In 1915 John Glasson Thomas, a teacher  – Tommy to his friends – met Miss Gertrude Brooks at a London church social. A few months later he volunteered to join the army. During his  few months training in England they were able to meet up several times but in October 1916 his unit was sent to the Western front. Over the next few months they corresponded by mail and their letters became less formal and more loving and clearly they were both desperate to meet each other again.

But it was never to be. Tommy was killed in August 1917.

Miss Brooks never married and later told family she would die ‘still loving and remembering Tommy’ and eventually passed away in her 80s.

Relatives have only just discovered the letters and the family has passed them on to the local library where, over the years, Miss Brooks was a regular visitor.

I suppose Courtney Cook would see this as very odd and unliberated. She posted a piece at Salon entitled “How to Leave a Soldier” describing how she made the decision to leave her military husband for a  “lithe, blue-eyed Marxist”  who had been an anti-war activist

You’d be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can’t argue with you. He doesn’t have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, “This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it,” it’s that much easier. The letter won’t even come as a shock.

There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn’t care who gets the couch.

I wonder what Miss Brooks would have thought about Courtney Cook? Of course one could always argue that if Tommy had survived the war the strains and stresses of married life might have taken their toll. But it was never to be and they both died with an idealised image of each other imprinted on their very souls – unless Miss Brooks had suddenly taken a fancy to a someone else by the summer of 1917 and written a “Dear John” to Tommy which he read just before he met his death in the trenches….

But somehow I don’t think Miss Brooks would have been that sort of woman…..