Letters between sweethearts Harry Pearson and Eileen Pleasants 1944-1946

My father, Harry Pearson (b. Tyldesley, Lancashire, 27 September 1918) met his future wife Eileen Ruth Pleasants (b. Romford, Essex, 10 October 1924) in 1944 while serving in the 110th Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery.

Their initial meeting can be narrowed down, with a fair degree of accuracy, to June 1944, when Harry is known to have enjoyed a period of embarkation leave in East London in the company of some of his regimental comrades. This was just before his unit was posted to France in the aftermath of the successful D-Day Normandy landings.

While relaxing and socialising on the Essex fringe of London, he managed to meet my mother, who at that time was living in Forest Gate, London, E7 and working as a telephone operator at General Post Office Headquarters in the City.

After a chance meeting in a local pub affectionately known as 'The Lord Bobs', Harry and Eileen seem to have fallen for each other at once and quickly commenced a courtship which was carried on chiefly by letter over the final year or so of the war.

Harry's release from military service eventually came seven months after VE Day on 19 January 1946, and he and Eileen married in East London on 2 March that year. Eileen pre-deceased Harry thirty-two years later in 1978.

After Harry's death in 1999, a bundle of handwritten letters, covering part of the period July 1944 to February 1946, were found among his effects.

None of the thirty-one letters overlaps with its immediate reply, and we do not know why these letters specifically were preserved, and not others - from what was obviously a longer-running correspondence. Nevertheless, these surviving personal documents, from nearly seventy years ago, provide an intriguing insight into the language, aspirations, opinions and values of a typical couple (aged only 26 and 19 on first meeting). They were two working class youngsters from different parts of the country, speaking with contrasting accents, thrown together in the turmoil of war and looking forward to sharing a life after the peace.