My parents met at the end of the Second World War. My father, Brian is on the far right, looking at the camera and my mother, Katie is sitting opposite him in the shade. This photo was taken on the day in 1945 when he first asked her out.
Brian was demobbed eight months before Katie and returned to England. During that time they wrote to one another every day, sometimes twice a day and before her death in 2009, my mother gave me the letters. I blogged them on the days they were written over seventy years ago along with hundreds of photographs taken by them at the time. You can visit the archive at With Love from Graz.
Katie was seventeen when the war broke out. She joined the VADs, nursing at Netley in Southampton before being posted onto the Isle of White. In 1945 she embarked for Italy and ended up in Graz in Austria working for Central Supplies.
Brian Thomas was a surgeon who was posted abroad in 1942 and spent much of the war operating in the field hospitals in Algiers and the Middle East before moving on to Italy in 1944. He too ended up in Graz where he met and fell in love with Katie.
LP Fergusson 