Double Duty: Sketches and Diaries of Molly Lamb Bobak Canadian War Artist

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

Anyone who has ever tried to research the history of daily life knows
that sources are hard to come by. History books recount the large
picture of battles and political acts, but the day-to-day small pictures
remain unrecorded except in fiction and occasional diaries or letters.

Here we have the war diaries of the first Canadian woman in uniform to
be officially designated a war artist. As a young art student, Molly
Lamb enlisted in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps in 1942 with high
hopes of going to war. For almost three years she traveled around the
country serving in canteens, creating meat-carving charts for the School
of Cookery, and painting scenery for The Canadian Army Show before she
was at last sent to Europe in June 1945, one month after V-E Day.

To keep up her spirits before the great event, she kept a diary in the
form of a newspaper, complete with handwritten articles and sketches in
a variety of media. This diary has now landed in our National Archives,
and Gossage has taken excerpts from it to fashion an entertaining
account of a Canadian woman in the armed services who also happened to
be an artist trying to keep her gift alive.

The original “newspaper” pages are reproduced to give the flavor of
the original, while their contents are also presented in regular print
for easier reading. The editor has divided the diary excerpts into
several sections and prefaced each with her own commentary. Although it
does help keep the history straight, this commentary also has the
unfortunate effect of revealing Lamb’s jokes and adventures before
they are told. If we were looking only at the drawings in the diary,
this would not be a disadvantage, but Lamb’s writing deserves
attention too. To those who have read her delightful Wildflowers of
Canada, it will come as no surprise that she is an exuberant and
charming writer as well as a lively artist.