AN EMOTIONAL full turning of the circle has led Market Rasen's Barbara Corden to the battlefields of the First World War, where her father fought and, when he could, read the Market Rasen Mail.
Barbara (78) from De Aston Field, has fulfilled a longtime ambition to visit the battlefields in Belgium where her father, George Stone, served as a shoemaker with the Lincolnshire Regiment from 1915 to 1919, working in forward trenches repairing the boots of the soldiers.
"My father lived in Grimsby but he became friends with Nobby Clark, who had a tuck shop in King Street in Market Rasen, and he had the Mail delivered to him.
"I think they were glad to have anything to read, so my father read the Market Rasen Mail when he was serving in the trenches, little realising that 60 years later, he too would be living in Market Rasen.
Barbara and her husband Denis moved to Rasen for work and, in the early 1980s, George moved to live with them, and rekindled his friendship with his old wartime buddy Nobby.
"While we were there we went to the same places and read the same paper as he had read there all those years ago," she said.
"The whole trip was emotional. To feel I had been where he had been. It was a humbling experience, which really brought home the number of people who sacrificed their lives".
Although George survived the war unscathed, two brothers died during the war. George died in 1985.
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