“There Are No Flowers Here”

Collected Letters of Jack Richardson

Letters written before and during the First World War, documenting a love affair that was tragically ended by death in the trenches of France.

In 1913 John 'Jack' Richardson was the 20 year-old son of the headmaster of Shaftesbury Road Elementary School in Forest Gate, East London. Jack was a lover of the countryside, a talented artist and a linguistics scholar; he adored Beowulf, and quoted Robert Louis Stevenson and Omar Khayyam. May Larby, 18, was the daughter of a local police constable; she was a sharp-minded mathematician with a great thirst for all knowledge, cultural as well as abstract. After a chance meeting on an underground train these two brilliant young people began a doomed love affair.

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“And now it's past twelve of the night and I'm writing this in the attic ( Lightbody is away ) with a bare floor and two little beds on it and the bright moon is shining straight into the window. It's only half moon but it whitens everything tonight. My light is a tiny glimmer from a primitive oil lamp and I can only just see. The guns boom accompaniment. My dear, this letter is very long and it's about nothing very exciting, but I feel the strangeness of things tonight more than I have before. It's these things I've tried to describe to you which have impressed me and made me more pleased than ever that I'm here to live this time through and see what really is another life.

I never felt death so omnipresent before. All the farms around show up as skeletons in the moonlight - you can see through their rafters and through the shell-ridden walls; and the fields are ploughed everywhere with trenches and works and filled with graves. We shelled the Germans as they left the town a month ago. There was house to house fighting to force them out, and the fields outside must be sown with corpses. A regular told me last night in our trench that when some of these trenches were cut they came upon arms and legs and bodies of the German dead. May, the war must end before the summer. And everywhere, during the day, outside the town where we are in the trenches it is one incessant scream and whistle of bullets and shells and at night absolute silence between the booming of the heavy guns and the bursts of rifle fire and the machine guns.”

Jack Richardson. France. April 1915.

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Jack was one of the many millions of young men who were soon to die, victims of the insane slaughter of the First World War. Before his death Jack wrote letters to May from his training camp, from his French billets and ultimately from the trenches. These letters, a short essay, a poem and some excerpts from May's memoirs tell their tragic story. Many letters are mundane, but reveal the slow development of Jack and May's relationship, and include fascinating historical details of everyday life at that time. Some later letters are beautifully descriptive of Jack's surroundings, as you might expect from a linguistics scholar, others are painfully poignant when read with the hindsight that Jack did not survive the war to live into old age with his lover as they hoped and expected.

This volume means a lot to me personally; May was my maternal grandmother, and her daughter, my mother, Elizabeth Holloway (who died in 2004), spent many hours mastering unfamiliar technology to transcribe the letters into a word processor. This was not an easy task by any means, as Jack's longhand can be hard to decipher in places. Unfortunately, at the time she was unable to find a publisher; I am pleased to be able to put that to rights now.

By pure coincidence I live in Forest Gate, only a few minutes walk from where Jack and May lived, nearly a century ago. Treading the same streets they trod, I often think of them, and cast myself back in time in my imagination, so it seems appropriate that I should be finally editing and publishing these letters. I feel sure that Jack, May and my mother Elizabeth would approve.

Paul Holloway
Forest Gate, London
June 2008