Love, Jim.
On an Anzac Day where we’re all forced to be apart, I’ve stumbled across a portal of connection and remembrance. In between working from home, schooling from home and cleaning my home; I’ve been journeying through centuries and hemispheres.
Self isolation has changed the way we see things, and in my case March’s card- collapse of the world found me eyeing off the innocuous-looking green ring binder on my bookshelf. As the meme goes, ‘Our grandparents had to go to war, you just have to sit on the couch.’
I’d been sitting on the couch. I wondered what it felt like to go to war.
“July 10, 1918
Captain Doherty sends his regards, say to tell you
I haven’t even looked at any Red Cross nurses abroad because there haven’t been any Red Cross nurses abroad.”
“June 24, 1918
Dear Prairie Lady - Want to go to the station with me yesterday? Come on. The train is on the North Spur so we’ll have to hurry to get there on time ... Then we pull out. Women are there in droves to cling hands, through windows and weep. Mrs Savage smiled, always will I remember it - and said, ‘Well Leon, give ‘em hell!’ and all the while she was crying inside - I know it.”
In 1918 my Great Grandfather was serving in the dog-days of WW1. He was 21, he was passionately in love and - oh boy - he could write. For twelve months James (‘Jim’) sent letters of love, pain and all that fell in between, to his sweetheart Katherine (‘Kay’).
“July 1918
Lord, Lady, I’d give my last tin of bully beef to see you. That’s the highest compliment I can pay you for I’ve been carrying that tin of BB for some time. You know, my heaven used to be composed of limousines, soft music and ladies wearing pearl earrings and wings. It is now my firm conviction that Heaven is a dry place where one can sleep.”
My Grama, Jim’s daughter, painstakingly transcribed the originals and gifted them to me on my 24th birthday. I was young, living in London, read them (...I think? Oh, forgive me!) And then they languished in various houses for 15 years.
As soon as I opened that green folder last month, I knew I had to share the letters. I floated the idea of serialising them on Instagram with Grama. She may be 93, but she’s no stranger to the internet. She agreed immediately.
There’s 112 years between Jim’s pencil scratches from France and my laptop in Melbourne, but in some bizarre way, it works.
We all have so much time at the moment. So I’m taking this project slowly. Each night I approach the next letter. I try not to read ahead (although, some would say, my very existence is the ultimate plot spoiler ...)
I type out his words, tuck them in a digital envelope and send them out into the ether. That the letters still exist is one wonder; that I can share them with strangers across the world, is another.
“July, 1918
In the French city of [redacted] we met Jane. She was all that my fevered imagination had suggested that a cafe girl ought to be, and she spoke English with an accent novelists speak of as ‘charmingly broken’, meaning that you couldn’t understand her. She also had the English faculty of charging three times what her champagne was worth, so that before we got through we were all charmingly broken.”
Like us, Jim and Kay were living through a collective trauma. They were (and we are) simultaneously witnesses and players. It feels foreign to live through a time that will be imparted to others, endlessly, through books, films and media that doesn’t yet exist. We’re breathing history that doesn’t have a final chapter. Was Jim as burdened by pre-emptive self-awareness as we are now? I doubt it. Because his letters don’t speak to historical events and world-changing decisions. They’re simply verbal steps, just one foot in front of the other, with little idea of what lies ahead.
“October 24, 1918
As to narrow escapes - I used to think that I would enjoy telling about one or two that I might have, but I don’t. There have been so many of them that they seem commonplace, somehow ... I lost my horse - we used to think that was something to talk about. Well, it isn’t. I guess I’ve seen a dozen of them fall, at different times, within twenty yards of me. I’ve gone through a swamp full of gas at night - I’ve taken part in an action on the line ... I did some little of the fighting, and I’m damnsure I did my share of the retreating.”
Surprisingly though, it’s not descriptions of front-line warfare that makes the letters so captivating. It’s the humour, the small observations, and the ardent passion of a young man for his sweetheart. I find comfort in this and the lesson it teaches to us now, living through our own sci-fi version of a war. In the midst of the worst, little things are still important. A smokey room in rural France. The phosphorescence breaking on the bow of a ship. A night’s rest under four blankets on a German-built bunk. And throughout it all, love. Sometimes romantic. Sometimes, shockingly (these are my great grandparents we’re talking about), really quite steamy.
“August 16, 1918
I had a letter from Mother telling me they have a new car - a Paige six ... If we’uns were around, I guess we could put that Paige to some good use, eh what? I can let my imagination start out in the front seat of the Paige with you as companion - and I don’t know where it would stop. For, Oh, Lady, my heart aches to be back with you - and I know that the longer I stay away and the more roughness I run into on my road, the more I’ll appreciate you and all that you stand for when I come back.”
The activity of transcribing Great Grampa’s correspondence has been restorative, almost meditative. And it’s brought my extended family back into my house. Each time I sit at my desk, a small crowd enters the room. Each has a part to play in ensuring these words have survived long enough to be shared in this way. It’s a chance to hold hands with my mother, self-isolated two hours from me. To reach out to grandmother, self-isolated in her retirement home. To send a smile to my great grandparents - isolated in memory and photo albums and shadows. Perhaps most importantly, it’s a process that is reminding me that creativity and love can still thrive through unimaginable hardship.
I’ll leave the last words to Jim, because he was so good with them. This Anzac Day, he’s reminded me to take heart, be brave, and know how much we’ll appreciate things when this is all over:
“July, 1918
I think - that if I ever get back - this affair will have done me a lot of good. Happiness, as they say, is never appreciated unless it is paid for.”
~ This article was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald ~