Tony’s Commentary 1
First Draft: 5th April 2013; Last Revised: 6th May 2013.
I have always found it easy to imagine that those who have left this realm are watching and listening to us, while chattering among themselves about what they see and remember. It is strangely comforting to envisage they are still amongst us and part of what happens, sometimes as a result of their own earlier actions and other times as a consequence of what we have subsequently wrought. It is an impish thought. So, I can well imagine Mum responding to the idea of these letters and what they venture with some initial bewilderment and disbelief but soon entering into the spirit of corresponding with enthusiasm and pressing expectations of they being regular and sustained. However, the thought of all those with whom she might be speaking and what she might be learning and deciding to do is somewhat nerve wracking.
My Mother always loved to write and receive letters. Sadly today we have only a few of the huge number she wrote to us. Of those we have, the largest number are letters that she sent to her Granddaughter, Zosia. Even though we do not have Zosia’s letters written to her, Grandma’s responses reveal the close affinity and deeply loving relationship that the two of them built despite the ocean and continent separating them. Zosia inherited her Grandma’s delight in and talent for corresponding. Their exchange flourished before the e-era made hand-written letters and cards less fashionable. Even though Grandma Florence had learned to type and take short-hand in the late 1920s when she began working, she never took to email. Her letters to Zosia were sometimes typed, sometimes handwritten with no apparent reason for her choice of instrument. Zosia, on the other hand grew up with a passion for pen, ink and carefully selected paper and cards that continues to this day. Unlike many of her friends, she long resisted the seduction of the computer keyboard and had an admirable pride in polishing the traditional virtues of a fine hand and thought provoking turn-of-phrase. Family, friends, colleagues, pupils and parents are the beneficiaries of this today despite all the pressures of a teaching career, her own brim-full family life and the overflowing responsibilities of a good friend to her dear friends that have drawn her in to the necessary efficiencies of email. Grandma Florence would be so proud of her for this and so many other virtues!
I know my Mother was hugely proud of me and all that she saw me achieve. I know because she lovingly told me and because she mentioned it to others who have so thoughtfully and kindly repeated it to me. This knowledge is a source of joy and immense comfort. Many people are not so blessed. But, as much as I believe this, I am haunted by the feeling that I did not do enough for her. Part of the impetus for this reflective project is the corrosive doubt that she did not know how much I appreciated all that she and my Father had done for me and to make possible everything I have had and done over the years. Although they told me very little of their own experiences while growing up in London, I have the strong impression that their beginnings were nowhere near so fortunate nor easy. I very much want to better understand that formative part of their lives, in as much as I can within the substantial constraints on uncovering them now. Whatever I am able to discover will be better than ignorance, no matter how troubling the findings and residual suspicions might be. Writing their story as best I can is at least one small way of showing my appreciation and honouring them.
Starting my letter to Mum with an apology for having failed yet again to be a faithful correspondent is an only too real example of the ways in which I feel I did not do enough to show my appreciation. It brought back guilty memories of making similar apologies when I had not written for several weeks. Even though I generally wrote or spoke by phone every couple of weeks, there were the times I failed to deliver. Recalling the occasions on which she expressed her concerns at not having heard from me somehow seems more troubling from this distance in time when specifics of the excuses I might offer blur into an amorphous feeling of heavy guilt. Re-reading gently chiding comments in a few of the letters from my step-father Ralph, whom she married in 1974 and lived with in his Norwich home until his death in 1993, reinforce my doubts. At this point I am not sure to what extent I failed to be the good son she so deserved. More careful reflection as this project proceeds will hopefully suggest that all I, Plu and Zosia did, not just the writing and telephoning but also the annual and other visits to Canada to stay with us and back to England by the three of us, and the connections maintained by Plu and Zosia, did go at least some way in mitigating my letter writing failures and showing more thoughtfulness than my sometime neglect as correspondent might in isolation imply. Maybe the Roman Catholic nuns and priests in my elementary schools left more fertile soil for seeds of guilt than I appreciate. We shall see.
The irony of me finding a new hobby in writing letters to her now that I am retired will not be lost on Mum. For some reason I can not fully comprehend she worried inordinately about me not having something to do when I quit full-time employment. Even though I had lots of varied interests beyond my work at the University and did not have the time to pursue them as I would have liked during those career years, she always had a horror that I would not know what to do with myself in my post-career years and that I and all those around me would suffer the debilitating consequences.
Thinking about it today, I believe she was really expressing her concerns about me devoting too much of my time to my University work and woefully neglecting Plu, Zosia, her and the rest of my family as a result. In that belief her concern was indeed only too well founded. Even though I felt at the time I had no choice and was striking a reasonable balance between commitment to my family and the job, I came to see the imbalance in my later years. From today’s vantage point I would choose to give higher priority to my family and am trying to now make up for what I denied them. Whenever the opportunity presents I urge those who are just starting in the work world to give higher priority to their lives beyond their career pursuits. To drive it home I tell them about the extraordinary pleasure I now feel in having more time with my family and for pursuing other interests, like this project, when I do not have the commitments to the job. Interestingly I find myself feeling busier than ever and doing things, I would never have imagined. Now the challenge is to find an appropriate balance between all the “hobbies”.
While I have started by reactivating my conversation with Mum, I am equally keen to do this with Dad. But, while the two of them grew up in London during the same inter-war years, their experiences were substantially different as I hope to bring out when I shortly start corresponding with Dad. There is also a major difference in that the relationship I had with my father not only had its own distinctive and loving characteristics during my early years but came to a tragically abrupt end with his totally unanticipated suicide when I was 21. We never had the chance to talk as much as I did over the later years with Mum. I am so happy that he and Plu met and I suspect he saw that I had already totally fallen for her. He was not around to see us get married two years later, then finish our university degrees and launch totally unimagined careers and fulfilling lives in Canada. Nor did he have the joy of getting to know his granddaughter, Zosia, and share with Mum, Plu and I the wonder-full gift she was to us all and the immeasurable pleasure she has brought to our lives as we watch her grow and flourish, now with Jeff and Sequoia. We have a lot to talk about and I am very much looking forward to my conversations with him and bringing Mum into them.
As I have learned about others’ experiences in recording their own family histories both in my researching and through talking with friends, I have come to appreciate that my family was not unusual in not talking about their ancestors. While there are many accounts in print and on the web, they are still a small proportion of those that might be recorded. Further, the failure to talk and write about histories should not be assumed to mean that peoples lives were dominated by tragedies and grief that they want to forget and that there are not joys and thrills of pleasure that they would want to recall. In today’s high pressure world, many can not find the time and emotional energy to take on the task. As in my own case, I have learned that others have only found the interest and time later in their lives and that by then the task of capturing stories is to a large extent too late; the stories unfortunately died with the ancestors.