The letter is sent from my maternal grandfather, Leonard Billingham, to my grandmother Louie on 2nd September 1944.
He had arrived in France in August 1944 after the liberation of Paris. He was a Private in the RAF Transport and Logistics corps. My grandmother was back in the Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham, B18 living in a back-to-back house. You can see this from the address on the envelope, which is written as 1/5 Rosalie Street – House 1 at the Back of number 5 Rosalie Street.
I came across this particular letter in a bundle of letters given to me by my uncle during lockdown.
He’d never sorted through them after he found them in my grandfather’s belongings when he died in 1992. There were letters dating from 1942 to 1946 in the bundle, covering life in the RAF from conscription to demob. My mother’s birth, my uncle’s birth and lots and lots of things about motorbikes are covered in the letters!
This one stood out because it is so evocative. I can imagine the scenes greeting him as he arrived in the newly liberated French towns and the relief of the French people awaiting the arrival of the allied forces. It must have been quite amazing for my grandfather to experience. He’d never left Britain before he joined the RAF. Only a few weeks earlier he’d described being sent to take supplies to the D-Day beaches in the days directly after the landings. He’d been given a rifle, some francs and what he described as a ‘Mae West’ which I’ve since learned is a life jacket (cockney rhyming slang for vest maybe?). He drove his lorry out of a boat and up the beach, unloaded it and came back to England. Then a few weeks later he was sent out from RAF Uxbridge to France.
The end of the letter is sadly missing, but I still think that it is such a beautiful description of events in August 1944, written by ‘plain old Mr Billingham’ as he refers to himself. A young man, from the heart of Birmingham in the middle of the war.
