When are letters truly private?

Conflicted is the word. I felt conflicted about reading letters marked ‘Private: Dad’s wartime courtship letters to Mum’. 

The fact that my mother labelled the envelope in which they were found using the words ‘Dad’ and ‘Mum’ suggests she was thinking of her two daughters, the nomenclature they would use if they/we came upon them. If they were really to remain hers, to remain private and personal, then she could have labelled them ‘Don’s courtship letters to me’. 

This is a post-facto justification. In fact I was completely paralysed by the single word ‘Private’. I used that word as my excuse for not opening these letters. I left them in the suitcase of family memorabilia for about 3 years before I plucked up courage. I realise now I waited until both my parents had died, though that wasn’t a conscious decision.

Although I had started the writing for this book several years before they died, my mother already had early signs of dementia. I tried reading chapters to her. I told her I was writing about her life growing up in India. That I was using her own written pieces as well, as the core around which to weave my own experiences of India. But I don’t think she took it in. 

I told my father too but perhaps by a certain age one is too preoccupied with the effort of daily living to pay much attention to such matters. He was concerned about his military legacy though. He had tried to offer the Australian War Memorial his Chindit memories and memorabilia. But they were not interested as he was in the British Army. And the Brits had many men of his generation leaving memoirs, and objects, and so on, so they were of little interest there. I felt sad for him. 

In the Aged Care Home he displayed his medals rather more conspicuously than before, and asked them to put ‘Colonel’ Donald Britton on his door sign. To set himself apart I suppose. To retain some glimmer of former respect. In fact when the hairdresser gave him a short back and sides I had to point out that actually he was primarily a musician, and used to long hair, not primarily a military man as she had understandably surmised.  

We are all cautious, even uncomfortable at the thought of our parents’ love lives – ‘courting’ and ‘courtship’, the words my mother favoured, are so genteel, completely avoiding the emotional messiness of love, let alone the physical reality of love-making. So for people of my parents’ generation to have their early relationship-mostly-by-letter exposed first of all to their daughters and then, through the publication of this book, to a general audience – it felt transgressive. 

I had to tell myself that this romance was lifted from the ordinary by its historical context – a relationship brought into being by Empire, then having to navigate the perils of wartime action, wartime postal services, wartime censorship – this is what makes these letters fascinating, of enduring interest, and not just to the immediate family. 

That’s what I think, what I hope….