I bought a box of wartime love letters on the internet…
(and then five more)
Recently, I discovered that old letters are being sold on the internet (individually or in small bundles) with the purpose of being used as scrapbooking or ‘junk-journaling’ material. The horror I felt at this discovery is the excuse I’m using to explain why, when I saw a listing titled ‘Large Lot of Wartime Love Letters’ during my browse, I bought it immediately. The idea of them being divided up into bundles and sold as art material was horrifying; the letters needed to end up with someone who would look after them, and understand their value, and I knew that could be me.
Once I got started, I found that I couldn’t stop. Before the first box had even arrived, more were already on their way. I did have a criteria for the letters which I wanted to collect: ones from the Second World War, written between romantic partners, and the more letters within the collection the better.
I did some reading recently on the concept of ‘small-h histories’ — those which focus on the everyday history of everyday people, rather than large, world-changing events. That is the sort of history which I want to preserve by collecting these letters.
I intend on cataloguing the letters and keeping them safely stored, but I also have other plans. Here you will find blog posts about my research into the stories I find within the letters, and my process of cataloguing them. One day, there might also be an online archive (in my more ambitious dreams)!
So, in the spirit of small-h histories, I will say this. The histories found on this website will be small-w wartime, rather than (big-W) World War Two; they will be about friendships and romance, the garden at home, and hospital stays — not the statistics of battle strategies and General Montgomery. There might be plenty of stories from the war in North Africa, though, as many of the men who wrote letters in my collections served there!
If you want to learn about WWII through personal stories, told by those who experienced it, this might be the place for you.
