Her story reads like a sad romance novel. Pia was the beauty of the family, the prettiest of my great aunts. In the late Thirties, she got engaged to an aeroplane pilot, but the Second World War put paid to her dreams. Her fiance was killed in action. She became one of the many widows before marriage.

Although Pia was still very young at the time, she never married. Whether she didn’t find anyone else, or didn’t even look, I don’t know. She died when I was still relatively small so my childhood memories of her are sketchy—I remember an old but cheerful spinster who was very much part of her wider family’s life.

Back then, I didn’t know about the death that had changed her life. But ever since I found out, I have wanted to tell her story, to make sure it is not forgotten. The Theme Thursday challenge gave me the excuse. So here is Pia before the war, stars in her big brown eyes, a hint of a smile playing on her lips. Beautiful, happy, and blissfully ignorant of the tragedy that time was about to bring.

Pia in the mid-1930s