I couldn ’t bring myself to read my parents’ love letters for years

Before her mother died, she handed over a shopping bag of private and personal letters sent long ago between her and her father. But what would Sabine Durrant learn about the man who died shortly after she was born?My father died just after I was born and I knew very little about him until I was in my 30s. I was a journalist then, and I approached it like an investigation, writing a memoir about what I discovered – his unhappy childhood, his life as a pilot in the navy, and his disappearance one November night during practice manoeuvres off the Dorset coast. The memoir was published in a book and serialised in a newspaper. After it appeared, my mother talked to me about him; not much but enough. She told m e he had been a great love, and she told me in heart-rending detail about the night he didn’t come back. We both cried, which was good, because I had got used to thinking she had forgotten him. We had met for lunch, and when we had finished eating she rummaged in her shopper and brought out a plas tic bundle, a smallOttakar ’s bag containing a thick pile of letters. “You can read these,” she said. “If you like.”I took the letters home, and I was going to read them that night. In some ways, it felt like victory. The teenage me, the one who in secret trawled for evidence, who had raged against her silence – would have drunk them in. I liked to think I had bypassed her in my search, because I hadn’t wanted to upset her. She was long remarried, with a life of ...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Family Life and style Psychology Science Health & wellbeing Source Type: news