Slough couple's torturous five year wait to wed after war hero captured by Nazis

Captain Brian Dowling and Margery Street were due to marry in May 1940 until the Nazis captured the groom at Dunkirk just before he was due to return on leave.

The bride-to-be, then 20, spent many months not knowing whether her fiancé was dead or alive.

Four months later The Red Cross helped deliver a postcard with news that her partner was still alive, but being kept as a war prisoner.

Over the next five years Captain Dowling, 23, was held prisoner at various camps, while his bride-in-waiting treated the wounded at Woking Hospital in Surrey.

Throughout the war the pair penned letters to one another which, although heavily censored, helped keep the young prisoner hopeful whilst enduring captivity.

When the war finally ended the US Air Force flew the Captain home to his fiancee. They finally wed on May 23, 1945, in West End, Surrey - five years later than originally planned.

The couple, both from Slough, went on to lead a happy married life and had three children, nine grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Their eldest daughter, Sue Hatt, has now preserved her parents' remarkable story in a novel she wrote based on the long-concealed letters.

The retired lecturer meticulously read the letters and retraced her father's wartime ordeal across France, Belgium and Germany.

The 74-year-old said: "When I was little the war was very much what my parents talked about. But their story didn't seem remarkable because, in my generation, everybody's parents had a wartime story to tell."

As normal life continued Sue forgot her parent's love story until many decades later.

In 2013, she found an old suitcase containing a box of letters and began reading them with her elderly mother, who died shortly after.

Sue, a mother of four, said: "As I read the letters I realised that there was something rather special there and found lessons that are relevant for today."

The former economics lecturer began chronicling the story for her own children and grandchildren, but soon realised the tale deserved telling creatively, whilst staying true to the account.

Sue added: "I don't think there's a single fact where I didn't have proof of what happened. But I had no idea of the exact words they said to each other in 1939. So it did require some imagination, but you're not working in a total vacuum."

Whilst writing the story Sue reflected on what it was that kept her young parents' dream intact during their years apart.

She said: "I think for my father it was easier. It was loving her and waiting to go back to her that kept him going. He would tell her, 'we are very young and we have got a lot to look forward to. We have got all these joys to come.'"

Sue, who has spent the past six years creating a novel, thinks her mother's loyalty to her father is more revealing and adds suspense to the story.

She said: "It's the waiting. Will he survive and will her love survive? For my mother the war was her big moment, sort of like going to university nowadays.

"She was going to dances and meeting all sorts of people. So it's that sort of tension that keeps the book going."

In Captain Dowling's absence, two men, a doctor and a family friend, proposed to his fiancee.

Sue said: "Ultimately she remained loyal. It was about keeping the promise. She had given him her word."

She said: "I realised when reading the letters that these were people I had never known. We don't think of our parents before we were born. They were young, passionate and idealistic. All the things you don't think your parents are.

Sue added: "My father was adventurous. I hadn't seen that version of him. Maybe the war changed him and he decided that Surrey was really rather nice after all."

The author's own daughters have now read the book and were pleased to finally fill in the blanks from "bits" they had heard before.

The book, written to coincide with the 80th Anniversary of Captain Dowling's capture, is an emotional story telling of loss, love and separation.

Sue found it painful to appreciate the "dreadful" physical and psychological suffering her father endured during the war.

In 1940, Captain Dowling was serving with the British Expeditionary Force in France. His battalion, the 1st Buckinghamshires, was deployed to delay the Germans by holding Hazebrouck, a French town to the south west of Dunkirk.

He lost his best friend in the battle and was captured by the Nazis who marched their prisoners back to Germany through France, Belgium and Holland.

Sue, who lives in Llanvaches, South Wales, said: "They were marching day in day out. There wasn't much food because the Germans had taken what was there on their advance.

"They were some of the first prisoners of war, so the guards were rough. They had to show them who was boss and that escape wasn't going to be allowed."

Once in Germany, Sue's father and his fellow officers were taken by train to Laufen Castle, known as Oflag VIIC, on the German-Austrian border. The officers were imprisoned there until 1941, when they were shifted yet again.

Sue added: "The prisoners of war camps weren't pleasant places. There was a big question of whether he would survive."

The novel, explained the author, offers lessons relevant to today's challenges.

She said: "This is a very difficult time for a lot of people now. The enduring lesson from their story that you won't necessarily go back to where you were before, but you will come through.

"If you believe in yourself, you can come through and make something out of it afterwards."

Captain Dowling died in 2004 aged 88 and his wife Margery passed in 2017 at 98 years old. Sue said that her parents were both remembering their story "right until the end."

The novel, called On His First Leave, is inspired by the photographs, letters and the couple's extraordinary love.

It is currently available on Amazon Kindle, and will be stocked in Foyles and Waterstones book stores after the lockdown ends.