I NOW NEED to retrace my steps and record a few episodes that occurred in the 1990s and into the 2000s, all except the first one being Japan-related.

On the spring of 1990 I had been clearing out my parents’ house in Birmingham before selling it. My mother had died in August 1983 and my father had recently gone into a nursing home. Neither of my parents had been good at throwing things away. I had been aware of a wooden chest under one of the beds, but it was locked and I had no key. But there were keys in drawers all over the house, and eventually I found the right one. What I discovered was my mother's treasure chest, and among her treasures was a humble cardboard box tied up with rough string. It contained letters between my mother and a young lieutenant in the British forces, called Geoffrey Boothby. My mother was living in Birmingham, and Geoffrey was first at a training camp in Dorset and then, via northern France and into Belgium, fighting around the town of Ypres. Although I had known of Geoffrey's existence, that he had been killed in the First World War and that my mother remained in touch with his family, it had never remotely occurred to me that there was anything romantic between them. At my discovery, so many years after the events, I was shocked, but also immensely moved.

Nearly a decade and a half later I found a niche publisher willing to publish the letters, under the title Thirty-Odd Feet under Belgium: An Affair of Letters in the First World War, 1915-1916. (copies of the second revised edition available from me at arthur.stockwin@sant. ox.ac.uk). The letters tell the story of a love affair developed almost entirely through letters, while Geoff was experiencing appalling conditions in tunnels under the trenches in the notorious Ypres Salient, between two highly intelligent, humorous and literate individuals. Geoff was killed when the Germans blew a ‘camouflet’ into his tunnel on 28 April 1916. They had never met again after his departure to training camp in February 1915.