To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  There hasn’t been any real relief here because of the end of the war. Most chaps are much too aware of the time that will elapse before they return home, and some are now more than ordinarily apprehensive about SEAC [South East Asia Command], which we all call Burma. I can quite understand the feelings at home and that much of the enthusiasm is synthetic, cultivated by the flag-selling interests. Remember that I saw the paper flags Woolworths were selling when on leave. But anyhow, I’d like to see them all waving around Blackheath at the moment!

  I wonder if next Spring we shall be doing the cleaning together? I hope so. I hope we shall both be really living, really living together by then. I want to explore, to voyage, to investigate, to discover and to know. I want to hold you tight and tell you you are mine and I am yours.

  I LOVE YOU.

  Chris

  Epilogue: Dear Reader

  In 2004, three years before he died at the age of 93, Chris Barker asked his son Bernard what to do with his war letters. ‘Should I throw these away, or will you take them?’ They reached an agreement: the letters would be saved, but his father insisted on an injunction that they wouldn’t be read until he and Bessie were both dead. ‘I asked why,’ Bernard remembers, and he said: “I say what I’d like to do with her”.’

  Bernard Barker, a professor of education at the University of Leicester, began to read the letters properly in 2008. ‘There were many more letters, and many more words, than I expected.’ There were 501 letters totalling 525,000 words.

  His parents, Chris and Bessie, were married in October 1945. He was born the following August, two months after his father finally returned to England from Italy and resumed his work in the London Post Office. They lived in Blackheath, a suburb of south-east London, where they soon had another son, Peter, in 1949. Chris Barker worked his way up to executive level, wrote regularly for several Post Office journals, and after his retirement in 1973 he remained active in the local Labour Party and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Bessie also resumed her work at the Post Office, and at home developed her talents for painting, enamel firing and gardening.

  ‘Both my parents were to me transparently emotional, passionate people,’ Bernard notes, ‘but their feelings were under such adamantine self-control that it is a surprise now to read these open statements of their shifting wartime emotions, written long ago. Their love for one another was so complete, always, that it was difficult for my brother and I in childhood and adolescence to relate to each of them as a single person. Even so, this early love at a distance was, perhaps, the best because they found one another through their ability to write about what was really important in life and to imagine a happy future with home and children.’

  I spoke to Bernard Barker in May 2013, a few weeks after he donated his father’s letters to the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University, of which I am a trustee. The letters were part of a wider archive, including Chris Barker’s journalism for various Post Office journals, photographs, and a collection of documents relating to his family stretching back to the 1890s. They were beautifully and painstakingly presented, a testament to a life lived through paper. Many other documents in Chris Barker’s life were either lost or burnt, including the majority of Bessie’s letters, of which only 16 survive. But we have enough to appreciate the flowering of a full and lasting relationship during the most challenging times – a battle triumphant.

  In the written introduction to his father’s archives, Bernard Barker remarks how ‘our life capsules spin at painful speed towards and away from even our friends and the closest members of our family. We catch parts of one another, disclosed fragments of a greater whole, before hastening to another time and place. We think the years have gone but we ourselves are lost to each other in the end.’

  The wartime correspondence between Bernard Barker’s parents ended with these lines on 7 June 1946, with Chris Barker writing to his new wife:

  Darling, tonight I spend my last night in the Army. Tomorrow I spend the night in the train. As you go to sleep on Wednesday night, think of me speeding along the rails towards you, sleeping this final separate sleep. And remember that when you awaken in the morning, it will be to hear my voice and see me. Dearest, Darling, Only One, thank you for all that you have been to me through these years, and be sure we shall overcome with our love, any difficulties there may be later on . . . I can never be as good as you deserve, but I really will try very hard . . . We shall be collaborators, man and woman, husband and wife, lovers.

  Great miserabilist that he was, Philip Larkin was spot-on with his famous line from ‘An Arundel Tomb’, as right with Chris Barker and Bessie Moore as with you and me: what will survive of us is love. Letters fulfil and safeguard this prophecy. Without letters we risk losing sight of our history, or at least its nuance. The decline and abandonment of letters – the price of progress – will be an immeasurable defeat.

  When will it come, that monumental day, that last proper letter through the door? Next Wednesday? A year from today? Five years? The last letter will appear in our lifetime. It will be personal, emotional, maybe even handwritten, but crucially it will be physical, the evidence of human connection. It will have travelled along a definable route, perhaps not far from the journey we’d have taken to deliver it ourselves. We will not know it was the last until months or years later, when we have glanced back to acknowledge a passing, like the last hair to whiten, or the last lovemaking.

  And what can we do to stave off this terrible event? We could write more letters, unwieldy as this seems. We could write to a few of the people we now email, a longer and less urgent transaction, and one that may create a certain amount of alarm amongst our recipients. The quality would probably be better, the physical effect memorable, the pleasure more. We could sign off in haste and run to catch the post. Our grandchildren and historians may thank us. And then there would be the unusual pleasure of receiving a letter back.

