Find Me

Scattered around my computer monitor were three of my mother’s journals and two boxes of her saved letters, bundled and tied up with string.  Colourful stamps and postmarks were visible on the envelopes as were addresses, written in familiar hand-writing, faded with time.

Writing my mother’s memoir had become my ‘pandemic project’.  I’d spent the last long months reading her old diaries and letters, recognizing some of the stories and reveling in the ones that were new.  Rainbow-coloured post-it notes bloomed from between diary pages, letters were now organized chronologically, and I’d created an outline of key events to help me keep on track. 

On this particular January day, I was ready to type the first sentence.  My fingers were quivering over the keyboard when my eyes fell on a scrap of paper poking out from a notebook.  My own handwriting demanded “Find London 1947.”  My hands dropped into my lap, and I remembered a day three years earlier and my mother’s voice:

“After all your badgering, I’ve finally written it down for you - my memories of arriving in post-war London, after travelling across the Atlantic on a converted troop-ship in 1947.  Do you want these pages now?”

I could remember her telling me the beginning of the story:  “There were four of us in a cabin on the lowest deck.  No port-hole.  Everyone was sea-sick.  My cabin mates included a G.I. war bride, who kept telling me I was absolutely mad and going the wrong way across the Atlantic, which she would not do herself for anything in the world except to see her sick mother; and a white-haired Canadian born in England, thrilled at the prospect of her first trip "back home" since before the war; and an Irishwoman who stayed in her bunk clutching a bowl to be sick into and calling in heart-rending tones on the Mother of God to help her.”

But try as I might, I could not remember my mother having given me any pages.  And in the months I had spent reading her papers and correspondence, I knew I had not seen them there.  Lost, I said to myself sadly, turning my head to look out the window.  Lost forever.

Then, as that forlorn thought repeated in my mind, I felt a gentle pressure on my cheek, feeling the way a warm breeze does on a hot summer day.  But there was no breeze, and certainly no warmth on this sweater and slippers and hot-mug-of-tea January day.  My head moved, instinctively, the way it might have if someone had suddenly pointed and said, “Look!”

And then my eyes saw something I had not really seen for almost 3 years.  Behind my computer monitor was another, smaller computer – an Apple computer.  My mother’s.  Slim, petite, so innocuous as to be invisible, although of course it wasn’t.  No-one in my family had wanted it; no-one knew how to use it.  It had ended up missing the donation box and been brought to my home and placed in a logical spot – on a computer desk.  Hidden in plain sight and then forgotten.

I knew suddenly, clearly and urgently that the story had to be there.  But how to access it?  I moved my monitor aside and pulled the Apple computer forward.  I rummaged in my desk drawer, through pens and paperclips, old photos and full notebooks until my hand closed over the unfamiliar shape of the Apple computer’s mouse.

To my astonishment, my fingers knew what to do by themselves.  They found the non-intuitive location of the ‘on’ button and then clicked the foreign little mouse which behaved quite differently from my own.

And there on the screen were the icons of folders.  And bless them, they were named.

And one of them, “Memories of England.”