I am overwhelmed by the letters, spellbound

ALTHOUGH I BELIEVE HE WROTE OTHER LETTERS at that time, these 2 are all that survive.


It was very moving, to view these letters for the first time, after my father died. Whilst I knew him, he never once mentioned his war experiences. You may have noticed that he referred to “Going to get my new suit; blue grey”
That of course was when he joined the RAF. He served in the terrible conflict in Burma and then spent a long time in India.


He said in the letters that he went to the pictures with ‘Marj Brown’ and then there are more references to her and “The Brown Family”. This gives me a very strange feeling, as I am glimpsing my Father dating my Mother whilst they are just teenagers, about seven years before they gave birth to me!

Another mention of the Brown family refers to Uncle Bert.

“Brown’s Uncle Bert made us laugh the other night. All the evening he had been saying how he wasn’t bothered by air raids and that he would go up to bed as normal. At ten o'clock sharp off he went pausing at the top of the stairs to say that it was just a case of getting used to them. At ten fifteen he was down under the stairs with the rest of us.”

Just to put this into perspective; Uncle Bert was totally blinded in the First World War. In the same conflict, his twin brother Horace was blown to pieces with no trace of his body being found.


It is sad that I have no recollection of any of the locations my Dad refers to in the letters, because the family moved to the Sussex countryside whilst I was quite young; where I had an idyllic childhood, so I am not complaining.

Another sadness concerns My Aunt Ida; the recipient of these letters. A few months ago, we were all looking forward to her 90th birthday. However, sadly a few weeks before the big day, she suffered a massive stroke. She also has ‘other complications’ which have resulted in her being placed in a nursing home in Swanage, her home town in Dorset.