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[Page 53]
Article from the journal "Timespan"
Photograph of Nell Clark signed "With Best Love Nell".
Dear Nell
Nellie Elizabeth Clark died on 24th October, 1986, aged 90. She had been ill for only a brief period, having enjoyed good health for most of her life, apart from partial deafness.
She had lived 86 years of her life on the same block of land at Killara, a northern suburb of Sydney, and had worked for the same insurance company for most of her life.
"Auntie Nell" and her sister, Jen, who died in 1980, had been much loved by her great nephew and nieces - myself being one of them. She had few other relatives.
We all share very happy memories of holidays spent with our two great-aunts; no doubt disturbing the tranquil and well-ordered life that they followed between school holidays.
I had only known Nell as an old lady, having first come into her life when she was already 53 years old. To a child in such circumstances, older people were never young, and never had a life of their own before the present. We often looked at photos of my mother's family - playing tennis at their tennis court in the 1920's, holidaying at their beach-house at Collaroy, picknicking with an impressive collection of 'old' cars in the background.
Nell rarely mentioned her youth. However, there was always a portrait of a handsome young man in uniform in the house and we knew that he had been Nell's fiance, vaguely somewhere back in the 'older days'. She didn't mention him much and we, as children, never bothered to ask.
Having inherited the old home at Killara after Nell's death, the laborious task of sorting through a life-time's possessions fell to my brother and his wife, as they had decided to reside there. I arrived to help one day and my brother casually remarked that in Nell's chests of drawers, carefully tied together in a bundle, was a collection of letters from her fiance - and that he'd thrown them into a rubbish bin!
For a historian, albeit an 'ancient one', this seemed to me to be close to sacrilege. After sorting through several large bags of rubbish, I finally retrieved 59 letters from her fiance, several others from some of his friends (dating from August, 1914 until September, 1916) various World War 1 postcards from France, memorabilia from Egypt and several photographs.
That night I began to idly sift through them. The more I read, the more intrigued I became.
ALAN KEATS GORDON, from Lindfield, (for the first time I discovered his name) had written to my great-aunt continuously from the time of his training in Sydney in 1914 to the dreadful battles of the Somme in France in 1916. What a wealth of information he gave!
Over the next few months I transcribed my letters chronologically and became more and more involved in Alan's life as a young World War 1 soldier. As a history teacher, I have often taught the Great War in class, but this provided such an intimate view of one young man's experiences and made, for me, one aspect of Australian history more alive and immediate. It also gave me a fascinating glimpse into the earlier life of a close relative that I had never even guessed at.
Timespan No. 27. June 1987 Page 43.