Ella Ward - 27 Letters to my Daughter

For my daughter.

You are my bestest heart girl.

My darling,

Youre holding this book because I can no longer hold you. It feels cruel that my last act as a mother was to die. Im so sorry. Its the one thing, more than anything, I wish I could undo.

However, as I look back on my life, there isnt much else I would change. But youll come to see that. Youll see a lot of things, because in this book Im giving you everything. All of it. I havent left a bit out.

I have written twenty-seven letters for you. In them are the lessons Ive learned, and earned, in my life. All 188 of them. Lessons that have come from the monsters Ive vanquished, the mistakes Ive made and the loves Ive forgiven. The adventures Ive flown. The spells Ive woven. The tears Ive wiped. Ive sewn them all together in these pages. Every word Ive written is for you: to keep you and strengthen you, and hold you, now I cannot.

I havent written these letters alone. Did you know that our family comes with generations of words captured and chronicled? And, oh boy, are they some words! My darling daughter, you come from a family of letter-writers, nostalgists, storytellers and people who quite like giving toasts at dinner parties.

Or, as your great-grandmother put it to me recently, We are a family of people who believed they were important enough to write it all down.

Important or not, it turns out that whatever Ive been through in my life, someone else in my family has usually gone through it already. When I first began to read their words, this overlapping of experience felt like coincidence, but it soon grew into a regular occurrence. Ive chosen to take great comfort in this serendipity. It means that these twenty-seven letters are not only a gift from me, but from all of us.

While everyone has a family, ours is a little more unusual than most. I hope these letters will not just hold you, in my absence, but theyll also allow you to fall in love with these unconventional ancestors. Their words of wisdom have often been a comfort to me, but their sparkles of madness have always been a cure! I believe that being brave and kind and clever is one thing but being all those things with a twinkle in the eye is another. Which is why I cannot wait to introduce them all to you.

Theres an American soldier whos fighting through Europe in 1918. Theres also a woman running away from an elephant in Kenya, in the 1960s. Theres a man brandishing a pistol in World War II Shanghai, and a teenager slopping through the mud on the last day of Woodstock.

These are your relatives and they all have lessons for you, to add to mine.

These letters will arm you with the knowledge, wisdom and wonder of us all. Because when push comes to shove, and death is dancing closer than youd like, family becomes more important than anything else. We are a group of people who werent dissuaded by little things like death. Or war. Or loss. Or elephants. I am one of them which means, so are you.

And so, now I am done and dead and you are left with this. My all. To you, my everything.

I love you.

Mama x

What sets one family apart from another? What makes your family yours? Is it the curve of a nose that is echoed through generations? A tinkle in a laugh that goes up and down on a scale? Or is it something less tangible: a sense, a hum in your belly, a feeling of coming home?

Family is all those things, but none of them can exist without one important element: the telling of stories. A family is only as strong as the stories that are told. And, Im afraid to say, the stories cant just be told they need to kept.

One afternoon, I sat down with my great-grandfather Jims letters from World War I. Tucked away in a locked-down house in the middle of a pandemic, I found myself eyeing the innocuous-looking green ringbinder on my bookshelf. As the meme goes, Our grandparents had to go to war, you just have to sit on the couch.

Id been sitting on the couch. I wondered what it felt like to go to war.

Jims letters from the Front to his sweetheart, Kay, contained extraordinary stories. But then added to them, was Jim himself. His words allowed me to live his wit, passion (raunch!), pathos and the small, curious details he was surrounded by. As I read on, Jim became more real than any sepia-dusted photograph I had seen. While we have Jim to thank for the stories themselves, its Virginia, Jims daughter, to whom Im so grateful for passing them along.

Virginia, my Grama, painstakingly transcribed her fathers spidery, pencil-written letters and gifted them to me way back on my twenty-fourth birthday. They languished in various houses for fifteen years. But 2020 was the year to complete my letters to you, and the year it seemed to read Jims letters to everyone.

One day youre writing letters of love from the Front, the next... your great-granddaughter is reading them from beyond the dawn of the twenty-first century. Theres only one reason these stories have been able to travel so easily through time: family.

This is what family is, my girl. Its a passing-on of responsibility. A collective agreement between those who sit on ever-widening branches of a family tree. An understanding that the lessons must be protected for the next generation.

Family doesnt just require a history told, it requires a history held, passed on, so the newest members can look back and see, with a small gasp of recognition, just what special group of people they belong to.

And this family, our family, has two very important things going for them. Yes, weve written it all down, but crucially weve all kept it safe for the next generation. Which is why this family can remain a home for me, and you, and for those who are still to arrive. Its how I managed to discover so many overlappings of experience. Its what has meant I can write my letters to you.

I think it might be rude to talk about people without properly introducing them. But I know its definitely rude to publish their private letters and memoirs, their fears and dreams, near-deaths and true-loves without properly introducing them.

So. These members of your family are the ones who wrote it all down, and protected the words for the next line of the family tree.

They are my great-grandparents Jim and Kay, my Grama (Virginia) and Grampa (Buzz), my mother (Kate), and me. And, of course, we all have you. And now you have all of us.

Jim, Kay, Virginia, Buzz and Kate have all written down their stories, their letters and their lives. Over this past year I have swum around in their words and filled myself up with their histories. I am dizzy on dust and my fingers are papery from scanning.

But this isnt just a collection of old stories swept into new letters. Because anecdotes are wonderful, but theyre also a dime a dozen. No, my sweet girl, I have a wonderful secret to let you in on. The tales this family have shared, come with a very special magic.

Bringing each of these stories together is playing five records all at the same time and realising alarmingly that its all... harmonising. Is this music or is this noise? Who cares! It sounds wonderful.

Would you like to see how the magic works? How a family of storytellers have passed something special down the line? Come now, hold my hand, lets begin.

*

Grama. Virginia. My grandmother and probably the central reason all of these letters are here for you. The keeper of the family archives. Its fitting that shes the first voice well hear in these letters other than mine, of course. The initial hello comes from her own room, and it comforts me that she clearly feels as fond of her first bedroom as I am of mine. Well check back in with Grama often enough, but theres one specific thing I want to share from this particular memory of hers, so you can begin to hear this magical harmony for yourself.