Memories from a New Century
You may have come across some very old postcards on this site. They come with a story. Here it is:
My grandfather was born in 1885. Had he still been alive when I was born, he would have been 88 years old. For some reason, he married quite late in life. He was 55 when my father was born, and he died in 1957. As you can imagine, I grew up not knowing much about my grandfather, and what little I know pertains to his later years.
Fast forward to the 1990s.
I can’t remember the exact year. Was it 1996? Or 1997? One of those years. It was springtime, and it was a four-day weekend. As was often the case back then for long weekends, I had returned home from Toulouse, where I was in college and about an hour away. My group of friends from high school lived in different cities, so long weekends were always a great opportunity for us to meet up and spend time together.
One phone call. Two phone calls. Three phone calls. Ten phone calls? I can’t remember how many friends I tried to call that Friday evening, but I couldn't reach any of them. For some reason, none of them had returned home that weekend. Keep in mind that this was before cell phones existed and the internet was just something I had vaguely heard about. Getting together with friends required a level of planning that we don't need anymore. It involved a lot of back-and-forth phone calls with various people to finally set a time and place to meet.
Well, that night, my parents' house was going to be the place. The time was the entire weekend. I would be the only participant.
Did I mention that my parents were also going to be away for the whole weekend?
In other words, I was going to spend four days completely alone.
After watching five or six movies, I decided that I had enough. I love cinema more than the average person, even more so back then, in college, when I actually had the time to watch movies. However, I don't love cinema enough to watch movies non-stop for four days. Boredom slowly but surely crept in. I hate being bored. I'm usually never bored because I always find ways to avoid it (it comes with growing up without siblings or any kids my age in my neighborhood). I even have trouble understanding people who say they're bored. Yet, that night, boredom almost won for the first time in years. And I really wasn’t sure how to spend the remaining three days.
I hear some of you suggesting that I should have just picked a book. That's their way of keeping boredom at bay.
Yes, that's a good idea. No, really, it's a great idea.
But you see, back then, I was a literature major. I used to spend my weekdays reading pretty much constantly. While I loved it then and still love reading today, I'm sure you'll understand that I wasn't eager to do on weekends what I did every day. The whole point of a weekend is to take a break from the other five days.
In an attempt to fight boredom, I started rummaging through random items around the house to see if I could find something interesting. I soon noticed an old box sitting on top of the shelves in the upstairs living room. It had been there for years. Its contents had never caught my attention before.
I grabbed it and opened it. Inside were several hundred old postcards, about 500 of them. And by old, I mean really old! Almost all of them dated from between 1900 and 1925.
They were my grandfather’s correspondence from his younger years, before he met my grandmother. This was also the time of World War One. My grandfather never got drafted—if I understand correctly, he had some health issues at the time that spared him from the war—but another family member did. Somehow, his letters to his wife ended up in the box before it made its way to my parents' home after my grandmother's death in the 1980s.
Intrigued, I started reading one postcard, then another, then another, and another. I read all of them! I spent the entire weekend in the first decades of the 20th Century, learning about my grandfather’s youth, about an extended family I had never heard about, and, more generally, about everyday life in a French village at the beginning of a new century.
It turned out to be one of the best weekends of my life, then. It’s still near the top today.
A few years ago, I thought that the content of these postcards should be put online as an archive from the early 20th century. In the mid 2000s, I started a blog in French, transcribing them. It’s still online; you can check it out there. However, it required more time than I could afford. I never finished it.
So, here we go again. I’m going to try putting this content online again, both in French (there) and in English (on this present site). It’ll take the amount of time it’ll take.
Ideally, I would sort them before publishing so that you could read the stories in order, but that would be too time-consuming. Not to mention, I only have digital scans of the postcards; the originals are still at my parents' house. Maybe one day.
For now, I like this disorganized way of learning about these people. It's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It's like old memories coming back to the surface.
In any case, I hope you’ll enjoy these memories from a new century:
David Billa
Main "Protagonists"
- Adrien Billa (1885 - 1957)
Although I have very few postcards written by him, he is, in a sense, the main protagonist of these Memories, as most of the cards are addressed to him. He is my grandfather. Strangely, mostly because he died about 15 years before I was born, I don't know much about him; the little I know is from when he was old. Learning about his life as a young man is the first thing I found fascinating about these cards. - Jean Sazy (1885 - 1974?) and Jeanne Sazy (1890 - ?)
Jean and Jeanne were a young couple who lived in my grandfather's village. Jean was from a nearby village, but Jeanne came to live there after her father disappeared without trace when she was two (he most likely abandoned them, as her mother had obtained a legal divorce). They married in 1911, but in 1914, Jean was conscripted into the war that we now know as the First World War. Somehow, many of the postcards they sent to each other ended up in my grandfather's collection and are now in my possession. I think that Jean was an employee of my grandfather's (or great-grandfather's) and worked at the family's farm. Their correspondence is one of the most moving things among all the cards. Jean survived the four years at the front and eventually returned home. They had three daughters after the war. I don't know much more about them. - Amélie Gense (1904 - 1985)
She's from Amiens, in northern France. Her family was displaced by the war when they fled to the south. They spent the war in my grandfather's home village and were likely housed by my family. She befriended my grandfather and maintained a correspondence with him for several years after returning to Amiens. I believe her letters make up most of the cards I have, and they're fascinating. The nature of their relationship is equivocal, and it may have been romantic despite their age difference. I wonder if she was really born in 1904; that would make her quite young. I'll look for her birth certificate eventually. However, my grandmother was younger than her (but only met and married my grandfather when she was a -young- adult). Going through many birth, death and marriage certificates while researching the people in those cards, I can tell you that a significant age difference wasn't uncommon at the time. - Rameli Lamouroux
She's a very mysterious person. Even her first name is strange: Rameli? It has to be a nickname, doesn't it? In any case, her cards are some of the most recent in the collection. She wrote most of them from Avignon in the 1920s. She seemed to know my grandfather very well, yet I have no idea who she is. I couldn't find any information about her anywhere, and the fact that it's probably not her real name doesn't help. - Gaston Candelon (1906 - 1997?)
A friend of my grandfather's. - Raoul Billa
A cousin of my grandfather's. - Guillaume Billa (1881 - ?)
Another cousin. He fought in World War One. - Marcel (Marcelin) Delval
Another cousin, or a friend, who joined the Navy. - Renée Gense (1899 - 1982)
Amélie's older sister. I don't think I have postcards from her, but she's mentioned from time to time.