30. Love, Death and Letters from My Mother's Hut

My mother was a great letter writer and kept up a regular correspondence with Elizabeth and I during the years we were in Nigeria and New Zealand respectively. I never kept my Mum's letters, and I don't believe Elizabeth did either. But Mum, as I indicated in an earlier blog [13. "My Mum and Other Huts"], was one for squirrelling away things in her beloved shed at the bottom of the garden in Malvern Link. When she finally moved to a rest home all the letters that Elizabeth and I had written home over the years were found in her hut, many of them neatly parcelled up in batches.

The letters of mine that Mum had kept stretch back to my boarding school days and even earlier, the very first being dated May 31st 1948 when I was a few weeks short of eight years old. The letter, addressed from Cambridge, appears to be to my mother in Scotland where I presume she was spending time with the Henderson family in Edinburgh.*
[*see blog 43, "We think that the kitten is a lady" - My First Letters (19th May 2012)]

When my son Stuart came over from London in November 2001 for a visit he brought with him all these letters of mine that Mum had so carefully filed away over the years. Some of the letters - three or four hundred of them in total, mostly flimsy airmails - were jumbled up chronologically and it took me some weeks to sort them into their date sequence, a process not helped by Mum's penchant for cutting off the New Zealand postage stamps (presumably to give to a niece or nephew or grandchild or some charitable cause), thereby sometimes eradicating the date stamp on one side and parts of the first few sentences of the letter on the other. However, since the first two sentences were generally very formulaic – thank you for your letter, I hope Dad is better or am glad you are well, the presents arrived safely, the weather has been hot, wet, dry, cold - I could always see the gist of their introductions and reconstruct the actual words with tolerable accuracy.

In other cases the letters had been carefully collected into years, the letters for that year enclosed in a rubber band, and a piece of card with the year’s date on it in Mum's spidery handwriting tucked in front of the pack. Most of the rubber bands were now rotten and stuck to the cards, and they would disintegrate as I opened a pack. But with the 1982 letters the rubber band was quite fresh, suggesting that at some point Mum had re-read those letters, or at least some of them, and then packaged them up again. Perhaps she wanted to remind herself of Mary. Or perhaps she wanted to read again Mary's words about how much Mum's children loved her. I hope so, because Mary was right, and we were never good at telling Mum that. In fact, we were probably all obsessed, as children are, with the question of whether or not our parents love us (and, if they do, why won’t they say so), and give scant attention to the question of whether or not we love our parents (of course, we do, we say) and why won’t we tell them – is it none of their business? I wonder if Mum was remembering how my sister Ruth phoned her one night – Ruth must have been in her forties at the time – and asked if she was a wanted baby. And what Mum made of my brother Stuart's rebirthing dramas as he tried to locate his own adult hang-ups in the womb’s emotional bonding, or a perceived lack of it?

I was a war baby, so I don’t think we had better go down that track; even if there is a track, it has never occurred to me that it might lead anywhere useful. Was Elizabeth the only one to avoid such psychic cul-de-sacs? I certainly never remember her indulging in speculation about whether, or how much, Mum and Dad loved her. Perhaps she has the confidence of the first born in their rightful place in the world, or her faith in God’s love is all that really matters to her, or perhaps her practical no nonsense nature recognises the fruitlessness of such probings? Or perhaps she knows Mum and Dad really did love her best! Perhaps, perhaps.

Back in 2002 when I opened the 1982 pack of letters, I did so with some trepidation. Rightly so. They triggered sad and powerful memories of Mary's death. I had never been so close to someone’s death before or since, other than my own in my later annus horribilis. Some vivid brushes with it, certainly. When an undergraduate student at Cambridge, I saw my landlady’s husband at Rathmore Road blue and choking a few hours before he died of lung failure. And I have always been able to visualise in the wash of a steamer on Loch Fyne when we are returning from a family day trip to Strachur and Inverary, the sight of the body of a man who has committed suicide by jumping overboard, and to hear the screaming from his wife and young daughter, screaming that finally subsides as my father, bless his priestly heart, comforts and prays with them. And I remember Linda’s tearful account of passing an accident scene in Birkenhead in which a van had knocked two old people over as they were trying to cross the road, and she had seen them lying on the kerbside, like a couple of crumpled rubbish bags waiting for the garbage truck, and known they were both dead. But Mary’s death was up close and personal and the screaming was all inside.

Before we moved to Orewa last October I sold my old desk top computer leaving me without a drive for the old style floppy disks. I had 21 of these old floppies with only a vague idea of their contents and TaylorMade computers in Orewa, for a small charge, loaded them onto a CD. I still had much of this material in other files. Not, however, the complete set of letters from my mother's hut that I painstakingly typed up in 2002; I must have been seeking something very boring and mindless to do at the time to have gone to such trouble.

In my case, right from the days of my weekly letters home from boarding school, what I wrote and told my parents about is often merely the shell of my inner life, a shell of primarily routine daily trivia, of family comings and goings, of events and celebrations at home, at school, at work. Much that is personal is censored and hidden and my emotional life, my love life in particular, scarcely touched upon. I am sure they were grateful for that by and large, just as I have no wish to know in detail the ins and outs of my children's relationships. Privacy provides sanctuary. But at times of major change in my life it must have seemed strange to Mum and Dad to have to confront, with little or no warning, all my careful camouflages stripped away and confront someone else beneath my dutiful-son mask.

In typing up all my old letters in 2002 I see that at various points I have inserted commentaries triggered by the content of those letters, such as the remembrance in the present piece of some close encounters with death. And I have, from time to time, put aside the inner censor and drafted "the letter I dared not write", a version of the letter that would give a more honest description and analysis of what was going on in my life at the time. And now, after all these years, I can look at these two versions of myself and decide anew, in revealing some of them to you, what to edit and how much to censor.

And you can puzzle over what to believe.