Deborah Montgomerie: Love In Time Of War

Dear Georgie, I am not very happy. At present I am on a big ship. It is almost as big as the Queen Mary. This ship is going to take me away from New Zealand, from Mummy, from my Georgie and my Irwin. That is why I am not very happy. It is not nice to be going away from all the people I love so much. However, it cannot be helped and so you and I will have to pretend that we do not mind so much."

The title of Deborah Montgomerie's new study of wartime correspondence between New Zealand soldiers and their loved ones left me with a couple of false impressions. First, I expected a collection of romantic love letters.

There are few of those here, partly because soldiers knew their letters were often regarded as common property by their extended families and neighbourhoods, and so tamped down on the endearments, and partly because Montgomerie defines "love" more broadly and usefully. She includes letters from sons to parents, from brothers to siblings, from friends to friends, and from fathers to children.

My second false impression was that this would be an anthology-style book, in which the bulk of the text was given over to the letters. Montgomerie reproduces relatively few letters in their entirety. Instead she uses excerpts as a way of tracking individual stories, which she tells, for the most part, in her own words.

We follow the war experiences of three soldiers and their loved ones, with letters from many others brought in to show the ways in which these lives are representative.

Letters were gold during the war. Every trivial detail of life at home was fascinating and precious to servicemen overseas, and for those left behind, they offered a way of tracking experiences they could barely imagine. They were also precious evidence that their authors were still alive.

Montgomerie does an excellent job of bringing all this out. Her style is formal but accessible, an effective blend of the academic and the journalistic, and she works hard to place the letters in their long-vanished social context.

My only complaint is that she sells her subject matter slightly short by not giving us more. There are so many little clues to prevailing attitudes and modes of life in every line of these letters. A fuller selection would have made even better reading.