There Are No Flowers Here: Collected Letters of Jack Richardson - Paperback

by Elizabeth Holloway (Author), Paul Holloway (Editor), Jack John Richardson (Author)

May and Jack first met on the London Underground; both were students travelling to King's College from their homes in Forest Gate at the very east end of London. Their friendship grew as they discovered their many common interests; "poetry, social conditions, human motives and the many topics that have concerned students over the centuries", as May put it. They began writing letters to each other as well as meeting regularly, and soon realized they had fallen in love. However this was 1914, and Europe was on the brink of war. Jack joined the Territorial Army and by the time war was declared he was already training to become a 2nd Lieutenant, a subaltern. He continued to write to May during his training, and from the trenches of war-torn France, where he was injured by a sniper, until he received fatal injuries while scouting in no-man's-land. This book tells the story of this doomed love affair through excerpts from May's memoirs, Jack's writings and sketches and above all through Jack's letters to May.

Author Biography

Born in 1893, John "Jack" Richardson was the son of the headmaster of Shaftesbury Elementary School in Forest Gate, East London. Jack loved literature, especially Beowulf, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy. He adored the English countryside, was something of an expert on church architecture and, as if that were not enough, was also a talented amateur artist. Jack was commissioned as an officer in the 2nd City of London Fusiliers and soon found himself a 2nd Lieutenant (a subaltern) in command of a company of men in the trenches of the Western Front. On Sunday April 25th 1915 Jack was wounded while scouting in no-man's-land and died of these wounds on Friday May 7th 1915. He was 22 years old.