If Sundays were the anchor of my week, then letters were the thread that held the rest of it together, thin, fragile things, and yet strong enough, it turned out, to carry the whole weight of a family across the distance the war had put between us.
They arrived irregularly, sometimes two in a single week, sometimes none for a fortnight at a stretch, depending on the trains and the bombing and whatever unknowable calculus governed the delivery of post in wartime. But whenever the post van's engine sounded in the lane, a distinctive rattling growl I learned to recognize from a considerable distance, I would abandon whatever I was doing, lambs half-fed, sums half-finished, blackberries half-picked, and run to the gate, arriving breathless and hopeful long before the postman had reached it himself, hoping today might be a letter day.
Margaret understood, better perhaps than anyone, the particular ache of a fortnight without word, having raised two children of her own through years when news of any kind, good or bad, could take an age to arrive. On the worst of those silent stretches, when a full three weeks passed one hard winter without a single letter from either London or France, it was Margaret who sat with me by the kitchen fire each evening, not offering false reassurances but simply keeping me company in the waiting, mending socks or shelling peas while I read my storybook aloud for the hundredth time. When at last, on a gray Tuesday morning, three letters arrived together in a single post, two from Mother and one, much creased and travel-stained, from Father, delayed somewhere in the slow chain of military censors and wartime transport. Margaret laughed aloud with relief nearly as great as my own, declaring that such a stretch of silence had aged her a full year and she'd thank the postal service kindly not to repeat it.
Mother's letters came on thin blue paper, folded into small, careful squares, her handwriting neat and rounded despite what I would only later understand had been written by candlelight in a house that shook, some nights, from bombs falling not so very far away.
My darling Charlotte, one such letter began, in the autumn of that first year,
I think of you every single hour of every single day, and I am so glad to hear from Mrs. Whitaker that you are settling in well, and that you have made friends of Emily and Samuel already, and that you have named a lamb Winston, which made me laugh aloud when I read it, for I can just picture your father's face when I tell him. London carries on much as before; we had rather a noisy night of it on Tuesday, though our own street came through without harm, and I want you to know that Mummy is being very careful and very sensible, and you mustn't worry about me one bit.
Mrs. Peabody next door has taken to keeping chickens in her back garden, if you can believe it, which made me think of you and your egg-collecting, and I laughed to imagine you giving her hens a stern talking-to about proper manners, the way I imagine you must sometimes have to do with that Old Boadicea you wrote to me about.
I have your father's last letter here beside me as I write this. He says he is well, and safe, and that he carries your photograph folded inside his breast pocket, close to his heart, wherever he goes. He says to tell you he thinks of your laugh often, and that it is the thing that gets him through the harder days.
Be a good girl for the Whitakers, my darling, and know that no matter how many miles sit between us, you are, and always will be, the very center of my heart.
All my love, always, Mummy
I read such letters again and again, in the quiet corner of my room beneath the eaves, until the paper grew soft at its folds and the ink began, in places, to blur very slightly from handling. I learned, through them, of the small daily texture of Mother's wartime London; the blackout drills, the endless queuing for rationed goods, the particular kindness of neighbors who shared what little they had and looked after one another's houses when the sirens sounded.
Father's letters, when they came, were shorter and more sparing, a soldier's letters, careful of what the censors would permit, careful too, I would understand only much later, not to frighten a small daughter with the true nature of what he faced.
My dearest Charlotte,
Your mother tells me you are learning to feed lambs from a bottle, and I confess I am rather jealous, as I have not had the chance to feed a single lamb since I left home, and I understand from your description that it is a task requiring both patience and a firm grip, two qualities I know you to possess in abundance.
I carry your photograph with me always, my darling girl, tucked safe against my heart, and I look at it whenever the days grow long, and it reminds me of exactly what I am fighting to come home to. You are very brave, and I am prouder of you than I know how to say in a letter.
Give my very best to the Whitaker family and tell young Samuel I should like very much to shake his hand one day, for looking after my daughter so well.
With all my love, Daddy
Some of Father's letters arrived with whole lines blacked out by the censor's pen, thick bars of ink obscuring whatever detail of his location or circumstance he had let slip past his own caution, and I found these redacted portions endlessly fascinating as a small girl, holding the pages up to the light in a vain attempt to divine what lay beneath the ink, until Margaret gently explained that the blacked-out words were not a puzzle to be solved but simply information too dangerous to risk. "Your father knows exactly what he can and cannot say," she told me, "and he'd rather leave a gap than risk giving anything away that might put himself or his fellow soldiers in danger. Best not to fret over what's missing, and simply treasure what's left."
There was one letter, too, that arrived so terribly delayed that its contents had long since been overtaken by events by the time it finally reached the farm, a letter from Father, dated some four months earlier, telling of a minor injury to his hand already healed by the time I read of it, and a Christmas he had spent under canvas that had already given way, in the letters that followed, to an entirely different season. I kept the delayed letter all the same, filing it carefully alongside the others in the small tin box Margaret had given me for the purpose, understanding even then that every single word my father had troubled to write, however delayed in its arrival, was a word worth keeping.
