Fragments...

Anne here. 

On the last day of my trip, somewhere between New York City and home, I lost my camera. I don't know how, or where — I can't even recall taking it out of my bag, or using it that day, but it's gone. It's not the loss of the camera itself that's so distressing, but the pictures still on it, all my pictures from the RWA conference, my stay in Maryland, and New York. People, places, moments captured for me to look back on for years to come, each one, a small story. No longer. To whoever has the camera now, those pictures are just random shots of strangers. Without context, they're meaningless. 

It got me thinking about travel records of the past. Then journeys were more a matter of days and weeks, not just a matter of hours. It was a more leisurely pace and people had more time in which to record their reflections. On my first big solo trip away from home (3 months travelling through Europe) I filled a diary with anecdotes, descriptions, pasted in illustrations, tickets, postcards etc and I brought home enough photos to fill an album. Had I lost my diary, the finder might still have been able to enjoy reading it — assuming they could decipher my scrawl— because writing creates its own context.

I love reading old diaries and letters. They bring worlds and times and people to life. For my second book, Tallie's Knight, I used the letters of an Irish lady travelling on the continent with friends in 1802-3. My third book was prompted by a story I read in an old newspaper — the Fiji Times of the 1870's. When I was at university I did some research for a professor, recording shipping movements in and out of Fiji, and I read years worth of the Fiji Times. I read for hours more than he paid me, because I couldn't help getting distracted by the wonderful stories that kept popping up. And years later, one of those stories sparked a novel.

Journals and letters also played a big part in the writing of my most recent book, TO CATCH A BRIDE (coming in September.) It's partly set in Egypt, and I used a number of travel journals and diaries of Englishmen traveling in and through Egypt at that time.

The trouble with research is that so much of it is so fascinating, but doesn't relate to the actual story. It helps evoke the atmosphere of the time, and throws up all sorts of fun and interesting snippets, but any research that makes it into a novel is very much the tip of an iceberg.

For instance, here's a description by an Englishman of his first experience in riding camels: "I had the rope of the camel's head in my hand, and I found the motion unpleasant, as is that of all animals which move two legs on the same side at one time. I did not know what to make of my fellow travellers, but Mustapha offered me his pipe: I smoked very comfortably, and soon became more used to the movement...[snip] After two hours travelling was much alarmed in respect to the motion of the animal for about that time I felt a most violent pain in my side and back, and this continued to increase, so that I was obliged to dismount and walk." 

What interested me was not just that he found the motion

 of the camel painful, but that he happily shared a pipe with his

 arab servant, despite the presence of plague in the region.

Egypt in the early 19th century was still very much affected by plague. Yes the plague, bubonic plague, the same disease that had decimated Europe's population in earlier centuries. I knew it was still in evidence in Egypt — it was one of the reasons why the various quarters of Cairo were able to be closed off. The fascinating aspect for me in the contemporary accounts was the attitude various Englishmen had toward the theories of how one came to catch the Plague. Science had not yet proved the existence of germs, and it was very much a question of faith as to what one believed. So a wide range of beliefs were in evidence. 

Several openly scoffed at the nonsense talked by "these contagionist fellows" who claimed that the disease came from contact or close proximity. It had nothing to do with that, one fellow claimed; it was all about keeping active. To test this theory, one group of soldiers had been marched quickly through a plague-infested village, while another (hapless) group had camped in the village for several days. Of the soldiers who had marched briskly through the village, only a small number came down with plague, whereas many of those who had lolled about at the ease in the village had become infected. Proof positive, it was claimed, that activity kept the disease from catching hold. There were all sorts of "remedies" for its treatment, too. And debate raged about the proper method of quarantine, and the question of what materials carried the infection and which didn't. Wool and feathers were, apparently, fatal carriers; oil cloth and wheat were not.

 My characters were sailing home from Egypt so I became very interested in the domestic arrangements of the ship. On your left is an officer's cabin from an American naval ship of the period.  On your right is a bathroom.  The captain on some boats had a bath and even a flush toilet. And since my characters were traveling on a private ship, they had even better quarters than this.

