Photo: Paul Wade
Well, so that was a letter.
I still have no idea how to explain the jump from 27 April to 7 May, but hey ho. Maybe they're still in the metal trunk at my mother's. Maybe Winnie didn't get keep them, or Jack never got them back, since it's through him that I have these things. Impossible to know.
There is a lot going on in this letter.
I think about Petrach and that cultural history of letters I was talking about last week, I think (time is such a slippery entity at the moment).
This sense of letters being meant for a single recipient.
In a letter like this, where there is some much reference to other letters and other people mentioned in those letters, and when half the correspondence is missing, it does feel as close to trespassing as this project gets.
Why keep letters, of course, if one doesn't want them to be read?
It's a reasonable question.
I suppose we can assume a degree of consent by virtue of their continued existence; they were carefully stored. And despite the fact that I tend to think of Jack as dashing and rakish, he was also extremely methodical and disinclined to do anything unintentionally.
There are things in this letter I've very happy to have read and other I wish I hadn't.
It's lovely to hear him say sweet, loving and affirming things to her. There are moments when this is a beautiful love letter. I'm struck too by what he says about how wonderful it will be to be able to make and change plans at will, to say, "let's just pop down to the shore for the weekend."
The shore! Oh, the shore. I am seriously getting teary just thinking about it.
It took me a minute to find that photo, but I wanted one I had taken.
This is Stone Harbor and Avalon, NJ and it is where my family has gone to the beach since I was very small.
See?
This is me on the porch of the house we always rented when I was a child. We also used to stay in a house Jack and Winnie would rent for the entire month of September.
We would go on boat trips and Jack would fish off dock and refuse to let us inside until my mother had handed over this chocolate cake with peanut butter icing that she always baked for him. This cake includes a cup of hot coffee and is legendary in my family.
I have been thinking about the ocean a lot, because I realise I may not get to go this year. This is of course not a huge deal, but simultaneously terrible - I don't think there's been a summer of my life when I haven't gone swimming .
But I am digressing quite a lot here.
There were things in this letter that were hard to read. The descriptions of Filipinos, for one, in language reads to day as extremely culturally and racially insensitive.
It's not that he's saying anything terrible about them - just the descriptions, the language. No.
It reminds me of a play I directed a few years ago, that includes a cache of letters not dissimilar to these, sent by a Czech man working in oil wells in Africa to his daughter at home in Prague. You can imagine the content of these. We discussed the issue in the translation process, we consulted with a BAME playwright. It's a reflection of the time, was the general consensus. You have to leave it in.
So we did. And so I did today. But still.
The space between is sometimes vast. Sometimes that's a good thing.
There is also a fair bit in this letter about manoeuvres. They've moved to the interior. Perhaps that is why there were no letters, actually.
I'm struck by how much time has passed between the letters she's written and they date he's responding - on 7 May to letters from the 18 of April.
I think about the instantaneousness of communication we're used to now and how we still manage to get tangled in text message communications. Those horrible moments of silence followed by a deluge, the delays or misorderings that can spark an argument. How much harder at such a temporal remove to maintain the sense of conversation.
I guess it's like this, a bit. We write to read. We write as a means of saying things. What comes back is anyone's guess.
On that note, I am,
Your ever-lovin'
(I stole it from you.)
[Musical postscript: This time I deviated from our regular 1940s soundtrack to play this tune sung by Scottish singer Julie Fowlis. In addition to much of my grandfather's jewellery and a cache of letters, my grandparents left me with an attachment to traditional music from Ireland and Scotland, which they got me listening to at a very young age. They didn't introduce me to this one, but I might not have found it without them. Like the works of Svetlana Alexievich, which I found on my own, it is something I turn to when I am stressed or need to muster my strength. Like many such songs, it's about a long journey, where much goes wrong, but it all turns out okay in the end.]