Notes From A Blue Suitcase

All those people...

The blue suitcase belonged to my mother. I found it at the back of her wardrobe when I was packing up her possessions two days after her death with what I felt was unseemly haste on the part of the retirement home because they urgently needed her room. Not that there was much to pack up: her clothes; a handful of jewelry including her first wedding ring and the jasper earrings my father brought back for her after the war; her falling apart Bible with the cover I embroidered with gold suns; R10 in her purse for the jelly babies she loved; in her writing desk, her pen and paper and three unfinished letters to her grandchildren.

An empty writing desk, an empty suitcase and an almost empty purse…What a wonderfully uncluttered way to leave the world! Everything else given away, including the brown envelope with my childhood letters and drawings she gave to me many years before her death. She said she did not want ‘random strangers tossing out her treasure one day.’ I remember feeling sad and incredulous about ‘one day’ because she was still doing yoga and swimming long distances every morning. Overwhelmed that my letters and drawings were her treasure.

I took the blue suitcase away with me. It was the ideal place for the brown envelope and all the letters from my friends and family that I could not bear to throw out during our many moves around the country. Every year, during a cleanup of my desk drawers, more and more added. Never the time to sort them into some sort of order. Never the courage to read them again or throw them out.

My child’s memoir, The Colour of Flying is nearing its final stages, and with thoughts of the cover in mind I took a deep breath and opened the bulging suitcase to look for the brown envelope. I found it, buried under hundreds and hundreds of letters and cards, a little worse for wear, labeled in my mother’s neat hand. All around it, the memories of my life.

While I wait for the final comments on my memoir, I have time to start creating some sort of order in the blue suitcase. My plan is to group the letters according to sender, arrange them in date order, read them again and roughly record a history, perhaps for another memoir. Later, I will offer to return the letters, where possible, to their authors, or to their children.

So far, I have made a start on the handwriting I recognize and put those letters into plastic sleeves to await the next stages. But last week I came across a flimsy blue sheet with spidery writing I did not remember, addressed to my Missy B and signed, Your Annie. My nanny who looked after me from my birth until I left school wrote that letter. Her friend, Nomakepu, with the sore feet had died on the railway line, the figs I loved were getting ripe, the dogs were fine and she herself was well apart from her sore arm. She said missed me like a piece of bread.

For the time being, I have put my sorting task aside until I feel less undone. I see now that it is not a simple matter of creating an orderly arrangement of documents for posterity like I did in the libraries I worked in long ago. It is a journey back into parts of my life I dimly remember, made suddenly real again in vivid images by the words of people who loved me. So, I will take my time, swim as often as possible, drink a little red wine in the evenings, and get as far I can before ‘one day’ comes.

Barbara Townsend,

April 2025