Letters from a Jersey Mother 1956-61

18 July 1957 My dear Len and Margaret This is Thursday am and Dad is getting ready to go and see if the town is still standing up also to see if his friends are all well. This is a wintry a.m., cold, windy, cloudy and I’m almost certain rain will come very soon now. I’m hoping the boys will have better weather to fly over on Tuesday [1] . However it’s not a very long journey from Southampton. Are both boys getting excited? We are all looking forward to seeing them. They are lucky to be coming just in time to see the Queen and the Battle of Flowers. If the weather is good they will enjoy both fetes. We hope the Queen will have better weather on Thursday than what it is today.  Otherwise the poor soul will have to fly, she being such a bad traveller I don’t think she would risk to come on the boat this rough weather. Some say according to the weather she might land at Bouley Bay. If so she will find herself at the pier, also if she comes by air.   They are no...

There are few paragraphs in these letters and almost no full stops. I’ve put some of both in as an aid for the reader.                                                                                       3 Yaralla Villas First Tower 26 March 1956 My dear Len and Margaret To speak the truth I have been thinking of you all most of the day – when we were having breakfast I told Dad that probably the furniture remover had arrived at your home and you were all very busy, I wondered if you were having good weather for the big event, here it was a grand morni...

28/10 2020 I recently uncovered some letters from my father to my brother John who died 2 years ago. In one of them dated 29/11/1990, John had obviously asked about the family, so below my descriptions of how I recollect them, I've copied out Dad's thumbnail sketches. Granny - Ada Mary du Feu (nee Trachy) - meek, mild, looked like everyone's idea of a granny. Good household manager, mother of seven children. Would not cross her cantankerous husband I thought, but actually the letters reveal she was made of sterner stuff. When i used to go for my lunch, if the phone rang, (in the hall of course) she would not allow me to answer it. Only Papa could answer it. Dad said - From a long line of farmers, their farm was at Les Augerez, St Peter. From a large family Mother was a sweet, fairly reserved person and aspired to a level of gentility that Father didn't even understand. He was a down to earth sort of man without any pretensions and Mother used to despair of his salty lan...

When my mother died suddenly in 1979 at the age of 57 we were shocked, upset and didn't know what to do. It fell to me and one of my brothers, Paul, to empty her flat. Furniture and household equipment was easy but what to do with 'stuff'? Letters, photos and other ephemera went into a suitcase which I have carried around Britain with me ever since.  This year, 2017, has been a horrible year for our family. Both my brothers, John and Paul, got prostate cancer and while they were both very ill Paul asked to see some family photos, so for the first time in 38 years I opened the suitcase. Amongst the papers and photos, I kept coming across letters from my grandmother to (mainly) her son, my father, her favourite. She never did approve of my mother who was Catholic, and was horrified that my father had changed his religion to marry Mum. My aunts used to tell me how spoiled he was, his 3 older sisters had to wait on him, clean his shoes and put up with it when he stole their...