Communicating across the world

During the pandemic, zoom calls and facetime etc were the lifeline that kept us sane, especially Christmas 2020, my first ever spent alone. My son and his family were living abroad and my daughter was in Scotland while I was in the SE of England!
Now my DD lives with me and DS and DiL live in the North of England. We regularly have video calls but at the moment we are all together in their home as they have just had another baby so we are here to help while DS is at work. Returning home tomorrow and I'll miss the cuddles, but we'll still be connected reasonably often.
DD currently interviewing for a job in Dubai! At one time I'd have been really worried about that but modern technology really helps!

Greenfinch

I was a £10 POM ( though I am not sure children had to pay)It took 6 weeks to get there and no chance to communicate internationally. Life was not all it was cracked up to be and we returned home paying our own passage of course. I am looking forward to the BBC drama about this topic.

Many people from my husband's family were "£10 Poms" in the sixties, whole families went, across the generations, and never came back to live here though I think that some did visit.
Most of them have had very good lives there, much better than they would have had if they had stayed working in the Greenock shipyards, or in Paisley and Glasgow. The older generations also lived much longer.

My grandparents didn't have a phone for years and in the 60's I remember that we would occasionally speak to them on their neighbour's phone. Fortunately when the neighbours moved they got a phone of their own, but considered it a great extravagance.
My husband always travelled for work, sometimes being away for three months, and never wrote to us although we did get the occasional postcard, usually after he got home!
He used to go to the back of beyond (remote parts of Oman, Saudi, Indonesia and India) and if he wanted to speak to us he'd have to book a call which always seemed to happen when I couldn't speak to him as I was taking the children to school or whatever. I used to find a message on the answerphone when I returned home.
However our lives were changed once we got a fax as he could let me know when he was likely to be back.

We loved it here from the moment we arrived early in the 1970s. We didn’t go back to visit the UK for 10 years because, with 4 children, it just cost too much. The beautiful greenery is what struck us all when we did go back to visit parents. We had forgotten that and had never appreciated it when we lived there. That and the history and old, old buildings blew our minds. We had just taken that for granted. We don’t FaceTime now because we don’t have any close relatives left but it certainly would have changed things.

I was a £10 POM ( though I am not sure children had to pay)It took 6 weeks to get there and no chance to communicate internationally. Life was not all it was cracked up to be and we returned home paying our own passage of course. I am looking forward to the BBC drama about this topic.

In the early 60 s I was 15 and had travelled to Germany alone, by train, fir 6 weeks . We didn’t have a phone and as far as I recall I probably wrote to let mum know I had arrived safely but it would have taken a while for it to arrive.

When her mother died in Germany a few years earlier it took two weeks fir a letter to arrive to let her know and by then the funeral had already taken place. Over 65 years ago and I still remember her distress.

In 1947 my S African Mum left to come to the UK to marry my Dad . They had met when he was on leave during the war . Her parents didn’t come over to the wedding as my grandfather was a GP and couldn’t get cover . They came over when I was born a year later and then we went to Cape Town when I was 4 . My mum never saw them again as they both died a year later . Airmail letters took weeks and phone calls were brief and indistinct.
Today I had a 20 minute FaceTime call with my cousin and it was as if she was in the room . Amazing technology.

Infoman - if you were young you could get to Perth for £10 in 1963 as
Ten Pound Pom.

Annie1 Best wishes for your son’s recovery. My daughter has been very ill for the last few years in Australia and is now recovering but it has been hard to be so far away.

What an exciting life you have had! We lived a year in Japan and travelled round Asia by local transport and back home overland and I thought that was exciting and adventurous. 15+ years in Papua New Guinea in the 50s and 60s and now St. Lucia is far more exotic.

I wrote long letters to family and picked up replies at Poste Restante along the way but it would never have occurred to us to phone parents. I did send mine a telegram when we reached
Agra, India, the day the Indo-Pakistan war commenced, to tell them not to worry and all was quiet, which was far from true.

My husband was in the merchant navy and at first in the 70s phone calls to a ship were via Portishead Radio. Later they could phone home via Inmarsat, the maritime satellite. I joined him for trips sometimes and phoning home was, I think, £7 a minute then

BFPO was quite a quick service but phone calls had to be booked.

My DP didn't have a phone either so the next door but one neighbour would run round to fetch one of them before we all clubbed together to get a phone installed for them.

Roddi3363 your post was a surprise as i did not know there were other grans who lived in Papua New Guinea. We live there ftom the late 50s to 1975. Daru, Ksvieng and Port Moresby were our homed. My husbsnd was Clerk of the Parliament and got the job because he know Sir John Guise the Speaker earlier in his career and he spoke fluent Motu. I loved my time there!
As my family were in Australia i really recsll our weekend calls. Now with Whatsapp and Messenget it is free but the time differences are a ptoblem. In St Lucia we are 5 hours behind UK snd sbout 16 hours behind Australia! Just now my elder son is in Costa Rica and he has been seriously ill. Time difference is huge to Australia and i have been ringing his travel insurer a lot to get their help. I embrace new technology as our family is able to be in touch daily.

