A mother’s letter to Australia, by Ann Thirsk
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this letter, written in 1857, a farmer’s wife in an English village writes to her daughter, who has recently emigrated to Australia with her husband.
My dear Mary, Your letter of the 2nd of May came on Tuesday, and your father read it aloud twice in the kitchen and then took it to the Red Lion and read it a third time, so that the whole village now knows that you have a cow and a verandah and that the flies are very bad. I am glad of the cow. I am not so sure about the verandah, which sounds to me like a place for catching cold.
There is a great deal of news. The new curate has come, and he is very young and very earnest and preaches for fifty minutes, which your father says is forty too many. Susan Dyer is to be married at Michaelmas to the miller’s son, and says she will have white satin, though where she will get it from in Lowick nobody knows. The black hen you reared from a chick is laying again after her moult, and is as bad tempered as ever. Your father has whitewashed the dairy.
I have done as you asked about your things. Your books are in the chest under the stairs with camphor against the moth, and your blue merino I have turned and made over for your sister Hetty, who is grown so tall you would not know her. I kept back the little shawl with the fringe. I do not know why, for it is no use to anybody, but it hangs on the back of my bedroom door and I have not been able to put it away.
You ask whether we are well. We are very well. Your father’s knee troubles him in the wet, but it always did. I have no complaints at all, except that the house is very quiet. I set four places at the table on Sunday without thinking, and Hetty had to take one away. I tell you this only because it made us laugh.
Do not trouble yourself about writing every month, my love, for I know how much there is to do in a new country, and the post is so dear. When you do write, tell me small things. Tell me what you have for dinner and what colour the sky is in the morning and whether the cow has a name. I read your letters many more times than your father does, though I do not take them to the Red Lion.
God bless you and keep you, and James also. We think of you every day. Your loving Mother.
“The writer hides her sadness about her daughter’s absence.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1 Section A (30%) - Reading, covering 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.