'It Was As If We Had Never Been a Part' ; a 'Moment of Madness' During Wartime Cost Bessie Hassell Her Happy Marriage - Until a Letter 50 Years Later Rekindled a Love That Had Never Died Report Catherine O'brien Photographs Lesley Jones

Summary

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Ted and Bessie Hassell's house sits huddled on a Scottish headland overlooking the icy and windswept North Sea. In the remote hamlet of Cairnbulg there are no trees, nor garden borders none would survive.

Inside, however, their cottage is cosy and brimming with the sort of keepsakes you would expect to belong to an octogenarian couple. Across one wall of the sitting room, a display cabinet of photographs provides a visual narrative of their long and eventful lives. Yet if you look closely, all is not quite as it seems.

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'It Was As If We Had Never Been a Part' ; a 'Moment of Madness' During Wartime Cost Bessie Hassell Her Happy Marriage - Until a Letter 50 Years Later Rekindled a Love That Had Never Died Report Catherine O'brien Photographs Lesley Jones

Amid the usual portraits of children and grandchildren, there are two frames of Bessie and Ted together. One is a sepia-toned shot taken on their wedding day in 1943. The other, taken some 55 years later, is from their second wedding. In the chasm between lies an extraordinary epic of love, illicit sex, betrayal and ultimate redemption.

The Second World War had a profound effect on love and marriage in Britain, but many of the films and novels that spr...

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