I wrote a letter to my parents the other day. It turns out I can't post it because our Post Shop is closed, but it was satisfying to put pen to paper, collect up a few cartoons I'd clipped for them and address the envelope.
We text and email nearly every day, and my mother is a dab-hand at FaceTime, but they live overseas and during the lockdown I've been suppressing a nagging anxiety that, should something happen to one of them, I won't be able to just get on a plane and go to them.
It is not lost on me that I am experiencing something of the anxiety about intractable distance that afflicted the families I've studied for most of my career: separation was the universal experience of wartime.
During World War I and II, staying connected was imperative for millions of families and those who were literate poured out on to the page their need for connection.
In 1916, the British postal service handled an average of 11 million letters each week from the Western Front. Over the course of the war, the French postal service delivered 10 billion items of mail.
Letters from the Western Front to New Zealand took an average of 60 days to arrive. That time was more than halved during the WWII, with letters arriving in three weeks and sometimes more quickly than that.
During WWII, the items of mail ran into the billions each year, with new methods of delivery including airmail and even the microfilming of letters to save weight and volume.
During both wars, literally millions of pages—plush and scrappy, in pen and pencil, articulate and barely literate—connected those New Zealanders and Australians serving overseas with their families, and they show the many ways family members tried to stay in touch and enmeshed in their family's daily activities when they couldn't be together.
Reading the letters of servicemen and women is astonishingly illuminating of everyday family life. Given the circumstances that separated them, everyone was surprisingly "fit and well" as soldiers and nurses reassured their parents they were still alive and bearing up, although often living under horrendous conditions.
Parents and wives also downplayed anxieties and worries even as they suffered financial and emotional stresses.
Sons urged their aged mothers to "get a man in to chop the wood" and their younger siblings to "be a help" around the house. Wives wrote to husbands of growing children, the need to buy new shoes, and small kindnesses of neighbours such as the giving of "hundreds and thousands" for a child's birthday cake when none could be found in the shops.
Given how long men and women could be absent from home, courtships were conducted through correspondence, marriages planned, lovers consulted about the establishment of households—the types of silverware and bedsheets one might buy.
Even more intimately, they discussed contraception, sex and the merits of delaying having children.
Inevitably, family members also grieved together across vast distances, and not just in the case of soldiers being killed. Elderly parents died, leaving sons and daughters bereft and unable to comfort each other. Tragically, the deaths of children broke the hearts of both those at home and those overseas and unable to be close to their spouses and kin.
Through all this, it was clear the needs of the Empire or the country trumped those of families and individuals.
Soldiers and nurses applying for furlough or early repatriation for compassionate reasons could be told quite bluntly that the Empire's need was greater at a time of war than any one family's, and their applications refused regardless of rank or wealth.
Duty was painful and sacrifices were substantial—time with those one loved most, attendance at life's significant events, friendships and relationships that must have suffered and withered through lack of attention and care or just simply too much time apart.
But this Anzac Day I am focusing on Jean Waters' neighbour, who brought her the "hundreds and thousands" for young Miriam's birthday cake amid rationing in 1942. Jean's husband, John, was at a Royal Air Force base in Iraq, away not only from his wife and little girls, but also from his friends, having been seconded to the British base.
In the 103-degree heat, in the middle of a power cut and so without fans, he smiled, I hope, at the description of the little party half a world away, celebrated with half a sponge cake (without cream, just iced) sparkling with rainbow sprinkles through the kindness and sacrifice of a neighbour.
Professor Kate Hunter is Director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and teaches in the University's History programme.
Read the original article on Stuff.