NINA & VIC: A World War II Love Story

Published by Woodfield, November 27 2004

ISBN: 1 903953 69 3

A signed copy is available, price £10.99 + £2.80 pp




 This book marks the first written in my maiden name, Janine Harrington.

It is is my mother's story and was ten years in the making. My mother died in 1996 so never saw the writings we did together reach fruition. She too was a writer, as was my father. And this book was finally published on the 60th anniversary of Vic's passing.

I am now Secretary of the worldwide RAF 100 Group Association, and Editor of 'Confound & Destroy', the Association magazine. We meet each year at Norfolk where 100 Group was based during the war, and pay tribute to those who didn't return. And it's a strange feeling to be standing right beside his friends and colleagues, now all over eighty years old, when Vic and Canadian pilot Jack, will forever remain young.

Publication of the book gave me the opportunity to do an exhibition as part of the BBC2 War Experience week, hosted by Scarborough library, and to talk about the story and the writing of it. It has touched so many people's lives. I have been contacted by people it mentions, people Vic wrote about in his letters to my mother, which in turn, has given information to relatives wanting to know more about them. And someone recently wrote the following as a review:

'A funny, romantic and sad true story of the love between a WAAF and an Airman in World War II told through her diaries and the letters they sent to one another. Nina, the WAAF, who's two brothers had gone off to war. Nina and her mother being bombed out of there home in Liverpool. Nina joined the WAAF in 1943. Fell in love with Vic, a Navigator flying Mosquitos, at a Christmas party on their base that year. The letters that passed between them tell of a love very rarely seen. They convey so much love and hope in a way that people have now forgotten. It was a love that had a tragic ending on the night of the 26th/27th November 1944. It's the story of an unworn wedding dress lying at the back of a wardrobe for over 50 years. It's the story of the search for Vic's last resting place with his pilot Jack, a Canadian. The story of a promise kept.

The letters are a lost art in themselves in the way they express the love between two people and should be shown in all schools as an example of the art of letter writing.'