My mother passed away last year and it fell to me to sort out her house. Returning from four years in Russia and the Caucasus, I moved into her Suffolk home to get it ready for selling. There was a huge amount to do. Alongside organising my mother’s headstone – no small or hasty business – there was an entire house and a life to sort through. This involved going through endless knick-knacks, glasses, crockery, clothes – and 15 or more rubble sacks of papers and old letters. The last was both cathartic and disconcerting. These are written relics of a life that existed before I came along, one that may well have been richer and more hopeful. I found mountains of love letters to my mother from luckless suitors, good luck telegrams from her family as – in her early twenties – she’d set out on her big trip to America, and notes from university theatre directors begging her, as a young woman, to audition for their latest play.
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