  We could join a letter-writing club. Recently I talked to a woman in Leeds who ran one in local pubs and reported new members every week; they wrote to relatives and friends they had lost touch with, and occasionally to each other. They liked the process of writing, the self-expression, but they also liked the camaraderie – the same pleasures one might derive from a book club or knitting circle. There is also the very pink online site called MoreLoveLetters.com, in which a caring bunch (more than 10,000 have signed up) send love letters to strangers to brighten their day (they leave them in fitting rooms, coat pockets, library books). I think the main purpose of it may be to make the letter-writers feel cute about themselves, but no harm in that.

  Or we could pay for a letter subscription. In April 2013 I emailed the American writer and filmmaker Stephen Elliott to ask him about a project he had started a year before called Letters in the Mail. This was an adjunct to Elliott’s leftfield culture website The Rumpus, and had about 1,500 subscribers, each of whom were paying $5 per month (in the US) and $10 (overseas) to receive a photocopied letter through the post every fortnight. The letters are usually written by a novelist, or an artist of some type, among them Margaret Cho, Rick Moody and Aimee Bender, and they write about whatever takes their fancy – their next novel, a failed relationship, their mother – either handwritten or typed, and some with illustrations. They mail their letter to The Rumpus, and The Rumpus photocopies it 1,500 times and puts it in 1,500 envelopes. There is usually a return address from the writer, and recipients are welcome to write back. It’s for people who miss real letters – a photocopy being the closest many of us will get these days. ‘The inspiration was just that I was sending out these daily emails and I got into a conversation about letter writing,’ Elliott told me. ‘I missed writing letters. I decided to do Letters in the Mail that day and announced it the following morning.’

  Letters from a loft: Deb Olin Unferth keeps a tradition alive.

  Some of the letters are a bit self-consci
ous, but some are terrific – revelatory, funny, full of news, thought-provoking. I got one from a woman called Alix Ohlin about what letters had meant in her life, including those from her dad and some from a stalker who had somehow tracked her changing addresses through five states. The stalker letters would open with history and philosophy, but then descend into incoherence. He (Ohlin assumes it was a he) has stopped writing now, and Ohlin is no closer to knowing the stalker’s identity. She found the letters perplexing and annoying rather than threatening. Initially she thought they might be from a shy ex-boyfriend or would-be boyfriend, but towards the end she just envisaged someone lonely and angry. She was reminded of Emily Dickinson: ‘This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me’.

  I also received a letter from someone named Melissa who wrote from the hipster Thunderbird hotel in Marfa, Texas. She was looking out from her room onto blue skies and wild grasses, listening to the whistle of passing trains. She was supposed to be working on a new book idea, but she had just spent the last few days having sex with her girlfriend instead, and now she was running out of time. She wrote of how she was reminded of Sylvia Plath, how she wanted ‘to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience’ that life had to offer. ‘And I am horribly limited.’

  Another letter I really liked came from a woman called Deb Olin Unferth, who wrote from Connecticut of her life as a writer and a teacher. ‘I’m staying at my partner’s this weekend,’ she explained.

  He lives in a loft space, one of those democratic constructions with large windows, open space, and no doors. Instead of a closet he has this cubby hole with clothes hanging overhead, and I’m tucked in here writing this because it’s still dark and he’s asleep. The blow heat came on and woke me, and in my emergence from the depths, I felt a deep, almost primitive longing for radiators, like missing the womb or the smells of a past life.

  Not exactly earth-shattering, but I could imagine that place, and there was an appealing tone to her writing (I discovered later that Unferth was a university English professor and novelist/memoirist). I read on:

  Oh radiators! My first winter in New York and how I felt at home because of the radiators, the outrageous overheating radiators of New York City! I knew them from growing up in Chicago, the loud, banging radiators of Chicago that hissed and clanged and leaked. I lived in that Chicago: salt-stained station-wagons, black slush, heat lamps that never worked at the Howard el, parking spaces you would dig out of snow and ‘save’ with old furniture in the street.

  Much of her letter focused on a video she had been given by her mother after graduation – something she refers to emblematically as The Movie – a film that taught her something about self-worth and self-image. She also wrote fleetingly about the death of a brother and a nephew, about teaching in a maximum security prison, and of feeling alone.

  It was an oddly personal and brave letter to send out to people you didn’t know, and a reader could never be sure of its veracity. But I trusted her, and a week later, I wrote back. I wrote about this book, about the loss of letters, a little about my family. I wrote the letter over several days, and discovered a depth I had previously neglected in emails: I would analyse things more, and make more connections between things that happened. I was intrigued by the possibilities of our new writerly relationship. Then I did something I regretted. ‘I did briefly Google you and now wish I hadn’t,’ I admitted to her.

  Not because I found anything that was even fractionally unappealing, but because I found out anything at all, when I should have just let a correspondence run its natural course. The temptations and remorse of the Internet. So if you can resist Googling me, I’ll tell you something that people always enjoy: if it hadn’t been for the Nazis, my dad wouldn’t have changed his name from the original Garfunkel, which means I’d be Simon Garfunkel. But of course I probably wouldn’t, because I’d have rushed to change it on the morning of my 18th birthday. (Lacking the courage to use it as my calling card, the way people have clung to names like Laurel Hardy even as celebrity events overtake them.)

