Dear Ronnie,
Hope you will soon be well again. Brian send his love and will write to you again.
Love from auntie
It was sent to my dad, then a boy of eleven, some time in 1941 (the exact date on the postmark is obscured). At the time he was in Lincoln County Hospital, recovering from a burst appendix - a serious condition which could have caused potentially fatal peritonitis. Times are hard, but I imagine it was harder in those days - born into a world in the grip of the great depression, topped off by a world war, then ending up in hospital with a life-threatening condition in the days before the National Health Service. Now that is an insecure world. So maybe I should be a bit more upbeat over a few depressing headlines.
My dad survived, (although I think he missed a lot of schooling due to an extended stay in hospital), and I found myself wondering about the fate of the ship on the postcard, the destroyer, HMS Icarus. The name wasn't a good omen, recalling the boy who flew too close to the sun and fell to earth. A quick Internet search revealed that HMS Icarus didn't suffer a similar fate, but survived service off Norway, in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean to be paid off and broken up for scrap in 1946. During her service career, she served in Atlantic and Russian convoys and the Dunkirk evacuation. She was also responsible for sinking two U-boats and participated in the destruction of two more. So the Icarus story wasn't the tragedy I'd feared, although she was almost on the scene of one of Britain's greatest naval tragedies. In May 1941, the battlecruiser HMS Hood was struck by a shell from the Bismark. One of her magazines exploded and she sank in about three minutes. There were only three survivors from Hood's crew of 1,418 men, picked up by the destroyer HMS Electra. HMS Icarus was on the scene shortly thereafter, but could find no more survivors, just debris.
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