For New Readers

Welcome to Stan and Grace – the blog.  If you are a new reader, this is a good place to start.

You are joining the blog at a point where the story has already started, but don’t worry – there’s a long way to go yet.

The best place to start is by reading the page ‘A Box of Letters’, which is accessed from the left-hand side of your screen if you are on a computer.  If you are on a phone, you need to tap the three lines at the top left-hand side of your screen and you will find it below the ‘Contributors’ panel.  There you will also find information about the families of the two writers.  It’s worth knowing who is who.

If you go back through the archive of the posts you will find a post ‘Going to a Dance’ (posted 30 January 2024), which should be your first stop, along with ‘About Grace’ (2 February 2024) and ‘About Stan’ (7 February 2024).  You can then decide whether to read the whole back-story or just start from today’s date.

What should you expect from the letters?  The writers are two young people who first met on 6 February, 1942.  Although their families live in the same village, Stan and Grace live over 100 miles apart.  Both are ‘living in’, in very strictly controlled roles: Stan is in the Army and Grace is training to be a nurse.  For the first three or four months they are getting to know each other and spend much of their time trying to get their leave to coincide so they can meet again.

To begin with, Grace doesn’t save Stan’s letters and it is not until late in 1942 that you begin to get a real two-sided correspondence.  What do they write about?  Their families and their friends, their developing relationship, Grace writes about her work and you learn about how nurses were trained and managed, about new treatments and, sometimes, about her patients.  Due to censorship during wartime, Stan can’t write much about his work but as time progresses you follow his progress through three of the major campaigns of World War II.  You follow their developing relationship and, as time progresses, their hopes and plans for the future.

However, imagine that you had to write two letters a week about your life; not all of it would be very interesting.  It is the same with Stan and Grace, even in the middle of a war much of their lives are mundane.  This is not a soap opera, so be prepared for periods where not much happens.

In the end it is essentially a love story, in their own words, set in a momentous time.  You will understand everyday life in the middle of a world war, both on the home front and in the services and have a front-seat view of some fascinating events – peppered with a good helping of tedium.  In other words – real life.