Before she broke her hip, my mother was going through old letters. She rang me and asked whether I wanted to keep my letters to her. “Nope,” I said, “I didn’t even know you still had them, throw them out.”
I’ve been spending a lot of time in my parents’ house since then and I found the big black bag of letters in the dining room waiting to be sent for recycling. I started to leaf through them. The first thing that astonished me was that there were so many of them. I wrote a lot of letters from airports. And then from when I lived in Brussels and before that in Rome. I seemed to spend every spare minute I had writing letters [and I know that I wrote to friends as well – I was clearly a writing machine]. They had, I regret to say, no great literary merit but thematically they seemed to cover: looking for jobs; asking for money and thanking my parents for money already received. I was certainly reminded of the extent to which my loving parents had bankrolled my early years in the work place. No wonder they were so relieved when I finally managed to get properly paid employment as opposed to my time doing traineeships and internships.
I let the letters go into the bin. I suppose they stopped when email got going, sometime between 1995 and 1998. Imagine, I am from the last generation of people who routinely put pen to paper to share news. Who would have thought?
You put the letters in the BIN?!?? I am an inveterate thrower-out but even I’m shocked.
Sad to lose that archive. But your blog is a better record of the years after about 1995 than most of us will ever have. What amazes me in retrospect was not just the number of letters I used to write, but the range of people I used to write to, including relatively slight acquaintances I met travelling or through work.
So unfair. Clearly you are favourite child. Despite asking Mum to give mine back to me I found several torn up in bin. I rescued them along with lovingly made cards.
That’s it Nic, I’m hard core.
MT – I’m not so sure – there was nothing particularly exciting there, I assure you. I agree with you about the range of people – no one was safe from a letter. It does seem odd in retrospect. It may be an age thing as well. I bet if the world was still writing letters our middle aged selves would have restricted our range of correspondents.
Hel, of course, I am the favourite child. Surely this is an article of faith?