Red Cross Letters

When Richard Norwood gets in a deadly dogfight with an Italian boy over Egypt, and has to parachute out, he doesn’t expect it to define the rest of his life. It’s war – kill or be killed – but when both he and the Italian end up on the ground he finds that there are no politics in humanity and that a promise to a dying man must be honoured. The promise turns into a letter to Vittoria Martinelli, a nurse in the American Red Cross.

This is the story of wartime letters that carried one man and one woman through the Second World War. It’s the story of a great artist and a masterpiece painted on Maleme Beach in 1941, and it’s also the story of a Hawker Hurricane called Molly Malone with a kilted pin-up girl painted on her fuselage.

It’s a lament, a love story and a requiem for all the things that should have been but will never come to pass.