We’re sorting stuff out getting ready to move house, so my wife was going through various bits and pieces from her late mother. Amongst them she found a letter home from her dad, dated 19th June 1944. Seventeen pages written from the perspective of a radio operator on HMS Virago off the beaches. It’s astonishing. There are a couple of diaries, too, but really difficult to read those. I’ll try to get it scanned and upload a link - it’ll be quite chunky - but it’s been folded in an unmarked envelope for a very long time, and the paper is flimsy, so hard to get it flat.
Utterly gobsmacked to read the words of a 19 year old lad, who left school and lied about his age to join up, but who writes so eloquently.
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Okay, here’s a PDF scan in my OneDrive of the whole thing:
Letter home from Des Wright 190644.pdf
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I thought it best to stick this on a web page, as clicking on a OneDrive link from some random on the Internet is not something I’d do myself without a degree of trepidation…
So I’ve made a wee subpage on my own rather minimal site. The images here are JPEG, so smaller than the TIFFs in the original OneDrive folder, but I haven’t overcompressed them, so be wary if your dataplan is limited:
https://inglenot.co.uk/DesWright/index.html
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