Dear Leticia
I’m so excited. I’m coming to London and plan to burrow into your boxes in the Wellcome Collection. During the first week in January 2020 I will attempt to get my head around what you have bequeathed to the world. And then I’m off to the New York Writers’ Workshop in Sardinia for a week.
When I return from Sardinia, I will spend as much time with you as I can, also hoping to meet with your niece. In between all of that I am looking forward to catching up with my English grandchildren and their parents.
Sardinia
Although my enquiries have so far been unproductive, I still hope to visit the Melbourne seaside suburb of St Kilda before the London trip, to get a sense of the place that both your parents were thrown into. I can empathise with Charles Fairfield and Isabella MacKenzie who met on board the ship and later married and made their first home in St Kilda. In the late 1890s, they made, what must have been, a gruelling journey from England to Australia. I am able to imagine their displacement of self and culture on their arrival, from knowing the experience of my own parents when, with me in tow, they left their beloved Scotland after the ravages of the second world war, to make a new life in Australia, at that time still a colonial backwater in many ways.
When writing your biography, I had already planned to include details of my journey to find you. And now, the reading I am undertaking in preparation for documenting your history supports this. The thinking seems to be that the reader of a historical story should be aware of the writer’s time and place, that the work can only ever be an interpretation of the past rather than an authoritarian truth. I just know that at every step in this journey, I will be hoping that you would have approved.
I almost said to you: ‘Don’t hold your breath, this could be a very long project – oops – wrong thing to say to a woman who physically stopped breathing in 1978. However, hopefully, I can breathe into your amazing story and help bring it to life for posterity,
The Wellcome Collection Building in London.
