Seventy four original letters written by Thomas Kermode between 1936 and 1947 to his son Jim. 

A great resource for researching original voices from Australia’s pre-war to post-war eras and 1940s South Australian social history. Thomas’s commentary on WW2,  and universal issues at play within and between the various members of this middle-class family.  Some issues are due to the war.  Some are caused by Thomas’s powerful beliefs, opinions, and bias. 

“If you dream big, start early”.

All his life, Thomas Kermode seeks knowledge, meaning, and truth. He becomes a worthy auto-didact.  Late in life, he seeks identity and a place amongst the world’s premier diarists in his non-stop two million word outpouring of self, over a six-year period.  His so-called Animadversions. Alas, Thomas is overtaken by illness and old age, and dies.  He fails his dream by running out of time to publish his book.  His next of kin fail him by not preserving the estimated 150 to 200 handwritten volumes (2 million words) that he produced and left to them.  Only a handful survive. This is a terrible shame.  Publication of “Letters to his son Jim” goes some way to remediating that loss.

Purchase the book via Amazon Australia (Amazon.com.au) at $14:85 AUS +postage 

About the author:

I am infatuated with Thomas my Grandfather. To offset this emotional imbalance, I have left out my own commentary. Thus “Letters to his son Jim” simply provides each of the 74 letters verbatim. I have augmented some index entries, to guide the reader to the more interesting plot elements. 

You could do worse than to start at the index (which is at the front of the book) and examine the entries for “Animadversions”, “Balhannah”, “Catholic”, “health”, “parsimony”, “Thomas”, and “War”. 

I am presently working to publish an index of the Animadversions that have survived and also of his 70 WW1 letters to wife Emily May, and her 24 letters to him. Some 400+ pages in all. 

Edward “Adrian” Kermode