PATRICIA TOWNSEND Bridging Time 1944-2024: Letters To My Father

In this elegiac tribute to her father’s experience of the final months of the Second World War, Patricia Townsend combines words and images, past and present, public records and private conversations to create an eloquent insight into one man’s experience of the everyday trauma of those extraordinary times. In doing so she illuminates the difficulties of a generation in talking about their war – and why so many of them remained silent.

– Shirley Read, writer and oral historian in photography

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PATRICIA TOWNSEND Bridging Time 1944-2024: Letters To My Father

PATRICIA TOWNSEND Bridging Time 1944-2024: Letters To My Father is a self-published book.

“My father, Sam Townsend, served with the Royal Engineers during the closing months of World War 2, writing letters home to his parents every few days. After the war he never spoke of his experiences and I didn’t know his letters existed until, shortly before his death, he gave them to me. Although he couldn’t disclose where he was when he wrote each letter, I was amazed by his vivid descriptions of what he saw and felt.

In this book, I reply, 80 years later, to my father’s letters. My letters to him are in the form of sonnets, each responding to, and quoting from, a particular letter from him to my grandparents. The book is richly illustrated with photographs, many taken on a journey I made in 2024, following my father’s war route through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Some of these are montaged with wartime photographs. Others are from my father’s own album.

The book is my attempt to understand my father’s experiences, how they affected him and how they may have indirectly impacted my own childhood.”