NONFICTION - July 30, 1995

JOY STREET: A Wartime Romance in Letters edited by Michael T. Wise (Little Brown: $22.95; 361 pp.) Everyone’s discovering their parents’ letters these days. Since not many people write them anymore, they have a symbolic aspect, the authority to carry revelation to their readers from another generation or another place in history. These are the letters of Mirren Barford, a 20-year-old Oxford University student and Jock Lewes, a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards, one of the founding members of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS). The letters, dating from 1940-1942, were discovered by Mirren’s son by her subsequent marriage, Michael (who apparently knew all along of his mother’s love for Jock), after she died in 1992. “Joy Street” was the phrase Mirren and Jock used to describe their meetings. And both were well-versed in the art of code; Mirren worked for a military intelligence unit and Jock for a commando unit. Jock was the consummate soldier, revealing almost nothing of his wartime activities in his letters to Mirren. “The golden rule of war,” he wrote in one letter, “is ‘Don’t drift into battle.’ . . . That is why I am steering straight at you; instinct tells me a good thing will come of it.” Of course he was killed in action, resplendent, aged 27. Returning from an operation against the Nofilia aerodrome in Libya, he was killed by a cannon shell from a German fighter. “Darling,” Mirren writes in her last worried letter to him, “I’m sure your parachute must be very safe.”