WORDSMITH: Searching for a lost love

I’ve been searching for love online, looking for Mr right. I’ve not had much luck – Mr Right is proving hard to find, elusive.

To clarify, I’ve been looking for Mr Wright, Mr Percy Wright; or someone who knows of him.

It’s been some years since I met Mr Wright. He first showed up in Fermanagh, at a popular market. He was there with his new fiancé, in the first flushes of their love. But I didn’t meet them there. I met them in Cavan, where a friend introduced us.

I took them to a local café to get to know them, better. I bought a coffee then joined them at the table; carefully taking them out of the crumpled brown paper bag in which they’d been given to me.

Let me tell you of how I came into possession of their epic love story – some time ago, on a breezy Saturday morning, my friend browsed Clogher Market. Amongst the stalls, bustle, banter, and bric-a-brac her eye was caught by a white plastic bag. It looked out of place on a market stall and this drew her to it, curious of its contents.

On opening the bag, she expected little. But instead, she found lots. Loads of hand written love letters and heart-soaked miscellanea. Mindful the bundle was lost, she took it, hoping to return what’s precious to persons mourning its loss.

She wrote to addresses contained within the letters explaining her wish to return the love-bundle. Sadly, her letters were returned to sender, un-opened. The love remained in her safe-keeping. Until this beautiful bundle of love was handed to me, “Can you help? Put them on twitter or something, where a family member might recognise them,” she suggested.

Back in the café, as I perused the letters and miscellany, I felt a wistful pull back to a period past, to Belfast and Lisburn in the late 1940s and early 50s. In personal correspondence, the highs and lows of a profound love is told with a palpable passion. They tell of the burgeoning love between an Ulster Beauty Queen, Norma Colville, and her Handsome Beau, Percy Wright. The letters document their courtship, engagement, marriage, the birth of their first child, and beyond. It’s a life and love chronologised and preserved for a posterity that’s been lost.

Percy is quite the romantic, his letters to Norma are often poetic, “Darling, you are my one desire, you are what I require to make this world nice and sweet, and make my life complete.” In one letter to Norma sent from a business trip to London, Percy recounts a lone trip to the cinema, “…I only went to see the picture because it starred Susan Heyward, she reminds me of you. But darling, you are far more beautiful than she…”

Amongst the bundle is a picture of Percy and Norma in a group; I was struck by their resemblance to Hollywood Stars of the late 40s era. What’s evident in their correspondence is Percy’s unbridled passion, “I put ink on my lips and this is the result, a kiss for you,” a little arrow pointing to his lip prints on the paper – cheeky.

As I read through the letters, I was struck by how much we’ve lost. Percy and Norma wrote with a spark that ignites their words. In one letter wherein Percy questions Norma’s love for him, you can feel the ache and uncertainty in his words, while you also see the ‘shake’ in his handwriting. Their love made me lament the loss of handwritten letters in our increasingly robotic world; Percy and Norma wrote from their human heart and soul.

I posted their story online, complete with pictures. And although their story touched hearts and minds, no one came forth to claim Norma and Percy as their forbears. For now, they’re not quite lost in time, but they are in a kind of Limbo, in a Cavan cupboard – waiting…

Percy wrote, “A year together with never apart. And now you have all the love in my heart. And may the New Year be as good as the old. And the story of our happiness will again be told. Yours with undying love, Percy.”

I’ll keep searching, hoping their family find the love – and the story of their ‘happiness will again be told’.