Sunday May 16. 8.30. a.m. [1943]
# AN IDYLLIC MAY SUNDAY
# AIRCRAFT SHATTER DREAMS OF PEACE
# AFRICAN VICTORY CELEBRATED
# MIXED FEELINGS OVER YOUTH PARADES
# MORE LETTERS FROM RON

This is one of those lovely days that come sometimes in May. Rene used to call them real Sundays when she was small, and one fell on a Sunday. Well this has every appearance of being one of them. As our time is two hours in advance of the sun, part of this side of the sand-hills are still in shadow and part of them catches the sun. Birds are singing, and it is so calm and quiet. War seems very far away, but that is a fallacy. Only a few hours since our planes were going out in droves to burn and destroy and to add another load of misery to the world in the hope of reforming. I wonder if “doing evil that good may come” ever works out successfully. Today we are to celebrate the African victory, Church bells may ring a merry peal this morning. I fancy there will be many people with sons and husbands who will never come back from there to whom the bells will sound like the passing bell, and many more anxious wives and parents who are waiting to hear from relatives who they know were fighting, who will not be able to rejoice whole-heartedly until they know they are safe. Well, war will creep into my diary as it creeps into everywhere now. But here today it seems far away and very peaceful, this lovely morning with the warmth of summer and the freshness of spring, the scent of the white lilac from the bush at Sykes gate, yet it seems a little spoiled by Jean going to parade with the Life Girls to Chapel. It is Youth Sunday and tho’ I know the Life Girls are a peace-time movement, they seem as if they must be in uniform and march and parade, more in imitation of war than working for peace. Father says “No war will ever put an end to war, only peace can do that.” He has just been upstairs (I am in bed as I have a touch of bronchitis) and says Dr Mellor died yesterday.

Girls' LIfe Brigade and Boys' Brigade Assembly for Parade, Chapel St Leonards, 1943

Girls’ LIfe Brigade and Boys’ Brigade Assembly for Parade,
Chapel St Leonards, 1943 (Photo: Dennis Plant Collection) 

 

We have had 5 letters from Ron this week and Rene one. He has got our parcel. In Rene’s letter he says he has just got letters from me after being a month without. Poor old Ron, it would seem an endless time and so disappointing when the other mails came in. I never write less than once a week, we can only write and post them and hope for the best.

Miss Sykes’ house, ‘Sandlea’, was the first in the row on Anderby Road, the nearest to ‘The Point’, next door to ‘Red Tiles’ (see Village Map). Harry Sykes, believed to her brother and probably also living there at the time, had been a naval petty officer and was a Boys’ Brigade assistant and member of the Royal Observer Corps

Mrs Dandison, previously mentioned leader of the Girls’ Life Brigade, appears in the photograph.

Dr Mellor, in Skegness, had been retired.

Have you read an introduction to May Hill & family (includes photographs) and explored ‘The Casualties Were Small’?

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