 There's more information on ships cabins here.

So much of the flavor and small detail of my books comes from diaries and letters kept and preserved over time and published in some manner, sometimes long after the death of the writer. I have boxes of letters saved over the years. I used to be a prolific letter writer. Not so much lately. It's all emails. But I can pull out a letter in my brother's handwriting and it evokes him and his humor and dry wit in a way that photos can't ever do. He died when I was 20.  I have letters from my Dad, who's been dead some years, and from friends I haven't seen in years, and I can pull out a packet of letters and be transported to another time and place. I have a box of letters that my mother wrote to my godmother over the years, that my godmother gave back to Mum, and I've learned things about my childhood I never would have known otherwise.

 I wonder what will happen to that sort of record from our own time. So often we keep blogs now instead of  journals and send emails instead of letters, and cyber communication can disappear without a trace. As can cameras...

So I'm wondering, do you keep a journal? Do you save letters? Do you write letters any more, or is it invariably email? Or tell us about your precious mementoes from the past.

Comments

[romsfuulynn]

I have so many precious mementos I haven't even gotten through them.

(I'm in the process of cleaning out the house my mother lived in for 54 years. Her father moved in with us at that point, bringing his family stuff.) I have the photo album my grandfather put together for his grandmother of the pictures he took & developed on a trip to Europe with his mother and aunt. When he was 13. In 1896 & 97. Nine month trip. And his mother's letters to his father. Same trip.

Unfortunately she used tissue thin paper, dark ink and they are very difficult to decipher because they show through.

My family keeps EVERYTHING. (I just threw out 1937 telephone bills.)

[Nicola Cornick]

Anne, thank you for such an interesting insight into travelling in Egypt in the early nineteenth century. I love the fascinating snippets of information that travel diaries can contain and have been drawing on them heavily for my current manuscript too, though from Arctic travellers in my case.

I had no idea that plague was still rife in Egypt at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and how interesting that medical theory suggested you could avoid it by keeping active! In the seventeenth century in England they apparently thought it was an airborne disease so that if you had a big gap at the bottom of your door the plague germs would be able to blow out of the house on the wind!

I don't keep a journal except when I am on holiday when we write detailed travel diaries. I can't imagine anyone in the future wanting to draw on them for research, but who knows?!

I'm looking forward to To Catch a Bride very much, even more so now I know more about the background!

[Patricia Rice]

Oh, Anne, I'm so sorry about your camera! Losing all those pics has to be devastating. I wonder if we all took a picture of our addresses and left that on the memory stick, if anyone would bother returning the stick? Probably not.

I envy your wealth of letters. If my parents ever wrote so much as a paragraph, I don't know of it. I wrote copious journals while I was growing up, but my mother threw them out when she moved. It would be wonderful to have those memories back again!

[Sherrie Holmes]

Sherrie, here.
Anne, how sad about the loss of your camera. Have you considered running an ad in the personals section of the local papers? You never know. It might produce results.

I've tried to keep journals over the years, and still have some of them stored away, but I don't like to read them. Seems the only time I wrote in them was when I was going through some big turmoil such as divorce or a run of bad luck. Life's too short to hash over old woes!

My grandmother and I maintained a correspondence of 30+ years until she died at age 91. Toward the end, I realized I should be asking her questions about family history that would be forever lost when she died. I saved those letters. There are wonderful family stories in them, recounting life in the US from 1900 through 1991.

I have numerous research books containing journals written by women who crossed the prairies in covered wagons during the settling of the American West. Some of them are so vivid and bring to life an era that is long gone.

One journal writer (a bit jealously) told of a tall, horse-faced young spinster in their wagon train who always had a circle of young men about her because she was so jolly and full of good humor. Despite the many hardships they endured, this cheerful young woman obviously provided a spot of happiness during the long, arduous journey.

