Let go and let them go
Sunday, 15 March 2026
Mike White is a senior writer and columnist.
OPINION: On a bench in our garage is a blue metal trunk containing a trove of treasures.
It’s one of those metal ones, with three latches to secure it, and handles at either end to bear it.
When I say it holds treasures, there’s nothing worth a cent really, but it’s full of a thousand things ready to rekindle memories, like tinder awaiting a flint’s spark.
Matchbox cars I collected as a kid; a blanket that family picnics were spread across; beloved books; a painting of a cottage in snow.
And two large bags of letters.
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Everything in the trunk came from clearing out my mother’s home last Easter, a process where every drawer held a surprise about someone you’d known all your life.
In many ways it’s a ghastly process, the final act of someone’s life, with arbitrary decisions about what should be kept, and practicality overwhelming sentimentality.
But in other ways it’s a fitting homage, a slow study of that life, a chance to re-imagine that person’s world and them amongst it.
The letters were in a cupboard in the corner.
They spanned decades and many authors. They included postcards and handwritten envelopes and flimsy aerogrammes.
They had stamps that were austere and exotic.
They told stories of lives in transit, lives separated by oceans.
My Mum came to New Zealand in 1948, leaving her home in England, where war had blighted her youth.
She boarded a ship called the Tamaroa in Southampton with her sister and a friend, three nurses heading to the other end of the world.
She was 22.
Letters she wrote to her parents while on board recount the joy of it all.
“Somewhere in the Atlantic - just past the Bay of Biscay, on the way to the Azores,” one is headed.
There were sports and silliness, there were sweet officers and new friends. She didn’t want it to end.
She wrote of the full moon mid-Pacific: “Just to stand at the stern and watch that dazzling silver river, and the white wash, as we speed on our course, and feel the pure night breeze.”
She mailed her letters from Panama, and her parents kept them safe.
It was 35 years before Mum returned to England, and by then her parents had died. But her travelling correspondence had been kept.
So when she made that first trip back to the UK, someone reunited her with the letters she’d written on thin blue paper while sailing to a new world.
When she got home to New Zealand, she put them in a cupboard in the corner.
A few years later, I set off in the opposite direction of her youthful trip, and flew to England.
It was nearly seven years before I returned, and in that time, I kept as best I could to the one request Mum had made: write every week.
And there they were, in a cupboard in the corner, bundled according to continents, chapters from a series of prolonged adventures.
In the same way her parents had kept her precious letters, Mum had decided she couldn’t jettison my roaming correspondence.
In all the time I was away, Mum kept her side of the bargain, writing weekly, never expressing the anxieties she sometimes felt as I slipped off the map she used to follow my progress.
She could never complain - hadn’t she too disappeared over a horizon in her 20s, regular letters being the only thread connecting her with home and family?
I thought about this recently when we met a man walking his two dogs near the lake.
He wasn’t in a hurry, and nor were we, so we idled while the dogs sniffed.
He wore a Highlanders jersey and the look of a man with a lot on his mind.
His 19-year-old daughter was about to set off on her OE, and his mind was throwing up endless grim scenarios.
She’d been working in a restaurant here and had lots of contacts in Europe, but still he imagined her lost in a far land, at the whim of all the world’s evils.
He talked of tracking apps, he repeated her age.
He wanted to be there with her, a few steps behind, perhaps, but always in sight, always able to save her.
We mentioned how it was a natural rite of passage, we’d all done it, and keeping in touch was now so much easier.
It did nothing to still his concerns.
I only wish I could have shown him a telegram one of Mum’s uncles sent her as she sailed away on her OE, nearly 80 years before, which should be the last words of anyone waving a child off at the wharves or airport.
“GO ON AND PROSPER. HAPPINESS ALWAYS.”