Letter from Ursula Valentine to her husband John Valentine

Letter from Ursula Valentine to her husband John Valentine

Mentions a WAAF lodger and writes about her domestic activities, listening to a talk by Mrs Jean Knox, the Director of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and about news of American miners’ strike.

1941-11-17

Four page handwritten letter

This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.

EValentineUMValentineJRM411117

Start of transcription
Lido
Monday 17.11.41
Darling Johnnie,
I do so hope you got back safely and undetected last night. I was on my own till 9.15 when the WAAF came home. She is not at all a bad girl, we had quite a long chat about this & that she has a boy friend in The Navy and four married sisters. She’s not particularly high class
[page break]
when you get her talking, but all the same she makes her bed & leaves her room tidy, so I suppose I might have done worse.
This morning we have had a large wash & as it has been blowing great guns & raining intermittently all morning I have been dashing in and out to bring things out of the rain or put them out again when it is fine. To crown everything,
[page break]
specially Florence, the clothes rack in the kitchen broke when heavily laden with damp nappies and came down with an awful crack on poor Flo’s head. She took it very well, but it shook her rather because only yesterday she’d found a mouse in their flat & had fallen down in sheer fright & hit the other side of her head.
There was an awfully good postscript last night by Mrs Jean Knox, ATS commander, on Service. I really enjoyed it.
[page break]
Nothing else exciting to report. I haven’t had Frances weighed yet. There was no correspondence. You’ve probably seen in the papers that those wretched American miners have gone on strike after all. It’s a bad show.
Lots & lots of love to you my dearest. Write soon and tell me [underlined] all [/underlined] about it.
Yours for always
Ursula