For those courting in the 1940s, their relationships would be tested by the perils of war and enforced long separations.
So it was for newlyweds John and Ursula Valentine, whose story is told through their wartime correspondence which was uncovered in 1993 by their daughter, Frances, who edited the many hundreds of letters into book form. Now, Steve Darlow has created a play from the same material that paints a very particular portrait of a young couple parted in dangerous times.
John has to leave new wife Ursula’s side for training with the air force as a navigator before joining an active squadron and starting operations. Whilst he is away from home, his missives contain socks and underwear sent back for washing and mending by Ursula who, meanwhile, has given birth to Frances. Ursula’s parcels to him contain letters that affectionately describe Frances in a baby gas mask and the impact of a Morrison shelter on the decor of the living room, together with darned socks and new handkerchiefs.
It is all rather nice, and even when John’s plane is shot down and he is reported as missing, there is no aching heartbreak. The collection of letters is impressively large, but is, not unreasonably, incomplete, and there is reference to letters being censored once he has become a prisoner of war, but there is little grit in a narrative that seems intent on showing both John and Ursula as heroically plucky.
Time passes with John scratching away at a violin in a succession of unsanitary locations to relieve the grim monotony of camp life, whilst Ursula, between sessions of darning, goes on epic bike rides, house-hunting in all weathers and at all hours, with everything recounted with a touch too much jolliness and delivered in enthusiastic RP.
It is a tale of hardships, illnesses, frustrations and ill-treatment imagined almost entirely without suffering but big on heart-warming and nostalgia.
Director Jo Emery manages the back and forth so it doesn’t play too much like a tennis match, but the script has an unbalanced opening where Ursula doesn’t have a line for what seems like an age. The momentum is then not served by the intrusion of an interval, and the continuity strays towards the end with a deviation that has John recite his letter to the family of his crew’s pilot.
In the end, though, this is John and Ursula’s story showing how, through the now quaintly outdated practice of letter writing, they kept hope alive during difficult times, sending their love and news (and socks) across war-torn borders.