Letters from my Mother (Cecilia Peartree)

 We've just had the de-clutterers round again, and I think they've at last finished with the front room. After a couple of sessions earlier in the year they had got rid of most of the complete rubbish, so this time they reached the far corners of the room and retrieved some treasures, relatively speaking. Old photographs and holiday souvenirs, a bit of family jewellery, more sheet music, and what seemed like thousands of letters from my mother.

To put this in some sort of context, the front room had started out as quite an organised sitting-room, had morphed into my bedroom for a while and then into a store-room which as well as our own family clutter had accommodated whatever was left over when we cleared out first my mother's house and then my brother's some years ago. While I was in hospital having my hip replaced, family members had pushed things into the corners to make sure I had enough space to walk about in safely, and then the next time I was in hospital, having my other hip wired back together, other family members moved my bed upstairs and rearranged some other furniture at the same time. Every time things were rearranged, more odds and ends built up.

And by coincidence, we have at last managed to fit my mother's dining-room table into the space!

I was taken aback to find I had kept so many letters from my mother, though I knew we had written to each other at least once a week for some time. We began this correspondence while I was at university in Edinburgh, but that part of it is now lost. The frequency of letters increased once I was working in London. Unfortunately, my father died very suddenly, playing golf, not long after I'd moved there, and my mother was completely distraught and I expect if I opened the letters she wrote then to my address in a flat in Swiss Cottage, I would find some of them almost unreadable. After that comes a collection of letters to the next address in East Finchley, the first lot under my maiden name and then more to the same address after I got married. We moved out of London only a year or two later, to a new build in Bletchley, which in those days seemed like a complete town of its own but which is now completely swamped by Milton Keynes, or so it seemed to me when we re-visited it not long ago..

The correspondence flagged a bit when we moved to Edinburgh, as we were now within easier reach of each other again, and indeed my mother fell into the way of driving over some Sundays for lunch, which she brought with her. She did travel quite a lot at this stage of her life so there were some interesting postcards and other souvenirs among the things we discovered last week. They included a cruise ship programme for the cruise we went on together in the early 1970s. There were some highlights - sailing up to Venice in the early morning, and going through the Corinth Canal - but the first thing that came into my mind seeing the programme was that I had vowed never to cross the Bay of Biscay ever again, after being seasick for two days, all the way from Southampton to Ceuta. A few years before that, I had vowed never to cross the North Sea ever again as well. Until Eurostar came along I was more or less trapped in Britain.

The de-clutterers tried to talk me into getting rid of the letters, and that would have  been the sensible thing to do after all this time, but I said I wanted more time to think about it and implied that I was planning to write a biography of my mother. They've been oddly respectful of my writing all along - even the hand-written scrawls on scrappy bits of paper - so I guessed that would make them back off. I had already thought of doing something like 'Travels with my mother', which might be a bit more interesting than a basic life story. I'll have to try and make room for it in my busy writing schedule.

Incidentally, I know my mother destroyed all my letters as she went along, so she probably expected me to do the same with hers!

An action shot of my mother playing golf