I Remain Your Loving Wife Lizzie: Letters in a Skip 1917-1919

The First World War created a huge army from civilians who had never fought before. They left behind families, sweethearts, wives and children. They too experienced war. When it broke out in 1914, Lizzie Green and her husband Tom were newly wed with a baby son. They were an ordinary working-class couple living in a rented house off the Old Kent Road near the London Docks. In 1916 Tom was conscripted and in 1917 he was sent to India, not to return until the end of 1919. Lizzie was on her own. We wouldn’t know anything about them unless, by chance, in a skip on the sea front in Broadstairs, Kent, over a hundred of Lizzie’s letters to Tom had not been found. Frayed and faded now, her robust handwriting recorded for Tom her daily existence and gossip. Here as the letters unfold over the long absence, we open a window into a life disrupted and hurt by separation. The military war was somewhere else: in south east London it was hard graft, early bombing raids, rationing, raging flu, family rows, problems with lodgers, and the landlord, and the prolonged wait for demobilisation. How Lizzie longed for him, for his return, for the future. Single-minded, determined to survive, she waited, and wrote.

About the author:

After a career in local government and as the first Housing Ombudsman Roger Jefferies has been writing novels and short stories. His interest in genealogy prompted him to explore Lizzie’s family and transcribe her letters when they were given to him.

256  pages

ISBN: 978-1-910996-15-7