It’s April 1946. My Dad is a twenty-year-old Able Seaman aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Vengeance. The ship left Singapore a week ago after acting as the venue for the Japanese surrender of the territory. Today it anchored off the coast of Japan, close to where the first atomic bomb was dropped. Tomorrow Dad will go on shore leave, during which he will stand on the rubble of Hiroshima, an act that more than likely will lead to his death some twenty years later. But this evening he is writing a letter to a potential sweetheart back in the Ferry. The letter came into the Big Sis’s possession after its recipient passed away. Not all of it survived, but even from this opening page you can tell that Charles Gisby (aka Derry McKay) was a bit of a charmer. I don’t know if he and Mima got together when he returned to the Ferry. I do know that he met and married a beautiful colleen who was in service to Lord Rosebery at Dalmeny House. Was Mima heartbroken by this turn of events, I wonder? Or did she have her own sweetheart by then? Whatever the case, she hung on to the letter for the rest of her life; it must have meant something to her.