I was in Malaysia then Hong Kong in the 60’s only contact was blueys (service blue air letters ) which took a week or maybe two to arrive
I just once rang UK but we didn’t have a phone at home so I had to ring the grocers opposite our house and they went over and got my mum to come to answer their phone
I didn’t appreciate how difficult it must have been for my mum and dad at that time I m glad they had each other my poor Nan who I had lived with since my grandad died was left alone for mum and dad to keep an eye on

In 1976 my husband was asked to work in Sudan for eighteen months. We took our three children and our dog with us. We lived in the middle of nowhere, and there were no telephones anywhere near us. The Company office had a telex machine. Our only means of communicating with family at home (UK) was by letter, and letters were taken to the office in Khartoum when the Company plane came to site. We ended up staying for five years!

Just a month after leaving school in 1970, my parents took me to the airport and put me on a flight for Rome where I spent the next 6 months. I was supposed to be being looked after by a distant cousin of my father, who had married an Italian, but she had recently had to take in her mother-in-law so there was no room for me at their home and I was left to find my own accommodation. I was just 18 and had to learn quickly how to survive in a foreign country without any parental support and only a couple of (very expensive) telephone calls to them whilst I was away. I did, however, send weekly letters - suitably edited so they did not worry about what I was up to! The whole experience gave me with 2 valuable skills (apart from learning Italian): a strong sense of independence and taking responsibility for myself at an early age, as well as a life-long love of writing letters (nowadays long emails). I probably wouldn't have acquired either of these if I had been constantly on the phone or Zoom to my parents during those 6 months.

My father's sister and aunt used to send us parcels from New Zealand in the 40s. Sometimes there was rich fruit cake and chocolate. I remember them being posted In October and frequently not arriving until April. Letters and cards took at least 8 to 10 weeks to come to Scotland then.

Newly married, at the age of 19 I accompanied my husband to sea on an oil tanker for sometimes 5 or 6 months. No phonecalls but each port was excited to get 4 or 5 letters from family. Those blue airmail letters were read and reread. Till pay-off day and a surprise home-coming! These days I live in Spain and I love mobile phone conversations with GD as she shows me her toys and new shoes

I remember the excitement of waiting for my Danish grandmother's Christmas phone call in my childhood.

Having to find a public call centre in Spain as a 20 something year old, so I could phone my mother in Denmark and reassure her that my dance course and accomodation were fine.

Having a phone call home from Hamburg cut off when the money dropped down in a public phone and having to go away for change then phone up again.

Between 2013 and 2016 when we were out of the country for three years, I could just write e-mails to everyone at home I wanted or needed to be in touch with, access my and DH's bank accounts over our Internet banking service and mail the bank at need over their end-to-end encrypted mailservice, access the Danish state homepage to check our income tax returns, renew health insurance etc. and just use my mobile phone to phone anyone I wanted, irrespective of whether they were in one or another country.

When I think back to the homesick 16 year old me, anxiously waiting for letters from home for days on end when first I left home, and my mother just as anxiously waiting for mine, I really feel the blessings of modern technology.

The only drawback is that I suspect, we grew up faster when we left home than a modern 16 or 18 year old does because we couldn't get hold of mum and dad at the drop of a hat.

Yes the wonder of video calls we take for granted nowadays but at the cost of no more letter writing. My gran working in Germany 1911 to 1915, wrote many letters none of which survived but we do have all the postcards she wrote in between the letters so very interesting. I even find old emails written over 20 yrs ago now that are worth rereading but how will they survive?

I worked for Voluntary Service Overseas in Papua New Guinea in the mid 1970's. The school I worked at was out in the bush and had a radio telephone which we were only allowed to use at Christmas and for special occasions and events. It was so stilted having to say "Roger" etc that it made real communication very challenging but at least we heard familiar voices occasionally ....over 2.5 years of absence.

I was a university lecturer and I remember trying to explain to a group of students the difficulties in communication when I was a child in Singapore in the 60s, no phones (Singapore was fabulous but still a third world country) no satellite technology and if you asked a question in a letter back to uk it was probably 4 weeks before you had a reply, to this day I don’t know if they believed me!

FaceTime in between visits to see them in oz was how I saw my GDs grow up. Marvellous invention. I’d be sitting on my sofa in my dressing gown they would be playing on beach in Noosa. Lovely prize for them.

In 1967 I had an invitation to visit relatives in Canada, but I had to stay in North America for longer than I could stay there. So my mother wrote to a friend of hers in Boston to see if she could put me up for a week. It was a student charter flight with fixed dates.
The relevance of this is that the friend phoned us to make all the arrangements . It was amazing to receive a clear call from another continent. So much so that I have never forgotten it.
BTW I had a fantastic time that summer and even spent a day and a half in New York with some girls while we were all waiting for the time of the return plane

Most of my family emigrated to Australia on the £10 pom scheme and I remember a call was £1 a minute so it only happened for about 5 minutes at Christmas.

I remember in the 1950s how emotional my Mum would become when a letter arrived from my maternal grandparents in the west of Ireland. She’d read the letter and dab her tears and slip it into her apron pocket to read again later. It’s no distance now but back then it might as well have been thousands of miles. We could only afford to visit once a year. Then the only contact was by letter until the next year. No phones in the family but one of my uncles in Ireland had our neighbour’s phone number for emergency contact. It was only ever used for bad news.

Today’s technology is wonderful. My 2 youngest grandchildren are a 3 hr drive away but I see them several times a week on video calls. I love when they make a spontaneous call to show me something they’ve drawn or even just on the way to school if they’re ahead of time. I count my blessings.