The sub-series consists of John J. Hume's personal diaries 1940-1948 and 1968-1970, and his daily expense books 1939-1940 and 1949-1964. His diaries offer an intimate portrait of a private soldier in the Canadian Army during the Second World War. There are no diaries for the months between July 1943 and April 1944, when he served in action at the front in Sicily and Italy and then convalesced in hospital from wounds suffered 13 December 1943 at Ortona: the army forbid soldiers at the front from keeping diaries, lest they fall into the hands of the enemy. The surviving diaries offer a revealing glimpse of a sensitive and perceptive young man in the grim and bureaucratic machinery of the Canadian Army at war. The diaries begin in March 1941 with written entries continuous through to June 1943, resume again in May 1944 and continue on into his postwar life until 1948.
The 1941-1943 diaries document his service in North America with the Victoria Rifles of Canada regiment. In early 1941, they were stationed in St. John's, Newfoundland, where Hume managed the regimental stores and organized dances for the men in his spare time. The regiment moved to Gander in April 1941 to guard the vital airport and aircraft refueling site. In October 1941, they moved again to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. His diary for November and December reflects the increased intensity of war preparations in the Pacific, his reaction to Pearl Harbor, anxiety over the fate of the Royal Rifles at Hong Kong, and disgust at trading in the Lee Enfield rifle urgently needed in Britain for the reviled Ross rifle. When the regiment moved to Halifax in August 1942, Hume left it to go overseas to England. For late 1942 and early 1943, the diary contains a detailed account of life in the large Canadian Army centre at Aldershot: the endless training, monotonous routine, friendships formed, pettiness of camp life, and trips to the surrounding countryside. The diary ends abruptly in June 1943 when he was drafted out of the Canadian Infantry Reinforcement Unit and into the West Nova Scotia Regiment bound for the Mediterranean theatre. It resumes again in May 1944 while he completed his convalescence in England. In the aftermath of D-day, his relief at being assigned to the Treasury Office in August instead of France is palpable, though tinged with shame. He expresses his emotions in October 1944 on learning that his "surest friend" Tom King is missing in action and later joy on learning that he is alive. Certain themes pervade all of the wartime diaries. His religious convictions and doubts, his desire to serve God and truth by moral conduct, his frequent loneliness and ambivalence and anxiety over friendships, and his delight on receiving news or parcels from home.
The postwar diaries are primarily of interest for revealing the impact of the war on Hume and tying his life experience into the larger picture of the Hume family in Canada. They survive for the years 1946-1948 and 1968-1970 and are supplemented for the missing years by the "skeleton" record of his daily expense books. In some ways, his experiences are representative of a war veteran returning to Canada in the mid-1940s and in mid-life in the late 1960s. These periods are often depicted as boom years but Hume struggled to adjust to post-war world, working on the margins as a bank teller in Montreal, hotel clerk in Thunder Bay, front desk clerk at the YMCA in Ottawa, and civil servant with the federal government. The diaries refer to bouts of alcoholism and depression, and discuss issues such as sexuality. The later diaries show that Hume gives money away to friends, is frequently short of cash, drinks often, and has at times difficult relations with his brother and sisters. The social and economic advances of the postwar years seem to have passed him by though he still enjoyed some of life's simple pleasures, a beer after work, a movie, or reading the newspapers.
