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A Message in a Bottle. Une Bouteille a la Mer.

By Anita Mathias

 

What an interesting story!

I found a message in a bottle

When a Frenchwoman wrote a love letter to her dead son, put it in a bottle and threw it into the sea, she never dreamed anyone would read it. But author Karen Liebreich did and, moved by the anonymous mother’s grief, set out to find her
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  • Phil Daoust
  • The Guardian, Saturday 14 August 2010
  • Article history
Karen Liebreich
Karen Liebreich with the bottle washed up by the sea on a Kent beach. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
One spring day in 2002, a French woman whose name we may never know, stood on a cross-Channel ferry and threw a bundle of clothes into the sea. After it, went some lilies and a bottle in the shape of a teardrop. The clothes had belonged to her son, Maurice, who had died at the age of 13, and the bottle held her letter to the boy “that no wind … no storm … not even death could ever destroy”.
“Forgive me for being so angry at your disappearance,” the letter went. “I still think there’s been some mistake, and I keep waiting for God to fix it … Forgive me for not having known how to protect you from death. Forgive me for not having been able to find the words at that terrible moment when you slipped through my fingers … “
The bottle vanished, the ship docked, the mourner went home to get on with her life. She never dreamed the letter would reach shore, let alone that someone would read it.
Karen Liebreich, a London-based author, did just that a few weeks later. The bottle had washed up on a beach in Kent, where it caught the eye of her friend Sioux Peto, who was walking her dogs. Inside, Peto found a thin scroll tied with a ribbon and enclosing a lock of hair. The handwriting was in French and, as Liebreich is fluent in the language, Peto sent her the letter for translation.
This was tougher than it might have been, with the anonymous writer addressing now her son, now an imagined reader, and piling watery image upon watery image. “You can’t just skim it and understand it,” Liebreich says.
As far as she could tell, the boy had died early one summer, probably by drowning. “For a long time,” his mother wrote, “he travelled between two waters, between two lights, trying tirelessly to use up the strength in his outstretched arms. He submitted to the silence, the terrors and the cold … “
She had, of course, been devastated – “My life started when he was born, and I thought it was over when he left me” – and for a while Liebreich was afraid she might be reading a suicide note. But no, the woman was ready to move on. “While God gives me life,” she wrote, “I promise you to live it to the full, to savour each instant in richness and serenity. I know that we will find one another, when the time comes.”
As she translated, Liebreich found herself crying. “I’m not a weepy person,” she says, “but the letter was very beautiful and very moving.”
Liebreich couldn’t sleep that night. In the days that followed, she found herself becoming more protective of her own children – Sam, then 10, and Hannah, eight – even, perhaps, of her husband, who is a doctor. “When your children are young, you can get lost in all the banality,” she says. “The house is full of toys and laundry and stuff from school, and in the boredom of the domestic routine you forget how precious they are. Something like this reminds you how important they are.”
Still, that could have been the end of the affair. Liebreich might have dried her tears, regained her rhythm and only occasionally thought of the woman whose story had shaken her. Instead, she set out to find her. “I was plagued by unworthy emotions,” she explains in the book she subsequently wrote about the search. “I wanted to know how Maurice had died; I wanted to know what his mother was like; I wanted to know whether I could track the origin of an unsigned letter in a bottle. I wanted the writer to know that the bottle had been found on an English shore and that I had read her letter. I wanted to reassure myself that she was all right.”
Did the woman want to be found? Wouldn’t that just rake up all that pain again? “Sending a letter in a bottle invites a stranger to pick it up and read it,” Liebreich told herself. “I think the unknown mother wanted the tale of her love for her son, the knowledge of his death and her despair, to be known.”
Liebreich has experience as an investigator, having tracked down old Nazis for the BBC series Timewatch and a previous generation of paedophile priests for her book Fallen Order. The only things she knew for sure, however, were Maurice’s first name, the age at which he died, that he was his mother’s first son, and the name of one of her friends, Christine, described in the letter as “gentleness itself”. And she soon discovered that much of this knowledge was useless, with France recording deaths not in one central register but in 36,000 local ones. There was no hint of foul play, so no reason for the police to get involved.
