After a stroke… I found solace in my parents’ love letters
When the travel writer Jonathan Raban had a stroke three days before his 69th birthday, it never occurred to him to ask, ‘Why me?’ He had high blood pressure, drank wine every day and was a lifelong, unrepentant smoker. Given all this, the stroke that left him paralysed down his right-hand side wasn’t unexpected – it had ‘simply been biding its time’.
You’d be hard put to find an invalid with less self-pity than Raban, who recounts the effects of the stroke, and his six-week stay in a rehab facility, with an air of ironic detachment. He spares you nothing when writing about the humiliation of needing help for the most basic things, yet manages to see the black humour in his situation.
Woven through this memoir is Raban’s account of the early days of his parents’ marriage, conducted almost entirely through correspondence. Monica and Peter met in 1939, but it was a year before they so much as held hands. By the summer of 1940, when they met again, Peter had been through the horrors of Dunkirk, although he never spoke about it. In March 1941, Peter got 48 hours’ leave, enough time to get married and have a brief honeymoon. Until he returned home in 1945, Monica and Peter kept up a stream of letters, ‘an intimate cascade of writing once, twice, sometimes three times a day.’ Raban, who was born in 1942, marvels at how much his parents kept from each other. ‘Their marriage would necessarily be a long-distance affair in which they would collaborate to produce an ideal fiction that resembles an epistolary novel.’
Jonathan’s letters from his father when he was at boarding school were distant, so his letters to Monica were a revelation: ‘lucid, simple… with an emotional eloquence I did not know he possessed’.
‘Reading these letters,’ Raban writes, ‘I tremble for the flesh-and-blood couple who will have to live up to the ideal they are setting for themselves in their writing
when they eventually meet again’.
Monica and Peter struggled when they were reunited in 1945, but their marriage endured and Peter became an Anglican clergyman. Jonathan barely knew his father until he was three years old and his relationship with him never recovered. Eventually, a shared love of books led to ‘a sort of reserved mutual regard’.
Raban is a wonderful writer, yet we never find out what inspired him to research his father’s war experiences so meticulously. The author died this year, 11 years after his stroke, just after completing this book. He admits that each time he sat down to write after his stroke he would ask himself, ‘What have I lost?’ This memoir shows that his skill as a writer never deserted him.