Real Life: Love letters in wartime

Katie Thomas sits by her husband's hospital bed. He has been in a coma for weeks.

Turning the pages of Clive James's Unreliable Memoirs, she urges 72-year-old Brian to wake up and laugh along with her. For a moment, his eyes flicker and he regains consciousness.

"Is there anything you need, my darling?", she asks.

"Only you," he replies. They were his last words.

F. Brian Thomas and Katie Walker met during the Second World War and theirs is a story of undying love.

It is also a story signposted by almost 300 love letters, kept for decades and not seen until now.

Their daughter Loraine is transcribing the documents, dotted with scribbles by her father of pyramids and palm trees from his travels, and uploading a different one each day to a stunning new blog that reveals the truth about love in wartime.

"I'm barely 50 letters in but an extraordinary story is already emerging," Loraine, a 59-year-old writer says.

"I have no idea what revelations the yet-to-be transcribed letters hold so the voyage of discovery can be shared by followers of the blog.

"Reading love letters written by one's parents is a high-risk project but a number of factors minimised the risks. For a start, at the end of the war, couples didn't consummate the relationship until they were married. There are a few delicate suggestions of the strong physical attraction they have for one another, but the tone of the letters is romantic and tender as opposed to passionate or graphic.

"The other incredible factor is that the more letters I transcribe, the clearer it becomes that all the promises they made to one another were fulfilled. It is easy nowadays to be cynical when one reads of undying love but when my father wrote to my mother 'You are the big love of my life, and I'll never love you less,' he meant every word."

A surgeon by profession from a strong medical family – his father was an eye surgeon and his mother one of the first women in the country to qualify as a doctor – Brian, originally from Swansea, was 29 when the war broke out.

In the weeks before his first posting oversees as part of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), he married his then girlfriend Kit in January 1942. Just a month later, he embarked by convoy from Gourrock in Scotland, sailing through the North Atlantic to Freetown in Sierra Leone, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and heading up towards Durban. He eventually disembarked at Port Tewfik, the major war-time port of Egypt.

The following year, a spell of short leave arrived and Major Thomas returned home – to find Kit living with another man.

Shocked, he left on a hospital ship via Alexandria and Tripoli and spent the next three months in Algiers – the inspiration for the pyramid and palm tree doodles.

Allied forces invaded Italy in September 1943 and Brian was posted to Pompeii. As the Allies moved up through Italy, so did he, eventually arriving in Graz in Austria. It was here that he met his future wife at the local hospital.

Katie, originally from Burnham Beeches, was just 17 when the conflict broke.

She joined the Blood Transfusion Service before becoming a VAD, nursing at Netley in Southampton and on the Isle of Wight before embarking from Liverpool to sail through the Mediterranean to Naples. She was stationed outside Rome in a tiny village called Agnagni, eventually ending up in Graz in 1945. They met at the general hospital and it was love at first sight.

Katie knew Brian was married and that the marriage was effectively over and the four months they spent together in Graz convinced them that they were meant for one another.

As he had been serving overseas for longer, he was demobbed eight months before Katie.

In January 1946 on a troop train leaving Graz, he wrote: 'My Dearest Darling. When you read this I will have gone and as I write this – even now – my poor old jam tart is just aching with a big, big sadness. Oh my darling, I do love you so very, very much. You'll never know quite how much until our great day comes, when usses will be really usses for evermore. Let's try, my dear darling, not to be too sad, though we are bound to be that way for a little time.

"When I think of the thousands of little things I'm going to miss, I wonder how I'll ever get through these months that lie ahead. But at the end of that time, the sun will come out again and shine for usses, and we'll wonder then how we could ever have felt so sad, knowing deep down inside our hearts that all will come well in the end.

"This little bit of our lives here in Graz has been the most perfect thing that has ever happened to me, my Booful one, and I can't believe that the gods would have been so cynical as to allow us to be so completely happy if they didn't mean us to have a future as well. So just go on loving me, as I love you, and go on trusting usses as we always have done."

They continued to write to each other throughout their separation, their heartbreak at being apart pouring from the pages.

Katie wrote on January 25, 1946: "Darling, I just didn't know I could feel like this. I've never in my life experienced anything resembling it, I just feel as if I have a lump of lead in my chest and some kind of of water system behind my eyes. I start reading a book or something and then it all comes back in a rush and I just think I shall die of misery. Oh darling, how depressing all this is but by it you can know a little how very much I love you and how the thought of life without you seems intolerable. My darling, I shall keep faith – once this acute misery has passed. I know I shall begin to believe in our future again."