Over the next few years, Liebreich consulted newspapers, bottle-makers, sailors, doctors, graphologists, psychologists, psychotherapists, secret servicemen, literature professors, forensic scientists, private detectives, even clairvoyants and tarot readers. “The letter would not leave me in peace,” Liebreich writes. “But each time I considered giving up I thought I would make one more effort – one more email, one more phone call, one more visit to the library. The answer might be round the next corner.”
Experts provided various explanations. The boy had indeed drowned, said one. Water was not involved, said another. He might have overdosed on ecstasy, said a third. The mother and child were close. Unhealthily close. Estranged. The letter had been thrown from a cliff. No, a boat. The woman was dead. No, she was a survivor. She was definitely a lesbian, unless of course she wasn’t.
When others weren’t feeding her red herrings, Liebreich was doing it herself. “The fact that the letter was so opaque meant that I went off on tangents,” she admits. It took her six months to realise that perhaps Maurice hadn’t drowned at all, and the letter’s “water”, “harbour”, “vessel” and so on were nothing but metaphors. It never occurred to her that his death “at the dawn of summer” might have referred to his age rather than the calendar.
After three years, Liebreich decided enough was enough. If she couldn’t find Maurice’s mother, she could at least write about the search. “If, somewhere, the letter-writer is alive,” her book concludes, “then perhaps this book can serve as a clumsy ‘letter-in-a-bottle’ reply … I wonder if she will receive my message.”
She did. In 2009, three years after The Letter in the Bottle came out in Britain, the nameless “she” got in touch to say she felt violated. As she put it, it was as though her story, her suffering, her very intimate being no longer belonged to her.
By then, the book had been published in French, to huge media coverage. “In Britain the story was seen as a failed quest,” Liebreich recalls. “In France it was an unsolved mystery.” Years before, she had struggled to interest the media; now she was worried that Maurice’s mother would be outed by a friend or neighbour. Instead, the mother contacted Liebreich via the psychologist Olivier Roussel, who runs the website unebouteillealamer.com – A Bottle in the Sea. She apparently saw him as one of the few sympathetic voices in the book. She might be willing to talk to Liebreich directly, but she needed time.
The author, who had no intention of upsetting her any more, gave her time. Readers wrote with tips for finding the woman or stories of their own losses. One Swiss man emailed that she should be ashamed of herself: she was hunting the mother like prey. Perhaps he was right, she thought.
The two women finally met a month later, in a nameless town in northern France. “She was very pretty, slim and elegant,” Liebreich writes in the new, updated version of her book, “with a delicate face and good cheekbones … Though she later told me she was 60, she looked much younger … After searching for so many years, I could not believe I was there, face to face with the author of the letter. And so we talked.”
Largely, it seems, about the many things Liebreich and her helpers had got wrong. Maurice had not drowned, but been knocked off his bicycle. He had died in 1981, 21 years before the letter was written, not just a few. The “dawn of summer”? “Just a lyrical expression.” The talk of rupture, alienation, conflicts? “I was never in conflict with my son at all.” The claim that they had lived together “almost as a couple”? “A shocking thing to say.” The lesbianism? She had had a good laugh over that – probably one of her few while reading the book. And the medium’s claim: “I don’t think you will ever find her … she is no longer alive.” “Well, I am alive and you have found me.”
One false trail was laid by the woman herself – but she has paid the price for that. The letter’s first draft had described Maurice as “the only person in the world (with my other sons) that I was born to love for ever”. Somehow she omitted that nod to Maurice’s three brothers while writing out the fair copy. It was not deliberate; it was not because she didn’t love them. “The reason she didn’t kill herself was the other children,” Liebreich says. “She is their mother as well.” It still took some explaining.
But what about Liebreich’s own belief that the writer wanted to be found? “It never occurred to me that anyone would find my letter in the bottle,” the woman explains in a postscript to the new edition. “I thought it would smash in the waves and the fragments of glass and paper would gently disperse through the oceans. I gave it to the sea, to the universe: it was perhaps my way of talking to God.”
Maurice’s mother, who Liebreich has promised never to name, seems to have forgiven her for reopening old wounds. “It was a terrible shock that it all came out,” says Liebreich. “But I think she felt it was done sensitively. That was a great relief.”
