Both mature professionals, they fell in love with childlike glee.
John and Dorothy had met briefly in New Jersey. A medical doctor
from Australia, he was en route to the British Isles to further his
education. Friends of Dorothy, also a doctor, had fixed them up on
a blind date neither looked forward to. Yet they had fun. When she
decided on a summer vacation in England, her best friend and
traveling companion Helen broke her leg at the last moment, as if
by fate. John happily saw Dorothy around London but thought of her
only as a lady doctor from America. Then, in the hospital matron's
sitting room, something happened that changed both their lives. A
rushed courtship, a simple wedding in Wesley's Chapel, and the
briefest of honeymoons followed. She sailed home, and John,
scarcely believing he was now a married man, stayed on at St.
Paul's Hospital in London. For three months, the Atlantic separated
them. John wrote to Dorothy every morning and every night, never
once missing a day. A self-confessed very ordinary man, he revealed
much about himself and about how he coped in London during their
separation, devising a hundred different ways to express his love
for Dorothy. His letters convey a refreshing earnestness and
honesty. Although Dorothy's half of the correspondence has not
survived, her mysterious cable, "Come at once " assured John's
arrival in East Orange by Christmas. This tenderhearted story,
based on the love letters John wrote to Dorothy from London in 1933
and including numerous excerpts, is told by their son for those of
us who have experienced or imagined the love of a lifetime. Born in
New Jersey and raised in California, John Kessell did not set out
to be a professional historian. His work in the 1960s, however, at
Tumacacori National Monument in New Mexico, site of a Spanish
colonial mission, alerted him to the possibility. Returning to
graduate school with new purpose, he earned his doctorate at the
University of New Mexico, survived a decade as historian-for-hire,
and joined the UNM Department of History. His major historical
editing project with colleagues Rick Hendricks, Meredith D. Dodge,
and Larry D. Miller resulted in the six-volume "Journals of don
Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1691 - 1704." Kessell is also author
of "Kiva, Cross and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540 -
1840"; "The Missions of New Mexico Since 1776"; and "Pueblos,
Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico."
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