DURING World War One around 19,000 mailbags crossed the Channel everyday as people tried to keep in touch with sons, brothers, husbands and lovers.

Now, the theatrical production The Second Minute explores the lost letters of love, gas attacks, rations, births and deaths in a poignant and uplifting production weaving together the stories of the war’s soldiers and families.

Based on the archive collection of the Sherwood Foresters regiment, this historic drama explores how the post managed to hold the country together, with cross Channel communication, as a generation of the country’s young men was being destroyed.

As part of the Imperial War Museum’s First World War centenary partnership and programme, Spot On, Lancashire’s rural touring network and Nottingham Playhouse, will present, to selected venues, a moving account of the real communications carefully carried between English homes and the chaos and insanity of the trenches.

The Second Minute will be coming to Cliviger village hall on Sunday, May 25 and Samlesbury War Memorial Hall – a venue built in dedication those in the parish who were killed during World War One – on Friday, May 30. Both performances start at 7.30pm. Sue Robinson, from Spot On, said: “The Second Minute is a simply told, moving meditation of the lost stories from the hundreds of thousands of small scraps of paper that survived the mud and slaughter of the battlefields to return to the homes of those that did not. Weaving together the heroic, tragic and comic, The Second Minute shares a powerful collection of letters and stories of soldiers and families through their own words.”