I cannot master text messages, not even using my basic no-frills mobile phone. I have upgraded my technological skills to reasonable e-mail standard, but when I want to communicate, I prefer to talk person to person. If that is not possible, then I’m quite happy to write someone a letter and despatch it by post. This may disparagingly be called ‘snail mail’, but it is actually the most immediately personal contact between people other than face to face conversation because when I send a letter that very paper which has been in my hands will find itself into the hands of a loved one, a family member, a friend or even an unknown business contact.

I have been reflecting recently on the way in which written correspondence from previous decades brings to life people of importance to our lives, although they may have passed on long ago.

A handful of treasured letters remain in our family, many received early last century, some even late in the 19th century. In them is a wonderful connection with people we never met and those whom we may have known only through oft-repeated stories or faded photographs. Letter paper yellows and fades. It becomes brittle and fragile. Yet we are blessed in having a treasure trove of stories and pictures that help us to know and understand parents, grandparents, great aunts and uncles, wayward cousins and friends from the past.

Our connection with them comes from a significant collection of postcards that had been stored away and have recently released their long-held secrets. These postcards survived the years in good condition because their card is more substantial than paper, they have the added attraction of an illustration and the message is concise and most often precise, too.

Postcards have a history dating back to the institution of postal services in the early to mid nineteenth century. However, it was the development of photography and of new printing processes that established postcards as a fashionably popular and effective way of being in close personal contact with friends and relations everywhere.

Among our collection there are cards that have a few friendly words on the reverse side, sometimes only an address. The illustration of a town, or a beach, or a landscape returns us to a time earlier than living recall. A steam train near the Barron Falls in North Queensland, and Sydney Harbour without a bridge or an Opera House are only two of this kind.

Most revealing of all, however, are two fascinating sets of cards that originated from different sides of the family sent by men who served overseas on the Western Front in the first world war. Scenes of life in Ceylon and Egypt, lanes and camps in England posted before men had been in action bore messages of optimism and hope. There followed beautiful, embroidered cards made and sold by Frenchwomen for soldiers to send to mothers, sisters, sweethearts and wives. Others bore brave messages, patriotic cards assuring folks at home that the British Empire would prevail.

However, from the battlefields the words and pictures are different. Photos show flattened villages and crater-pocked fields. The messages have sometimes been censored rigorously, but enough is written to reveal the men’s early innocence in the training camps and later the stark reality of death and destruction which they experienced at first hand in France and Belgium. Each of these men, one my father-in-law, the other my great uncle was wounded but they survived the war to return and live with ordinary families in ordinary jobs in ordinary towns around this country. Neither boasted about his exploits. Each was thankful to have lived through the ordeal.

For those of us who never knew them at that time the surviving postcards give us a real understanding of two men who, in years to come might only be recognised as faces in family portraits.

Postcards are meant to communicate a short message connected with a particular place. For me they have done much more than that.

Michael Goodwin