The past burst into my life last week in the shape of a bundle of pale blue envelopes. There were 288 of them, edged with alternating red and navy arrows and imprinted with an Australian stamp and the postal charge, 10d: 10 pence back in the days before decimal currency. Like a magic retro carpet, these aerogrammes flew me back 60 years to a time when I measured out my days in these letters from my parents.

I was newly married, and Michael and I were living in London where I became a reluctant teacher while he attended a post-graduate course in medicine. Gazing at my mother’s beautifully rounded European script, I recalled my heart-jumping joy whenever I saw one of those pale blue aerogrammes lying on the hall table of our draughty rented flat.

Like Australian pound currency, aerogrammes are obsolete. The young people in my family had never seen one and couldn’t understand how they worked, these antediluvian handwritten missives that predated emails, texts and iPhones. But they were an emotional lifeline that kept people connected at a time when international phone calls were prohibitively expensive, charged by three-minute intervals and punctuated by the crackling sound of the undersea cable.

We stayed in London for almost four years and in that time my parents wrote to us twice every single week, and now I hold their letters in my hands. For years they had lain forgotten at the back of a drawer, waiting for me to rediscover them and reconnect with myself at that green stage of my life.

As you see, I’m a hoarder. Not of physical objects but of mementoes of events and emotions recorded on paper. Now that I think about it, they represent a chronological record of my existence. I have even kept my school reports going back to my school in the southern Polish city of Kraków when I was six, and my first Australian one in which the kind teacher wrote, “Diane is learning English quickly.” Over the years, I have kept letters from friends now dead, references from employers, articles I have written and loving cards from my family.

During the Holocaust, my life hung by a thread no stronger than gossamer but, for 63 of my relatives, that thread snapped.

DIANE ARMSTRONG

My partner, Bert, who feels no need to fill drawers and cupboards with evidence of his existence, marvels at my compulsion to keep all this documentation from every stage of my life. I wonder about it, too. During the Holocaust, my life hung by a thread no stronger than gossamer but for 63 of my relatives, including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, that thread snapped. Is this trove of memories a subconscious need to reassure myself that I have survived, that I am alive?

My parents were not hoarders. Life had taught them that objects were disposable and people alone were irreplaceable. As I read my mother’s accounts of dinners with friends, movies she has watched and weddings she has danced at, I can hear her optimistic no-nonsense voice as clearly as if she were speaking. Her letters are bright and sharp, just as she was.