Family secrets

Two old carrier bags at the back of the cupboard I’d not noticed before. I dragged them out to see what was in them. It was old letters from the war and sepia photographs, hundreds of them. Detritus from Uncle Jack, whom we looked after in his last years when he couldn’t remember anything and took to the bottle. Uncle Jack was my grandfather’s brother. (My grandfather died of a brain tumour long before I was born.)

I sat down and looked at the photographs and read some of the letters. The majority were from Uncle Jack’s mother, my great-grandmother, whom he adored. In them she tells her son all the family news and about how she longs for the day when the family is reunited.

Uncle Jack was in the Royal Artillery. He would have received these letters first in North Africa (‘We were up and down that desert like bloody yo-yos’) and after that in Italy.