I wrote back to both my parents faithfully, with Margaret's patient help forming my letters into words and my words into sentences, filling page after careful page with the small treasures of my days; Emily's stories, Samuel's steadiness, the lambs and the eggs and the blackberries, the Sunday walks and the ice cream, the school and Alice and Miss Ashworth's smoking stove. And always, at the end of every letter, in the same careful hand, the same words:
I miss you both very much and I think of London and of you every single day. Please write soon. Love, Charlotte.
I did not know, could not have known at four and then five years old, how much those simple letters meant to the parents who received them; how Mother read and reread each one by candlelight in a house grown quiet and lonely without my chatter, or how Father carried each new letter folded alongside the photograph in his breast pocket, drawing from my accounts of lambs and blackberries a strength that steadied his hand and his heart alike, more, he told me once, than a hot meal or a full night's sleep.
As I grew older, my letters changed too, growing from the simple, laboriously formed sentences of a five-year-old into the fuller, more confident paragraphs of a girl of seven and then eight, until by the war's later years I was writing entirely unassisted, filling whole pages in my own increasingly steady hand without any help from Margaret at all. Mother kept every single one, tied in ribbon and stored in a drawer of her own dresser, and would remark, in her replies, on how grown-up the handwriting had become, how the spelling had improved, how she could nearly see, in the shape of the letters themselves, the girl growing taller and steadier with each passing season; a small, private comfort, she told me long afterward, for a mother forced to witness her daughter's childhood almost entirely secondhand.
There was one letter, arriving in the spring of my second year at the farm, that I came to treasure above nearly all the others, for it was the first, I realized even at six years old, in which Mother allowed herself to write plainly of her own fear rather than carefully managing it away for my comfort.
My darling Charlotte,
I must tell you something rather frightening happened this week, though I want you to know before you read on that I am perfectly well and quite unharmed, so you mustn't worry, only listen to the whole story through to its end.
Tuesday night's raid was a bad one, worse than we've had in some months, and a bomb fell rather closer to our own street than any has before, close enough that our windows rattled something dreadful and a fine plaster dust came sifting down from the ceiling, and I confess, my darling, that for a moment I was more frightened than I have been since this whole business began, because in that moment I thought suddenly and with great clarity of you, safe in your green hills, and thought how very glad I was, whatever the ache of missing you, that you were not here to hear that terrible sound.
Mrs. Peabody came knocking not ten minutes after, to be sure I was quite all right, and we sat together the rest of the night with a pot of tea between us, listening to the all-clear finally sound sometime near dawn, and I want you to know, my darling, that even in the worst of it, I am never truly alone.
I tell you all this not to frighten you, but because I promised you I would never lie to you about anything that mattered. But do not fret over me, my darling. I am careful, and sensible, and I have the very best of reasons, you, my dearest girl, to take every care to come through this war whole and well.
All my love, as ever and always, Mummy
I cried reading that letter, though not entirely from fear, from something closer to gratitude, I understood only much later, at being trusted with a truth rather than merely protected from one. I showed it to Margaret that evening, wanting, in my small way, to share the weight of it with someone, and she read it through twice, her face grave, before folding it carefully back along its creases and handing it back.
"Your mother's a brave woman," she said simply. "Braver, in some ways, than any soldier, for she does her bravery alone, night after night, with no one beside her but her own good sense and whatever neighbors she can gather round her. You come from good stock, Charlotte Spencer, on both sides of your family, and don't you ever forget it."
I wrote back that same evening, my letter longer and more careful than usual, telling my mother that she was very brave too, and that I loved her more than all the lambs on the farm put together, which was, Margaret assured me when asked, really rather a great deal of love indeed, given how very many lambs there presently were.
I remember, too, the particular ceremony that grew up around the writing of my own replies, once I was old enough to manage more than a few laboriously copied lines. Margaret would clear a corner of the kitchen table each Sunday evening after supper, setting out a fresh sheet of paper, the good ink pot, and the pen with the slightly bent nib that I had claimed as my own simply because it fit my small hand better than any of the others. I took the task with tremendous seriousness, composing each letter as though it were a report to be delivered before some invisible tribunal, crossing out whole sentences that did not please me and beginning again on a fresh sheet if the crossing-out grew too untidy, until Margaret gently suggested that a letter need not be perfect to be loved, only honest, which struck me, even at six or seven, as rather wise advice, though I did not always manage to follow it.
I remember, too, a particular misunderstanding that arose in my sixth year, when I wrote to Mother describing a village fair with such enthusiasm that she wrote back asking whether she might come and see the next one for herself, and I, in my eagerness to have her visit coincide with the very best of what the village had to offer, gave her quite the wrong date entirely, muddling the summer fair with the autumn one by a full two months. She arrived, poor woman, to find no fair at all, only an ordinary Saturday, and though she never once scolded me for the error, I remember the particular shame of realizing what I had done, and the fierce resolve that followed it to be more careful, ever after, with the small facts I entrusted to paper. Margaret found the whole episode rather funnier than I did at the time, though I have come, across the years since, to find it rather funny myself, and have told the story more than once to my own grandchildren as proof that even the most earnest letter-writer is not above the occasional muddle.