La was a strict matriarch, and you had to mind your p’s and q’s
Ruby Janet Oakley lived with her family in Greenwich, South-East London, during the Second World War, where they endured night-time bombing raids and countless lesser hardships – not least rationing. “Yesterday, I had to queue for 45 minutes in the pouring rain for fish and it has given me a touch of lumbago. Still, I got the fish!” she wrote in 1943.
Ruby Janet, known by her nickname ‘La’, was the paternal grandmother of Katie Oakley, a retired nurse from Wimbledon, South-West London. “After my father John Oakley died in 2004, I began sorting out his possessions,” Katie explains.
“Among his wartime medals and bullet-riddled beret I found neat bundles of old letters. They were written to him by his mother La during wartime, and he had kept every single one. I was astonished by the
