Diane Parkes meets a playwright who was inspired after discovering a wartime romance in her family.

Actress and writer Caroline Horton was clearing her grandparents’ Staffordshire home when she came across a shoebox containing hundreds of letters. Inside she found a treasure trove of memories.

Reading through the handwritten epistles and reliving the wartime romance of her French grandmother Christiane and her Midland grandfather Cyril, Caroline rediscovered two young people head over heels in love during Europe’s darkest hour.

And the story has inspired her to create a one-woman show telling their tale.

Caroline, who grew up in Lichfield, was close to her grandmother Christiane who died in January at the age of 91.

“I had spent a summer listening and transcribing her stories so I knew some of it already,” Caroline says. “Then she had to go into a retirement flat in Lichfield which was much smaller than her home. She was such a hoarder that there was so much there and we had to go through all of her stuff. We found hundreds of letters and telegrams. The first is dated early in 1937 and they go on until the early 1950s.”

And they tell an incredible story.

“My grandmother was French and she was sent to England by a crackpot eye specialist. She had been almost blind from birth but she went to school in France and did really well there. She saw this specialist in Paris and he had this crazy idea that she was studying too much and she should go to England because she didn’t speak English so wouldn’t be able to read or write.

“So she was sent to England where, of course, she learnt to read and write English. And then she worked all across the West Midlands. She was working in Cheadle in Staffordshire and she met my granddad at a tennis club.

“She was eccentric and very short-sighted and was French, and there weren’t many French girls in England at that time and I am sure that was part of the attraction.”

But their romance was to be threatened by events outside their control.

“They were separated for nearly six years because of the war,” says 29-year-old Caroline. “My gran went back to France and my granddad was sent all over the place. But he was never sent to France.

‘‘She said she kept hoping that he would be but also dreading it because France was so terrible at that time. But she said that if she was in Paris and heard English soldiers she would want to hear them keep talking to remind her of him.”

Fortunately both survived the war. “Just before the end of the war my grandmother received a telegram saying he had landed in England and could she come over and marry him. So they were married on February 23, 1945,’’ she said.