Edna cherishes the letter which proved her POW fiance was alive

But Edna Young did not care.

The postcard from the Burmese prisoner of war camp meant that her husband-to-be, John Young, was still alive.

“It was the only communication I had that he was alive in the whole three-and-a-half years he was away,” says Edna, 90, casting her mind back to when she was 22.

“It just said he was in good health and not working, but in actual fact he was seriously ill.”

John Young came back from Burma suffering with malaria and weighing just six stone.

But his first thoughts were about Edna.

Edna says: “I remember when the war finished and someone said someone wants you on the telephone. I answered the phone and it was John!

“I asked where he was and he said, will you meet me at South Kensington station? And that’s where I went.”

The postcard was just one of only two pieces of communication the couple had during the war.

The second was a letter John, who was with the Royal Corps of Signals in the 11th Indian Division as a despatch rider, sent to Edna after being released from the camp to let her know he was “in one piece, complete” and tentatively asking if she was married yet. The faded and torn letter shows John’s slanting and faltering handwriting and closes with the lines “They have just called the mail so I must close. Until we meet again.”

The letters are among a box of treasures that Edna, from West Mersea, has kept all these years as a reminder of life during the war.

Among a newspaper page announcing the end of the war, John’s army pension book, a ration book and a booklet detailing the horrors of the Japanese PoW camp in Burma, is a tattered envelope labelled Blood Money. It contains rolled up Japanese money John brought home for Edna in case she was in need of cash.

She admits she is not sure why she kept the items, only saying: “I must have thought it was important to keep them, just in case.”

John did not often discuss his experiences and Edna always supported his decision.

She says: “John went to war a boy and came back a thin man.

“I was told that if he wants to talk about it, let him. If he doesn’t then just leave it. “He didn’t say too much about it, though, but I do remember he used to say, ‘it’s rice or the rice sack’. “He meant that if you didn’t eat the rice they gave you, you would go into the rice sack, dead. There was no escaping those places.

“John worked on the railway in Burma and even when men were so sick they couldn’t stand, they had to carry them to the railway so they could break stones sitting down.

Edna says: “I used to think, I don’t know how he went through it, but I suppose being a young man you are stronger.

“There wasn’t much point thinking about whether they were alive or not when they were out fighting.

“Life was going on here and look at how we were bombed. “John’s mother, who was a housekeeper in London, died during a bombing.

“We were living day to day.”

“But I must have been waiting for him. I didn’t meet anyone else or want to.”

The couple were married in 1948, were together for more than 40 years and had two sons together.

Edna, who has four granchildren, giggled when she remembers the “quiet” young boy she knew before the war when they both lived in London.

John was a fan of motorbikes and used to ride with his friends to America Square near Edna’s home in the Minories, near the Tower of London.

Before the war he even suggested they get engaged, but Edna refused, saying her father would not have it because she was still just 17.

Edna remembers: “My mother used to say, those boys making all that noise on a Sunday afternoon on the motorbikes!

“But after the war my mother took him under her wing and cooked for him. “As soon as he ate he would bring it back up again. When someone has been that ill you have to work up to it, but he improved. It took a few years.”

After getting married the couple ran a pub, the Cauliflower, in Rainham, for nearly five years before moving on to run pubs in Shenfield.

Running pubs was in Edna’s blood. Her parents owned the Angel pub in the Minories, London, where she worked since leaving school aged 14. By the time she was 17 she was practically running the pub, even though she was not old enough to have a drink.

The couple moved to Mersea, where John had family, in 1972, and ran the Blackwater Hotel in Church Road for many years.

John passed away 20 years ago from cancer, at the age of 73.

“Doctors said they thought it was from all the malnutrition during the war,” says Edna sadly.

“We had a happy life, though.

“It’s a great loss when you lose your partner.

“You still go out, but you are always on your own. “There are thousands of people like me, but I want to keep as I am and end this way.”

Edna regularly meets up with friends from West Mersea Blindspot, a group for people with limited eyesight.

Edna adds: “The only thing I am very sorry about is to think we went through all that and we don’t seem to have achieved very much. “We haven’t learned anything from what people such as John suffered during the wars. “But there will always be wars – it just goes on and on.”