It seems rather strange reading letters that were written by my parents before they were married.
They’re not love letters, but just words, words that knowing my father and mother as I do, seem so totally at odds with that knowledge.
The thing is, I never knew anything of that era existed, even though I knew my mother was a hoarder, and we didn’t discover the extent of that phobia until it was time to move them from their last residence to the retirement home.
There were cases and boxes filled with papers, letters, cuttings, and everything else in between. Nothing had been thrown out.
And whilst I knew those letters existed, there was the yuk factor involved, such that I would never want to read them because, well, that was my parents’ stuff.
So, all of it was sorted, most of it thrown away, and only what we thought was of any intrinsic value was kept. Those letters were part of the ‘keep’ pile and ended up in an old metal steamer trunk, and there they have lived for about ten years.
With the recent cleaning of my office, much to Chester’s disdain, the trunk suddenly looked out of place in a clean room.
My grandchildren ‘found’ this trunk and started looking through the contents and finished up with the letters.
And, being the curious people, they were, they started reading them, of course, stumbling over understanding the handwriting, which was based on what we learned in school, cursive script. That meant I had to interpret the writing for them.
Talk about morbid curiosity!
And like I said, in reading them, formed the impression that these two correspondents were nothing like the people I knew growing up.
These letters dated from 1948 and 1949 when they were married in June of 1949. There was no doubt it was a different time, and they were different people. My mother came from a country town and went to work in Melbourne around that time. I know that during the war, those years from 1939 to 1945 she was a student at Dandenong High School.
It was odd to realize that considering we eventually moved to Dandenong, and that may have had something to do with it.
My father served in the war till 1946, and then after being discharged from the army, worked as a projectionist until he went overseas for nearly a year, ostensibly to see how the war had affected Europe. After that, he went back to being a projectionist at the Athenaeum in Melbourne, and later on, not knowing much of his work history, he would always tell us about the movies, especially those that came up on television.
There’s more I’m sure, like the fact my mother had another chap on the go at the same time, but it seems he was not interested in settling down.
Perhaps more will come to light in further reading, but like it said, it seems very strange to be reading those letters, much like walking over a grave; it gives me the odd shiver down the spine.
No doubt, the next time the grandchildren visit there will be another installment.
They, at least, think the story is fascinating.
