Will Hall has been in the RAF and training for a year, ‘chaffing at the bit for action’, but having just been moved from pilot to navigator training and sent to Moncton, Nova Scotia.

Mail would arrive that had been opened and re-sealed and marked by an examiner or censor handstamp. (All of the envelopes of the letters sent between my parents during the war had these stamps, showing they had been opened and read). The letters inside might have words blacked out if the censor had suspicion about what was being said.

Rationing was necessary in large part because of the difficulty of importing and exporting by sea. Also, many materials, including food, was a priority for the military. The Japanese capture of the principal rubber-producing areas of the Far East eliminated the sources of 90% of the world’s natural rubber, which in those days all tires were made of. In the US, rationing of materials for clothing was less severe than in England. Marguerite was very lucky to be able to get clothes for her college wardrobe.

In the final episodes of this podcast, beginning with this one, the words of Will Hall are his own! This episode beings in the Spring of 1941. The German Luftwaffe blitzed the Port of Liverpool for seven straight nights in May 1941.

As usual on my BackStory page, below you will find extra details about my family as well as what was happening in the US and the UK. See also photos on Instagram.

Marguerite is back home in Hanover. Here is more detail about some family members, as well as the strange coincidence of my discovering, as I was writing this story during the Covid pandemic, that one such family member had written a novel in the 1930s about a virus-caused pandemic! In England, for Maude, and the Hall family, the Battle of Britain has begun. Read more about censorship, radar, the Home Guard and Operation Sealion.

The Quinceañera that Marguerite mentions is a girl’s 15th birthday party, an important celebration in Central and South American countries that marks the passage from girlhood to womanhood. Now that Marguerite is 16, it is indeed strange that marriage is not being discussed by her parents, and likely the reason she is being sent back to the States.

Eileen’s older brother Jackie was, like his father, a merchant seaman. My cousin Elaine (Eileen and Ronnie’s future daughter) agreed with me in allowing Jackie to fall in love with Maude for this story. With the exception of that detail, the storyline of Jackie is true in Fondly yours…

It’s harvesttime for Maude where she is an evacuee in Wales, but warm and tropical for Marguerite. She goes swimming with friends; this is a photo of them at Oja de Agua.

The picture for this entry is of the turquoise Morpho butterfly. When Marguerite sees it, she must make a wish.

In Episode 7, Maude meets young Eileen.

During the war, it was the job of ‘Home Intelligence’, a unit of the government’s Ministry of Information, that was responsible for both monitoring and boosting the morale of the people.

Here is my mother, Marguerite, shortly before leaving Hanover for Costa Rica, savouring a strawberry soda…

These two young lads are Will and Ronnie Hall.