THE LETTERS
BY ERICA CERVINI
Twice a day Rose Pearlman waited for the postman’s whistle that roused her street. She’d open her front door with its red tulip leadlight panel and follow the tessellated path that curled to the right past a lavender bush to her letterbox. Rose depended on the twice-daily letter drops at 36 Lambeth Place in the Melbourne bayside suburb of St Kilda to learn if four of her eight surviving children serving in World War II were safe.
Rose would sift through the envelopes to identify those with foreign stamps, which alerted her that her children had written. If they had, she’d take the letters to the sitting room at the end of her long hallway, sit on her chair cloaked in floral velvet and read. Once Rose had pored over the letters, she’d place them in a brown case she had used for moves from East Melbourne to Ballarat and then to St Kilda. She also kept newspaper clippings about her children in the case, which mice had nibbled on for decades.
The war letters made Rose the centre of attention on her street. A constant flow of family and neighbours would knock on her door to comfort Rose while she was waiting for the postman’s whistle. Sarah Rubin did this with food and gossip.
“Rose, I have vanilla slices from Patersons,” Sarah would sing from Rose’s unlocked front door and then totter up the hallway to the lean-to kitchen.
The Letters
“Tea, Sarah?” Rose would ask.
“Yes, please. Have you heard, Rose, that Mark Goldman and Evelyn Fridman are engaged? I thought that Mark was going to marry that Annie girl,”
Rose also visited friends and family who lived in St Kilda to give them local news and updates about her children at war. Few people had phones in those days, so most people tapped on each other’s doors to say hello and spread news. They resembled worker ants sculpting their paths, stopping to pass on messages, and then off again along their network of trails.
The visits distracted Rose, but not for too long before she would be wondering again when she’d hear from her children. They understood this. Rose’s second oldest daughter, Celia, an army nurse left for the Middle East via India in February 1941. She gave Rose some comfort for her upcoming sixty-sixth birthday.
Arrived safely. Happy Birthday Mother in Advance.
Love all. Celia Pearlman. 6 March 1941.
The telegram’s banner featured a sketch of a bird in shades of indigo and cornflower, its underbelly a splash of vermillion and yellow. In the background were calm waters, yachts and run-abouts. Rose responded with a letter and photo of herself with the
The Letters
inscription: “To my dear darling daughter Celia who loves you dearly, Your devoted Mother. I hope you like it.”
Leslie, Rose’s second oldest son, flattered his mother in one of his letters from Rabaul in New Guinea. “I bet you looked the best of the lot,” he wrote in reference to a Jewish dance Rose had told him about in one of her letters. Leslie’s words of comfort were also peppered with humour as he allayed his mother’s worries that she should send him supplies:
There is nothing at all I need in the way of eats and clothes etc. We are pretty well fed and clothed so really there is no need to bother about us. There is not very much beer about at present but still we manage to get enough!
Celia, Leslie and their brother Cyril, who was stationed in Egypt, kept writing. Lloyd, another brother, would pen his letters when he joined the army and then air force. Some days Rose’s letterbox was festooned with her children’s letters.
In February 1942, Leslie’s letters stopped. But there was hope more would eventually arrive. Rose had written a letter to the Red Cross to ask if they had news about Leslie. They did:
Your son with a party of six or seven others, crossed the river by canoe while our informant set off in a different direction…it may well be that he was taken
The Letters
prisoner then or soon after. We sympathise with you very sincerely in this time of great anxiety and trust that your suspense will soon be relieved by knowing definitely that he is safe, even if he should be a prisoner of war.
If Les is a prisoner-of-war, he probably can’t get in contact with us, Rose thought.
The army also gave Rose hope that he was alive in a POW camp because they told her to keep writing to Leslie. So, Rose kept him informed about family and friends.
Dear Les,
We hope you are well as we are all here. Your brothers Lloyd and Cyril are married. Harold has a son Anthony Leslie. Lots of love from everyone.
From Mother and Family.
Five days after World War II ended, the telegram girl knocked on Rose’s front door and passed a flimsy envelope to her. Rose handed it back because she didn’t have her glasses with her.
“Can you tell me who it is from, please?” Rose asked the girl.
The telegram girl opened the envelope, surveyed the clipped sentences and found the name.
“Les,” she replied.
“Our Les,” Rose whispered. She had been waiting three and a half years to hear news from “Our Les”, her son.
The telegram girl then took it upon herself to read aloud the eleven words on the thin tea-coloured paper. “Dear Faye, Peace greetings. Hope to see you soon. Les Goldsmith,” she said.
In a split second, Rose’s joy dissolved. The telegram girl hadn’t read Les’ last name until now, and it wasn’t Pearlman, but Goldsmith. The eleven words were intended
for Faye, Rose’s daughter who lived with her and whose boyfriend, Les Goldsmith, was also serving in World War II.
In 1946, the army returned the letters to Rose she had written to “Our Les”.