They have met again and may even be on the way to becoming friends. “We have found other things to talk about,” Liebreich says. “We email each other. I think there’s a friendship evolving that’s not linked totally to this book and the death of the child.”
“I still have the bottle,” she adds. “We don’t know what to do with it.”
The Letter in the Bottle is published by Atlantic Books, £7.99. To order a copy for £7.49 with free UK p&p go to guardian/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

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If you'll forgive me for adding to the noise of th If you'll forgive me for adding to the noise of the world on Black Friday, my memoir ,Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India, is on sale on Kindle all over the world for a few days. 
Carolyn Weber (who has written "Surprised by Oxford," an amazing memoir about coming to faith in Oxford https://amzn.to/3XyIftO )  has written a lovely endorsement of my memoir:
"Joining intelligent winsomeness with an engaging style, Anita Mathias writes with keen observation, lively insight and hard earned wisdom about navigating the life of thoughtful faith in a world of cultural complexities. Her story bears witness to how God wastes nothing and redeems all. Her words sing of a spirit strong in courage, compassion and a pervasive dedication to the adventure of life. As a reader, I have been challenged and changed by her beautifully told and powerful story - so will you."
The memoir is available on sale on Amazon.co.uk at https://amzn.to/3u0Ib8o and on Amazon.com at https://amzn.to/3u0IBvu and is reduced on the other Amazon sites too.
Thank you, and please let me know if you read and enjoy it!! #memoir #indianchildhood #india
Second birthday party. Determinedly escaping! So i Second birthday party. Determinedly escaping!
So it’s a beautiful November here in Oxford, and the trees are blazing. We will soon be celebrating our 33rd wedding anniversary…and are hoping for at least 33 more!! 
And here’s a chapter from my memoir of growing up Catholic in India… rosaries at the grotto, potlucks, the Catholic Family Movement, American missionary Jesuits, Mangaloreans, Goans, and food, food food…
https://anitamathias.com/2022/11/07/rosaries-at-the-grotto-a-chapter-from-my-newly-published-memoir-rosaries-reading-steel-a-catholic-childhood-in-india/
Available on Amazon.co.uk https://amzn.to/3Apjt5r and on Amazon.com https://amzn.to/3gcVboa and wherever Amazon sells books, as well as at most online retailers.
#birthdayparty #memoir #jamshedpur #India #rosariesreadingsecrets
Friends, it’s been a while since I blogged, but Friends, it’s been a while since I blogged, but it’s time to resume, and so I have. Here’s a blog on an absolutely infallible secret of joy, https://anitamathias.com/2022/10/28/an-infallible-secret-of-joy/
Jenny Lewis, whose Gilgamesh Retold https://amzn.to/3zsYfCX is an amazing new translation of the epic, has kindly endorsed my memoir. She writes, “With Rosaries, Reading and Secrets, Anita Mathias invites us into a totally absorbing world of past and present marvels. She is a natural and gifted storyteller who weaves history and biography together in a magical mix. Erudite and literary, generously laced with poetic and literary references and Dickensian levels of observation and detail, Rosaries is alive with glowing, vivid details, bringing to life an era and culture that is unforgettable. A beautifully written, important and addictive book.”
I would, of course, be delighted if you read it. Amazon.co.uk https://amzn.to/3gThsr4 and Amazon.com https://amzn.to/3WdCBwk #joy #amwriting #amblogging #icecreamjoy
Wandering around Oxford with my camera, photograph Wandering around Oxford with my camera, photographing ancient colleges! Enjoy.
And just a note that Amazon is offering a temporary discount on my memoir, Rosaries, Reading, Steel https://amzn.to/3UQN28z . It’s £7.41.
