Why had Dulcie passed away?
Why hadn’t Len or Terry replied to Fran?
Why was Terry’s handwriting so strange?
Why did my research find no record of the death of a Dulcie Clarke in 1981?
It even occurred to me that Terry might have been illiterate and unable to write back. Of course, we soon ruled out that ridiculous theory. If Terry hadn’t written that card then perhaps it was Len?
Fran’s letter to Terry was never answered and for the next forty years she continued to miss and grieve for her friend. She kept all Dulcie’s letters safe and often thought about her lost soulmate.
One day, she promised herself, I’ll do something with these letters. They are too precious to lose and they are important historical documents.
Time passed.
Fast forward forty years to November 2020 when Fran’s email from Michigan, US, landed in my inbox. I was captivated before I had even reached the end of it.
Joe and I became involved. We promised Fran that, if we could, we would transcribe and publish Dulcie’s letters and share them with the world.
The project engrossed us and Dulcie’s story both enchanted and shocked us. But, like Fran, we found it hard to accept Dulcie’s sudden and unexplained death. It was all too odd and left us feeling uneasy and dissatisfied.
Strangely, it was the image of a long-dead kangaroo that eventually helped us solve the mystery. Although I hadn’t yet found any trace of Dulcie on the internet, she had left plenty of clues in her letters to Fran. Clarke with an ‘e’. Bungundarra. The towns of Yeppoon and Rockhampton. The names Terry and Len.
I searched through Facebook without much hope. It was possible that neither Terry nor Len were still alive, or they didn’t use Facebook.
I found a young man in Queensland named Adam Clarke but he was much too young. Idly I scrolled down his timeline and then stopped. My heart skipped a beat. I stared at a black and white photo Adam had posted up some months ago.
The caption read: Grandma with a huge roo.
Somehow, I absolutely knew I was looking at Dulcie. Was it possible that Adam could be the grandson of Len and Dulcie?
It took me a full 24 hours before I reached out to Adam, partly because I didn’t want to be disappointed and neither did I want to disappoint Fran.
With Joe at my elbow, I took a deep breath and sent Adam a private Facebook message.
* * *
The conversation went like this:
ME: Hi Adam, apologies for contacting you as a complete stranger. My name is Victoria and I have a really random question about a pic on your timeline. Was your Grandma’s name Dulcie by any chance?
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ADAM: Yes, that was her name. How do you know her? She passed away last June.
You could have heard a pin drop. Joe and I gaped at each other. We’d found Dulcie! But she’d passed away in June 2020? How could that be? Did we not have the right Dulcie after all? I didn’t know how to answer. My fingers refused to type. Long pause.
ADAM: Hi, I’d like to know how you knew my grandma. It’s amazing you picked her from that photo.
* * *
ME: Hi Adam, thanks so much for your reply. Sadly, I didn’t know your grandma. Sorry to be so mysterious, but I just wanted to check that I have the right family. Would you mind telling me the name of Dulcie’s husband, or your father, or the place where they used to live?
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ADAM: Are you doing a family history? There’s a lot of things that I only just found out. Dulcie’s husband (my grandad) is known locally as Len but his name is Tom Clarke. They had a farm at Bungundarra outside of Yeppoon, Queensland.
Joe and I gasped. We’d found Dulcie! My reply did not convey how excited we were.
ME: Thanks for that, it sounds like I have the right family.
* * *
ADAM: I’m very curious now.
* * *
ME: One last question, is your dad still alive? Sorry to ask.
* * *
ADAM: Yeah, he’s still going strong.
* * *
ME: Oh, good!
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ADAM: I’m still interested to know where this is going.
* * *
ME: I am an author and also have a small publishing company that specialises in publishing books about people’s lives. Recently one of my readers contacted me saying she had some letters in her safekeeping from a penpal in Australia who died a long time ago and wondered whether I would like to publish them in a book. The letters are about day-to-day life running a farm.
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ADAM: So the letters are my grandma’s?
* * *
ME: Yes, I think so, but they ended suddenly in 1981 when her penpal was informed that Dulcie died. That’s why I’m so surprised you said she died last June.
* * *
ADAM: Well, if you send a photo of her writing, it’s very distinct. This is getting weirder.
