by David Nobbs
This is to wish you a very happy Christmas and New Year. It’ll be strange to be so far from Thurmarsh at the festive time and you’ll be very much in my thoughts, and I’ll have lots of memories of Christmases past, and all the fun we had with the crackers and paper hats and jokes and of course the delicious food. I hope you won’t feel lonely and will be comforted by the memory of all the merry times and also by the fact that I’ll be thinking of you.
Well, I’m busy setting up the project, and Peru will soon be covered in English cucumbers. Peru does have quite a lot of cucumbers already, which is a bit disturbing, and they don’t rate them very highly. In fact there’s a Peruvian saying, ‘Me importa un pepino’ – ‘I couldn’t care a cucumber.’ However, their cucumbers are short and stumpy, so maybe they’ll like our long, firm English ones.
We’re busy trying to find land. The Cajamarca valley is very fertile, but the best land is already in use. Still, we won’t need the best land, as we’ll be growing our cucumbers under glass. We’ve begun interviewing Peruvians for jobs, and have met some very interesting people of high calibre.
Our office is in Baños Del Inca, a village a few miles away. It has hot springs, and is the place where the Inca leader Atahualpa was having a nice hot bath when the Spanish invader Pizarro called on him the day before the Spaniards slaughtered his army in the main square of Cajamarca. I saw these events described once in a play called The Royal Hunt of the Sun by Peter Shaffer in London, so that is very interesting.
I look forward to hearing from you and will write again soon.
Happy Christmas and much love,
Henry
Sarajevo
Rua de Matelos
Altea
Costa Blanca
Spain
14th December 1981
Dear Henry,
I was astonished to get your letter and even more astonished that it came from Peru! My heart raced terrifyingly when I read that you love me, and it races now, as I sit on the terrace on a sunny, but rather windy December afternoon.
Yes, it’s true that I made up about there being somebody else. There has never been anybody else and never will be.
I love you still, Henry darling, and feel no anger towards you after all these years, and I certainly won’t accept that all the blame was yours. If only I’d not been such a brittle reed and so hopelessly perfectionist. If I could have accepted that love is irrational and nobody is perfect, and tried to help you through your jealousy, how different things might have been.
I’m quite happy here, although I suppose my life isn’t exciting. I look after Daddy, who is slowly growing old, and is missing England and all his political life dreadfully. We never found anywhere at the right price, prices have leapt in England, and we’ve left it too late. We’re trapped in exile, and neither of us like it. This is not a criticism of Spain. I would love it if we were of Spain, we are only in Spain, and that’s a horse of a very different complexion, as Mr O’Reilly might have said if he’d been a more loquacious kind of Irishman!
We’re in the middle of doing a big jigsaw, and Daddy loves to do them together as he’s really very lonely, so I must stop now.
Write soon.
With love,
Hilary
PS I nearly forgot. Happy Christmas!
Apartado 823
Cajamarca
Peru
Jan 2nd, 1982
Dearest Hilary,
I was delighted to get your letter, which didn’t actually arrive till after Christmas. I’m absolutely thrilled to hear from your own pen that you still love me and always will. In fact reading your letter led to a solitary activity which has to be indulged in not too violently at this altitude! But your letter also puzzles me and worries me. You talk about our relationship as if it was all in the past. Surely, as we both love each other, we should be thinking of the future?
I want to ask you two simple questions. I’ve gone on bended knees to write the first one, so my writing may not be very clear. Will you marry me? And the second question is equally simple. Will you come and live with me in Cajamarca? Please say ‘yes’, my darling.
You’ll love it here, the landscape is on a grand scale. The valley throbs with vitality and fertility. The great hills are arid but steeped in melancholy beauty.
