Introduction
“Dear Kath, Love Ron” consists of the letters my Dad wrote to my Mum from 1937 to 1946, mostly while he was serving in the British Army. There are also just three letters from Mum to Dad, a handful from other people, some transcripts of conversations with them both and a memoir that Mum wrote in her seventies. I have included some of Dad’s poems where they relate to the contents of the letters.
Dad – Ron Spathaky – served in England, Tunisia, Italy, France, Bel-gium, Egypt and Palestine during and after World War II. The letters do not describe any battlefield exploits. As a member of the Army Educational Corps, he never came near to the front line. A major interest of the letters lies in what they reveal of his relationship with Mum during the extended periods of separation that his army life imposed. Their relationship was at times loving, caring and passionate, but sometimes despairing, tempestuous and stressful almost to breaking point.
Mum – Kath Spathaky née Cree – kept the letters in a cardboard box for about seventy years. My brother, sister and I discovered them when she moved to a nursing home at the age of 95. Most were in their original folded state, many in their envelopes, and more or less in chronological order. Mum agreed that I should take them and look after them.
She had clearly kept the letters in date order at one time. But I think that as she got older she became less careful about keeping them in their correct place. A degree of detective work was needed to get them back into order. After sorting, I started photographing the collection, using a fairly ordinary digital camera. There are over 325 letters and other documents such as postcards and telegrams. The total number of digital images was nearly a thousand.
I then started on the transcription. My aim has been to create a text that is as close to the originals as possible. The handwriting was normally fairly easy to read and there are very few cases of doubt about the actual words.
There are many references to people, places and events however, that will appear abstruse to many readers, partly due to the passage of time and the fact that the letters were never intended to be read by anyone other than their recipients and partly because the language of Mum and Dad’s political culture was that of a distinct minority of the political life of the period. Sometimes the letters are deliberately cryptic to avoid the attentions of the military censors.
I have therefore attempted to clarify all references that might be unin-telligible. Dad makes numerous references to books he has read or wishes to read, people who were mutual friends or in public life at the time and places he visited or where he was stationed. I have tried to trace full references for all of these. The results of these researches are given in footnotes.
Occasionally Dad’s words are not clear or he omits or misspells words. I have corrected trivial errors. Where the interpretation might be critical I have given my interpretation in square brackets [like this]. Readers should be aware of Dad’s rather archaic or pedantic use of “I should” where almost everyone today would write “I would.” It can be confusing. Readers may notice one or two other idiosyncrasies.
As I went along I wrote short commentaries between the letters to keep the reader abreast of the time frame and the general context. Throughout the book my words are in italics while plain type signifies that the words are Dad’s, Mum’s or, occasionally, those of other writers.
It took me sixteen months to transcribe the letters and create a first draft of this book. I managed to keep more or less to a schedule of typing one letter every day, working from the photographic images and referring only occasionally to the original paper documents.
The reader should expect the letters to be imbued with the language of dialectical materialism, the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. It is clear that Mum and Dad shared their commitment to that ideology and would understand the nuances of meaning which only that shared commitment would convey. So when Dad writes on 7th June 1942 that he has been sunbathing and adds that it “has not contributed to the cause very much,” I know he means that his sunbathing has not advanced the Revolution.
I admire my parents for their steadfastness in adhering to their communist ideals through the period of these letters. It has become clear to me that communism in the 1920s and 30s was a relevant response to the gross inequalities and repression that the working classes of Britain and other countries suffered through the operation of the capitalist system. Furthermore the Communist Party of Great Britain was the only party in the country that consistently through the 1930s opposed and warned about the rise of fascism at home and abroad. Communism was the prevailing orthodoxy of political discussion in our family through my childhood until I was a teenager, when Mum and Dad left the Party.
All discussion in the family was influenced by political considerations. The influence on me has been lifelong, so that supporting the equality of women, rejection of racism, fighting for the rights of workers against the oppressive actions of employers and championing human rights generally have been sine qua nons of my life. For Mum’s and Dad’s influences I am truly grateful.
I have tried to avoid making value judgements about the contents of the letters. To nitpick what Dad and Mum wrote at this distance of time would not be fair to their memories and would surely introduce a subjective bias. I feel too close to my parents to do that. Let the letters stand as they are; let Mum and Dad be revealed, as surely they are in this collection, by their own words.
Some of my relations and other people who knew my parents may be shocked by some of the events revealed in these letters. Mum and Dad were not saints and we should not expect them to be nor portray them as such. I am unrepentant in publishing these letters in full as they stand. Of course they are incomplete but they are what we have and are as close to the truth as we can get, untainted at least by any censorship by me.
I love them both.
Mike Spathaky,
January 2019