Remembrance

Thirty years separate these two photographs taken in wartime.
The soldier is my maternal grandfather, William Edward Beck. Born in St. Austell in Cornwall, at some time he moved to the village of Lelant near Hayle, where he met and married my grandmother. An engineer by profession, he joined the Army at the start of WW1, and I know that he served in France because as a child I saw an album of postcards, many of them beautifully embroidered, that he sent to my grandmother.
Fast forward to another war, and here he is arriving at my mother’s wedding. She was serving in the WAAF when she met my father who was in the RAF.
Like many men who served, my grandfather never spoke about his wartime experiences. It wasn’t until after he died in 1968 that I became interested in knowing about it. Sadly it seems his army record was among many that were lost in a fire at the record office, so I’ll never know.