Homefires burning: how a cache of passionate love letters shows the second world war on two fronts

The intimate correspondence of a Manchester Guardian journalist and his wife is the basis for a theatre piece marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day

During a house move, a cardboard box belonging to my husband Matthew’s grandparents came to light. Inside we found thousands of love letters sent between the Manchester Guardian journalist Gerard Fay and his wife Alice, during the second world war. They were jumbled up and undated, and reading them all seemed a daunting task, so the box was shelved.

Matthew is an academic writing a book about an earlier generation of Fays, Frank and Willie, the actors who co-founded Dublin’s Abbey theatre with WB Yeats. Frank was Gerard’s father, so when lockdown happened we decided to tackle the correspondence, to see if there was any useful information for Matthew’s book. We discovered so much more.