The following are photos and a live writing transcript in response to Episode 1.6
I love the picture of home that emerges from this letter.
It strikes me that I don't know the 346 his family lived in. I feel like it's in New Cumberland. I feel like that's where my grandfather's family lived. I vaguely remember driving past it once as a child.
Or have I just imagined that, because my grandparents liked an Irish pub in New Cumberland that we used to go to with them.
He writes about English soldiers being in their house. About jam sessions. It sounds rather wonderful.
It sounds quite different to holidays at my grandparents' house, which were not in any sense raucous.
This is the house where I visited my grandparents as a child. It's also the house where my dad grew up.
This isn't how it looked when they lived there. The bit on the right was a screened in porch.
This house had the most wonderful back garden with mature pine trees that felt like a veritable forrest to me. My grandparents kept a box of treats for squirrels and chipmunks on the screened-in porch and we would feed them.
When my grandfather died, and the house was empty, I had a brief vision of an alternate life for myself, where I bought this house and lived in it. I always thought it had good bones. I imagined rolling up the carpets, clearing the furniture and having wild dance parties there.
Instead, someone bough it, moved in and installed pink flamingoes on the lawn.
And in the fullness of time, screened off the porch. (Why do people do that? I don't get it, the air is so lovely. Do you actually need one more room that desperately?)
This letter made me laugh several times - I love the way he asks her for things. I recognise my own acquisitive tendencies. Like I have absolutely everything I want/need, I don't need anything, really, nope, don't need it, all good - but oh, isn't that quite lovely/interesting/fascinating, maybe I'll just get one more thing.
I didn't realise that my grandfather's job in the navy had to do with the post office. His father had worked in the post office and he and his brother ended up doing it to.
It makes sense, I suppose - he'd already had it as a summer job and university. I knew this from my grandmother's letters to him.
There are some beautiful images in this letter: watching films in the rain, drinking this intoxicating coconut drink, that's buried underground for a week.
I think of the farmer's market in Prague each weekend, where you can buy coconuts to drink from. Maybe life was more interesting when you can only get them were there are actually palm trees.
Or is that just a ridiculous, nostalgic thing to say?
Here's Rosalind Russell in Flight for Freedom, the movie (or flicker - that's a new term for me) my grandfather doesn't think it's worthwhile to see again.
This surprises me slightly, as she looks a bit like my grandmother in this picture.
See? That's her, with the eyes closed. Everyone seems to have had that hair in the ‘40s.
He seems bored in this letter and a little down. I want to give him a hug and find him a copy of the Seabee magazine. I wonder if he actually sent them all to my grandmother, if they kept them. Maybe they're buried in the trunk somewhere.
It's funny - I think of being in a war - at home or on the front - as being a sort of massive overstimulation. I realise I've been equating it to anxiety, as in we MUST BE ON HIGH ALERT AT ALL TMES. Probably this comes from watching war movies, which of necessity unfold around such moments.
But it makes sense that long swathes of it would be boring. Of course they would.
Neither of them seem anxious in the letters. Is it possible they aren’t?
And if they weren't, why on earth am I?
Like now, for example, I'm waiting to see if someone I need to travel with can get a replacement passport. I am aware my adrenaline is heightened because of this.
Seriously?
Maybe I need to get a little set of chisels and take up wood carving.
P.S. Gene just came in and we had a consultation about the picture frame. He advised me to get a slip stone if I should get a carving set. You need it to keep the chisels sharp!
Until next time (Friday at 1pm CET / 12 pm BST), keep those chisels sharp, my friends!