[anne gracie]

Romsfuulyn, what a treasure trove you have to go through. The album from your grandfather is particularly precious. And the letters, difficult to decipher as they are -- they were typical of what people used to send letters in those days, minimizing weight and therefore postage.
I don't understand people throwing out old things like letters or diaries or photos. I suppose it's the historian in me. I would rather take the stash to the local historical society and hand it over than throw anything like that out. It's amazing what history can be learned even from things like household bills.

[anne gracie]

Nicola, I'd seen references to plague, but until I delved into research I didn't realize it was Bubonic Plague -- I just assumed it was a general term -- plague and pestilence kind of thing.
But the city of Alexandria seemed to be constantly suffering from plague, and places like Cairo suffered from bouts of it in the warmer months.
And the so-called medical theory of infection I talked about was only one of the more bizarre factors. There were references to wind and fresh air and airborne misamas...
I couldn't get over the way several diarists referred to "contagionists and anticontagionists" as if they were political parties or some such, and scorn was heaped on the opposition, whichever it happened to be.

I'm looking forward to your arctic book. It sounds fascinating.

[anne gracie]

Pat! I can't believe your mother threw out your journals! How dreadful.
Mind you, my mother was similar. She used to give away my clothes and toys all the time -- usually my favorite things. And never asked me if I minded. But I learned to hide the things I didn't want gone.
Probably Mum's habit of clearing out my things is part of the reason I became a pack-rat.
I regularly destroyed the begun-but-never-continued journals I started each year when I was a kid because i couldn't bear anyone to find them.
In the last few years I've kept a writing journal and that I've found interesting to look back on, even from such a short distance of time.

[anne gracie]

Sherrie, thanks, but on that last day I went from the hotel to a taxi to the airport and home, so the possibilities are limited. And I've chased them all up except for the NY taxi -- after long waits on the phone at international rates, and still no actual person on the end of the line, I gave up.
Your grandmother's letters sound wonderful. As does that wagon train diary. I'm sure the people who kept those diaries couldn't imagine how valuable their accounts would be to future historians.

[pjpuppymom]

Oh Anne, I'm so sorry you lost your camera. I have all of my RWA photos (300+) and many photos of DC from a trip last November in online albums at a Kodak site. Would you like the link? You can email me offline at pjpuppymom (at) yahoo (dot) com.

I've always been fascinated by letters, journals and travel diaries. I'm an avid letter writer and while email has replaced some of it I still do a lot of letter writing. I've saved letters that I've received over the years and love taking walks down memory lane with them. While going through boxes of "stuff" after my dad's death I came across letters that my uncle had written to my grandparents while he was stationed in Europe during WWII - fascinating glimpses into a soldier's life.

I always keep travel diaries and enjoy re-visiting places via my writings and photos. When I traveled to Spain and Italy in 2005 I kept a daily diary and shared it via email each day with family and friends at home.

[pjpuppymom]

I'm counting the days until TO CATCH A BRIDE is released. I can't wait to read it!

~PJ

[Janice]

I love letters. Every time I touch that letter I received from my brother John when he was in the National Guard in Japan during the Korean War, I can hear his voice again and I feel all the emotions I felt in those days again -- my mother's worry, my fears, and my own feelings about being left out, because in those days adults kept hard matters secret from the children, and they were all adults.

Electrons on a screen just can't replace the sense of touching something that someone else touched. I gave a copy of the letter to his daughter; someday I'll give her the original.

Imagine the thrill of touching something that was touched by Napoleon, Wellington, Washington, Lincoln, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Sayers, Jane Austen -- or your own favorite regency writer :)

If I were writing this as science fiction, I'd say that DNA traces carry memory and can store up an entire individual - maybe that's why the Doctor can put his TimeLordness into a pocket watch and hide out as a mere human.

[Sue]

My husband and I started keeping a diary from the January of the year we were married (those appointment agendas with space to write each day). I wrote a week and then he wrote a week. I highly recommend it for new relationships, it was a great way to see inside a person's head. The big bonus now is that we have a very complete record of our first 10 years (we got tired of writing at 10)and it encompasses the wedding, births of our two children and deaths of both fathers. We often debate what to do with them; husband doesn't want the children to get at them but I think they are an important glimpse of life in the late 20th Century; warts and all! I have them hidden so they won't get thrown out.
Maybe someday someone will write a historical and use our diaries as a resource!

