Enduring Love

I heard a story today, first hand, about a girl who finished school and went to work as a clerk in the summer of 1940. And very soon after, she was invited to the cinema by a young man who worked across the office. This was August. At the end of September that young man shipped out from Northern Ireland for training in England for the Royal Air Force. A year later they saw each other again briefly when he returned on embarkation leave, before being deployed to north Africa for the duration of the war. 'Course, she didn't know at the time where he was bound. Only found out when he hailed a friend from his ship in a harbour in Sierra Leone en route, and asked this friend to deliver a message to the girl's father, a police officer in the country. Who then passed the news on. As you would. The two, the girl and the young man, then corresponded, he from RAF bases across Africa, her from radar stations along the British coast, for the next four years. Correspondence at the time meaning censored postcards delivered back and forth through the military.

Then somehow, after four years apart, he phones her up one autumn day in 1945 to say he's just arrived home, to England. And she spends the rest of the night crying in a bar.

They were married the following Spring. Herbert and Eileen Wilson. My grandparents.

Now, call me a hopeless romantic, but that's lovely...