I have recently started writing actual “pen and paper” letters for a worthwhile UK charity called “From Me To You.” This charity forwards donated anonymous letters to people dealing with cancer and accept letters from “letter donors” around the world. Maybe you are old enough to remember the delight when a letter would drop on your doormat. I still love it! I can only imagine how much that must mean to someone dealing with chemotherapy, on their bleak days.
So, for the price of a stamp and sitting for 30 minutes and writing a letter about life in the Netherlands; my pets; what birds I see in the garden etc. I can reach out and help a stranger having a bad day.
This project has reignited in me the idea of writing a letter to a friend occasionally instead of a WhatsApp and hope they may be inspired to return one. After all, if we save them, we may be educating or entertaining our descendants, or become famous such as the letter writers used in Shaun Usher’s book “Letters of Note” or the “Letters Live” stage production.Communication as an expat living far from home is the lifeline that often keeps us afloat in, what can be at times, strange and lonely waters.
We rely on Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp and social media to keep us in touch with distant family and friends without a second thought. Just imagine not having a phone available to you and the only way to keep in touch or send messages to family was via postal mail! The very idea of only being in communication that way is laughable!
Before Instagram
I am my family’s archivist and am lucky to have postcards and letters sent to my great grandmother during the 1900’s. Photographs were expensive, and few working-class people owned a camera so a postcard from a journey was a way to share your experience … no Instagram in those days!
Postcards were also a way to communicate brief information about travel arrival times or safe arrival at a destination. Many of the postcards in my great grandmother’s collection are concise communications, a type of early text message. Short messages such as, “Sent parcel on Friday night. Did you get it?” “Tell Mother please send the GK,” and “Please send Mr. Harley’s umbrella, it is in the front hall stand. It is the green one and has a silver band on the handle.”
Then there are the more important messages such as “I will arrive at 6.30 and get the mail (mail delivery transport) home. Leave the key under the mat” to the urgent, “Dear Auntie, will you come down as soon as you can because Mother is so bad.” I can only hope she made it in time.
Of course, whether the messages are from the early 1900’s or today human nature is the same, as evidenced in the postcard that says, “I should think Floss Inkpen will be ashamed to go out, nice goings on.” I wish I knew what Floss Inkpen had done, and would we even be shocked by it in 2024!
Two of my great uncles both fought in World War I in France and sent postcards to their mother with photos of bombed buildings. I can’t imagine these reassured her any more than footage on CNN or the BBC does for parents of children serving in the military today, but it was a “sign of life” for parents anxiously awaiting news from their loved ones in the “trenches.”
All of these messages paint such a great picture of life in the past but also highlight how we take our easy communication for granted today. In the 1900’s there were no phones or computers by which to stay in touch with your family overseas. My great grandmother’s sister was a “ladies’ maid” and spent some years in Quebec, Canada, quite literally a world away from her family in England. Their only correspondence were letters and postcards, which took from three to four weeks and cost her 1 Canadian cent.
Imagine waiting to hear the news from your family for one month or more.
Letters were our record of times past
When I moved to the US in 1999 there was no Internet, smartphones or video chats and we relied on letters or faxes from the family in the UK. I can still remember the children’s excitement when a fax came through from their grandparents. The spontaneity of those faxes made them feel closer, rather than the other side of the Atlantic.
Although communication is instantaneous, now it is transient and leaves no record for future generations. Being the beneficiary of my father’s and grandmother’s need to save nostalgic items can be tiresome at times but it also means I have an amazing historic record of times past in my family. Will our great grandchildren have access to our “WhatsApp” conversations or emails? It’s unlikely and that is a shame. My descendants will at least have postcards that my sister and I send to each other when on our travels.
Let’s reignite this dying skill. As Goethe said, “Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.”
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Read more from Jackie here in Dispatches’ archives.
Photographer/writer Jackie Harding was born in the United Kingdom. As a long-time expat, she lived in Boston for 12 years and in the Netherlands for the past 10 years.
Trained as a nurse in the U.K., she worked for nine years in the United States as a special education teacher’s assistant. Since moving to the Netherlands, she has discovered writing and photography.
Contributing to Dispatches since 2016, Jackie has written about her travels around Europe as well as about expat life and issues.
She also covered the Women’s March Amsterdam.
She’s married to British businessman Martin Harding and is the mother of two international adult children.
