A Life Not Lived Through Letters

Every week in the care home in rural Lincolnshire the English language lesson doubled as the time for us to write to our parents. For me that meant writing to my mother, leaving it to her to decide how much of what I wrote to her was for sharing with my father and sister. Even at the age of twelve I would address the envelope to 'Mr and Mrs... ' and the initials before the surname would be my mother's, not my fathers. I had a mental block about my father that defied explanation. If any member of staff in the place observed it, then none of them said anything to me about it. 

I write 'care home' here, that was yet another evasion. For Social Services or the county education department to sell to parents the idea of sending their children to this place, then parents who were worried about their awkward children had to be told that the place was a school, nothing could be said about it being a care home. I was too young when I was sent to know what a care home was and how careless care homes could be, particularly when they changed the name of what the place was known for.   

I can still picture the room all ten of us sat and wrote in, to write, where I sat somewhat apart half way towards the back of the room, partially blocked from being seen from the front of the class by black shelves with wood effect borders full of books where, unwatched, I could safely lose my concentration whilst thinking what to write and my detachment would not be spotted. The other thirty seven or so pupils in the other four classrooms were also quietly writing to their parents. The school was quiet enough with that lesson that in summer we could hear the birdsong through the open windows. I know now that my letters were read by the staff for signs of, well, emotional disturbance that they had not spotted by any other means. I did not think about them reading our letters then. If I had raised the matter of my need of privacy from the staff then they would say 'we have to check your English grammar'. We had to leave the envelopes open for the staff to seal, after which they put a stamp on them all and posted them off. 

I had no apt language for how I missed Mother. For the first two years I would write S.W.A.L.K. on the back of the envelope, half aware that it was something that I had seen in the films about WW2 that we were allowed to watch on television of a Saturday afternoon, where a a soldier might put that acronym on the back of the envelope when sending a letter to his girlfriend. I was entirely unaware of what those films left out, that the wartime audiences knew, so they could fill in the gaps I did not notice. I did not know that the acronym was 'inappropriate' for putting on the back of an envelope containing a letter to your mother, which officially was meant for all the family. My misunderstanding of the use of  S.W.A.L.K was compounded by the care home not wanting me to know what a girlfriend was, and what they, or I, were for. So how could I know S.W.A.L.K. was not apt?

I have no idea now what I wrote to Mother for 39 weeks a year for five years in the mid 1970s, or what happened to the letters after she received them. My mother is still alive, still living in the terraced house my father first bought in 1960 and finished paying for when he became redundant twenty years later. He died over a decade ago. She is still sentient and mobile after her own fashion as she approaches becoming ninety years old. For all I know she still has those old letters that I wrote in an awkward scrawl with my left between the age of eleven and sixteen nearly fifty years ago.

For ten years I kept the letters that she sent me in return, letters where the safest subject was what she was doing on her allotment, writing about how she planned her allotment for the coming year. What to plant, when to plant it and how to prepare the ground was proof that she could plan when what she made plans for was obedient enough to her. It says a lot that so few other subjects could be written about safely in any detail because they were less safe subjects for writing about, their descriptions contained too many sharp edges and required too much detail to be made sense of for the pages of the small writing pad that she allowed herself to write on.

I kept her letters together in a bundle. I doubt I read them but I can't be sure about that. The bundle was treated as a valued relic amongst my personal possessions up to 1986, when some, though far from all, the scales fell from my eyes about how definitively I was a misfit within my family and I had openly been a misfit for 15 years, and it was a subject that none of us talked about.  

At the time I 'lost' the letters I was moving from a big flat I had furnished through friends and shared with people I thought I trusted but I had fallen out with, to a small flat with the help of a new-found friend who I would write to when we had to live apart for several decades after. The decision behind the change of flat was preceded by several painful arguments and a  break between me and my family, where they laid bare the history between us that previously they had avoided. That was when I learned how much I did not fit around them, and they would not let me fit around anyone else less painfully elsewhere. 

I have no doubt now that I was right to leave those letters behind, though for some time I wondered. What they symbolised had become utterly devalued. Mothers letters were one side of a dialogue of the blind where the accumulated misunderstanding were beyond absurdity, with hindsight.   

I left them on the mantle shelf in the living room of the flat that I was leaving, knowing that my mother would inspect the place, that it was tidy enough to pass on to the next tenant. I did not tell her they were there. I left them for her to claim if she found them. Quietly I started to change from being the awkward misfit those letters symbolised, to becoming a calmer character.