Trenches and Destruction: Letters from the Front 1915-1919 Pleasance Walker. This item is unavailable.Trenches and Destruction: Letters from the Front 1915-1919 Pleasance Walker

Who was Pleasance Walker? A trunk full of her letters was uncovered in a north Oxford attic sale in 1970s, disappeared again but was rediscovered by Caroline Roaf. She has been on a dogged quest ever since to sift, sort and edit Pleasance Walker s remarkable letters and get her hidden story out there . Today in 2018, the correspondence to her mother and father from a young volunteer thrown into the maelstrom of nursing wounded and dying soldiers and dealing with war-torn civilian victims reveals a women of natural vitality, remarkable resilience, and compassion. It is a world away from her genteel life in leafy north Oxford to which she often alludes... With an innocent-like candour and sometimes surprising humour Pleasance s takes-life-as-she-finds-it outlook will strike a chord both in the centenary commemoration of the First World War and, as an independently-minded woman, in the centenary commemoration of the Suffragette Movement and the vote for woman.

Caroline Roaf (editor) grew up in Ireland in the days of letters, telegrams and two digit telephone numbers and comes from a family with a long tradition as prolific letter writers. In the 1970s she began work on an anthology of letters for young people. Although this resulted in an introduction to the finder of the letters published here, letters didn t then have the appeal they have now. Bringing up a family, combined with a career teaching in Oxfordshire comprehensive schools, and as a writer and researcher on educational matters (including the subject of handwriting), filled the intervening years. Retirement and downsizing led to the rediscovery of that old box of letters, now suddenly relevant in Oxford s centenary commemoration of the events of the First World War.