Please Mister Postman

how I miss letters

“I wish the internet hadn’t been invented.”

I said this to my husband the other day, to which he replied, “So, you’d be happy not to see your daughter’s face once a week and be able to keep in constant contact via WhatsApp, even though she’s on the other side of the world?”

He’s just too quick for me sometimes, damn him.

I had to then try to persuade him that I was right, because this is the dynamic that keeps our marriage alive. I explained that my pronouncement had nothing to do with the evils of social media or the latest ridiculous outburst by a certain orange man. It was simply this: I miss letters. Writing and receiving them.

I know it would be painful to have to wait weeks for a flimsy airmail from my daughter as my grandparents had to do in the 1970s when we lived in Sydney. I also know that she would agonise over the cost of making a phone call and so most probably would only do so if there were an emergency.

But still.

I have the letters my mother wrote to my grandparents back in 1973-4 and I can re-read them whenever I want. It’s like time travel. It’s also like drawing back a curtain to reveal a scene I wasn’t a part of back then. I get to hear my mother tell how she really felt about living so far away from her parents - things she would never have said to my four-year-old self.

Mum’s honest reflections on living in Sydney in the 70s

I also have my parents’ love letters from the first three years of their relationship. So, so precious now that they are both dead.

Then there are the letters from childhood. Letter-writing was what everyone did “back when I was a girl”. Even people who were not “good” at it wrote letters. Letters were passed between girlfriends and boyfriends via trusted intermediaries as well as by post. Some were carefully crafted and sealed with shiny stickers. Some were hastily scribbled with mistakes in Biros running out of ink. I and many girlfriends spent a sizeable amount of pocket money on loose-leaved writing paper that came in a tantalising spectrum of colours, some of which required us to write with sparkly gel pens to make our writing legible. Then came the excitement of the electric typewriter enabling me to write faster while also making myself snort with laughter at some of the typos I produced. (I’ve always been easily entertained.)

What did those letters contain? News and gossip, yes. Invitations. Declarations of everlasting friendship, love and/or lust. But they also contained utter nonsense. The kind of nonsense perhaps sent now by a homogenised emoji or meme, but back then scribbled in handwriting that could only belong to that particular friend or lover.

a typical example of the kind of weekly letter my sister wrote while I was at uni

My sister wrote to me while I was at university. Her letters on A4 pages torn from exercise books still make me honk with laughter now as I can hear her voice at that age, and her pages are littered with the funny sketches she doodled to accompany her rambling thoughts. Her news would be interspersed with caricatures of Mum shouting about wet towels on the bedroom floor, or a cartoon of the cat pooing somewhere she shouldn’t have, or unkind but hilarious drawings of teachers furtively produced during lessons and assemblies.

I had boxes and boxes of letters from friends I had met on music camps and on family holidays. I also had boxes and boxes of letters from friends who lived only a few streets away. They were a more exciting and more private means of communication than the phone, which was nailed to a table in the hall meaning everyone could overhear what was said, or worse still, listen in from the extension in my parents’ bedroom. One evening while chatting to a boyfriend, his mum picked up the “other end” and said, “Why don’t you just come round, Anna, so that someone else can use the phone this evening?”

Letters and notes could be hurtful as well, of course. They could also inadvertently result in trouble. A friend loves to remind me of the time when we were both in France on our years abroad as part of our degree. At college we would leave notes on our doors to let friends know if we’d popped out, so, thinking a friend might come to see him while he was visiting me, he left a note on his door in French informing anyone who needed to know that he was away for the weekend. It turned out to be very useful information for the people who then broke into his flat and burgled him.

I’ve moved house so many times in adult life that many of these letters have been thrown out. I was very grateful to everyone who wrote a physical letter rather than an email when my parents died, so I’ve kept all those. I’ve kept many of the funnier and more poignant letters and cards sent by friends too, and I still have early rejection and acceptance letters from my first days hunting for a job in publishing. Other notes were destroyed not so much for lack of space, but to stop other people reading them - something not so easy to do in this digital age.

A friend and I tried to rekindle a letter-writing relationship when we both moved from Wiltshire, she to the Lakes and I to Cornwall. We soon ran out of steam. There are too many other ways to write and read. And stamps cost a bloody fortune. So now we leave each other daily voice-notes instead. The stream-of-consciousness witterings we send are lovely to listen to while walking, and the content is pretty similar to the letters we wrote. They are however no substitute for the thrill of seeing an envelope with familiar handwriting, waiting on the door mat.

Do you still write letters? Have you kept any precious ones? There are so many now that I wish I had not thrown away…