WHILE clearing out some drawers in our mother’s bedroom last week, my siblings and I discovered a little treasure trove, stashed away in an Old Spice aftershave box under a pile of paperwork.

Love letters written in the months after my mother Hattie and father Billy got engaged and in the run up to their wedding in 1952, they paint a picture of a young, loved-up couple planning their future together.

Sadly, they tell just one half of the story of the nurse who fell in love with a jeweller, because we have only found the bundle of letters our mother wrote to our father.

The search goes on for the other half of the conversation, because if he faithfully saved all the letters she had written to him, we feel pretty sure that she will have saved everything he wrote to her.

Although they were written in the Fifties in North West Ireland, the sentiments expressed are universal and timeless. Hattie, who was 25, complained in some letters of missing Billy already, even though she had only waved him goodbye a few hours before.

Young couples nowadays would relay this via a smartphone instantly: “Miss U already,” perhaps adding a tearful emoji.  

But there is something about the ritual of sitting down and putting pen to paper, the unique and instantly identifiable personal scrawl, even the smell of the paper and the dated stamp, which makes a handwritten letter stir the emotions in a way that email and text never can.

Now bedridden, in decline and aged 89, Mum’s face lit up as we started to read her letters out to her. Letters full of hope and excitement as she enthused about the rented house she and Dad, who died 16 years ago, had at last secured for themselves after previously worrying that the outlook was bleak.

Then talk about colour schemes and what furniture they were going to buy together. And, after being separated due to the fact that she worked as a nursing sister in a city hospital while he worked in the family business in their home town, she could barely believe, she said, that one day soon they were going to be together forever.

Her affectionate sign-offs gave us all goose bumps, and she beamed as we read them out to her now, more than sixty years after she had written them: “Well darling this is all my news for now, I love you more than anything in the world, you are a darling, sweet, adorable, angelic, pet, you are.”

Even she laughed when we stumbled across  one letter revealing what pressure she felt under as she prepared to give up her nursing career, which she loved (this was compulsory once women married back then), in order to become a Fifties housewife.

“Darling, I hope that if all goes well I will be able to have everything just right and nice for you always – your mother is such a wonderful cook and housekeeper that I’m sure you will often notice the difference but one thing I can promise you, I will always be trying harder to do better and one day I will, you are such a darling that I would never like to let you down.”

How times have changed.

We like to think that Dad, in his response, offered to do his fair share because it certainly turned out to be a marriage of equals and mutual respect.

But, as the hunt for his letters continues, I can’t help thinking that our children will never have anything half as touching or heart-warming to reflect on after we are gone.

 

Tucked away in the same drawers we found a few other pieces of fascinating correspondence from the same period, including letters from my uncle, who was then living in Scotland, to my father; pages full of interesting news and witty observations. However, it was a letter from my great-aunt to my mother, her niece, which contained the most bizarre little nugget of information. Auntie Frank, a farmer, wrote to report of a strange bird that had landed in the river near them: “It is like a goose, has a long bill and the legs are away back, further than any other bird. It can dive under the water and stay down a long time.” Neighbouring farmers, she reported, had captured the bird, thought to have come from Australia, and kept it in a box at night, tethering it down by the river all day. “There are loads of people coming from all over to see it,” she said. Poor bird. Thankfully, times have changed…