Doreen Bates

Doreen Bates was born in 1906 and died in 1994. Brought up in South London, she attended Croydon High School and read history at Royal Holloway College. Doreen joined the civil service as a trainee inspector of taxes in 1927 and met a more senior colleague, William Evans, with whom she formed an intense, mutual emotional bond. He was married, but childless, and Doreen came to long for a child fathered by him. This longing was fulfilled with the arrival of undiagnosed twins, a boy and a girl, in 1941, whom she, along with their father, nurtured while at the same time pursuing a professional career in the stressful conditions created in London during the Second World War. She wrote this remarkably vivid diary documenting her life during this time.