A Wonderful Find!

Among the many bits and pieces that came to my home after the death of my father was a simple wooden box, about sixteen inches tall and eleven inches square, fashioned out of inch thick pine and fitted with a “drop-in” lid.  The lid has five holes drilled through it, presumably to allow the air in and thus protect the contents a little. I had no memory of having seen this box before although, later, I was to learn that one of my sisters remembered it from her early childhood when we were living in Hendon, my father having been transferred there as Railway Station Master.

After the box came to my home, it sat for years under the stairwell, closed up again after I had taken a brief look and saw that the contents, on top at least, were the remains of a Kodak film processing kit and some odd looking tools, among them “caponising instruments”, obviously to be used in Dad’s life-long hobby of rearing “chooks”, mostly for the eggs, but more importantly for the table at Easter and Christmas.

Last year I decided to have a good look inside this box and to both amazement and delight discovered bundles of letters, the majority of which had been written by my mother to my father, in the two years before their marriage.  As well, there was a small number of letters from Dad’s mother, his sister and his brothers.  They were still in their envelopes and tied up in bundles, with brown string.  Although dusty from some ninety years of storage, they were in extraordinarily good condition.

My first reaction was to start reading them, and read I did, for an hour or so.
 
Within twenty four hours I had contacted my sister and, although I did not mention the find, I arranged to call on her, thinking that she also would be surprised.  Of course, Margaret could tell me that she knew about the box, having often crept in to its spot in the Hendon house so that she could read some of the contents.

The letters from my mother are delightful, so obviously written by a young lady who was deeply in love with her man, and waiting for the time when they could set a wedding date.  The delay, it would seem, was because my father was working at a very small country station in the central, coastal area of Queensland, and although there was a residence to which he could take a bride, the place was fairly isolated and he was fearful for any loneliness she might feel.  She told of day-to-day life on the farm in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales where she lived with her widowed mother and some of her bachelor brothers.  The news of the times was mentioned, including the fact that the Golden Casket lottery had just begun and tickets were being sold in New South Wales.

Having been reared in the city and large, country towns myself, I can truly understand the hard life my mother and her family lived, rising at an early hour to assist with the milking, washing the clothes in cold water and enduring harsh winters.  Not a word of complaint, though, in the lines she penned to my father.

One added treasure in the box was finding two letters written to Dad by his eldest brother, who had joined the Dungarees in Allora, when they walked from Warwick to Brisbane on a recruitment March for World War I.  These letters were written in pencil, in a beautiful hand, from the Western Front, carefully telling of his days but without revealing any hint of his actual position.

The final resting place for the letters has not been decided but, when we three sisters who are left meet , I know we will make a decision that is pleasing to each of us.

Josephine Nolan