Atlantic Airmail: Mum and Son 1973-1974
by Lorna Fermer and Angus Willson.
Published by Lulu.com 2010
ISBN 978-1-4461-4282-0
This 116-page A4 book records the letters from home, and Angus’s replies, while he was working at QUNO in New York City. There is also travelogue of the time he spent travelling by Greyhound Bus across the United States. Both countries experience their own changes just as Angus’s own life is further influenced by the places he saw.
Atlantic Airmail is available print on-demand for £13.99 paperback or as a PDF for immediate downloading at £4.99.
See the preferred source http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/atlantic-airmail/11787198 [opens in a new window]
It is also available from Amazon.co.uk [opens in a new window] and in USD from Amazon.com [opens in anew window]
Backpage blurb
“Petrol isn’t rationed yet but we are now restricted to 50mph.”
“Most of the shops have either candles or camping gas lamps but no one will bother to buy a dress in the dark.”
“Let me ask after your big head”
News between home and an eighteen-year-old abroad before the days of email and cheap transatlantic phone calls.
Atlantic Airmail reveals the nineteen-seventies from both sides of the pond and the generational divide: a coalition government and an impeached president.
“No, I have not cut my hair”
“The cockroaches here are enormous”
“Heard Henry Kissinger in the General Assembly today”
From the Foreword
“In August 1973, and at age eighteen, I left England for a year in New York. It was a great adventure working in the city and travelling around the USA. I kept a diary and wrote a travelogue – and the occasional letter home. I had intended to make something of my written account. However, the letters remained in a box, untouched but not forgotten. On my return to England I carried on being a student and other life-events overtook the immediate opportunity to write about my travels.
On returning recently to the small box containing my own papers, I started to re-read the letters I had received from my Mother while I was in New York. I soon realised they contained a richly descriptive slice of personal and family geographies. In some ways the seeming novelty and distance of New York City in the 1970s has been transformed into global familiarity. Meanwhile, the details of ‘ordinary’ daily-life in Britain at the same time stirred a feint memory.”
Angus Willson