Under the Mango Tree

New York, USA, December 1940.

The envelope had travelled a long way before it reached the British Air Commission in New York.
Its edges were worn, the paper thin, the handwriting unmistakably familiar.

K. S. Rawlins recognised his father's hand.

For a moment he simply looked at the envelope.
Home seemed very far away.
Britain had been at war for more than a year. Across the Atlantic, families waited for letters that might take weeks to arrive, carrying ordinary news through extraordinary times. A few handwritten pages could be the only connection between people separated by an ocean and a war.

But this letter had not crossed the Atlantic untouched.
It had been written by his father on the eighteenth of November, 1940. Somewhere along its journey it had been opened and examined. Parts of the letter had been physically cut from the pages for security reasons, leaving empty spaces where words had once been.

The examination was identified only by a number.

Examiner 6894.

Whatever had been removed was no longer there to be read.
K. S. Rawlins opened the letter carefully.
He began to read what remained.

The surviving words spoke of family, of home, and of the ordinary events of lives continuing while he was thousands of miles away. But the missing sections interrupted the story. Whatever Examiner 6894 had considered too sensitive to cross the Atlantic had disappeared with the pieces cut from the page.

When he had finished, K. S. Rawlins folded the letter along its original creases and returned it to the envelope.

He could not have known where that damaged letter would eventually travel.

He could not have known how many hands would protect it, how many houses it would pass through, or that it would survive long after the man who had written it was gone.

Nor could he have imagined that, decades later and on the other side of the world, his granddaughter's daughter would open an old wooden box in Bohol and find it waiting for her.
Her name was Letecia.

The man who had written the letter was her great-grandfather.
And the letter was part of her story long before she was born.