6. Dearest Dimples

Chapter 6: Dearest Dimples, explores Jim’s early letters to Norah, sent between March and June 1941. We learn about his family, his life aboard a minesweeper, his interests in sport, music and films, and we experience him as a cheeky chap who enjoys banter and is keen to push boundaries. I explore evidence of feeling and emotion in Norah’s diary responses when Jim briefly stops writing in the summer of 1941 and explore their correspondence in the context of research into the place of romance in young women’s lives in the 1930s and 1940s. At the end of the chapter, I ask what Jim’s pen-friendship with Norah meant to him. Is she, as he claims, his only girl correspondent, holding a special place in his affections? Or are her letters trophies among his fellow sailors, read out in the mess to bawdy comments, her photograph passed round like a tin of sweets?