Here’s an endorsement from my friend, Francesca Kay, author of the beautiful novel, “An Equal Stillness.” This is a beautifully written account of a childhood, so evocative, so vivid. The textures, colours and, above all, the tastes of a particular world are lyrically but also precisely evoked and there was much in it that brought back very clear memories of my own. Northern India in the 60s, as well as Bandra of course – dust and mercurochrome, Marie biscuits, the chatter of adult voices, the prayers, the fruit trees, dogs…. But, although you rightly celebrate the richness of that world, you weave through this magical remembrance of things past a skein of sadness that makes it haunting too. It’s lovely!” #oxford #beauty
So, I am not going to become a book-bore, I promis So, I am not going to become a book-bore, I promise, but just to let you know that my memoir "Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India," is now available in India in paperback. https://www.amazon.in/s?k=rosaries+reading+secrets&crid=3TLDQASCY0WTH&sprefix=rosaries+r%2Caps%2C72&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_10My endorsements say it is evocative, well-written, magical, haunting, and funny, so I'd be thrilled if you bought a copy on any of the Amazon sites. 
Endorsements 
A beautifully written account. Woven through this magical remembrance of things past is a skein of sadness that makes it haunting. Francesca Kay, An Equal Stillness. 
A dazzling vibrant tale of childhood in post-colonial India. Mathias conjures 1960s India and her family in uproarious and heart-breaking detail. Erin Hart, Haunted Ground 
Mathias invites us into a wonderfully absorbing and thrilling world of past and present marvels… generously laced with poetic and literary references and Dickensian levels of observation and detail. A beautifully written, important, and addictive book. Jenny Lewis, Gilgamesh Retold 
Tormented, passionate and often sad, Mathias’s beautiful childhood memoir is immensely readable. Trevor Mostyn, Coming of Age in The Middle East.
A beautifully told and powerful story. Joining intelligent winsomeness with an engaging style, Mathias writes with keen observation, lively insight and hard-earned wisdom. Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford 
A remarkable account. A treasure chest…full of food (always food), books (always books), a family with all its alliances and divisions. A feat of memory and remembrance. Philip Gooden, The Story of English
Anita’s pluck and charm shine through every page of this beautifully crafted, comprehensive and erudite memoir. 
Ray Foulk, Picasso’s Revenge
Mathias’s prose is lively and evocative. An enjoyable and accessible book. Sylvia Vetta, Sculpting the Elephant
Anita Mathias is an is an accomplished writer. Merryn Williams, Six Women Novelists
Writing a memoir awakens fierce memories of the pa Writing a memoir awakens fierce memories of the past. For the past is not dead; it’s not even past, as William Faulkner observed. So what does one do with this undead past? Forgive. Forgive, huh? Forgive. Let it go. Again and again.
Some thoughts on writing a memoir, and the prologue to my memoir
https://anitamathias.com/2022/09/08/thoughts-on-writing-a-memoir-the-prologue-to-rosaries-reading-secrets/ 
#memoir #amwriting #forgiveness https://amzn.to/3B82CDo
Six months ago, Roy and I decided that finishing t Six months ago, Roy and I decided that finishing the memoir was to be like “the treasure in the field,” that Jesus talks about in the Gospels, which you sacrifice everything to buy. (Though of course, he talks about an intimate relationship with God, not finishing a book!!) Anyway, I’ve stayed off social media for months… but I’ve always greatly enjoyed social media (in great moderation) and it’s lovely to be back with the book now done  https://amzn.to/3eoRMRN  So, our family news: Our daughter Zoe is training for ministry as a priest in the Church of England, at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. She is “an ordinand.” In her second year. However, she has recently been one of the 30 ordinands accepted to work on an M.Phil programme (fully funded by the Church of England.) She will be comparing churches which are involved in community organizing with churches which are not, and will trace the impact of community organizing on the faith of congregants.  She’ll be ordained in ’24, God willing.
Irene is in her final year of Medicine at Oxford University; she will be going to Toronto for her elective clinical work experience, and will graduate as a doctor in June ‘23, God willing.
And we had a wonderful family holiday in Ireland in July, though that already feels like a long time ago!
https://anitamathias.com/2022/09/01/rosaries-readi https://anitamathias.com/2022/09/01/rosaries-reading-secrets-a-catholic-childhood-in-india-my-new-memoir/
Friends, some stellar reviews from distinguished writers, and a detailed description here!!
https://amzn.to/3wMiSJ3 Friends, I’ve written a https://amzn.to/3wMiSJ3  Friends, I’ve written a memoir of my turbulent Catholic childhood in India. I would be grateful for your support!
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