One year, one life

In 1989 I spent a year living and working in New Zealand. While I was there, my mother wrote to me each week. Thirty six of these letters have survived. Although only just over thirty years ago, this was an era when computers were in their infancy and few homes possessed one. Social Media had not been invented. It was still the age of letter writing and expensive, long distance telephone calls. These letters, written over the course of a year, offer a reflection of life at the end of the 1980s, as it was for a widow in her seventy first year, living in a north London suburb.