* * *
ME: So strange. I don’t have the original handwritten letters but I do have a snippet. I’ll find it and take a screenshot.
* * *
ADAM: Yeah that would be great. Be good to see.
* * *
ME: Here it is, found it.
ADAM: Looks like her writing. If you have the address too, it must be her.
* * *
ME: No question, we have the right family.
* * *
ADAM: We didn’t know of her writing letters.
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ME: Dulcie mentioned receiving parcels for the family from Fran, the penpal. They included toys for Terry, your dad. Perhaps he can shed some light on those times.
* * *
ADAM: My dad is on Facebook. You can contact him. It would be a good book. True hard times. Have a talk with him.
* * *
ME: Will do. Thanks so much for your help, really grateful.
I immediately contacted Terry. (Oh, the wonders of modern technology!)
ME: Hello Terry, please excuse me for bothering you, but I’ve been having a long chat with Adam and he suggested I contact you. I am an author and also have a small publishing company that specialises in publishing books about people’s lives. Recently one of my readers contacted me saying she had some letters in her safe keeping from a penpal in Australia and wondered whether I would like to publish them. The letters are about day-to-day life running a farm in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s and would be interesting for people interested in farm life in those days. We think the letters were written by your mother.
Several hours passed until, finally, a reply came from Terry.
TERRY: Hi Victoria, nice to hear from you. I must say that the world is a small place. Who would have thought a photo of my mother that was taken in the early 1950s and is on my son’s Facebook page could be noticed by somebody?
* * *
ME: Hi Terry! How nice of you to get back to me. I had a great chat with Adam today, he was really helpful. I never thought that we’d find your mum’s family! Such a lovely surprise.
* * *
TERRY: If you would like to ring me we can have a chat.
And so I dialled the number he gave me and we talked for over an hour. Terry was utterly courteous and charming and did not hold back, answering all my many questions and volunteering facts I knew nothing about. An avalanche of fascinating photos landed in my inbox over the following weeks.
I’m sure we both found that first phone call slightly surreal. Terry was describing his mother to an unknown English woman, and I was talking to somebody who I felt I’d known since he was born even though Terry and I are the same age. Through Dulcie’s letters, I’d seen him grow from a baby to an adult. I knew when he had cut his teeth, about his childhood illnesses, his school results, his first motorbike and when he left home.
“And what about Len, your father? When did he pass away?” I asked.
“Dad? He’s still alive, he’s in the next room. He’s 91 years old now. ”
&nbs
p; “And Dulcie didn’t pass away in 1981?” I asked again.
“No. Absolutely not,” Terry replied.
“And that card Fran received, you didn’t send it?”
“Nope, that never happened, I’d already left home. Mum died last June, I’ll send you her death certificate.”
Terry kindly did send Dulcie’s death certificate, leaving us with that same question.
Who had sent that sympathy card?
We can only conclude that Dulcie, herself, had sent it to Fran.
Why? Who knows.
“The land at Bungundarra was all divided up into parcels and expensive properties on acreage were built for weekenders,” Terry told me. “My parents sold the farm and divorced in 1989 and Mum became a recluse with very little contact with her grandkids or any other family members. She was 83 when she died in hospital of cancer. When I cleared her house out, I found some old letters from an American in Michigan, but I threw them out. I didn’t know who wrote them or that they had any value.”
We already knew that his mother had lived an extraordinarily hard life, but Terry explained that she’d also had some ongoing mental issues. Perhaps she just couldn’t cope with life, and keeping up a brave face with Fran was too difficult. Perhaps that’s why she ended the letter-writing. But she kept Fran’s letters until the day she died.
My next email to Fran was hard to write and bitter-sweet. I had so much news. We had found Dulcie’s son, Terry, and Dulcie’s twin grandsons, Adam and Heath. We had Terry’s backing for the book and a heap more photographs.
But I had to tell Fran that Dulcie had faked her own death.
Fran was deeply shocked but stoic. I will let her have the final words in this extraordinary odyssey of love and pain.
* * *
I am so glad you wrote me about all of it, she wrote. I always want to know the truth and not be shielded even though it is done with the best of intentions to protect me. I wonder if we will ever know the whole story.
