THE BOOK OF MEMORIES

Eleanor Casey sits at her kitchen table in Long Island, New York, in 1945, carefully making notes on a sheet of paper, adding a word here and underlining one there. Putting down her pen, she picks up a photograph. She looks at the young serviceman staring back at her and remembers the fun they’d all had when he stayed with her family a couple of weeks ago. She sticks the photograph firmly onto the page, which she adds to the sheaf of others contained in the black binder on the table.

Seventy-five years later, Eleanor’s binder sits on Barrie Holden’s kitchen table on the other side of the Atlantic – in Blackburn to be precise. As the nation strung up bunting to celebrate VE Day, eating cream cakes and drinking lemonade at socially distanced street parties across the UK, Barrie was pursuing the mammoth