In the 19 years since I left Australia, my mother has hand-written me 1810 numbered snail mail letters, averaging five pages a letter. That's two letters nearly every week!
I haven't been as prolific as she has, but when I do write, I generally produce two closely typed sheets of A4. Since getting the PC, which has fax software, I have taken to sending Mother's letters to my sister's fax machine. They get there about a week faster, but I think that really Mother misses seeing that envelope with the red and blue border in her mailbox.
Every couple of years, I bundle up Mother's letters and send them back to her, and she keeps my letters to her, so she has both sides of the correspondence. It's mostly pretty trivial stuff, and there are probably a few things on both sides which we would cringe about if we reread them. I have often wondered how many people in this day and age have such a detailed record of the minutiae of their lives, and I can just imagine some historian coming across them in fifty years and thinking that they are typical of everyday life in the late twentieth century, which I'm sure they're not!
Writing regularly is something of a family tradition: my father had an older brother who moved to Sydney during the 1930s, and my uncle and my grandmother exchanged letters twice a week until her death, when my father took over the South Australian end of the correspondence, which lasted until my uncle's death.
Back in my great-grandfather's time, there was another family separation: my great-grandfather emigrated from Leicester in England, and he and his mother back in England carried on a correspondence, although it wasn't as prolific as the later ones, owing to the length of time it took the mail to go anywhere back in the days of sailing ships.
I often think that despite the distance separating us that Mother and I probably know more about each other's lives than a lot of people who live a lot nearer to one another.
I also think that email is something of a throw-away culture, and in any case tends not to be structured like letters, and that future generations are far less likely to carry on a correspondence such as Mother and I do, and that whatever correspondence they do carry on will either be buried on a hard disk and eventually thrown out; or deleted within a short time. It will probably never make it onto hard copy and will probably never be available for a third party to read some years down the line.
Email is certainly convenient, and allows us to keep in frequent contact with one another, but it's almost like a phone conversation in terms of the lasting record kept.
Please feel free to agree or disagree. It will be interesting to see what other people in apfpy think.
Helen.
(Lives in England. Born in Australia - third generation - of predominantly English stock.)
Last Revised: 15th July, 2001.