Love during wartime

By Mark Squibb/November 9, 2022

Lillian “Billie” Wenman died on January 22, 2019, after a long life full of adventures, and leaving behind a loving family and endless memories.

Following her mother’s passing, Karen Lundy and her siblings were sorting through their mother’s belongings when they discovered a treasure trove – 92 letters written by their father, Roland “Vern” Ploughman of Bay Roberts, to their mother while he was serving overseas during the Second World War.

“I was absolutely stunned,” said Lundy. “We were at my mother’s apartment the day after she had passed, my two brothers and some of the grandkids, and we were just going through boxes of photographs, like you do when somebody has passed away, and we were looking at pictures of when we were kids and all this stuff, and underneath the photos, there were these letters tied up with string. And I didn’t know what these were. But I could tell from the envelopes that these were quite old. And I took one out, sort of randomly, from the middle of the pack, and opened it up, and it was written in 1943, from our father to our mother.”

She brought the letters back home to Newfoundland from Ontario, where her mother was living at the time of her passing, with the purpose of transcribing them, as the letters were old and fragile and could not bear much handling.

But as she read through the letters, a story began to take shape in her mind’s eye.

“I got more and more interested in this story, beginning with my dad hearing about this 17-year-old that he had to meet, and then writing to her, all the way through to after he had been wounded in Normandy, and, by the time he was coming home from England, having decided that they would get married,” said Lundy. “And they had only met twice before he had to go overseas.”

The letters are very different than love notes you would find today, Lundy allowed.

“Because once he went oversees, everything that they wrote was read by censors,” Lundy explained. “So, it was interesting to hear him write, ‘Hello darling,’ and ‘Oh my love,’ or, ‘It would be great if someday you could be Mrs. Ploughman. ‘But they aren’t love letters like you would think of them today because there was so little that men were willing to commit to paper with that kind of stuff.”

The letters span almost two years, from January 1943 to August 1945, beginning with then 19-year-old Vern writing to 17-year-old Billie, who a friend had insisted he meet.

While stationed in Ontario, Ploughman could speak in detail as to where he was and what he was doing, but once he went overseas, necessity changed that.

“Once he went oversees, all of his letters are from somewhere in England or France, but he couldn’t say where he was or he couldn’t say people’s names, and he couldn’t really tell her what he was doing,” said Lundy. “So, he would talk about worrying about his older brother Gerald, who was flying bombers with the RAF. And how he would get letters from home, and how his father was always sending him cartons of cigarettes. Just sort of general stuff, and then how much he missed her and how he wished he could be with her and apologising for not writing as often as she did. But you can see this evolution from writing to this girl that he had only met twice in person, that he was obviously very smitten with, to the letters slowly becoming more personal, or as personal as he felt he could be at the time. And it was very clear at the time, before he was even wounded at Normandy, that he was very much interested in coming home and in her becoming his wife.”

The letters that Billie wrote to Vern were lost in a tank explosion on August 10, 1944, during the Battle of Normandy that saw two men killed and Ploughman severely injured.

“My father was badly wounded, and laid for hours on the field waiting for help, and spent three months in the hospital in England,” said Lundy.

Following his injury, Ploughman returned to Canada in November of 1944, where he received bone graft surgery and recovered at a Toronto hospital where he was also able to meet with Billie once again.

He was released from hospital in June, and returned home to Newfoundland, where he continued to write Billie.

“You can tell he’s happy to be home, “said Lundy. “It’s very clear that he never felt he was a hero. He hated anything that celebrated anything that he had done. And he missed her the whole time he was gone. And he went back to Toronto mid-August, and they were married the following month.”

Following their marriage in 1945, the couple lived in Ontario and bore children, before eventually returning to Bay Roberts, where Vern lived until his passing in 1989.

“When I started to write this story, which I really only started to write for the grandchildren, I really didn’t have any intent to publish,” said Lundy, “but they became Billie and Vern to me. They kind of ceased to be my parents, and I could really see them as these two young people who were like any other young people of the time. It’s very interesting to be introduced to your parents at a time when they weren’t married, and they’ve never thought about having their children. Like, we don’t exist in this story.”

It’s a love story, but also a historical record of men at war, and a portrait of the hardships faced both at home and on the battlefront.

“The man who went on to rescue my father out of the tank when he was wounded and would become his best friend, he left Nova Scotia when his wife was pregnant, and that baby was born, and died a few months later,” said Lundy.

Now living in St. Johns, Lundy has decided to hand over her father’s letters to The Rooms, where she gave a special presentation on Wednesday, November 8.

“These letters are, what we call in history, a primary source,” said Lundy. “They’re pretty close to 80 years old. This stuff doesn’t turn up every day. I know I could have kept these in the family, but my fear is that eventually they might be lost, and that it was better to put them somewhere where they might be accessible to historians or anybody who might want to go and look at them.”