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Lance Corporal FC Beacham 7520975 RAMC Royal Army Medical Corps
32 FSU Field Surgical Unit
5/04/1943

Dear Margaret,

I was happy and surprised at the sight of two registered letters lying beside my bed when I woke up this evening. I was very pleased to hear all the news. I was very upset to hear about poor Cyril Smith, and am terribly sorry for Mary, his wife, especially in view of the circumstance, which makes it tragic. We have been enjoying the lovely sunshine again this morning. It’s really grand: the lads are beginning to get quite tanned and I expect I shall in time….

This is a sample of the letters between Margaret, then my fiancée, and myself, many of which make up my book, ‘Seven Long Years 1939-1946’. I couldn’t keep those I received from Margaret, in case I was captured by the Germans, who could’ve used the contents of her letters for their convenience (though there was little of interest as far as they were concerned).

My letters, meanwhile, had to be censored before they were sent, and this was just something you got used to, as far as I was concerned. Somebody else was reading my letters- and I didn’t like it! I didn’t have much trouble from the censors, only one came to see me one day. He said ‘D’you think you could write a little less on each line of your letter? Because I’m losing my way as I’m reading it!’ (my writing was rather small). He suggested that I should fold the page up, to make it smaller, and that would help. And we did that, and I didn’t have any further complaints from them.

I was 20 years old at the time of the war and liable for service. So I decided that I would go into something that I wanted to do rather than wait for somebody to call me up. I went to the recruiting office in Coventry and signed up, and got a King’s shilling for it, and went down to Aldershot. I went to France, and at first went to a hospital at Dieppe but the call came for me to go on to a more forward unit: no.1 Casualty Clearing Station. It was on the border with Belgium. And it was there that we stayed, with all our kit and equipment, waiting for something to happen. And one night something did happen. Suddenly, round the corner, flying low: some planes! And I thought ‘Goodness me, those planes have got German markings on them!’ They were flying over us and going towards Arras. The next day, we travelled through Belgium towards Brussels, and at a place called Ninove we unloaded and set up our hospital.

As I had been an office worker in peacetime, the army found me very useful in the office. One night I was going round the wards and the theatre when the doctor said to me ‘Put that down and hold this’. And I looked at him…and he gave me an arm to hold! And then proceeded to cut it off! How I stood up for the rest of the night, I don’t know… It was the first time I had really seen an operation done, and it’s not a pretty sight, I can assure you.

We got back into Britain without actually going to Dunkirk- we were pleased to miss that thank you very much! It was only by virtue of the fact that RTO, that’s a Railway Transport Officer, wouldn’t let us stop and unload at the place where we were supposed to put up the hospital again. We went on to Bourloigne, and the next thing we got on was a trans-channel crossing steamer and got home, very thankfully- rather than go to Dunkirk.

I used to write every possible day I could: in other words, if something was happening and I had got to go on duty, I couldn’t do it. But we determined before we parted that we would keep constant touch with each other, and this is what we did. She wrote to me as often as possible, I wrote to her as often as possible, and that led of course to hundreds of letters.

I asked her to marry me in 1942. I was working in the office at the time, and we had been moved from the Isle of Man back to the mainland, and up to Scotland. In the office, I got a smell of the fact that this was pre- going abroad again. So I rang Margaret up, and I said ‘Would you marry me on the 12th September?’ (that was in about 10 days time!) It was the first she’d heard of it, and I wasn’t able to make anything more definite than just asking her to marry me. I left it at that until I got a telegram a few days later, ‘Yes- all arrangements made’!

Saturday 12th September we were married in the parish church at Rugby. We had a week’s leave, and we were able to get a hotel in London, and it was gone in a second.

It was the last time I was to see Margaret for quite some time. In fact, it was 1945 before I next saw her- three years on. There were two things we decided to do. That was: write letters constantly, and the other thing was that every Sunday we went to communion. So wherever we were, on the Sunday morning we could think of each other. We decided that this was our way of keeping ourselves together.

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