BackStory: Marguerite (and Maude)
Marguerite, ‘star’ of the podcast Fondly yours….
Here is my mother, Marguerite, shortly before leaving Hanover, New Hampshire for a new life in Costa Rica. She is savouring a strawberry soda, the sweetness of which she would write about reminiscently a few years later. She looks like she could be in mid-twirl, on one of those tall, round soda-shop stools with the thick leather-covered seats, as she looks dreamily off into space – perhaps composing a letter in her mind.
Marguerite was a prolific letter-writer all her life. The first recipients of her letters were her grandmothers whom she wrote to even before moving to Costa Rica when she was 13. She wrote to them whenever she was away from her home town of Hanover, New Hampshire. Her grandmothers saved every letter and eventually returned them to Marguerite, who in turn saved them as well as many, many others – filling boxes that would decades later end up in my own hands. Almost every word of Marguerite’s in my podcast Fondly yours… are taken directly from those letters.
In Episode 2 of my podcast you will hear of another family member who wrote long letters home: Marguerite’s aunt, Eleanor-Owen (nicknamed with her husband’s name attached as there were 3 Eleanors in the family). She too was an adventurer, whose letters written home to her parents were collected and published into her book Turkestan Reunion, (a Good Read for those with wanderlust and a love of adventuresome stories, especially ones that take place during a long trek in a caravan of horse-drawn sledges through the dead of a Siberian winter!). As you can see, letter-writing, particularly in a story-telling fashion, was a family tradition.
When I was deciding for my mother’s story which of her letters to include, I came up with an idea of how to include details of my father’s young teenage years as well.
My family had only scant information about his youth growing up in Liverpool, England during the war years. And so I invented a penpal for Marguerite, a girl her own age named Maude. And I placed her conveniently living next door to young Will Hall, as he was known then, six years before he met Marguerite.
So the format of the podcast is an exchange of letters between Marguerite and Maude, with occasional excerpts from Marguerite’s diaries (which she also saved her whole life, and which I have also plumbed for this story.)
Maude’s letters have been composed by me. Therefore, I needed to slightly tweak Marguerite’s letters, especially at the beginnings and ends, in order to have them respond and be directed to her kindred-spirited pen-pal rather than her grandmothers, to whom they were actually addressed. But rest assured, (especially dear family members and friends who knew her), that the eclectic vocabulary and uniquely mature writing style for one so young, are Marguerite’s.
I found myself channeling my mother as I wrote Maude’s letters, and for that reason Maude’s writing style is similar to Marguerite’s. But that’s not unexpected between kindred spirits, is it?
Come back next month to this Backstory page to find out more detail behind the characters, settings and time in history for both the real Marguerite, her family and the fictional Maude and her family in the creative non-fiction podcast Fondly yours…