens output

Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson - English village life (turn of the 20th century? it's a while since i read it)

As I Walked Out One Summer Morning by Laurie Lee - he literally walked away one day and ended up fighting in the Spanish Civil War

i see all mine have already been suggested (also echo Black Diamonds - so good)

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube by Patrick Leigh Fermor

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies by Andy Beckett

We Were Cold Warriors by BDR JONNO DP 795 - there are 3 in the series. There may be one or two from me (it's a collection of anecdotes by former members of the British Forces in Germany) it isn't to everyone's taste.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Lucy Bird

Nurse! Nurse!: A Student Nurse's Story by Jimmy Frazier - young male nurse tells the story of his training

It Won't Hurt a Bit: Nursing Tales from the Swinging Sixties by Jane Yeadon

This might be a bit niche, but 'I leap over the wall' by Monica Baldwin.
She'd been in a convent, and came out in the middle of WWII. It's is a mixture between describing convent life, and the trials and tribulations of adjusting to life 'outside'.

or if we're talking ex-nuns, Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong is a brilliant read

Helen F wrote 4 autobiographical accounts of her early life in Liverpool. I'm a Sxouder but you don't need to be to read them. They are so readable

To War with Whittaker. One of my favourites

Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain, mother of Shirley Williams. Ignore the terrible film, it's her memoirs from 1900 to 1925, covering her losses and nursing during WWI in particular

Cider with Rosie! It's brilliant :)

The Toilers of the Field by Richard Jefferies.

It's not a memoir but so descriptive of the times that I think everyone should read it...
'Vivid and realistic descriptions of the daily lives of Victorian English farmers and labourers, first published in 1892.'

I`m going to have to go and read it again!