After my mother died, I decided to make a project of organizing her brother’s war letters, putting them together into a book, “Love to All, Norm: A Canadian Soldier’s Letters Home From the Second World War.”
The letters were mostly written when he and his regiment, the Algonquins, were training in the United Kingdom, and contain stories about life in England, “Limey beer,” and how a young Canadian man felt camping out on the grounds of an English estate. But as deployment approached, the mood in his letters changes – though he always keeps his humour – and for Mother’s Day, 1944, he sent his parents an extraordinary note. It is almost as though he sensed he would not come home – which he did not, dying in August 1944, in France.
Norman Christopherson was a law student who could have stayed in school, but he decided to volunteer, to the worry and pride of his parents. His brother, my uncle Wilfred, also volunteered and survived the war. This letter, dated May 7, 1944, is one of the longest he sent home.
