untold resilience

“you never forget, but you learn to cope, because you have to”

I was 16, he was 20 and Leslie was the first person I ever fell in love with. It’s difficult to try to describe the intensity of emotions in regard to relationships during that period. Those times were different; we were so aware of the horrors of war. The daily war bulletins took over our lives. People say you can’t fall in love when you’re very young like that, but I did.

I lived in Wellington, New Zealand: a country at the bottom of the world that was in the process of making a slow, difficult recovery from the Great Depression. In 1939, World War II came. Though