SEPTEMBER 18

Well, let’s start with this: I will try never again to mourn the depredations of age. It is a privilege to have the possibility of reaching old age, a privilege which should command immense gratitude. A privilege to grow old in freedom which I owe to young men like my uncle, Lieutenant Brian Malcolm Macdonald Sinclair. I have been down to southern Italy from Venice to visit his grave in Salerno War Cemetery. I realised it would be painful, of course. It has been more of a shock than I expected.

On the train down I opened the tin containing letters between him and my grandmother, mother, grandfather, fellow officers and two of his girlfriends, one of whom he was obviously especially fond of. There is a photograph which I presume is of her: Pam. These letters are full of life and tenderness and humour, and paint in some of the circumstances of their years, 1940 to 1944. Some of Brian’s had little strips cut out like paper dolls where the censor had disapproved, making it impossible to tell exactly where they were coming from, or when.

Mummy’s are funny and loving; she had a gift for writing. Hers are the most strikingly written. Brian’s are gentle and tender. He was obviously close to both his mother and sister. It is a surprise to me that he confides in his mother about the existence of his girlfriends; not shy or secretive; they talk as friends. He does not want her to worry, so he heads off her worries with information. He has read, for example, a news report that 30 bombs have been dropped on a coastal town in the south-east, so he writes to say that Clacton-on-Sea, where he is at the time, was not the one. There is a sense of equality between him and his mother. He is a friend to her as well as a son. His love must have been a great emotional support for her after her divorce.

In either late December 1942 or at New Year 1943 he was sent to the Middle East. In January 1943 he slips into a letter that he hopes to visit Cairo, and in July 1943 confides that he is “heartily fed up with bloody Africa in general and this dive in particular”.

On August 2, 1943 my grandmother writes to him saying: “I’m so cheered up about this Italian debacle. [Mussolini had been toppled from power a week earlier.] It seems to bring the end of the war so much nearer — and we are beginning to talk of your being home again. Most people seem to think that next year will see it through and some are even more optimistic.”

And then in January 1944 she receives in the post the thunderbolt letter from the War Office, addressed as it happens to her ex-husband:

Sir, I am directed to inform you with an expression of deep regret that a report has been received from the Military Authorities in the Central Mediterranean that your son, Lieutenant B.M.M. Sinclair, Royal Engineers, died of wounds on the 8th January, 1944. I am to convey to you an expression of the Army Council’s sympathy. I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant.