When death is dancing closer than you’d like, what becomes important? What do you need to tell your child? And how do you want to be remembered? 27 Letters to my Daughter is a beautiful, tender, funny and poignant guide on how to really live, from mother and writer Ella Ward to her daughter.
Today, you can read an extract from this book below. Read on …
Ella Ward
Letter Two
Introductions
What sets one family apart from another? What makes your family yours? Is it the curve of a nose that is echoed through generations? A tinkle in a laugh that goes up and down on a scale? Or is it something less tangible: a sense, a hum in your belly, a feeling of coming home?
Family is all those things, but none of them can exist without one important element: the telling of stories. A family is only as strong as the stories that are told. And, I’m afraid to say, the stories can’t just be told – they need to kept.
One afternoon, I sat down with my great-grandfather Jim’s letters from World War I. Tucked away in a locked-down house in the middle of a pandemic, I found myself eyeing the innocuous-looking green ringbinder on my bookshelf. As the meme goes, ‘Our grandparents had to go to war, you just have to sit on the couch’.
I’d been sitting on the couch. I wondered what it felt like to go to war.
Jim’s letters from the Front to his sweetheart, Kay, contained extraordinary stories. But then added to them, was Jim himself. His words allowed me to live his wit, passion (raunch!), pathos and the small, curious details he was surrounded by. As I read on, Jim became more real than any sepia-dusted photograph I had seen. While we have Jim to thank for the stories themselves, it’s Virginia, Jim’s daughter, to whom I’m so grateful for passing them along.
Virginia, my Grama, painstakingly transcribed her father’s spidery, pencil-written letters and gifted them to me way back on my twenty-fourth birthday. They languished in various houses for fifteen years. But 2020 was the year to complete my letters to you, and the year – it seemed – to read Jim’s letters to everyone.
One day you’re writing letters of love from the Front, the next … your great granddaughter is reading them from beyond the dawn of the twenty-first century. There’s only one reason these stories have been able to travel so easily through time: family.
This is what family is, my girl. It’s a passing-on of responsibility. A collective agreement between those who sit on ever-widening branches of a family tree. An understanding that the lessons must be protected for the next generation.
Family doesn’t just require a history told, it requires a history held, passed on, so the newest members can look back and see, with a small gasp of recognition, just what special group of people they belong to.
And this family, our family, has two very important things going for them. Yes, we’ve written it all down, but – crucially – we’ve all kept it safe for the next generation. Which is why this family can remain a home for me, and you, and for those who are still to arrive. It’s how I managed to discover so many overlappings of experience. It’s what has meant I can write my letters to you.
I think it might be rude to talk about people without properly introducing them. But I know it’s definitely rude to publish their private letters and memoirs, their fears and dreams, near-deaths and true-loves without properly introducing them.
So. These members of your family are the ones who wrote it all down, and protected the words for the next line of the family tree.
They are my great-grandparents Jim and Kay, my Grama (Virginia) and Grampa (Buzz), my mother (Kate), and me. And, of course, we all have you. And now you have all of us.
Jim, Kay, Virginia, Buzz and Kate have all written down their stories, their letters and their lives. Over this past year I have swum around in their words and filled myself up with their histories. I am dizzy on dust and my fingers are papery from scanning.
But this isn’t just a collection of old stories swept into new letters. Because anecdotes are wonderful, but they’re also a dime a dozen. No, my sweet girl, I have a wonderful secret to let you in on. The tales this family have shared, come with a very special magic.
Bringing each of these stories together is playing five records all at the same time and realising – alarmingly – that it’s all … harmonising. Is this music or is this noise? Who cares! It sounds wonderful.
Would you like to see how the magic works? How a family of storytellers have passed something special down the line? Come now, hold my hand, let’s begin.
Grama. Virginia. My grandmother and probably the central reason all of these letters are here for you. The keeper of the family archives. It’s fitting that she’s the first voice we’ll hear in these letters – other than mine, of course. The initial ‘hello’ comes from her own room, and it comforts me that she clearly feels as fond of her first bedroom as I am of mine. We’ll check back in with Grama often enough, but there’s one specific thing I want to share from this particular memory of hers, so you can begin to hear this magical harmony for yourself.
It’s around 1932 and she is about five years old. We’re in California. Listen:
The bathroom is all warm and steamy. Daddy’s been shaving in here. I wish I’d got up in time to watch him cover his face with Ivory soapsuds and see the dent in his shoulder made by the German shrapnel. I know what shrapnel is, Daddy told me. But I don’t understand a lot of things he told me about the war …
‘Daddy’ is James A. Quinby. That Jim in that war. My great- grandfather; your great-great. And while little Virginia was considering the divot in her father’s shoulder in the 1930s, back in 1918 Jim wrote to his sweetheart Kay (Virginia’s future mother), about that very scar:
… I’m glad to be moving again. They took my bandages off yesterday – entirely cured, except for a light dimple in my shoulder – won’t be able to wear a low neck for a while. My letters won’t be so regular – but you’ll know one thing will be regular – that’s – Love … Jim.
After Jim was Jim, and Daddy, he was Grampa. Although her parents took her all around the globe, my mother, Kate, would visit her grandparents back in the USA as often as she could. In 1969 she was sixteen and dancing with her Grampa around his Palo Alto living room:
Tobacco, Ivory soap, wood polish, daphne. I try hard to stay loose-jointed and fluid … at the same time I’m concentrating on the tight-framed foxtrot. My bare foot is practically behind Grampa’s brown brogues but I’m not worried. They never touch me.
Can you see the magic? You see? Many different songs but they’re all blending just right.
This family of yours, whether by genetics or design, has interlaced the very physical manifestations of memory through its own history and lessons. I find that I have done the same. Through all of my years I can tug on a shred of smell – say, daphne on a late-winter’s afternoon – and not only will my own memories come tumbling out, but more will follow behind. Memories that aren’t mine – memories I’m just holding safe to pass along. In writing these letters for you, I have come to realise time is elastic and what feels like forever ago can suddenly be very present. Life goes by so, so quickly.
Your family are people with a sense of joy, a taste for adventure, a predilection for drama and the ability to understand that ‘life is a matter of contrast’. For generations we have met misfortune with a determined curiosity and even, often, genuine cheer. And all the way through, we’ve decided we are not only ‘important enough to write it all down’, but we think you are important enough for us to keep sharing.
This is why I love our family. This is why I have called upon them to help me send love to you, my daughter. This is why it’s time for you to know where you have come from, and where you may be heading.
This is the first lesson for you, darling girl. Wrapped up in your very DNA is the ability to be courageous, clever and kind in the face of all kinds of fuckery.
So gather hold of those DNA strands and jump on in – the water’s fine!
Lesson #1: If you have a family, you have a story.
—27 Letters to my Daughter by Ella Ward (HarperCollins Australia) is out now. Limited signed copies are available while stocks last!
27 Letters to my Daughter
Limited Signed Copies Available!
Ella Ward comes from a long line of irrepressibly charming raconteurs, letter-writers, storytellers and people who 'quite like giving toasts at parties'. And so, a few years ago, when Ella was 36 years old, with a husband and a young daughter, and was told that she had a rare cancer and might die, she decided that death wasn't going to stand in the way of her mothering her child.
As Ella's treatment for her cancer began, she started drafting letters to her daughter. To tell her about life, love, death, the importance of cotton knickers and - above all - her family...
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