Letters from home

On the rare occasions that I write letters, they’re pretty good letters, even if I say so myself. But as my mother, an indefatigable letter-writer herself, will tell you, I’m absolutely no good at sustaining a relationship by letter alone. Years can go by between letters from me, and even the most devoted of friends eventually give up the one-sided effort and fade away. Not even the immediacy of email helps. I might forward the occasional joke, but don’t hang around waiting for a newsy juicy bit of personal correspondence, because it will be a long wait.

I’m lucky to have some of the family letters, although only two written by Sarah, to her adult children. The majority of the letters are from members of the Hall and Norgrove families in England to Sarah and William in New Zealand. I started out thinking that for Sarah, letters would have been a lifeline between her and the family left behind in England. She didn’t have the instant give and take of email; she didn’t even have the dubiously reliable New Zealand postal system which might get a letter from one end of the country to the other in under a week. She had to rely on the dodginess of sailing ships which might not even survive the voyage between England and New Zealand, and if they did, took months on the voyage.

In the early days of Sarah’s life in New Zealand, it would have taken up to a year to receive a reply to a letter she had written – four, five, six months for her letter to reach England, and the same again for the reply to reach her. Letters would have been less a conversation than a series of news bulletins travelling in two directions. This might have served to reinforce Sarah’s sense of isolation and separation from her family – while letters might have kept her connected to family and neighbourhood news, they would also be a reminder of how far away England was.

Paper was not the cheap commodity it is to us these days. Paper for letters was often scarce and always expensive; a newsy letter would be written on both sides of a sheet, and then “crossed” – the paper turned 90 degrees to write across it again. Then the sheet used as the envelope – for there was no such thing as a ready-made envelope – it would be written on as much as possible before being carefully folded around the first sheet and addressed. Postage would have been another expense, although possibly more for the families in England than in New Zealand – the New Zealand Company encouraged immigrants to write positive accounts of their new lives to those at “home”, presumably by giving free postage on their own ships. For the Company, it was free advertising, and many of the letters were collected up and published in their fortnightly English newspaper, The New Zealand Journal.

I was reading an article the other day that seemed almost surprised at the degree of literacy of people of Sarah’s class. I’ve got no way of knowing how and when she learned her letters, but it’s clear that Sarah, her parents and her siblings could all read and write, and that Sarah herself enjoyed reading. “You were very fond of a newspaper when you were at Ilford”, her sister-in-law Hannah wrote, enclosing a selection for Sarah’s amusement. Even though she could read and write, it seems unlikely that Sarah had written many letters before leaving for New Zealand. In England, her family lived nearby and she would have seen them often – no need then for letters to them. People of her class rarely travelled, so she was unlikely to have any friends living at a distance with whom she corresponded. Moving to New Zealand brought many changes, and among them would have been the necessity to maintain relationships with the people left behind through letter-writing.

Sarah’s early letters back to the family in England can only be guessed at. The first letters would probably have been written from the emigration barracks before boarding the ship at Gravesend, and from Gertrude between her departure from Gravesend and her final departure from the Downs eighteen days later. These would have been hasty letters, written when the opportunity of mailing arose, notes about shipboard life and how the family was settling in on board. There may have been one or two opportunities for similar letters during the five months Gertrude was at sea. When another ship was sighted heading in the opposite direction, wherever possible the two ships would drop sail within hailing distance, and news would be exchanged. A boat would be sent between them with mailbags and any other urgently needed provisions. From the first sighting of another ship’s sail, there would have been a few hours, or sometimes only minutes, to compose a quick letter to let the family know that all was well so far.

The first letter Sarah wrote home after landing in New Zealand must have been a difficult one. She wouldn’t have wanted to tell of their disappointment in finding Wellington so primitive, much less than the promised land they had been led to expect. She might not have wanted to confess the poverty of her first home, with its mud floors and leaky roof. She would have wanted to keep her fears about William’s employment prospects to herself, along with her homesickness, and her alienation in a land where not even the birds and trees were familiar. That first letter would have been short, telling how they were safely landed after twenty weeks at sea. It might have told how the town was laid out around the curving bays of the harbour, and of the steep bush-clad hills behind. She might have said it was warm, that the climate seemed promising, and that the nearby bush teemed with bird life which had no natural predators. She might have mentioned the friendships made on the ship, perhaps mentioned other people who had travelled from the same town as the Norgroves. Any mention of their prospects would of necessity have been vague and positive.

What is possibly the reply to that very first letter comes from Sarah’s father, William King Hall. It’s very short, written in the awkward hand of a carpenter for whom expressing himself in a letter is an unfamiliar experience.

Send us word how far you live from the waterline or where you landed and how far Mr Kebble lives from you Mr Allard would be very pleased to have a letter from you He is delighted to hear you are doing well he says William is a clever tradesman and will become a great man he tells every body what he can do

Tell William his mother and sister was well when we heard from them

What a brief and tantalising glimpse of her father this must have been for Sarah. We have to hope that she had received an earlier letter, sent while she was still at sea, which contained some news of her mother, and brothers and sisters, especially her blind younger brother Henry, and Caroline, the sister who was born only months after Ovid. At least there was news of William’s family, and a hint of what was to become another letter-writing relationship, between William’s family in Colchester and Sarah’s family in Ilford.

There’s evidence of correspondence between the two families, forwarding the precious letters and news received from New Zealand. William wrote to his mother, probably in 1846, asking him to find and send a glazier’s vice. His mother forwarded the letter to Sarah’s father, who made enquiries, and on receiving a letter with the price, wrote back to William’s mother Hannah on the bottom of it, asking whether she could find out from someone in the much larger town of Colchester how the vice could be shipped to New Zealand. Hannah in turn must have forwarded the letter to William and Sarah, although any letter of her own that accompanied it has not survived. Even so, the letter would have given Sarah quite a jolt, as William mentions that his wife, Sarah’s mother, is ill and not expected to survive.

A month or two later, the expected black-edged letter arrives from Hall, informing Sarah of her mother’s death, and enclosing a lock of her hair for a keepsake. For the four or five months it took for the letter to reach her, Sarah must have imagined her mother alive; the last month or so, perhaps, after receiving the earlier letter, wondering and worrying. Her father is in turn prosaic - “She was confined to her room for 6 months with a liver complaint. Mr Allison opened her and examined her liver which was her particular wish. He said her liver weighed near 12 pounds”, and anguished – “O Sarrah if you was here I could tell you my trouble but then I think again. Ah Poor Sarrah she has got plenty of trouble for I cannot tell what you go through”. The letter is marked at this point with the stain of one large tear-drop, Sarah’s grief still evident more than 150 years later.

Letters were a mixed blessing then, when the news was bad, and the recipient too far away to be of any help. And a long gap between letters was just as bad, worrying about the reasons for lack of news. In the same letter that tells of her mother’s death, Sarah’s father goes on to say :

My Dear I received your letter in March. Your Poor Mother and I were glad to hear you and William was well likewise the Dear Children. I hope they will never leave you to cause you to think and fret as we have done about you but you seem to think we had forgotten you all together and say you will not rite but I hope you know better than to think so light of a lone Father and Motherless Sisters and Brothers but you are quite just in Finding Fault for I feel guilty and ashamed of neglect in not riteing to you oftener but I hope you will forgive me and as soon as my mind is moore at rest I will rite a long letter. I hope your love to me nor my love to you will never be altered w[h]ile we are in this world.

Poor Sarah. If there was one letter from home she would have wished not to have survived the long voyage to New Zealand, it would have to be this one.