Updates

Posted on 22 September, 2026

Keep your chin up!

As readers of my boyhood memories ‘Sunny Side of the House’ will know, my dad joined the army as a teenager in World War Two, serving in Europe. He never spoke of his experiences but then I never asked. Every soldier’s war is different and I was privileged to read and review the letters home of Harold Bishop, collated and published by his granddaughter Geraldine Croft. It’s sometimes too late to ask, but never too late to read.

Keep Your Chin Up! (5-star review also published on Amazon where ‘Harold and Joan, Letters Home’ is available).

This loving compilation of a second world war soldier’s letters home can be read through at a sitting or savoured slowly, item by item – both ways worked for me! Supported by a wealth of contemporary photographs, documentation and helpful notes on historical context, it is a great tribute to a married man, twenty years older than some of his fellow recruits and with two small children, going through basic training in Scotland then into active service abroad.

Amid concerns for his laundry and supply of ‘cigs’, Harold strikes early on the tone of greater concern for those left behind than himself, with urgings to ‘make the best of it’ and ‘keep smiling’. We see not only the tough Commando Training – ‘barbed wire and water up to our waist and mud and slime up above our knees’ – but a tender remembered domestic routine with his older daughter Marion (‘a game of rummy before you go to bed’), to whom he writes before being posted overseas ‘Daddy is going away for a long time…’

The quiet, unstated heroism of Harold and his ‘darling’ Joan, a married couple separated by war but united in the hope of its end, makes for an uplifting and heartwarming read, highly recommended.