Stan and Grace

On 6 February, 1942, two young people were at home on leave in Grimethorpe, a coal mining village in what is now South Yorkshire (at the time it was part of the great West Riding of Yorkshire). Stan was 22 years old, a Corporal in the Royal Signals.  He had been in the Army for two years, having been just the right age to be conscripted in 1939. Grace was just 21 years old - her birthday was 2 February and she may have arranged her leave so she could be at home for her 21st birthday.  Grace was training to be a State Registered Nurse at the City General Hospital in Nottingham. Both their fathers: George Bristow and William Skuse, were involved with the Nursing Association in Grimethorpe and were part of the organising committee for a dance being held at the Welfare Hall.  Neither Stan nor Grace were particularly bothered about going to the dance, but both were persuaded by their fathers to turn out on a cold February night.  As the evening progressed a fight broke ou...

Early in 2001 my sister, Susan and I were working on the task of clearing our mother's house.   Our father, Stan, had died in 1989, just a month short of his 70th birthday.   Our mother, Grace, had now declined with dementia to the point where there was no alternative but for her to go into a care home.  Susan and I needed to empty the house prior to it being sold. We opened the wardrobe.  Most of the clothes had gone, either with Mum when she moved into the home, or to the charity shop.  There, in the bottom of the wardrobe was a large old cardboard box.  We pulled out the box, put it on the bed and opened it up.  Inside we found hundreds of letters, in random piles, in our parents' handwriting or typed on an old manual typewriter.  They were the letters our parents wrote to each other between February, 1942, when they met, and April, 1946, when our father was demobbed at the end of the Second World War. Susan took them home with her an...