  I’m 52, so old enough to have lived many of my romances through correspondence. I have the shoeboxes. I have the proof of naiveté and the rush of lust and over-cleverness, and I can remember even a slight sense of predictability and boredom when letters from my first proper girlfriend used to arrive almost every day, quite fat envelopes with the contents in a beautifully rushed hand, probably lots of things about what happened at school (we were 17/18), most of which she’d already told me the afternoon before when we met for coffee. Sometimes I think she even got the last post on her way home, after we’d just met. It’s the best history of that time that I have. Her lovely letters. I used to write back every two or three days, and I think I grew up a bit with each one.

  And like you I’m not unfamiliar with family bereavements. You wrote about your brother and sister’s son. My brother died when I was 18 and he was 23. My mother a year later from breast cancer. I still have the condolence letters, too difficult to read then and now, most of them no doubt beginning how difficult it was to put anything into words. But of course one tried, and still does – the condolence letter the last letter to fall, the one that one still has to find a decent sheet of paper and envelope and proper grammar for.

  A few weeks later, Unferth wrote back. And so it has continued, a new friendship through the mail. There was no other way: we didn’t have each other’s telephone numbers or email addresses; I’m not on Facebook, and tweets would have been insubstantial. I wrote to her of how my eldest son Ben (now 25) recently told me of meeting a woman he liked on holiday in Lisbon. They wanted to keep in touch, and so resolved to write. Ben vaguely envisaged some sort of old-fashioned pen-pal correspondence through the post involving envelopes and stamps, but things being what they are, they began writing by email instead. The problem was, this was all too instant. He would write, she would reply, and then he’d be obliged to write again, probably on the same day. But there was nothing significant to report, and so the whole thing fizzled out almost as soon as it began.

  I wrote to Unferth about the pleasures of snail mail, and about the origin of the phrase. There’s an understandable assumption that it began as a negative comparison to email, or, if its roots were earlier, it first appeared as a contrast to airmail in the 1940s. But there is at least one earlier reference, now almost a century old, and fittingly it appears in a letter. In 1916, an Austrian woman named Christl Lang was in regular correspondence with her fiancé Leopold Wolf on the southern front between Italy and Austria-Hungary. But in December of that year, her letters suddenly failed to reach him. ‘I can hardly wait for you to answer my letters,’ she wrote to him. ‘It should be called the Snail Mail, not the Military Mail!’*

  Unferth wrote that I was far from the only person to reply to her.

  In fact, I received an awful lot of letters in response, many more than I could have responded to, and there were indeed a few crackpots in the bunch, but most of them were fascinating, deeply personal, beautifully written letters and included gifts – books, artwork, photographs, bookmarks. I received one letter that arrived as a package and it turned out to be a giant wall-hanging letter that he’d written with a large strange pen that he’d found in a box of things he’d been sent home with when he lost his job. I had letters that people wrote over a period of two weeks, adding a little each day so they read like journals, and ones that seemed focused on telling one story and leaving it at that. And, oddly, the two most represented age groups seemed to be kids in their early twenties and men and women in their fifties or older. Almost no one in their 30’s or 40’s! And the ones from the older group were mostly married with kids, professionals, artists. Really excellent letters. The theory I came up with about that group is that those people know how to write letters, they grew up writing letters, they sort of miss writing letters, they can communicate that way with ease and grace. They know what a letter
is for. The younger group – excellent letters too – but, well, who isn’t a little lost in their early 20’s? It seems like they mostly wrote because they feel a little lost and are hoping for some adult wisdom or guidance (haha, right).

  I wrote back with a few examples of my favourite letters – both famous and not. I told her I had always been fascinated by the letter Elvis Presley had sent to President Nixon in 1970 when he wanted a badge from the federal narcotics agency. Presley already had other police badges, but he hoped that this one would allow him to carry guns and drugs into any country as he pleased. He wrote the letter by hand during a flight from LA to DC (it’s on American Airlines notepaper), and you won’t find a finer example of the persuasive power of celebrity. Elvis talks about the scourge of drugs amongst America’s youth, and how he wants to do anything he can to help. He ends with a PS – ‘I believe that you, Sir, were one of the Top Ten Outstanding Men of America also.’ (The letter worked: he met Nixon at the White House, and he did get his badge. He then went on to take a lot more drugs.)

  I explained that I am also a big fan of Jessica Mitford’s letters, not least her battles with her sisters and her unrelenting fire against bullies wherever she found them. I am not alone: in a book review, J.K. Rowling revealed that she loves them too, praising their rebelliousness, bravery, adventurousness, humour and irreverence.* Rowling noted how her correspondence provided a much fuller picture of the writer than her autobiographies, ‘as letters usually do’. Rebellion, bravery, adventure: not attributes one commonly assign to emails.