In my Freshman year of high school our English class was asked if we would like to have an English pen pal The idea being to improve our writing skills and hopefully to encourage us to become more inclined toward writing. I signed up and after a period of time I received the notification that I had a pen pal. It was a SHE and her name was Olive Pacey of 47 Clifton Crescent, Peckham S. E. 15 London, England. We began our correspondence and airmail letters flew across the Atlantic between us. She was an interesting pen pal and I looked forward to each of her letters. We were the same age and in the same year of school. Her activities were rather curtailed because of the frequent bombings. There was her mother and a younger brother. She never mentioned her Dad and I did not ask. She did have a “young man” as she called him. She sent me a picture of him. He was thin as a rail, puffing on a cigarette and looked unhealthy. He probably was unhealthy because all the healthy guys were in the military by then. The photo was taken by Olive while they were on a holiday at the seaside.
Olive was a sweet girl and there was something rather pitiful about her letters. They seemed very poor and unfortunate. I enjoyed our correspondence and she seemed to as well. Our correspondence lasted until the Germans started sending the Buzz bombs across the English Channel to devastate the English neighborhoods. She wrote of spending weeks at a time in their backyard bomb shelter without any relief from the drone of the approaching buzz bombs and their inevitable explosion. Finally, there were no more letters from Olive. I kept writing for quite awhile and my letters were never returned but neither did I ever hear a word from Olive again.
Many years later my friends, Richard and Georgie Jennings, who lived in Flagstaff, AZ let me know they were going to England to visit their remaining family over there. I gave them Olive’s address and asked them to try and find that area and see if they could find any explanation of, perhaps, what happened to her.
On their return they told me they could never find such an address as 47 Clifton Crescent, Peckham S. E. 15 London England. They went to a post office and inquired about that address and postal authorities told them that the buzz bombs had eradicated the area where that address had been and nothing was left of it.
After the war the rubble was bulldozed and the current new area built where that address had once been. Therefore, I have to assume Olive and her family were killed in the constant bombings and there were no traces of the Pacey family nor the city where they lived. She has haunted me for years and I hope she found peace and rest no matter what befell her.
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