I don’t get a lot of real letters these days. It’s all email and Facebook from my friends and family.

 

My letterbox has a no junk mail sign on it. I made the sign from those give-away fridge magnets you get from plumbers and real estate agents. I cut them into the shapes of our house numbers and then I still had plenty left so I made NO JUNK and put them on the metal box. I didn’t think they’d last but they have.

 

The odd clown turns my magnet letters around to say JO NUNK sometimes and then, oddly, I get all the flyers from the supermarket bursting out of my box. When I see all the junk mail, I notice the magnets have been swapped around. When I change it back to NO JUNK I only get the local rag and a few bills and still, after all these years, a few things for my ex.

 

So I don’t check the box much. I don’t know how long the letter had been there. One of the kids fished the letter out of the box. My hands were full so she posted it into the top of my handbag where it perched, out of place, across my lunchbox. I gave it a glance just checking it wasn’t going to slide off onto the footpath and when I saw it I did a bit of a double take.

 

I was holding a shopping bag and my handbag in one hand and I had my arm outstretched with the car keys to shut the garage door. I love that automatic door, it’s one of the first things I ever got sorted after me and my ex split up.

 

The envelope was smaller than usual, it was made from thick paper of a creamy light yellow and there was a real stamp. Stamps are another thing you don’t see much these days. There were other small round inked stamps on the letter showing its progress, like the sort you used to get on passports and, well, letters. But what made me stop, with my thumb on the automatic garage door opener and my arm outstretched and pointed at the garage door, what made me put my bags down on the footpath and pick it up and have a good look was that the letter was addressed to me.

 

Well not completely accurately to me – but that made me clearer still about who it might be from. The letter, in blue flowing fountain pen ink, was addressed to my first names and my ex-husbands surname. It said: To Mrs Gordon Edward Paulson.

 

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had mail addressed to me that way. I never used his surname. Not even when we were together. I have a perfectly good name and I never changed it. Maybe in the back of my mind I was thinking of the drama if I ever wanted to change it back. The only people who have ever sent me mail addressing me as a Mrs Paulson were a few elderly relatives who got the news I was married and put two and two together. I recognised this as the handwriting of one of my relatives but I’ve never had any mail from her before. And there’s a good reason for that.

 

“I’ll take these.”

 

My eldest daughter grabbed my things, breaking me out of my trance, and I followed her through the gate where the other one was waiting, sighing, and I let us all in. They dispersed into the house leaving me at the dining table. I grabbed a steak knife and sat down with the letter in my hand. Was this some sort of joke?

 

I’ll have to tell you what I’ve got in my wardrobe so you understand. On the top shelf, in an acid free box, in two archive quality folders, there are The Letters.

 

The earliest one is dated February 1820 and it’s from Carrie Bimson writing to my great great great great aunt or grandmother or cousin. She’s writing from a small farm in America to her family in Preston, England. Two old ladies corresponding over the years as the spokeswomen of the family news – but we have only one side of what they say.

 

The letters arrived with my grandmother. They were in an old bureau that her husband’s father had owned. That bureau contained all sorts of things: cards and a cloth bag of pennies we used for gambling, and a host of pictures of her grandchildren in Australia and New Zealand and lots of blue airmail envelopes from her sons and letters we wrote as young kids painstakingly writing the words to say thank you grandma for the money you sent, all kept by my Grandma each just as precious as each other.

 

The letters were old then. They were in shoe boxes and cigar boxes made by companies that didn’t exist any more. They were each in their envelopes and roughly filed by date up to 1911 when our recent family correspondence took over. I remember in the 70s looking at 1911 scornfully because it wasn’t even 100 years old but of course it is now. One hundred was a magic number that made something ‘antique’.

 

And when I was in a mood for thinking about old things, or I just felt like reading somebody else’s mail (which was a bad thing unless the people in question were dead) I’d take them out. I’d spread them on my parents bedspread. Sometimes Dad would join me and tell me bits and pieces about them. Some of the letters were written when there was a paper shortage and so they wrote across the page one way and then across it another way and you had to read it with a ruler for the criss cross writing to make sense.

 

There isn’t much for a historian to get excited about.

 

Some of them were written in the civil war and they told of how they hid the boys in the hay stack to keep them from conscriptors. Later, Carrie said it was sad that they had brothers dragged into fighting on both sides of the war. And later still she says they have been offered compensation land for a penny an acre – but that it is out in California and everyone knows that land is worthless. We always laughed over this. These people, our relations, might have been rich.

 

It was in the hope of riches that the letters were kept. Somebody, a great great grandfather I think, wanted to prove that he was the rightful heir to land in Ireland. The letters didn’t help with that but they are a different treasure to us. I loved to feel them in my hands and connect to way back then, and now at the dining table, because I haven’t touched a letter like this in years since my uncle came and put them in their plastic folders and helpfully transcribed them to go online for his genealogy, I feel that connecting again.

 

In my hands I’d feel paper that women wrote on who helped plough fields and sew clothes and birth babies. They sketch new flowers for their sisters to see, and enclose seeds and instructions on how to grow them. They send a home-made Valentines and Christmas wishes. They tell of new babies and baptisms and who was poorly. When there is a death you know before you open a letter because the envelope is framed in black. Unfortunately all the letters are out of their envelopes now so you can read without damaging them. You don’t have that feeling of anticipation that comes with folded paper sliding out of an envelope.

 

Carrie Bimson is the main author and she always says Do write! It is so long since your last letter! Tell me all the news. I want to know everything! And she tells of the weather in great detail and what is happening with the crop. When I was young I didn’t understand that this was because the weather was make or break for them. I understand her letters differently now. Carrie would have loved Facebook.

 

So here I sit with a letter in my hand that looks just like those in the wardrobe. I take the steak knife and carefully slit it open.

 

 

 

Dear Deborah Margaret

 

Well I never thought a daughter of my family would travel even further than I did! But here you are at the bottom of the world where the weather is backwards and you don’t have bears thank goodness but you do have wild boar like your poor great great great aunt Elizabeth was gored by and then they sent her home but she had William on the ship – but I already wrote about that. She’d of been better off staying in America.

 

I am writing because I know you’ve been asked by your Uncle to pass on our letters to that Museum they put up 12 miles from our old farm. I know you are conflicted. Don’t be child. They can go there when you are ready. My words were sent to my family and I’m just glad I still have family to read them. I was so lonely out there and so often scared to death and I missed my sister so. It’s a dreadful thing being apart from your kin. I didn’t say that though.

 

I was so pleased when I passed on that my daughter kept writing and the family kept in touch. Then I felt your letters beside my own as your grandmother added them to the box. I read your words, clumsy and slow as you learnt and then more confident as you found your voice. Imagine my surprise and delight when my letters travelled all the way to you.

 

I know I’m gone now but when you opened my letters as a child I felt like my words were still reaching my family.

 

Do keep writing! Tell me all the news, I want to know everything! Keep the words dear as long as you need them. And do give my love to your daughters – such sassy bright things. I do hope you get rain soon – I’m sorry for your drought it’s a trail and that’s for sure. May God keep you all well,

 

Carrie Bimson

 

 

 

 

 

“What’s for dinner?” asks the eldest and I pop the letter into my bag for later and put my cell phone on the bench – no messages.

 

I open the fridge and take out what needs eating first, look at it, get other things to go with it and start making the meal. We need more tomato paste. I grab the cell and tap tom paste onto my shopping list app and then add a note to the To Do list: write to my sister.