Lost love
Piecing together my parents’ passionate wartime romance
In 1938, an unlikely love affair began at a party in Islington, north London. When the host ran out of glasses, Mary Moss went to borrow some more from the young man in the flat above. He agreed to help – as long as he could accompany her back to the party. A few hours later, she and David Francis were strolling across Hampstead Heath, enthralled. Their passionate devotion to one another would continue for the next five years, until war brought their relationship to a tragic end.
Mary, 21, was an aspiring poet. David, 20, privately educated, was studying to be a chartered accountant. Their daughter, Rosheen Finnigan, knew nothing of this romantic story until her mother’s death in 2002. Mary had remarried and rarely mentioned David but, locked away in a trunk in the attic, she had kept more than 300 letters they had written to one another, full of love, longing, humour, political debate and domestic detail.
“They wrote to one another about their dreams and hopes, their daily lives, their thoughts on love and life, several times a day and sometimes only hours after they had been together,” says Rosheen. “Their intelligence, their sense of fun, shines off the page.
“My father died in India in 1943 and, like so many other people, my mother never spoke about the war. Reading their letters has been a very moving experience. Mary remarried and concentrated, understandably, on making a new life, but I always had a strange, slightly embarrassing feeling as a child, as if I’d lost my father along the way. So, finding the letters wasn’t just lovely, it has filled in something that was missing.”
Mary and David’s affectionate writings are the backbone of Letters From the Suitcase: A Wartime Love Story, edited by Rosheen, a former educational psychologist, and her husband Cal, a retired journalist. As soon as they started dipping into the papers Mary had left behind they realised this was no ordinary correspondence. For months, almost every surface of their lovely, timberframed house in Suffolk seemed to be covered with hastily scribbled notes, long letters and cables as they tried to piece together the story.
It began as a hobby – a bit of family history – but has now become a book with the encouragement of Cal’s sister, Judy Finnigan, the TV presenter, and her husband, Richard Madeley, who introduced them to their agent.
Rosheen and Cal had both regarded Mary with caution: having lost her brother and husband in the war, she was prey to black moods, so the passionate young girl who emerged from the letters was a revelation. “I love you far too much,” she wrote, a few months after she and David met. “Je t’aime tant, je t’aime trop. Far too much anyway to be really happy or interested when you are not there… and far, far too much to be free for a moment from your voice, your face and your touch.”
They married in July 1939, just six weeks before the outbreak of war. A generation on, Rosheen and Cal met at Leeds university and also wanted to marry young, but when Cal asked for Mary’s permission she flatly refused, insisting Rosheen wait until she was 21. “In the ensuing row he shouted at her ‘Mary, you must never have been in love!’” says Rosheen. “When he saw what was there in the letters, he cried.”
Mary was born in Ireland but moved to London when she was six and won a scholarship to the Notting Hill and Ealing High school. She loved poetry and literature but the need to earn a living precluded university. She went on to be one of the first recruits to Churchill’s intelligence centre at Bletchley Park in 1939. David was from an affluent family in Hertfordshire.
They shared a passion for music, films, literature and Left-wing politics. Islington, where their romance began, was a magnet for artists and romantic young radicals. David was the secretary of the local branch of the Communist Party (though he was later appointed to a secret operation on Mountbatten’s staff). “They were what you might call ‘Hampstead socialists’,” says Rosheen. “My mother remained a Communist until 1956 [when uprisings in Poland and Hungary were suppressed by Soviet forces].”
Some of their exchanges are surprisingly modern in tone, most notably their frank talk about sex. In an early letter, Mary tells David that “seeing you are not available, I have taken Auden to bed with me. TS Eliot is on the floor.” A few months after meeting she describes, amusingly, a forthcoming visit to a family planning clinic “to have another try at flashing my wedding ring in the face of all suspicion” (only married women were allowed birth control, so Mary must have had a bogus wedding ring).
Rosheen’s birth, in 1940, was a high point for both of them, though David was still undergoing naval training in Sussex and the final weeks of Mary’s pregnancy were spent struggling into air raid shelters during the London Blitz. A few months later, they began living together for a precious year in Swansea, where David had been stationed, having been commissioned into the Navy. He was then called to the Admiralty in London for interview to a “hush-hush” position and wrote to Mary that he was greeted with the words “Ah! You’re the young man who wants some blood and thunder, are you? Have a cigarette!” From then on he was in London. Christmas 1941 was approaching and Mary wrote from Swansea: “Darling, if you are as lonely and hungry as you sound, rush home to your Mary who will be delighted to feed and cherish you. I am going to cook madly all the weekend – Xmas puddings, mince pies and… might trap a BL.M [black market] turkey/ fowl/chop. I am also keeping the double bed aired and will inspect the springs. If anything stops you from coming I shall die.”
In 1942, David set sail for Africa as part of the planning team for Operation Ironclad, the invasion of Madagascar, which would be the first large-scale combined air, sea and land operation of the Second World War. After a brief return to London, he was sent to New Delhi, where he received his first airgraph letter from Mary on their third wedding anniversary. She was bitterly disappointed at his move to India, but must have at least felt relief that he was out of the fighting.
He also hated being away: “Oh, darling, darling, if only you knew the agonies I go through sometimes when I think of the thousands of miles that separate us… I daydream too much of the past, hoping wildly and blindly that tomorrow will see us together again.” Poignantly, his last letter to her, in May 1943, finishes: “However much I love you, my wonderful, darling Mary, there is no escape – yet.”
There was, of a sort: three weeks later, he died of smallpox. Devastated by David’s dreadful, faraway death, Mary put away the letters and that part of her life – and never talked to their daughter of her father again.
Though all other traces of David rapidly disappeared, Mary kept the letters for the rest of her life. “Finally, before her death, she gave me them all,” writes Rosheen. “And in doing so, she gave me my father.”