It’s always fun to throw a post into the wind, then see it blow across the world to another country and grab someone’s interest there. A bloggers dream, actually. Oh, the wonders of the internet!
A week ago, reporter Prutha Bhosle emailed me to request an interview about my book in progress on the adventures of Gladys in India. (She’d was intrigued by my post Adventures in the Attic.) We arranged for me to email her details, then we’d audio Skype. Scheduling the latter proved to be a bit tricky: my day is her night! With a 9 1/2 hour time difference, who would be doing the interview in pajamas? It did help that she was a night owl.
I thought hard about what details would be most relevant to people in her own city of Mumbai (Bombay, when it was part of British India). It seemed to me that Gladys and Ken’s 1926 jungle honeymoon adventures in Kerala India (near Mumbai) including the story One Less Crocodile would interest Prutha and her audience most.
But it turned out that Prutha was especially intrigued with how near-100-year-old original handwritten letters unfolded a love story:
How a vintage suitcase, overflowing with 1920s-1930s jungle honeymoon adventures, birthed a book.
This photo includes invitations from the Maharaja of Jaipur and The Governor & Viscountess Goschen; a love letter from Ken; and letters home to Walla Walla from Gladys in Port Blair, Andaman Islands.
UPDATE! This blog post led to a Mid Day News story on May 31, 2020, by Prutha Bhosle:American Author Traces Her Ancestors Love Story Through Letters ~ A North Carolina-based author relies on a trunk full of letters from 1920s India and Google Earth to reconstruct a love story of her ancestors for an upcoming book~ Mid Day is called “India’s most engaging newspaper” with a reported 25 million page views per month. How exciting is that?!
A Discovery of near-100-year-old Letters
My eyes adjusted to the dim walk-up attic, sun spilling through cracks between beams. I was surrounded by yet more to purge or make agonizing decisions about. But this time I was on a hunt for one battered, square, beige suitcase — about 1930s vintage. I spied it and dragged it into better light. Heavy.
I smiled at the name Winslow, scrawled in fancy letters in black marker. I’d written that myself, back when as a teen in the 70’s I thought that old suitcase “cool”. I’d claimed it to store my stuff, including an old peace-sign necklace and a mood ring. It had since been emptied, then refilled, several times.
A stuck-on yellow note had Pearce Papers scribbled on it. I knew the suitcase was stuffed to the gills with musty documents given to Mom when her parents (Gladys Gose Pearce and J. Kenneth Pearce) passed away. However, I’d never looked at the papers closely.
A belt was wrapped tightly around the suitcase, which was fit to burst with a weak old lock. Sure enough, when I pulled hard to uncinch the belt, the lid popped open.
Poof. Dust flew out; I sneezed. My curiosity would have to duke it out with my allergies.
I pulled out handfuls of sepia-toned photos, faded newspaper articles, and certificates. I sneezed again.
Then I found a bundle of letters, tied with a string. The top one was postmarked 1926, from India. My heart beat a little faster.
It was addressed to Thomas and Mrs. Gose, Walla Walla, Wash, USA. It struck me that that letter had traveled across the world to a small town where everyone seemed to know Thomas – no street address was needed, and no zip code.
It’s a little miraculous that the letters are in my attic. They had been moved from at least five different homes in three states before finally landing in my house, nearly a hundred years later. It’s a testament to the Pearce hoarding instincts, often criticized but in this moment appreciated.
I gently untied the string and pulled out that first letter. “Dear Mother and Father….” And after reading a few paragraphs, I shouted, “There you are!”
By “you” I meant Gladys — her zip, her personality, her wit and humor. Although she had graduated from high school way back in 1915, then college in 1919, I was instantly whisked back in time as I read her words.
I could now see her, hear her, as a young woman.
Jungle Honeymoon
Prior to finding the letters, I’d wrestled with something our family called ‘the book’: typed pages bound together with a black cover, which Gladys had titled Jungle Honeymoon. Gladys, an aspiring writer, had written it in midlife in the 1960s among other stories and poems. (In the 1990s she’d asked me to help her get published and be her co-author, but at that time I was still a budding writer myself.)
The settings in Jungle Honeymoon were fascinating. Gladys described the aristocracy of the British Raj era in the 1920s and 1930s, elephant-powered logging camps, and the convict colony in the Andaman Islands.
And oh, the stories! One described how local villagers begged Grandpa Ken to shoot a tiger that had eaten their family members. I also read about that and other exciting tales in newspaper articles about the couple after they returned to America. (There are also archived documents at the University of Washington about Grandpa’s work in India.)
While growing up, I recall Grandma Gladys telling me stories over English Breakfast tea, poured from a flowered turquoise Chinese tea set, served British-style with sugar and cream. She and the teenage me wore silk Japanese kimonos she’d bought during her steamship travels. I remember trying to avoid dipping the giant square sleeves in my tea.
Later in life, armed with an enormous VHS camera, I videotaped Grandpa Ken describing how that tiger could have done him in: he’d only had one shot in his rifle. I’m glad he won — not the tiger, or I wouldn’t be here, nor my kids nor grand-babies.
Missing Pieces
One problem I found with Jungle Honeymoon is that the funny Gladys I knew was missing. In her attempt to write as she thought an author should, her words hadn’t revealed her personality adequately. Or perhaps her words were a bit stiff because too much time had passed since her immersion in her experiences. (She came home from India in 1933 and worked on Jungle Honeymoon in the 1960s.) Since her essays needed heavy editing, I considered turning them into a work of fiction based on real life, to get more personal voice back into the stories.
Hence, my discovery of her letters was monumental. There she was: real, raw, right in the midst of those experiences! Conversational, using contractions the way people actually talk. And not wasting an ounce of precious paper space on letters that would take weeks by steamship to get home to Mother. And I found more than just letters: wedding invitations from royalty and photos that now make the words in Gladys’ letters truly come alive.
The Birth of a New Book
At long last, I found a way for Gladys and me to coauthor a book about her her experiences. In our final book (to be published soon) you will travel vicariously along with us, alternating between her perspective in the 1920s and ’30s and my own in 2020. Now nearly a century has passed since Gladys was a young woman in India, and in the meantime new technology allows us to dig deep and richly see what she experienced in a far more advanced way than we could have, had she and I partnered in this in the 1990s.
For example, with tools like Google Earth and YouTube, together we can all pretend we are in 1920s India. Research is literally at my fingertips. While reading about a royal wedding Gladys and Ken attended, within seconds I pulled up photos from that wedding via Google. I could visualize my grandparents there, in that very room in the photos. On YouTube I can listen to music they listened to, or watch a silent film seconds after reading a 1930s letter about a “new film” Gladys recommended her mother see.
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