Have you saved any love letters?

I wrote so many letters to my ex husband when he was at sea .. that I knew his 8 digit personal service number off by heart... and 45 years later I can still reel it off.... and all the letters were sent to a BFPO address.. which is British Forces Post Office... because clearly when a ship is at sea somewhere in the world.. it can't be delivered to the ship itself by regular methods....

.. so the BFPO office would deliver sacks of mail to the ship about once a week sometimes longer sometimes 2 weeks.... so by the time I'd sent a letter to him.. and he'd received it.. and then sent one in return.. sometimes he sent 2... there could be as long as 3 or 4 weeks between correspondence.. not ideal when the wife is home alone with a baby.. as I was and were so many other Navy wives
I know exactly what it's like. My wife was at home with our first son. I couldn't tell her where I was going or how long it would be before I could write again. Sometimes I'd get several letters at once.

Mail call Taiwan. I'm not in the photo.

image-2025-08-08-162323878.png
 
I have a memory box with a half century of cards, letters, and photos that have great meaning to me.

I rarely add anything these days or go through it, I know the contents by heart and should really dispose of it.

The good news is that one of the major contributors, over the past half century, is still a very important part of my life and that is what’s most important to me.
 
I still have the first love letter I ever received. I was twelve years old and in sixth grade. The letter was so very sweet. It was from Bernard, the optometrist's fourteen-year-old son who was in eighth grade.

Bernard would walk me home after school, carry my books, and offer me candy, but I hardly spoke to him, because my father would have had a stroke if he had known that a boy was pursuing me.

To find out why I didn't like him, Bernard even stopped into my mom's shop. My mother attempted to gently explain that I didn't dislike him, but he needed to stop since his attention would get me in trouble.

If I had been older, things would have been different.
 
When my father came to Australia in 1946 by plane, and we came out 4 months later because the boat had to go into dry-dock for major repairs. My poor father must have been so lonely in a new country and knew nobody. He used to write long letters to my mother, and she kept every one of them. My sisters and I only got to read them when our mother passed on. They were beautiful letters telling our mother all about this wonderful country we were going to live in. These letters were in an old box with a blue ribbon around them. He always ended the letter, "Give my little angels a kiss and a hug from Daddy"
She wrote to him, but they never kept her letters, don't know why. Only when my father was on his death bed, I told him he was lucky to have 3 daughters and it would have been nice if he had a son, only then did he mention there would have been, only my mother lost a baby before we came to Australia. That broke my heart hearing his story. Don't know why she never mentioned it to us. When I see photos of her, she hardly ever smiled and always looked sad.
 


Back
Top