AS verses in Christmas cards go, it’s hardly the cheery doggerel we’re used to: “This Christmastide your lights can shine brightly as they did in days of old.

“We are proud to have taken part in the Victory which has made this possible, and hope we may soon return to share in the Light of your new Happiness.”

This was the printed message sent from Germany for Christmas 1945 by a young RAF man called Charles ‘Chas’ White to his cousin Monica Topp.

Monica, who grew up in Ferndale Road and later lived in Gorse Hill, died in July 2008 aged 84.

Lke many people of her generation, she never threw personal ephemera away, and many of her old Christmas cards were found by her daughter, Josie Lewis, “I think the cards are beautiful,” said Josie, 60, who works at the Wyvern Theatre.

“To send one of those cards meant more, I think, than they do today. They would have been more valuable.

“Mum kept everything. People years ago didn’t have much, so everything was precious.”

Monica married Joseph, who worked at the Wills tobacco plant, in 1948. Joseph died in 2005. They had two children, Josie and her sister, Heather.

Josie thinks Chas, the cousin who sent the card from Germany in 1945, was from Dorset.

A year earlier, he had sent another card, this one showing a Spitfire, a doorway marked “Malcolm Clubs” and the initials BLA.

BLA stood for British Liberation Army. Malcolm Clubs were social clubs at RAF bases. They were named for Wing Commander Hugh Malcolm, a 25-year-old pilot posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his role in a devastating Allied air raid on a Nazi base in Tunisia in 1942.

Inside the card, Chas sends his best wishes for Christmas and the New Year, and identifies himself for the censor as a leading aircraftman with 70 MTLRU the Mechanical Transport Light Repair Uni.

Other cards in the collection discovered by Josie have more familiar themes, albeit ones that tend to be outnumbered on card shop shelves these days by rude reindeer, saucy Santas, paralytic penguins and musical mechanisms.

One from a Cousin Shirley shows shepherds or Magi heading for Bethlehem within the outline of a Christmas tree.

Another, signed with love from “Embe” shows a hearth, a chair, a roaring fire and a cat.

Such a scene is mundane and cliched to modern eyes, but a yearning for such cosiness sustained countless people of the era through the horrors of war.

Millions of those who fought and who waited for loved ones to return were in their teens and early 20s.

Josie said: “I think these cards are more personal and individual. They’re very reflective of their time.”