baldpipeguy
Baths 2
After John's death, my cousin Dorothy Maud, to whom he had been devoted, came into possession of his effects.
Among them was a bill of sale from a wholesale grocer's in Halifax, Nova Scotia for such items as tea, sugar, marmalade - luxuries during the war, but essential to a British table such as grandmother's.
There also was a packet of letters, and a diary.
The letters were sent to and from an Army officer serving in South Africa whose name appears only with his first initials; he in turn addressed his letters to "Jean Barron" and all were exchanged via Uncle John's London solicitor, who he used as mailing address.
As John was nominally a Frenchman, the name Jean - French for John - would have aroused no interest at home... but if opened (as they could have been at any time) by a British military censor, they would more likely have been interpreted as having come from a young woman named Jean.
The letters are interesting for being very unspecific as to the person being written to, or what plans or experiences the writer and sender share. Nowhere for example does either one say anything like, "I can't wait to go dancing with you again" or "I think of you in that pretty pink hat". Instead, they talk only of the pain of separation and their intense longing to be reunited.
And having written yearning letters when I thought I had found the one and only other person in the world I could love and would love me, the tone of their correspondence is very familiar. I can easily imagine how it must have felt for John, sleeping in cramped cold quarters on a tinpot merchant steamer, to remember the beautiful times spent wrapped in his lover's arms when they were together in Alexandria, Egypt... no doubt they found some secluded corner of the seafront where they could lie together in the sun and say everything they wanted to say with no fear of being overheard.
Baths 2
After John's death, my cousin Dorothy Maud, to whom he had been devoted, came into possession of his effects.
Among them was a bill of sale from a wholesale grocer's in Halifax, Nova Scotia for such items as tea, sugar, marmalade - luxuries during the war, but essential to a British table such as grandmother's.
There also was a packet of letters, and a diary.
The letters were sent to and from an Army officer serving in South Africa whose name appears only with his first initials; he in turn addressed his letters to "Jean Barron" and all were exchanged via Uncle John's London solicitor, who he used as mailing address.
As John was nominally a Frenchman, the name Jean - French for John - would have aroused no interest at home... but if opened (as they could have been at any time) by a British military censor, they would more likely have been interpreted as having come from a young woman named Jean.
The letters are interesting for being very unspecific as to the person being written to, or what plans or experiences the writer and sender share. Nowhere for example does either one say anything like, "I can't wait to go dancing with you again" or "I think of you in that pretty pink hat". Instead, they talk only of the pain of separation and their intense longing to be reunited.
And having written yearning letters when I thought I had found the one and only other person in the world I could love and would love me, the tone of their correspondence is very familiar. I can easily imagine how it must have felt for John, sleeping in cramped cold quarters on a tinpot merchant steamer, to remember the beautiful times spent wrapped in his lover's arms when they were together in Alexandria, Egypt... no doubt they found some secluded corner of the seafront where they could lie together in the sun and say everything they wanted to say with no fear of being overheard.