This Port Brokeferry Thing Keeps Going

(One day this whole Port Brokeferry thing might be a book. I like to think it will be. Here is Izzy again and her mother's letters from Germany. I am not always a fan of flash fiction, so having it be part of something more like this and having threads picked up again at different points in the complete tapestry, makes it more than just an isolated flash. Like a whole series of short scenes from a complete film and each scene tries to be a perfect 'shot'.)

LIEBE MRS CAMPBELL

In the dark at the back of Mrs Campbell’s wardrobe there are shoeboxes, low down, stacked one on top of the other and in neat rows. In some there are empty cologne bottles. When Izzy unscrews the small lids and holds the bottles to her nose, she can smell again how her mother used to smell. It makes Izzy remember what it was to be a child following in her mother’s shadow.

In beside the empty bottles are letters, hundreds of letters with foreign stamps in the corners. They are all addressed to ‘Frau Audrey Campbell, The Post Office, Port Brokeferry’. It was Izzy’s mother’s job once to sort the mail in the waking mornings, packing them into Izzy’s father’s postbag ready for delivery. Mr Campbell never saw the letters that came from a boy called Johannes and later a man with the same name. Or if he did, he never let on that he knew. Izzy saw her mother sometimes slip the newly arrived letters into the pocket of her apron, noticed the flush of her mother’s cheeks on those rare-seeming days, heard her mother singing then, too.

The letters in the boxes are sorted into some sort of order, by postmark date wherever the date stamp can be read. Mrs Campbell later added a small number next to the stamp, pencilled so lightly that on dull days it is not bright enough in the room to see the numbers. More than four hundred letters before they stopped coming.

These days, when Mrs Audrey Campbell is well enough to be serving in ‘The Post office and General Store’, Izzy steals into her mother’s bedroom and takes out one of those shoeboxes. A different one each time. She dusts it off as if it is a new discovered treasure. She lifts the lid, slowly, as if what might be inside will be a surprise.

Some of the letters have been torn open. All of the earliest ones. Torn as if in a hurry to set free what was inside. They all start the same: Liebe Mrs Campbell. Even the final letter - for that is open too and is the briefest of them all - starts ‘Liebe Mrs Cambell’.

Izzy used to run her finger across the page, following the lines that had been written, as though she was reading what was there. If anyone had been witness to the small girl that was Izzy, sitting cross-legged on the floor in her mother’s bedroom, they’d have seen her lips moving too, giving an awkward shape to the words that someone called Johannes had sent to her mother.

Izzy had seen her mother doing the same. Years back. Her father was sick in his bed and the days left to him could be counted on Izzy’s two hands. And Izzy’s mother standing in the kitchen with a letter, her finger tracing the lines across the page and her lips moving through the words, whispering the sounds.

It was like reading poetry is what Izzy thought then. It is what she thinks now. The letters are written in German. Aside from ‘Liebe Mrs Campbell’ and Johannes’ name at the end, there’s no sense in what is written, none that Mrs Campbell ever found and none that Izzy found, too. Many of the later letters have not even been opened.