Seventy Years, One Card: A Valentine’s Tale to Warm Your Cold, Dark Heart

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This has all the markings of an epic, old-timey romance: a war, a train station and woman named Doris.

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On Feb. 14, 1941 Harry Ward left his sweetheart, Doris, to join England’s war effort. At the train station that day, he handed her a card: “Two hearts entwine this Valentine. True love makes it sincere,” it read. They’ve had it ever since. “I bring it out of the cupboard and put it on our mantlepiece every Valentine’s Day,” Doris, now 87, tells the Telegraph . “It’s a special to me now as it was 70 years ago.”

The couple, who have two daughters, two granddaughters and four great-grandchildren, met in a cafe in November 1940, during the blitz. “He offered to walk me to the bus stop but when we got outside a bombing raid had started and there were flares going off everywhere around us, so we had to run to a nearby air-raid shelter,” Doris remembers. “We sat together in there for hours whilst Bristol was being bombed and he even fell asleep on my shoulder.”

Harry, now 88, says it was love at first site. “It was a heck of a night during the Blitz, but at least it meant we met each other,” he says.
“I gave her the Valentine’s card then and she is still my Valentine now.”

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