Reading A Stack of WWII Letters

Yesterday, I read half of the stack of WWII letters from Grandpa Roy Keith. He’d showed me these letters when I was in collage and helping take care of him until he died. He explained how the V-Mail would fold up to create an envelope. And others would be shrunk, mailed across seas, and blown back up in the states so they could be read again.

I inherited these letters when he died, along with the rest of his genealogy collection which I had begun to explore with him, but I had only read one or two of them while looking for a prop in our WWII play. Reading the others felt too much like snooping. But my grandparents have been gone for a long time now.

But they have been sitting on my bedroom vanity for a while. It occured to me that, just like Scarlett does in Across the Distance, I have a stack of unread letters from 80 years in the past. So last evening, in Scarlet fashion, I sorted the envelopes into a rough order and ventured into 1943.

The very first one, was written, apparently, after Grandma Ruby had left the base thinking Keith had to leave when he really just had to load his bags. He lamented the loss of time with her, (worried perhaps) that she felt snubbed, and pleaded for the details of her route home.

A Texas native transplanted to New York in February, he was freezing and worried she'd catch her death of cold. He begged her to take a more southern route home, if she could, to avoid traveling in the cold. He waffled on whether to tell her to write him at that address or wait for an official address because he wasn’t even supposed to be sending this letter to her. But a friend carried it into town and mailed it civilian-style and on the back of the envelope, he hastily scribbled, “Do not use this address.”

My grandfather was an accountant (I did not inherit his math skills) but he was also a sharpshooter, so after as he was drafted, he quickly became a rifle instructor teaching the boys how to handle a gun before they were sent off to Europe.

I used to play dice with him by rules no one else in the world uses and he would make me keep score for us and calculate in my head. I’d conceal one hand under the table and tap my fingers against my leg to compute the answers.

So I was surprised in one of his early letters to his parents and grandmother to find a lovely description of feeling the Mediterranean breeze, but not being able to pick up a shell. Which confused the heck out of me because in the last letter, he was stationed in New York and this address retained that location. He then went on to tell his mother how much she would love the location because everyone was planting flowerbeds. In fact, it was said…

And then we will never know, because someone from the censoring office neatly clipped out his sentence and chopped off the rest of the letter. He apparently went into more description in a second letter to his wife, and it was rejected completely from being sent as it held too many hints about his current location.

So his next letter was a rather scathing, “How am I supposed to write home if I’m not allowed to write anything about where we are or what we're doing? Dear family. How are you. I am fine. Goodbye.” After which he cooled off and tiptoed into a very generalized letter.

This letter made me so sad, but also laugh a little because the snarky tone he started out with is so close to where my brain goes when I’m especially peeved about something—or feeling trapped, which I’m sure he was.

Another letter rejoiced that they were allowed to disclose their location and said “their little boy” was on the side of a mountain somewhere in North Africa. A later, more depressed letter admitted he didn’t actually know exactly where in North Africa he was, but he was so high up that he could march straight into the clouds and actually they had come down to meet them that day.

A later letter mentioned old ruins. Do you remember, dear, when the biggest sport was watching lions eat people? But he followed it up with "the statures are nice, but I’d rather see my blue-eyed girl."

And every single letter for the first three months held a refrain of, “Please don’t stop writing. I’m worried about you. I haven’t received a letter from anyone… Well, dear, I hit a new low. I went to mail call and as usual there was nothing for me. But the guy next to me got his letter from May 28 (a week or two before) and I haven’t gotten any of mine for three months. You are writing, aren't you? Oh, I know you are...If these guys don't get the mail straightened out, I'm going to blow my top."

When I started reading the letters, I wondered what the experience would be like and if it would mirror the sort of experience people have in novels when they snoop into a stack of mail. And it was more coherent than I expected. I cried more than I thought I would too, I think because I also just spent almost a year across the US away from my family and the home I love. And that was in a place where I volunteered to go, worked on things I enjoy doing, and had a phone to call home on my day off.

One of my favorite letters was when Grandpa (finally) heard from home that they had moved his grandmother into a room on the first story of the house. He suggested they close in the porch and create a place they could all relax in the evenings when it was hot, then went on to suggest changes to several rooms in the house before reaching the end of the page and realizing he’d used up all his space on an imaginary remodel.

So there was a second letter enclosed that he’d written on the same day and informed them that was the fastest letter he’d ever written, and they probably didn’t want to hear his ideas for the house, even though he had more of them. But I did, because I live in that same house, and they did indeed enclose the back porch.

Still, it was fun to imagine him approaching whomever was in charge of handing out the V-Mail paper and being like, “Um…could I have another one of those, please?”

All of his words in this post are paraphrased, pulled from my memory because the envelops are delicate, and I didn’t want to hunt for specific lines. Someday soon I will type up the letters, so we have his words in our family history. But for last night, it made a pleasant evening sitting in the house my grandfather was raised in, reading his mail from 1943.

So much of our modern world no longer values the past. We don’t tend to pass items down to the next generation or keep the china set that belonged to our grandmother. And on some level, I understand it. You can’t cook in a kitchen that has no space for the things you need to use because it’s full of things you don’t.

But most people aren’t lucky enough to sit in the same rooms their grandparents used when they were the same age. They don’t go down the stairs with their hand on the rail their grandfather slid down and fell off and broke his arm. They don’t get to harvest grapes from a vine their great-grandmother planted and use some of her items to can jelly just the way she did.

But I do. And I’m so happy to be home.