[Andrea Pickens]

Anne, first of all, so sorry to hear about your camera. That's so sad that you lost the record of your trip!

As I mentioned in on eof my earlier posts, my mother was anazing at keeping records of her life. Family and trips are beautifully documented through the years . . .and some years ago, she and my uncle transcribed my grandfather's journals from the High German of his trip through South America. Utterly fascinating!

I wish some of her skills had rubbed off on me, I haven't been very good at keeping my own reocrds.I guess I was spoiled having her document so much of my life.

That said, I, too, love looking at journals and photos from the past. I've always been fascinated by history, and there's no better way to taste, feel and smell another time than to experience it through the perceptions of someone right there. A journal is usually so immediate, with none of the "filters" of more formal writing. The raw honesty comes through, giving a real face to an era.

I do write letters (a habit ingrained by my mother) but you're right in wondering how well blogs and cyber writing will survive. My tech guy is always warning me that no one knows how long storage disks, CDs, etc will last, as things are so new. Maybe a slight change in the earth's atmosphere will obliterate all data—we just don't know!

[Maggie Robinson/Margaret Rowe]

Our camera was stolen out of checked luggage a few trips ago. I completely sympathize.Somewhere someone has deleted pictures of the Robinson kids having fun. Sniff.

I'm very bad at keeping track of where I've been and what I've done. All I know is, I always have a good time.:)

I read a fascinating journal of a 19th century trip down the Nile which I used bits of in one of my books. I wish I had the discipline to keep a journal, but perhaps my own adventures are not so adventurous.

[anne gracie]

Thanks PJ, the photos I lost were mainly of significance to me. I've bitten the bullet and bought a new camera, so I'm hoping/expecting that the old camera will turn up, therefore. ;)

I love the sound of your travel journals. They will become treasures as time passes. I recently pulled out my journal from my first big solo trip overseas and to my shock there were events in it I had completely forgotten.
Not long until my next book arrives. :) I hope you enjoy it.

[Wendy]

I have never lost a camera, but a few years back my computer crashed and I had not backed up the pictures that were saved on it. I spent a very long 3 days worrying until the computer gurus told me that they had managed to find and save my pictures.

I used to write letters all the time...my aunts, grandmothers, cousins, they were all subject to my questions and descriptions of my life! :) Like so many of us now, I have moved away from writing with pen and paper, and have to confess that even my emails are few and far between.

I have a journal that I have kept off an on (more off than on) for the past 10 years and a couple of diaries from high school and university. Like Sherri, I don't tend to read them over and I keep telling myself that I will write in the journal more often but just don't seem to get around to it.

[anne gracie]

Janice, I get the same sort of feelings when I read my brother's letters. And an old friend of my dad gave me a copy of a wonderful letter my dad had written him - I guess he treasured the original a lot. It was lovely to receive it.

There is a power in actual letters, far beyond the words they contain, I agree. I remember seeing some letters Jane Austen had written and it felt so personal. They were in a case, so I didn't touch them.

Sue, what an amazing achievement -- 10 years of marriage journalling. That's a very special thing to have done. I'm sure it would be a fantastic thing for your kids to read at some stage -- when you're verrrry old, or maybe dead. I hate the idea of anyone reading my personal stuff, too, but It's a wonderful social document as well, so you could leave it anonymously to a museum or library.... But your kids would love it.

If you could have seen the way my sisters and I wept over some fragments of letters my mother had kept - from Dad when he was away at war. Incomplete love letters... and so beautiful. We stood in the kitchen, just howling over one faded page...
My grandmother used to read my mother's letters before she let her have them -- how awful is that?

