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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Elizabeth Nunns and has been added to the site with her permission….

Early in the war a girlfriend of mine suggested that we should write to some servicemen who wanted pen friends and it was because of her suggestion that I started to write to Raymond Scarr. He was a sailor on the HMS Newfoundland an 8000 ton British cruiser of the Colony class It was whilst he was aboard this ship in Tokyo Bay, waiting for the Japanese surrender that he wrote the following letter to me, dated the 26th July 1945.

Dear Elizabeth,

I’m terribly sorry I’ve not written to you before but the delay was unavoidable, I only just managed to find time to write to my mother. I hope you are not annoyed with me for that bit of neglect.

I’ve not been up here long but I’m getting rather fed up, nothing but water for weeks on end, it’s getting quite boring. I’d give anything for a stroll through some woods and to see the birds singing and dashing around.

I used to curse the snow but now I’d be as pleased as punch after this heat. Even while I’m sitting writing to you, I’m sat in practically nothing, the perspiration is rolling off me in bucketsful. Of course that may be with the effort of thinking. It really is difficult to concentrate in the mess. What with the wireless blaring out as loud as possible and about 50 people shouting out trying to make themselves heard, it’s like a free for all. As it’s dinnertime you can add to that the noise of dishes, knives and forks clattering. It fair drives me mad.

Take all that and the overcrowding, you can understand how a chap like me who likes the solitude of the woods and fields feels in a ship where it is almost impossible to find a quiet spot, to do some real deep thinking.

I sleep outside on the boat deck. There when I turn in it’s pretty quiet, I can lay back and look at the stars and just think.

Needless to say I get to wondering why we exist at all. There seems to be no point in our being here. We are born, then, later some die young, some live to be so old they are helpless. A few have a lot of worldly goods; many have nothing but poverty. No matter what we have, when we die we all go the same way.

I haven’t seen much of this world, but I do know that some people have too much and live on good food till they get as fat as pigs, while others are starving and have to scrape among the rubbish dumps for food. Why shouldn’t all be equal and have only enough to live happily and comfortably?

That’s a big problem which people like you and I will have to help to solve in later years when all this killing and destroying is over.

Oh! dear, I seem to be giving a speech instead pf writing a letter to a girl friend. I hope you are not bored with it.

Funny isn’t it, I can write a letter to you like this, but if I was with you I wouldn’t be able to say a word.

Now I’m afraid I’ll have to finish, but I’ll write again at the next opportunity.

Yours with love,
Raymond

I wrote to Raymond for three years and I still have the envelope from a letter he sent me, stamped on the back HMS Newfoundland, Tokyo Bay VJ Day 2nd September 1945.

Raymond’s family lived in Bradford and we finally met up in September or October of 1945. We kept in touch up to about two years ago.

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