Par Avion

We received our first air mail letter today. It was from my old french teacher, who's been reading this blog and has spotted some grammatical errors. Thirty-four years old and I'm still getting red pen all over my work. "Sarah is a very bright girl but she must learn to apply herself".

I thought air mail paper was obsolete in the age of electronic communication so I'm pleased to see it's not. This particular letter was all the more pleasing because it wasn't separate writing paper and envelope, it was one of those all-in-one jobs that leaves you just enough space to rattle off everything you want to say provided you keep your handwriting small. I love them, they remind me of the past, they remind me of airports and those old-fashioned arrivals and departure boards where the letters used to flip over to reveal exciting far-off places like Singapore and Tokyo and Sydney. Places I used to dream I'd see.

When I was a little girl, my great-grandmother, Frances, used to write to me on airmail paper. She was a "ten pound pom", a Yorkshire woman who had emigrated to New Zealand in the days of "populate or perish". Such was her dislike of my great-grandfather that she had boarded the ship without telling him and threw her wedding ring over the side before they were out of Southampton Water.

Eventually she came into Australia and later settled in Perth after her son had emigrated out here with his wife and kids. She used to send me an Aussie dollar and a cotton handkerchief with a map of Australia every year for my birthday.

Frances lived into her nineties but I never met her. We first came to Australia just eighteen months after she died. I missed her by a whisker but amazingly, we met a man in a bar in Perth who remembered her. "Ah yes, that bird woman. The bird woman of Perth they called her". It turns out she was mad as a bike and used to spend her days sitting outside the Post Office on Forrest Place feeding her feathered friends. "She was in all the papers, used to get onto buses blowing whistles and ordering everyone to get off. Total crackpot". When I asked my great uncle, he produced an enormous black and white photo of his mother sitting on a bench with a seagull on her head. "That's her. This photo was in the local paper so we ordered her a copy. It was with her things when she died. Take it back to England, you can keep it". I'll frame it one day. In the meantime, we gave Ella "Frances" as one of her middle names in the hope that she'll grow up to be as brave and as barmy as her great-great grandmother. Lucky kid.