Letters

When my grandma passed away, she had a small handbag with her. In it was a little purse with a couple of notes and some coins.

And a letter that I had written her, maybe ten years beforehand.

Grandma had five children and seventeen grandchildren, and she was part of a farming community where she knew everyone, and their kids, and their grandkids. And they knew her.

I loved my grandma to bits, the school holidays I got to spend with her on the farm are memories which come to me more strongly than just about anything else.

I knew gran loved me, always, but there were so many people in her life. I always thought I was just one of them.

The letter would have been something and nothing, written in June as a thank you for a birthday present she would have posted to arrive a couple of days before the 12th. I would have been not long home from spending the May school holiday with her, as I did every year by then. I hope that part of what made the letter special for her was that I had managed to tell her how much those weeks meant to me.

I was incredibly shy and quiet then. That didn’t phase gran at all, she just expected that you would be able to hold a decent conversation, answer a question or two politely and ask a couple in return.

She liked to spend a good deal of her time quiet too, listening to Geoff Robinson in the afternoons while she did the Herald crossword and fell asleep on the couch which caught the last of the sun, in the little enclosed porch at the back of her sprawling home.

I think she knew me about as well as anyone did back then.

I wish now that I had asked Gran a thousand questions and let her tell me about growing up, and getting married and everything else.

Her mother had died when Sophie was young, tragically, drowned in a river near their home.

Sophie remembered her father very fondly, but it must have been hard.

She told me about him in bits and pieces.

Once, there was something wrong with a piece of machinery in a pumphouse or some such on the farm. He went to fix it, and a pulley came loose and tore across his face doing terrible damage. She was there with her sister, still very young, and he simply got on his horse with blood streaming from the wound, told her to look after her sister and rode away to whatever hospital or surgery existed back then.

She matter-of-factly told me the only pain it caused her was that his good looks were gone after all the stitching and mending was complete. She was like that, incredibly practical. When I was a little boy she frightened me, I misinterpreted those things as coldness.

She was never cold; it was just that so many of the things which frightened other people didn’t even register for Sophie.

I had always loved my mum to bits. I slipped under the radar a fair bit because I ticked all the boxes of playing football and never minding all the bumps and bruises, but I was a sook. I loved time with mum.

She talked to me a lot, always has.  

I knew that there were things about growing up which my mum had found hard. She was the fourth of those five kids, with older brothers. And Sophie had had a hard time with my uncle who was not much older than mum, the third son. By the time mum came along there maybe hadn’t been the time and energy there had been once.

Some of mum’s strongest memories, the ones that she kept close for that feeling of total safety only parents can give you, are of her father.

There is a colourful picture in one of the bedrooms at mum’s place these days. I remembered it from grandma’s, it hung in the long hallway that ran away from the centre of the house and led to almost all the bedrooms.

Mum told me that Sophie had bought it on the Spanish border, maybe coming down from France. Sophie and Colin made a huge journey to Europe for the Rome Olympics, they had been to the Melbourne games in 1956, and by 1960 their kids were grown. Mum would have been in boarding school getting close to finishing.

Mum had made sure to stake a claim to the picture, when it came time to clean out cupboards and wardrobes, after grandma passed.

It was her father that she remembered, through that picture. When she called out in the night, as a young girl, it was her dad who came to get her. And he would put her up on his shoulder and walk her quietly down to the sitting room, where he would have been reading the paper or listening to the radio, with the fire going. She remembered the feeling of safety that picture gave her as he carried he up the hall, and down again when she was ready for sleep again.

Later, when mum was studying nursing in Hamilton, it was the trip back with her dad that she remembered from her weekends at home on the farm. That made her feel special, just driving across the silent country with her dad.

Mum and grandma made their peace in whatever way they needed, and it was good between them.

I think now though, that it must have been hard for mum. In a way I got a lot of the childhood she dreamed of having herself, with Sophie.

I think that it had taken time for mum to tell me about the handbag, and the letter. That sounds like something formed out of selfishness, or fear. I don’t mean it to. I got to have the very best of both of them. They never did, quite. Isn’t life just the hardest thing?