The discovery of 288 aerogrammes uncovered the untold loss my parents felt

The past burst into my life last week in the shape of a bundle of pale blue envelopes. There were 288 of them, edged with alternating red and navy arrows and imprinted with an Australian stamp and the postal charge, 10d: 10 pence back in the days before decimal currency. Like a magic retro carpet, these aerogrammes flew me back 60 years to a time when I measured out my days in these letters from my parents.

There were 288 of them, edged with alternating red and navy arrows.

I was newly married, and Michael and I were living in London where I became a reluctant teacher while he attended a post-graduate course in medicine. Gazing at my mother’s beautifully rounded European script, I recalled my heart-jumping joy whenever I saw one of those pale blue aerogrammes lying on the hall table of our draughty rented flat.

Like Australian pound currency, aerogrammes are obsolete. The young people in my family had never seen one and couldn’t understand how they worked, these antediluvian handwritten missives that predated emails, texts and iPhones. But they were an emotional lifeline that kept people connected at a time when international phone calls were prohibitively expensive, charged by three-minute intervals and punctuated by the crackling sound of the undersea cable.

We stayed in London for almost four years and in that time my parents wrote to us twice every single week, and now I hold their letters in my hands. For years they had lain forgotten at the back of a drawer, waiting for me to rediscover them and reconnect with myself at that green stage of my life.

As you see, I’m a hoarder. Not of physical objects but of mementoes of events and emotions recorded on paper. Now that I think about it, they represent a chronological record of my existence. I have even kept my school reports going back to my school in the southern Polish city of Kraków when I was six, and my first Australian one in which the kind teacher wrote, “Diane is learning English quickly.” Over the years, I have kept letters from friends now dead, references from employers, articles I have written and loving cards from my family.

During the Holocaust, my life hung by a thread no stronger than gossamer but, for 63 of my relatives, that thread snapped.

DIANE ARMSTRONG

My partner, Bert, who feels no need to fill drawers and cupboards with evidence of his existence, marvels at my compulsion to keep all this documentation from every stage of my life. I wonder about it, too. During the Holocaust, my life hung by a thread no stronger than gossamer but for 63 of my relatives, including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, that thread snapped. Is this trove of memories a subconscious need to reassure myself that I have survived, that I am alive?

My parents were not hoarders. Life had taught them that objects were disposable and people alone were irreplaceable. As I read my mother’s accounts of dinners with friends, movies she has watched and weddings she has danced at, I can hear her optimistic no-nonsense voice as clearly as if she were speaking. Her letters are bright and sharp, just as she was.

Like a magic retro carpet, these aerogrammes flew me back 60 years.

My father’s written voice is slower, more measured, but infused with wisdom and humour. He describes the antics of the wire-haired terrier they bought after I left – a furry replacement for me, perhaps – and confides that he is studying an English textbook. My father was always learning. At 70, after retiring from dentistry, he enrolled in an art class. This time, he was thinking of writing an account of his wartime experiences but felt he needed to improve his style. Many years later, he gave me a type-written autobiography which I found invaluable when I wrote my family memoir, Mosaic.

Reading the aerogrammes, I linger over the one in which he wrote, “Your letters bring warmth to my heart.” My father was reserved, and that was the closest he ever came to saying he loved me. I never doubted it.

Sixty years ago, I read their letters eager for the news they contained but now that I’m a mother and grandmother, I can read between the lines and understand what they left unsaid. I was their only child and from the moment I was born, just before the outbreak of the war, their every waking thought was focused on keeping me alive in the midst of unimaginable slaughter that took their own parents and close relatives.

They never alluded to that, just as they never burdened me with their loss and grief. In my self-absorbed young life, I had never considered how painful it must have been for them when I left and what emptiness my absence must have created. Not once in all the years I was away did the cheerful tone of their letters flag. But now, rereading their letters, I hear the stifled sighs and admire their restraint.

I still don’t know what guided my hand to a letter that I pulled out of the pile. At random, or so I thought. As I unfolded it and began to read, I shook my head in wonder and disbelief. Handwritten letters enable feelings to flow straight from the heart onto the page, and my mother’s excitement leapt from this letter as she described an evening spent with my best friend, Jan, and her husband, Bert, who had just returned from London. After dinner, Bert had projected a movie he had taken of us in London. Apparently my parents were so thrilled to see us on film that they asked him to show it five times.

I could visualise the four of them watching the 8mm movie and laughing as Michael and I appeared on the screen. My mother was prescient, but could she possibly have foreseen that many years later, after Michael and Jan had passed away, the friendship Bert and I had shared would bloom into love? Or that he would be sitting beside me, marvelling at the intricate web of destiny while we read her account of the evening he had spent with them six decades before?

Shivers ran down my spine as I reread that letter. At that moment, time lost its meaning and past and present became telescoped into a continuous arc that illuminated the miraculous circle of life.

The Wild Date Palm [Harper Collins] by Diane Armstrong is out now.

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