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Date: July 10th 1943
To
Jill Leir - (fiancée)
From
Denys Beames
Letter

10/7/43.

My darling,

Hello muchly beloved, is the weather any better back at home than this bloody downpour? We’re enjoying (?) the fourth day of a typically wet week, having seen the sun on one or two occasions, but for the most part everything is wrapped in a grey pall, bringing that depressing cold that chills one’s spine and kills all my ambition. Not that I have an excess of that.

My one ambition at the moment sweetheart is, as I’ve told you often enough, just to get home find a suitable future for us, beyond that I’m afraid I have no very great ambitions – just a chance to lead our own lives in our own way with a comfortable living and future in it. I often stop wonder whether I’m going anywhere in this air force, or if its all going to be a dead loss to me after this is all over. It won’t be a dead loss even if I can’t use it, any experience is something gained, but its going to be quite a problem, whether active flying will be a worthwhile career or not after the war. I guess we have never really talked seriously about just what I am going to do to earn a living for us andmake a home for our children and we wont have to worry very much for a while yet, however it is a big consideration, which gives me a good deal of food for thought.

At least it is good to know that you are preparing yourself, in the best possible way, for anything that you may have to meet and I often wonder if you won’t be a long way ahead of me when we meet again – in more ways than one. I suppose it is just natural that one loses touch with other things when one specializes on a subject, but I’m often really shaken at the things I’ve forgotten since I left school and the seemingly ever-narrowing outlook on life one gets from service life. It is only natural to absorb something of ones environment but to find yourself being entirely taken up in it is to my mind a pretty sad state of affairs and I’m now finding it necessary to interest my self in the allmost forgotten things of civy’ life especially in reading, current events and social entertainment.

I’ve been wanting to tell you of this worrying mental hangover for quite a while darling and feel better for having done it. Since I’m at the end of the page I’ll have to say adios for the moment, but I am always with you in spirit. God bless you dearest, all my love,

Your
Den.

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