Send a letter but whatever happens please don’t mention the virus

There will never be a shortage of bad news and right now it’s all too easy to get caught up in competitive misery whenever we converse. So, like our war heroines, spread some cheer, urges Christine Manby

Can we start 2020 again? The bad news seems relentless. How can anyone be expected to remain optimistic in the face of endless apocalyptic headlines? Perhaps by refusing to spend too much time sharing and talking about them?

Earlier this year, I spent some time with Patricia Davies and Jean Argles (both nee Owtram), two wonderful sisters, now in their nineties, who saw service as young women in Second World War. Pat was in the Women’s Royal Naval Service and Jean was in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Pat, who spoke fluent German, was an interceptor, listening in on the Kriegsmarine’s torpedo boats from various coastal “Y” Stations. She fed the Enigma code messages she picked up to Bletchley Park. Jean was a code and cipher officer, who was sent to Egypt aged just 18. Later she was posted to southern Italy, from where she sent and received coded messages for Allied agents imbedded with resistance groups in the Balkans.

The sisters have kept many of the letters they sent to each other and to their wider family during the war years and collated them in a new book: Codebreaking Sisters: Our Secret War. Having both signed the Official Secrets Act they were not able to tell anyone, not even each other, about their work – indeed, they “kept mum” on that front until many decades later – but while they were in uniform, they could share the details of their day-to-day lives and one thing that immediately struck me when I was allowed to paw through their archive was how upbeat and cheerful the sisters’ wartime letters were.

Even when Pat was transferred to the Admiralty in London just as the Germans started sending over the V2s. Even when Jean and her colleagues near Bari were seeing friends leave on deadly missions on a daily basis. Even as both sisters waited for news of their father, who was a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp on the River Kwai.

Despite the myriad reasons they had to be fearful, or at the very least thoroughly fed up, the sisters' letters are full of jokes, chat about films, books and music, and beautiful descriptions of the world around them. Jean writes about the spring flowers blooming on the Italian coast. Pat writes of the daffodils around the sandbags and anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park. The sisters wrote each other and their parents wonderful, uplifting missives full of joie de vivre. And they didn’t mention The War.

Ambulance drivers on Waterloo Bridge: governments during the war encouraged folks to send letters to eachother (Getty) (Getty Images)

As Jean explained: “You knew that your letters might be read by the censor, so you didn’t write anything that could get you into trouble, but you also knew that it was important not to fill them with bad news too. Receiving chatty letters was a real boost when you were far away from home.”

Pat agreed: “Letters were the only way you could keep in touch. You certainly would have written cheerfully because letters kept up one’s morale a lot. We did everything we could to cheer things up a bit, especially after our father was taken prisoner by the Japanese.”

It wasn’t just Pat and Jean who took care to make sure their letters were a joy to receive. In the US, a poster campaign of the time urged people to write to the troops overseas with the line, “Keep ‘em smiling with letters from folks and friends”.

Is there any point in knowing what this or that pundit thinks might happen next time the wind changes direction? 

Of course, Pat and Jean were getting the bad news too, but not by picking up a smart phone and reading an alarming headline written before the journalist has finished filing the rest of the copy. News took a long time to travel and to craft. Some of Pat and Jean’s letters were written over several days, making them entirely different from a text message sent in haste in a moment of sheer panic. At the same time, the nature of 1940s airmail letters, which were written on a piece of paper that folded into its own envelope, meant that one couldn’t waffle on forever. You had to work out what was really important.

Most of what we read every day really isn’t important. Most of it isn’t relevant to our lives. Thinking back over the past few years, apart from the dreaded Covid-19 which has the whole world turned upside down, can you really think of a bad news story that’s had a direct impact on your life? Ok. Apart from Brexit. And the flooding. And, and, and… But you know what I mean.

Of course, it helps to be forewarned. When a virus like Covid-19 is doing the rounds, it helps to know that it is doing the rounds and what you’re supposed to be doing to stay safe. But beyond that… When you can’t aim a taser at anyone who walks within two metres of you, when you feel utterly impotent… is there any point in knowing what this or that pundit thinks might happen next time the wind changes direction?

At times like this, the only thing to do is to take a leaf out of Pat and Jean’s book and make a conscious effort to share the little things that still make life worth living. When you next sit down to email a friend, or you’re minded to send a quick text, make it about the beautiful shoots still reaching for the sky in the garden. Or the baby birds fledging. Or even about a little fluffy cloud floating over the tower block next door. There will never be a shortage of bad news and right now it’s all too easy to get into a spiral of competitive misery whenever we get into conversation.

As Pat and Jean explained, just as bad news breeds bad news, good news breeds good news. Just as we feel compelled to empathise with a friend’s unhappiness by presenting them with evidence of our own, offering a piece of positivity inevitably elicits the same in return.

Pat and Jean lived through the worst of times and still managed to find the best in every situation. Pat said that when they were small, their childhood nanny would stop any complaining by having them say, regarding just about anything: “It might have been very much worse.” Decades later, that mantra still applies.

The Acer tree I can see from my window is covered in bright green leaves that make a lovely contrast to the dark red bark, reminding me that spring will become summer again and at some point lazing in the park won’t be an offence. In the meantime, send your best friend a joke or an uplifting quote (at times like this, even “live, laugh, love” is acceptable), or suggest a tune or send a book recommendation. Just don’t mention the virus!

In the words of Winston Churchill, who knew a thing or two about keeping on keeping on, “Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution, will bring us victory.”