As well as the letters, which were written in locations including Venice, Saltzburg, London and Swansea, they sent photographs to each other and Brian would send Katie trinkets such as his RAMC badge and a photograph of angel fish kissing. But, while back home in Swansea, he had the serious task of obtaining a divorce from Kit so he could be free to marry his true love.

Although Kit had a lover, he had no intention of dishonouring her name by suing her for adultery. The only way he could obtain a divorce in 1946 was to prove that he had been adulterous, difficult under the circumstances because he had not.

His letter dated March 2, 1946 reveals how he solved the problem. After visiting his solicitor Bill, he set about concocting a "farce" and looking for a woman who would go along with the story and say he had been unfaithful.

"I just sweated blood thinking how on earth I would ever find someone who could enact the farce with me," he writes. "Well, darling one, the proverbial Thomas luck held. My sister vaguely knew a girl in London, who was in with all the stage folk, and who lived on her own and had just divorced her husband. So I saw her first, hoping to chat to her, take her out to dinner, and then tell her my problem, hoping she'd be able to suggest perhaps someone who would do the deed with me.

"Well, I went round to her flat after ringing her up, and we had a drink or two. She was a nice soul (but not beautiful, so don't worry honey!). She then told me all about her divorce, and ended up by saying "I'm sure you've got a problem on you mind – what is it." So I told her, and she asked me why on earth I hadn't told her right away. She said immediately she'd do it, and there we were.

"So we just spent two nights in a hotel about 20 miles out of London and just slept peacefully in our separate beds! I never even held her hand!! When I left, I tried to get her to accept a gift, as a token on gratitude, but she wouldn't. I gave her a bottle of whisky, and ordered a whopping bunch of flowers to be sent to her, and that was that. I'm deeply grateful to her, and my faith in the essential decency and generosity of ordinary people has gone up by leaps and bounds.

"It was a real Beau Gest – by a complete stranger who did it for no reward, but just to help a chap who was in difficulties. She was just one of this world's damn good types and I raise my hat to her. She just went through the whole nonsense as if it was one huge joke. So that's the whole story of my incursion into the realms of organised legal vice!!

"D'you know, darling, I never now seem to think of myself as a separate being – it's always as part of usses. Whatever I do, or wherever I go, I find myself picturing usses doing it in our future, and even the thought of you doing it with me seems to enrich all I do. If I was certain in Graz that you and I were perfectly matched in every way as partners, I'm now doubly sure of it. Being parted from you has not dimmed in any way my love for you, or my memory of all the lovely times we've had, or all the wizard thing you've said to me, and all the lovely things I feel for you."

The pair were eventually married on March 17, 1947 at Slough Registrar Office.

By this time, Brian was orthopaedic registrar at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Hospital in Oswestry. He then moved on to be consultant orthopaedic surgeon for Oswestry and Hereford, a post he held until 1975. His portrait hangs in the Institute of Orthopaedics in Oswestry.

The couple lived in Hereford and, as well as Loraine, had a son Peter, now professor of orthopaedics at Keele University.

Both Brian and Katie kept one another's letters. Brian passed away in 1982 and before Katie died in 2009, she passed on the collection of letters to Loraine on the condition that she would not read them or publish them until after her death.

"When that day eventually came, I was too sad to embark on the monumental task of collating and transcribing this huge cache of correspondence but last month I eventually began to post them on the blog," Loraine says from her home in Oxford.

"What strikes me most is that there is no doubt in their minds. There is no paranoia or lack of confidence about their love. I am seeing in them in a new light but there are definitely things that I recognise about them, such as their sense of humour and positive attitude.

"My mother was 59 when dad passed away and I thought she would go to pieces but she held everything together and said 'I have had 32 wonderful years with that man'. She never grumbled.

"It is very moving reading all this. Sometimes when I read in their letters about the second generation of 'usses' I think 'Goodness me that's me and my brother'.

"I feel very lucky to have these letters. Not only do they show what life was like back then but I also feel like I have a bit of them still with me. When I'm reading them, it's as though my parents are still here."

Elizabeth Joyce

• The blog can be found at withlovefromgraz.blogspot.co.uk

• Loraine writes under the name of LP Fergusson. Her works of fiction include The Archivist and the sequel, The Golden Hand, modern satires set in Duntisbourne Hall, a stately home in Shropshire. They are available in paperback and ebook format from Amazon.