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What is still to do
The fundamental task of finding some kind of provenance for this book is still unfinished and, until one is found, the chance of the Diary being just a clever fake will remain. There are many events in its story where sceptics can point a finger and say, 'Aha, this sounds suspicious!'. It is not hard to make a case for Jeanne and her daughter fabricating fictitious events to disguise that the diary was something Jeanne had made up. A claim that the original manuscript was given to a foreign soldier, who may well have been killed in the war in Europe, would be very hard to disprove. The fact that Michael Croucher seems not to have been given access to the critical phase of Jeanne's own wartime diary could be viewed as suspicious. The story that the manuscript came from an old nurse would also be hard to disprove. And finding that Molly had identified an American soldier as having had the Diary when we later discovered he knew nothing about it, might be seen as the final nail in the Diary's coffin. We would have to ignore the generally perceived wisdom that a simple country farmer's wife had neither the knowledge nor the ability to perpetrate such a fraud. But everyone, it's said, has one novel in them. Perhaps this was Jeanne's.
As well as finding answers to all the other unanswered questions we've already listed, we need to continue to untangle the complexities of the Preston family stories. The mixing and muddling of anecdotes handed down by word of mouth within a family is not unusual. The best approach is to assume there is some truth behind the stories and to search to discover what it is without assuming anything is true except in a general way. If we can discover the basis for Jeanne's family stories about the Diary coming into her possession and if we can find reasons or evidence for the stories surrounding it's disappearance we'll have come some way to proving the Diary genuine. If we can actually find it, there will still be much to learn, but the argument about its ever having existed will be finally over.
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