"There Are No Flowers Here...": Collected Letters of Jack Richardson

In 1913 John 'Jack' Richardson was the 20 year-old son of the headmaster of Shaftesbury Road Elementary School in Forest Gate, East London. Jack was a lover of the countryside, a talented artist and a linguistics scholar; he adored Beowulf, and quoted Robert Louis Stevenson and Omar Khayyam. May Larby, 18, was the daughter of a local police constable; she was a sharp-minded mathematician with a great thirst for all knowledge, cultural as well as abstract. After a chance meeting on an underground train these two brilliant young people began a doomed love affair. May Jack Jack was one of the many millions of young men who were soon to die, victims of the insane slaughter of the First World War. Before his death Jack wrote letters to May from his training camp, from his French billets and ultimately from the trenches. These letters, a short essay, a poem and some excerpts from May's memoirs tell their tragic story.