Resurrection

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 423, 1 August 1947, Page 12

Resurrection

HERE are two programmes on letters and their writers running from 2YA at the moment, the BBC programme The Written Word, on Sunday afternoon, gnd Norma Cooper’s series Letters Home which is being heard on, Friday nights. If you are easily disturbed, as I am, you may well find that these sessions give food for a certain amount of concern, for their material is provided almost entirely by people who did not intend their letters for publication. Those of us who find it difficult at the best of times to put pen to paper to send that letter home would do well to ask ourselves whether it is worthwhile to take the risk of having sacrilegious hands prising open Aunt Susannah’s moth-proof trunk to find out how life was lived in the Wellington of 1947, or whether it might not in’ the long run be better to make it a toll-call. Consider the case of Charlotte Godley, extracts from whose letters were read by Miss Cooper last Friday night. Picture her in billowing negligée seated at her writing-desk on a summer morning of 1850, racking her brains to think of some little item of her daily life, something not:+so sensationally topical that by the time it reaches Home in six months’ time it will have lost all interest, nor anything so banal that it is unnecessary to write it. It is fortunate that the innocent Charlotte is, unlike Cicero, uncenscious of the fact that a predatory posterity will seize upon and devour with relish every detail of her daily life. So she records unselfcopsciously, the little snippets of life in the colony, her description of her tame kiwi, of the trip to Otaki, of the strange customs of colonials who "drop in unannounced," and as she seals each letter (does she write to Mother weekly, fortnightly, or monthly?) probably says with thankfulness, "Well, that’s that." It isn’t, which is just another of the things our pioneer women had to put up with.