Stan and Grace

  The Nurses Home, General Hospital, Nottingham. Thursday 26th  10 a.m.   My Dear Stan, I am so sorry that I cannot get my nights off as I said in my previous letter.   I honestly did not know until this morning that Sister had changed them and I sent you a telegram as soon as I came off duty.   I do hope that you get it in time.   I am really sorry if it has messed up your leave. You see, I have got another staff nurse on now and she has not had a day off for last month and she cannot have the nights off that she wanted as we are taking all emergency cases that particular week, so Sister decided to give her the nights off that I had asked for.   I was furious when I heard about it and went to the office immediately.   Of course, as she is more senior to me I just had to let her have them. Sister then tried to make me have from the 12 th – 16 th but I put my foot down and said no, as they were no good to me.   She wanted t...

  The Nurses Home, General Hospital, Nottingham. 3.50 a.m.    23 / 2/ 42 Dear Stan, Please forgive me for not having answered your letter before but I have been waiting until I knew definitely when I was having my nights off.   I got to know exactly 15 mins: ago, so you can see that I have not wasted much time in letting you know.   I am having from 7 th – 11 th of March.   That is a week next Saturday until the following Wednesday.   I do hope that you can get leave then.   About an hour ago I was not feeling in the best of spirits as I was not at all sure about my nights off, the Steriliser had run over (making a lovely lake which I had to mop up) and Sister had been hanging around finding fault with everything but now that I am sure about my nights off and there is every possibility of you having yours – well – I am on top of the world.   I was sorry that it took four days for my last letter to reach you but it seemed such a ...

 After meeting at the Nursing Association Dance on 6 February (see post 'Going to a Dance') Grace and Stan returned to their workplaces; Stan to Darlington and Grace to Nottingham.  As promised, Stan wrote to Grace, a letter which arrived on 11 February.  Unfortunately we don't have Stan's early letters because Grace didn't save them, so the first few letters are all Grace's side of the correspondence.    Note the time - Grace was working nights. Nurses Home, General Hospital, Nottingham     3.45 a.m.   Dear Stan, Thank you so much for your letter which I received yesterday.   You did manage the six pages after all, even though it was with the addition of a P.S.   I was so sorry to hear about your journey back.   I am afraid that if I had been in your place I would have felt really bad tempered when I reached my destination.   I did quite well, I was only a quarter of an hour late.   You know, I am not in t...

  Stan was born in 1919 in South Elmsall.   He was a talented boy treble, singing in St. Mary’s Church Choir and winning many prizes in regional music competitions, which give him an early love of classical music.   At 11, Stan passed “the scholarship” (11+ exam) and attended Hemsworth Grammar School, where he learned many things that would serve him well later – including basic French.   Stan’s twin brother and sister, Janet and John, were born in 1930 and in 1934, when Stan was 15, his parents decided that it was time he left school and started work, so he never got to take his School Certificate exams.    A job was found for him as a trainee journalist with Arthur Moseley, who ran the South Elmsall office of the South Yorkshire Times , a weekly newspaper with its base in Mexborough.     The photo above shows Stan on holiday, aged about 15. When Stan was 16, the family moved to 19 Burntwood Road, Grimethorpe as his father, George, was offere...

  2 February is Grace’s birthday, so today seems like a good time to tell you about Grace’s life up to February 1942, when the story told by the letters begins. Grace was born in the mining village of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire in 1921 (for more details of her family see The Skuse Family page on the left).   She attended Grimethorpe Board School and, like most children, left school aged 14 and ‘went into service’ in a big house in Leeds. Grace’s mother, Alice, had told her to put a chair under the doorknob of her room to prevent anyone getting in, and Grace was grateful of this advice when the teenage son of the household tried to get into her room.   “Oh, come on, Grace, let me in!” he said. “The other girl used to let my brother in.”   Can you imagine, away from home age 14 having to deal with this? This photo shows Grace, aged about 14, outside her home, 56 Brierley Road, Grimethorpe.  This house is mentioned in many of the letters that she and Stan w...

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...