The Diarist and his Diary

Denis Walter Argent was a man who came early to the serious side of life. He was born in Croydon, Surrey, of Huguenot descent, on 13 January 1917. His parents, Walter Stanley Argent and Constance Emily Norman, had met in Chelmsford, Essex, and married in 1908; his mother was the daughter of a publican (of the Golden Lion) and his father worked in a grocery store. In 1921, the family – Denis had a sister, Joan, who was seven years older – moved to Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where they took possession of an early twentieth-century semi-detached house at 20 Somerset Road. Denis's father became a commercial traveller. In 1924, when Denis was 7, his father, then aged only 41, died. Thus Denis suddenly became in a sense the ‘man of the house’. The three remaining Argents led a fairly constrained life: his mother took in lodgers; Denis gave some of his small earnings to his mother as soon as he began work at the age of 17; and his sister helped out as well.

As a young child Denis lived in Tunbridge Wells but at the age of 12 he left during the school year to attend boarding school, the Royal Masonic School at Bushey, Hertfordshire. The school provided a free education to the orphaned sons of Freemasons such as his father. In later life Denis wrote favourably of the quality of the education he received, considering it the equivalent of a public school education without the snobbish élitism. After leaving school in 1934, he worked as a journalist, first for the Tonbridge Free Press, and from 1938 for the Essex Weekly News in Chelmsford, where he was living when he was called up for military service.

As an adult Denis continued to learn new skills – first in Tunbridge Wells and later (from 1940) as a soldier – acquiring shorthand and typing, and keeping his French and German up to scratch (DR, July 1943). Most significantly, perhaps, he was a prodigious reader (as a glance at his diary will quickly confirm). In his meticulous writing for Mass-Observation, he reported that he had read 150 books in 1941 (DR, October 1943), 106 in 1942, and 80 by August of 1943 (DR, August 1943).