I also looked through my journals to see what was happening in my life then. I think both of us were entering a new life style. Empty-nesters almost. I had been through low points and Dulcie helped me with her “soap box” letter in March 1975.
After Dick’s illness, we sold our business, and left family and friends to move a 100 miles from Detroit to Coldwater, a small rural community, and bought a lovely house on the lake with no jobs or any real plans. Just to get Dick healthy again. And in 1980 we bought a franchise in a copy/print shop and began our new life. And it seems Dulcie found a new life too, not the death we had thought.
When our youngest son Mark drowned in the lake while home after graduating Magna Cum Laude from College in 82, some of the strength I found to deal with it I am sure can be attributed to how Dulcie had lived her life.
After her “death” I have had a whole different life with great challenges and achievements and happiness I could not have imagined and full of peaks and valleys.
Bungundarra means “hills and hollows” and I am content.
Fran Globke, 2021
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Thank you!
Acknowledgements
I am much indebted to Fran for allowing me to collate Dulcie’s letters in a single volume. As the recipient of the letters, she recognised their beauty and historical value and kept them safe for well over half a century. Thanks to her, we have an intimate account of farm life in rural Queensland during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
My thanks to Dulcie’s son, Terry, for allowing me to publish his mother’s letters. His unstinting generosity cannot be overstated. Without his support and assistance, this book might never have seen the light of day. He was unsparing in time and effort and provided many of the photographs that illustrate the volume.
My thanks to Dulcie’s grandson, Adam, for answering my first message when I started searching for the Clarke family, and the valuable information that he provided about his grandmother.
Grateful thanks to the beta readers of Dear Fran, Love Dulcie. Thank you Julie Haigh, Beth Haslam, Elizabeth Moore, Val Poore and Pat Ellis for your time, enthusiasm, and ability to spot errors before the book was launched.
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Disclaimer
Both Fran, and Dulcie’s son, Terry, have granted me full permission to reproduce Dulcie’s letters. However, readers should be aware that surviving family members have stated that Dulcie was given to exaggeration and that some of the events she describes may be inaccurate. Opinions differ, even within the family. I respect the family’s views that, over the years, Dulcie may have had issues and “lost herself”. I also know from personal experience that memories are subjective. No two people remember the same event in precisely the same way.
It is possible that the letters may be subject to flawed memories, imagination or exaggeration. Nevertheless, I urge the reader to accept the letters at face value in the knowledge that they are exactly as Dulcie wrote them at the time.
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Each book purchased will help support Careflight, an Australian aero-medical charity that attends emergencies, however remote.
About Victoria Twead
Victoria Twead is the founder of Ant Press which has been involved with publishing memoirs since 2011.
After living in a remote mountain village in Spain for eleven years, and owning probably the most dangerous cockerel in Europe, Victoria and her husband, Joe, retired to Australia where another joyous life-chapter has begun.
Victoria is the New York Times bestselling author of Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools and the subsequent books in the Old Fools series. Her days are now spent adding to the Old Fools series, helping authors publish their own memoirs and playing Princesses with her granddaughters.
Email: [email protected] (emails welcome)
Website: www.VictoriaTwead.com
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We Love Memoirs
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The Old Fools series
International bestselling memoir series from Victoria Twead
Book #1 Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools
If Joe and Vicky had known what relocating to a tiny Spanish mountain village would REALLY be like, they might have hesitated...
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Book #2 Two Old Fools - Olé!
Vicky and Joe have finished fixing up their house and look forward to peaceful days enjoying their retirement. Then the fish van arrives, and instead of delivering fresh fish, disgorges the Ufarte family.
* * *
Book #3 Two Old Fools on a Camel
Reluctantly, Vicky and Joe leave Spain to work for a year in the Middle East. Incredibly, the Arab revolution erupted, throwing them into violent events that made world headlines.
*New
York Times bestseller three times*
* * *
* * *
Book #4 Two Old Fools in Spain Again
Life refuses to stand still in tiny El Hoyo. Lola Ufarte’s behaviour surprises nobody, but when a millionaire becomes a neighbour, the village turns into a battleground.
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Book #5 Two Old Fools in Turmoil
Dear Fran, Love Dulcie Page 20