[anne gracie]

Andrea, I am a firm believer in hard copy. I have boxes of slides and old family films taken of my childhood, but we never dig out the slide projector and we have nothing to show the movies on. My nephew transferred it all to disk, but IMO it's the same thing -- you still need hardware to look at it.

But I have amy grandmother's old leather case that contains family photos going way back, and at the flick of a lid, I can look at my relatives from the 1890s, and my grandparents on their honeymoon, and my own parents in their courting days, and so on. Instant and viewable with no machinery...

[anne gracie]

Maggie my sympathies. I don't know how my camera could have been lost. I went from the hotel to the airport and home, and never took my camera out once, and I've phoned up the hotel, airports, airlines -- everyone, and no luck.
I saw some wonderful journals in a museum/gallery in Los Angeles years ago, and they inspired me in the keeping of journals--travel ones, especially. I wish I could draw, though -- the one that inspired me most had small sketches and drawings and doodles over the stuck-in-tickets, and was beautiful.

[anne gracie]

Wendy, what fantastic computer gurus -- don't you just love those guys when they recover something precious that you thought was lost?

As for reading over old journals, and letters,I generally don't either -- just when I'm trying to recall something. My writing journal I do though, as I started keeping it to understand more about my process. But one day when I'm old and have nothing else to do, I'll get out all the boxes and sit on the bed in a sea of memories and paper.

[Christine Wells]

Anne, I can totally sympathize on the loss of your camera. I lost mine in D.C.--at the Marriott, I think, and I was hopeful that it would be returned but no such luck.

You're right, there won't be the same kind of record of the email generation as there was of previous ones. I think an interesting phenomenon is that because on the internet few people know you personally, people can create a new persona there. You can choose the photos you put up, be selective about what you reveal. I suppose the same was true of letters, but perhaps not of journals as no one expected the general public to read them.

How lovely that you have so many treasured memories in the form of letters from members of family and friends. I found your research on Egypt and the ship fascinating. Can't wait to read this book!

[Janice]

My grandmother used to read my "mother's letters before she let her have them -- how awful is that?"

How very regency as well :)

But it's such a fine line between the desire to protect your child and an intrusion into her privacy. I can understand a parent doing that, though as a kid I would bitterly resent it!

[anne gracie]

Christine, I'm so sorry to hear of your camera loss, also. Of the 5 pics I downloaded onto my eeepie to try to use for my blog from the New York hotel, there is a lovely one of you, so I'll send it. I just wish I'd downloaded all the pics. :(

Yes, creating a persona is part of putting yourself into the cyber world., and it could be the same with letters. I find the whole art of letter writing fascinating. My aunt and uncle fell in love by letter. He was a soldier at war, my dad's good buddy, and she was just 16 when he started writing to her -- he waited until her 16th birthday, isn't that sweet? They got engaged just a week after meeting in the flesh, and it was a very long and happy marriage.

Janice, IMO there is no forgiving my grandmother -- my mother wasn't a kid, she was a teacher, earning her own living and already engaged to my dad, and he was a soldier, overseas and fighting. Their letters should have been private, but instead Mum would get home from work and find her letters open on the kitchen table. Dreadful!

[Janice]

Anne - Oh my! You left out that your mother was almost an adult at the time! Yes, I agree that your granny was completely out of line in reading your mom's letters after she was no longer a child. What did your mom do? She must have been very hurt & angry.

[Sherrie Holmes]

Sherrie, here.
"I find the whole art of letter writing fascinating."

Anne, that's how I got started on my own writing career. I signed up for a writing class at the community college because I wanted to write better letters. Turns out another lady was in class for the same thing. The teacher thought we were odd, to say the least. But then he started giving us assignments, and I got hooked, and along the way, discovered I had a talent for writing. And the rest is, as they say, history.

[anne gracie]

I'm sure she was, Janice, but my grandmother was an immovable force. Might as well try to argue with or reason with a brick wall. LOL

Sherrie, I think it's a great idea to do a class to write better letters. Apart from not knowing where that might lead ;) But expressing yourself better is a lovely thing to strive for in itself. And yes, you do have talent for writing.