A Box of Letters

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 and sorted them into years.  They then came back to me, as I had been researching our family history for a number of years and thought that I should "do something" with the letters.

Over a number of years I transcribed the letters, over 400,000 words, buying museum-standard clear leaves to put them in and museum-standard files to store them.  I managed to re-connect some of the photographs that had found their way into the big box of family photos with the letters that mentioned them together with other pieces of memorabilia.  

... And there they sat for a long time.  Next birthday I will be 70.  I feel that I have neither the time nor the skills to turn them into a book or a radio play, which was my original intention.  Then I realised that they were the ideal subject for a blog.  After a slow start when some of the early letters were not saved, letters were flying to and fro at a rate of a letter from each of them every two or three days.  I realised I could post them over four years on the dates that they were written.

So welcome to Stan and Grace - a story of love and of the everyday lives of a soldier and a nurse caught up in and divided by a world war.  Their daily lives are at the same time fascinating and mundane.  War made everything difficult, yet both in their way were at the forefront of history, one in the Army and the other in nursing and medical practice.  I think that the letters are fascinating, but I am biased because they were my Mum and Dad.

                                Letters from 1945, sorted and awaiting transcription.