Following my Dad’s death in 2017, I found a stack of letters which had written home – between 1942 when he was 20 and enlisted in the RAF to 1947 when he was finally de-mobbed aged 25. By this time he had been sent to India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and was working as a Wireless Mechanic on planes which were supply dropping to the troops in Burma.
I have in excess of 100 letters, in which he mostly talks of day to day life during his training in the UK – around Scotland and England, and his time in India and Ceylon. One one occasion whilst stationed in Great Yarmouth he was involved with helping with moving people from wreckage after a residential area was bombed, and in other letters he mentions the journey through the Suez Canal on his way to West Africa before moving onto India and Ceylon.
He talks of the difficult climate abroad, how he occupied himself with music and about hoping to be home soon. All the letters are signed off – ‘your loving son Gilbert’. Whilst there was not much he could share about their work and there are afew places in letters where certain detail was removed due to censoring, he did tell me of some of the detail and the letters serve as a record of time spent away from home during this period and lovely momento now he is no longer here. I’m attaching a letter written on VE day, the day after his birthday. He passed away on 15th August (2017), this date in 1945 now known as VJ day, which was when the war in South East Asia he was a part of, finally marked the end of WW2.
