Letters
Why Letters?
Dear Reader,
When I think about why I write letters, I find myself remembering a dining room table in Germany, and the excitement of coming home from school to discover that someone had written to us.
I was seven when we moved there.
My mother had left New Zealand for Australia to begin her life abroad, probably never imagining that her journey would eventually take her across the globe with four small children. Yet there we were, making a home in Germany, learning our way into a life so different from the one we had known.
For me, Germany was an adventure.
There was the white of the snow, the wonder of finding myself in a world I had never experienced before. There were unfamiliar words to learn, a German school to attend, and friendships to begin while we were still finding the language to understand one another.
Looking back, I wonder about the experience my mother was having alongside mine. While I was discovering snow, she was making a home. While we were finding new friends, she was caring for four small children, far from her own family and the people who knew her best.
And then a letter would arrive.
We would gather around the dining room table while Mum or Dad read aloud, listening to news from grandparents, aunties and friends. For a while, the people we missed became part of our afternoon.
Someone had sat down, thought of us and written. Now we were together around the table, receiving what they had sent.
They were little pieces of home.
I could be happy in our new world and still feel the joy of being remembered by the old one.
We lived in Germany for three years before returning to Australia, where the greater part of my life has unfolded. But I have never forgotten that anticipation, or how words on a page could change the feeling of a day.
Perhaps letters were part of my inheritance long before I understood their place in my life.
With my grandmother.
In 1935, my maternal grandmother, Josephine Vercoe, was the postmistress at Paengaroa in New Zealand. Across the Tasman, my German ancestors on my father’s side ran the post office and telephone exchange at Goorangoola, near Singleton in New South Wales.
On opposite sides of the Tasman, both sides of my family had found themselves doing something remarkably similar—helping people stay connected. Letters were carried. News was shared. Voices travelled down telephone lines.
I am of Scottish, Irish and German descent. Some of my great-great-grandparents had left Germany in the mid-1800s, bringing their skills as winemakers, carpenters and farmers to the lives they built in Australia. Generations later, I arrived there as a little girl, full of excitement.
I wonder what they would have made of that.
As I grew older, I wanted to understand more of the people behind the names, and the lives that had made my own possible.
In 2004, while visiting my godmother in the valley, I was given my great-great-grandmother Sarah’s Bible. A great-uncle had kept it in his basement for decades. He felt it belonged with me.
I already knew something of Sarah’s story. She and her sister Phoebe had left Scotland for Australia on their own, aged just sixteen and fourteen. They would marry into the German families in the valley, bringing these branches of my family’s history together.
As a child, I had travelled to Germany with my parents and siblings. Whatever was unfamiliar, we had one another. Sarah and Phoebe had made their journey with only each other.
I wondered about the courage that required, and whether they had understood it as courage at all. Perhaps they had simply done what life asked of them, one day at a time.
The Bible had been given to Sarah when she arrived in Australia. Now, so many years later, it had been placed in my hands.
When I opened it, I found something tucked inside: her signed voting certificate from New South Wales, dated 1906.
I lingered over her signature.
Here was a trace of her own hand. The girl who had left Scotland had grown into a woman able to take her place among those entitled to vote. I wondered what that had meant to her, and what she might have said if I could have sat beside her and asked.
I wanted to know more, so I ordered her death certificate.
When it arrived, I read it slowly until my eyes settled on the entry for her mother.
Mother unknown.
I stopped.
I knew about Sarah and Phoebe, their journey and the families they had married into. But here, where their mother’s name should have been, there was a gap.
Who was she?
The certificate could not tell me why her name was missing, or whether another record might hold it. Yet I kept returning to those two words. Somewhere behind them was a woman whose life was part of my own beginning.
I wanted to find her.
I have not yet found her name. The search remains open.
Sarah’s Bible had preserved something of her life. Her voting certificate held her signature. Her death certificate left me with a question that would travel much further than I could have imagined.
In 2013, nine years after receiving the Bible, I set out on a forty-day pilgrimage, spending most of that time in Scotland, joining a group journey from St Paul’s to St Peter’s, and finishing with three days in Germany.
By then, I had lived through a health crisis: eleven operations in two years, including a hysterectomy, and the fear of cancer after a tumour was found on my bladder.
So much time had been given to treatment and recovery. I wanted to make this journey—to follow the longing I felt towards these places and give myself time to listen.
Germany held memories of my childhood and the lives of ancestors who had left it long before I was born. Scotland held other beginnings, other people whose lives had eventually led to mine.
I could research their names from home. Being there allowed me to walk through places they might have known, to notice the land around me and consider what it meant to belong to their story.
During that journey, I began writing a blog.
Once, I had been the little girl waiting for news from far away. Now I was the one travelling, finding words for what I was experiencing and sending them back to the people at home.
Writing also gave me somewhere to stay with a question rather than hurry past it. Sometimes I only began to understand why a place had moved me as I tried to describe it.
During four days over Easter at Kinnaird Castle, I began to feel the possibility of writing beyond the account of my travels. There were stories I wanted to explore more deeply, stories that would ask me to keep returning long after the pilgrimage was over.
Sarah’s life would become the inspiration for The Sea Remembers Her Name, the second novel in my quartet, Wisdom’s Unbroken Thread.
But another story was asking to be written first.
The search for one woman’s name had taught me to notice other women whose lives survived only in fragments. In Scotland, that curiosity drew me further back, into the years of the Reformation.
I thought about women who tended the sick and carried knowledge passed from one generation to the next. How had some come to be feared in the communities they cared for? Who decided whether what a woman knew was useful or dangerous?
Standing among cathedrals bearing the destruction of those years, I could see what had been broken in the stone. I wondered about the voices that were harder to recover.
Faith has meant so much in my own life. These questions were not always comfortable to ask, but I wanted to stay with them.
They began to find their way into Whispers Beneath the Flame, the first novel in Wisdom’s Unbroken Thread. I am writing it now, with Sarah’s story still waiting beside me.
Alongside it, I am preparing to return to Kinnaird Castle with a small group of women, making room for history, shared experience and the questions we bring from our own lives. I could not have foreseen that when I first arrived there.
Somewhere along the way, the entries I sent home began to feel like letters.
Then there is the name I married into—Baird—which has always brought the bard, the storyteller, to my mind.
Perhaps it was inevitable that when I imagined sharing this part of my life, I imagined letters.
So these are mine to you.
Letters from the places I visit, the people I discover, the questions I carry and the stories that ask to be told.
Some will begin with research. Others with a place, a name, a memory or something I notice while walking through the world. I will share discoveries from history, glimpses of the novels as they take shape, and moments from my own life that I want to sit with a little longer.
I think of my grandmother writing to us, and my parents reading at the dining room table. She could not see us gathered there, listening. Perhaps she never knew quite how much those ordinary pages meant.
I hope these letters might offer you something of that companionship. Wherever you are when you read, I hope you will feel welcome, with a place to pull up a chair and stay awhile.
And if a letter stirs a memory, I hope you might write back.
I would love to know what it brought to mind.
With love,
Lyn
If you would like the next letter to find you, you’re welcome to join the Lyn Baird Circle.
