Postcards

I’ve got some brown, postcards and they’re frayed at the edges. He sent them as an eighteen year old, to his father in 1908. On the front of one postcard a group of soldiers pose with a self made sign that says The Fighting Fifth and on the other side are words scratched out with a pen dipped in ink; “Dear Father, hope you are well. Thanks for looking after my passes…” How fascinating for me to be able to look at and think about those words of my grandfather. I never knew my grandfather so I don’t know whether or not I would have liked him.

Postcards are part of my life and I even begin, “Hope you are well.” I wonder did I, in some way, get that from him.

It’s been a century since he sent those postcards and I try to imagine how that very personal kind of communication will happen in another one hundred years. Will there be postcards; will the art of writing by hand have been lost; those marks formed by hand and as individual as fingerprints. In his world of no electricity, no cars, no radio, no television, my grandfather Horace, could never have imagined or even comprehended that a grandson, now a grandfather himself would be writing about him on a lap-top computer.

I’m told Horace died in 1951 from effects of the mustard gas he was exposed to in ‘World War One’. As I was born in 1949, that means he must have held me in his arms at some point. I can’t remember it... and yet I have something of him that lives on in those words as individual as fingerprints there on those postcards.

Memories

I can remember when my mum would take me walking out of the barren housing estate in which we lived, and where there were no trees, to what seemed to be the country side and a world away, at least to me as an eight year old. She would peel raw carrots and we would eat them as we walked. I love raw carrots.

I can remember when my mum got false teeth – her own out and the false set in at the same time. She would never be seen without teeth. I remember when she was first able to bight on a carrot with her false choppers and when she did the bottom set broke: she was mortified! From then on carrots were cut into little pieces.

I can remember a holiday in the Grampians Ranges and my mum had become a grandmother, marching along in step with my son and reciting, “Left–left–he–had–a–good–home–and–he–left!” a vague reference to her war service years. I remember my mum was beside herself with joy, side by side with her grandson marching.

I can remember when my mum had her stroke, at the age of eighty. She was shoveling snow from her front door step and was never able to march again She died a decade later. But those things I can remember march on in me and in my son, and they will for many years yet because we remember. Those closest to us do live on in the influences they had on us.