When Duncan Marlor’s mother died, he inherited something far more precious than money.

May Smith left her son her wartime diaries, 13 volumes of hardback books dating from 1935 until 1946.

Realising what a treasure they were, he began editing them so he could share them with others.

“I’d had no idea when I was growing up that my mother was a diarist,” says Duncan, 67 and a retired classics and Latin teacher who worked in Erdington and Sutton Coldfield.

“She stopped writing a diary in 1946, a year after I was born, because I think she was too busy.

“She wrote again from 1960 to 1980 but these are more like family jottings, the war diaries are much more intense.

“I think she wanted to keep a record of her life.

“In one part, she wrote ‘I feel happier now I have reestablished contact with my diary’ – I think it was her way of sorting out what she thought about life.”

May was 24 when war broke out, and was working as a primary school teacher in Swadlincote, Derbyshire. She also became a billeting officer and so had the arduous task of trying to find homes for evacuee children, many of whom came from the Birmingham area.

She writes of the many excuses she received from families who didn’t want to take children in, all insisting they didn’t want her to feel they were “unpatriotic” and how a baby had to be passed on to another family after crying all night and suffering from discharge from the ear and “goodness knows what”.

Highlights of the book include May’s love of shopping and clothes, her take on politics and international events and how her Christmases became decidedly more gloomy as the war progressed.

But what is most fascinating is how she keeps two suitors at arm’s length whilst her heart yearns for another.

Her son Duncan found this particularly shocking, as the most unlikely suitor turned out to be his father.

“My parents came from different parts of Derbyshire and met at Goldsmith College in London for teacher training,” adds Duncan, a bachelor from Darley Dale near Matlock, Derbyshire.

“I’d imagined they were always going to get married but didn’t straight away because of the economical hardship.

“But that wasn’t the case at all.

“Freddie, my father, was just one of several suitors. She was at times very rude and scornful about him, quite sarcastic and disdainful.

“She talks of a clergyman who was her boyfriend but who, as we would say now, dumped her.

“She was trying to get him out of her heart at the start of the war.

“Then Freddie, who was a RAF weatherman, was posted to West Africa. It was only when she was going to lose him she realised how much he meant to her.

“In the end he didn’t go because his father was ill and he was allowed to stay in England.

“That’s how Freddie became the man for her. Over time, May’s love for Freddie grows.

“I had no idea of this intense story in my mum’s life, with its emotions and dramatic twists and turns.

“It was a shock the first time I came to read it.”

Despite their rocky start, May remained devoted to Freddie until the day he died in 1999 at the age of 86.

“He had a fall and lost his mobility so he moved into a residential home,” says Duncan.

“She went to be with him every day, which shows the stoicism she’s always had.

“She was 90 when she died, a grandmother to my sister Barbara’s two children.”

May’s closest friend Vera is still going strong at 99.

Duncan spoke to her about turning his mother’s diaries into a book and she thought it a good idea.

After securing an agent, two publishers ended up in a bidding war for the book called These Wonderful Rumours.

“It was very difficult working out what to leave in and what to leave out.

“I’ve always been a big reader of history but it was important to allow May to tell her personal story.

“I thought I might be overdoing it, with too much of the ‘bad hair days’ and the clothes shopping but the publishers said to leave it in. It helps people to relate to her by reading all the everyday stuff.

“After all, she never sat down to write an account of the war.

“Vera helped because her memory is remarkably good. She reiterated how much May loved her clothes and fashion, she was certainly a bit of a spendthrift. She remembered they both earned £15 a month and said she managed very well on that and never went short, with the indication that May rather liked spending on clothes and books!”

Working on his mother’s book has given Duncan a greater appreciation of her.

“Editing her diaries has given me great admiration of her, of the parts of my mother I didn’t know.

“There was a lot of humour there to help her get through.

“There are times I think I’d have loved to have talked to her about this but I’m not sure she would have wanted to have any deep discussions about her diaries.

“My mother and father, like many, never talked about the war. Her diaries brought home the hardship and the bleakness of it.

“I think she had it in her mind for someone to read them sometime, she wanted in some way to tell her story.”