The Postcard

A postcard written 77 years ago by my mother evokes memories

I posted this little piece of history on a Wisbech Facebook forum and received a big reaction from members of that group, many with little reminiscences of my parents, so I am sharing an extended version with my band of Substack followers in case you find it interesting.

I found this postcard while rummaging through some family paperwork (both my parents have been dead for more than 20 years and it is still hard to sort out all their papers).

It is from my mother who was American and came from Scottsbluff,  Nebraska (Nebraska is back on the map as it is also the birth state of Tim Walz - hopefully soon to be next Vice President of the USA. All the best people start their lives in Nebraska!). She was writing to her mother. ). I am not sure how we came to have it. Perhaps my mother brought it back with her when she was going through her mother’s papers after her death.

Before I get started, here is the typical picture you see of Scottsbluff – for the benefit of those who have not been there, or to Nebraska, or even to the USA.

The postcard of Wisbech was sent on 5th August 1947 when I was just over 2 weeks old.

In case you have difficulty making out her handwriting (my mother was a doctor after all!) it reads

“Hi Mom

Our flat is behind the building the arrow points to - and directly opposite the church.

This picture is taken from the market place which looks like a country fair on Saturday and is bare the rest of the time.

Incidentally there are 5 Inns like the one at the left, on the market place and 80 in Wisbech - “

That cheerful message belies my grandmother’s strong disapproval of her wayward daughter marrying an Englishman. When, a year or so earlier, she had written to her mother with the ecstatic announcement that she was to marry, she received a long reply describing her routine (bridge games, what was happening in the church, visits to the supermarket, the comings and goings of the extended Nebraska family and so on). At the very end of the letter she wrote

“I got your note. I cannot bring myself to write about it”.

Apparently her view of all Englishmen derived from the fact that, a few years earlier, an English conman passed through the state defrauding a large number of people as he went. She also believed that my mother would from then on be living in abject poverty. It took many years to correct those misapprehensions.

My parents had moved into a rambling flat near the church in Wisbech (arrowed in the postcard). By all accounts it was cold, inconvenient and had a leaking roof. My father had recently joined a local firm of solicitors at a salary of £6 a week which, even then, was barely subsistence level.

The flat where my parents first lived. Note the conservatory on the first floor to the left of the picture.

I didn’t get a mention in the postcard even though I had newly arrived - perhaps my mother was trying to forget the experience

I was born in a nursing home in Upwell (I think because my mother, at 32 was considered old to have a baby).

In the meantime my mother’s impressive medical qualifications were not considered good enough for the UK, so she had to take further examinations while still carrying me.  She did not practise medicine while living at the flat.

Of my own arrival, my father wrote in his book A Family Way:

The excitement of the first spring and summer culminated in the arrival of the first of the new generation - dark, hairy, unspeakably ugly but, to our massive relief, with only one head

But the flat, enthusiastically described by my mother, turned into a sour experience - my father again in his book:

Then one afternoon our son, crawling in the first floor greenhouse, prised open the door that led nowhere and fell 12 feet onto the concrete slab below.

Miraculously I suffered no injury, but I have managed to remain unspeakably ugly ever since! For my second near death experience a few years later go to my post: “Both Waving and Drowning”

My parents moved out of the flat to a house with no dangerous French windows before buying a plum orchard in the village of Elm and building a house in the middle of it.

There my mother set up a medical practice in the village. We had her surgery (= doctor’s office to Americans) in our home. Those were days when appointments were non-existent. If patients wanted treatment they arrived at the surgery. They sat in the waiting room (always festooned with geraniums) until they were called through. If they were too ill she drove out to see them at home in her Morris Minor convertible car (she had 3 in succession - a green one, a black one and lastly a pale blue one in which I passed my driving test). She did house calls every day. Virtually all babies in the village were delivered by my mother as home births. They all thrived, many to give their reminiscences later in life.

I take up bits of the the rest of the story in other postings. See “That bloody machine” and “The other D Day”