You’d get on well with the team. They’re a fine bunch of blokes. I can hear you laughing at me. Yes, maybe in this far-off spot the public school ethos has got to me at last. We had a good Christmas. I even got a turkey and made my own crackers, which is what my lovely maid Juanita (sixty-six years old – no rival!) thinks I am. I thought of you constantly, and could only half enjoy myself, so thirsty was I for your reply. I’d promised Cousin Hilda to lay aside a moment to think of her, but I forgot. I did think of our dear, dear Kate and Jack and lovely Camilla and poor Benedict. I wish I believed in God, so that I could pray for him.
Other countries have aid schemes here. There are Belgians trying to plant trees everywhere, and a German is making German sausages. We all know him as Bratwurst Bernhardt, and I understand I’m known as Cucumber Henry!
Only two shadows darken my life. The Range Rovers haven’t arrived and, more importantly, I don’t have my beloved with me.
I should have said earlier that, if you can come, it will be fine for you to bring your father. I’m sure we can get you both on the payroll somewhere. Baños Del Inca is a long way from Whitehall.
With deepest love,
Henry
X (One kiss from you is worth a thousand from anyone else)
66, Park View Road
Thurmarsh
South Yorkshire
4th January, 1982
Dear Henry,
Thank you very much for your letter. Thank you for your good wishes for Christmas and the New Year. I had a very enjoyable Christmas, if solitary. I did myself very well, but I avoided ‘over-indulgence’. I were a bit badly over the New Year, but then I don’t see the New Year in, believing that one year is very much like another. So did Mrs Wedderburn, incidentally.
Your news is very interesting. I have never had experience of ‘foreign parts’, finding the North York Moors a very satisfying run, so I cannot imagine the Andes. Are they at all like the North York Moors?
I were right touched to hear that you would be thinking of me on Christmas Day. I must admit I do feel a bit quiet at times, now that the Good Lord has taken Mrs Wedderburn and Mr O’Reilly, and the gay days of my gentlemen are gone for ever.
I were interested to hear that you are busy setting up your project, and that Peru will soon be covered in English cucumbers. I’m sorry the Peruvians have lots of cucumbers already, but interested to hear that theirs are short and stumpy, and pleased that you think you can do well with long, firm English ones. It were interesting to me that the Cajamarca valley is very fertile. Parts of the North York Moors are very bare. It’s funny the way places differ. It was interesting that you had met some interesting Peruvians of high calibre. I were brought up to believe that there were very few foreigners of high calibre, and now it seems that the reverse is true. I pray to God for guidance.
It was interesting about the play by Peter Shaffer. I saw The Desert Song with you at the Temperance Hall in Haddock Lane, but I don’t think it was by him. Mr Frost were in it and you went to the pub afterwards with that journalist and milk bottles were later knocked over. I don’t hold with the theatre. It leads to bad behaviour. Mrs Wedderburn did take me twice to the Playhouse, but neither play was by Peter Shaffer. They were both by Agatha Christie, and they were both very good, and I didn’t guess who had done it. Nor did Mrs Wedderburn, incidentally.
A lorry delivering electrical goods swerved to avoid a dog and completely demolished the bus shelter at Thurmarsh Lane Bottom yesterday, but otherwise we have had no excitements to match yours, so I will close now, hoping you are well and not catching any of those foreign diseases which those poor foreigners have to contend with.
With love,
&
nbsp; Cousin Hilda
Sarajevo
Rua de Matelos
Altea
Costa Blanca
Spain
19th January 1982
Dear Henry,
Thank you very much for your letter, and I must say straight away that my answer to your first question is ‘not at the moment’ and to your second question, ‘no’.
I didn’t mention the future because I’ve learnt to live in the present, it’s the way I get by, and I talked about our relationship as if it was in the past, because it is. Of course we may have a relationship in the future, but I’ll only find that out a step at a time. I’d like to meet you on your return to England, and see if we can cope with a return to normality together. I lived for a very long time in a world more sombre than you are capable of imagining. Nobody knew. Not my father, my psychiatrist or, above all, my mother. I feel now that I’m sitting on a green lawn, but the lawn juts out over that sombre chasm and it would be all too easy to fall back into it. I couldn’t cope with seeing you again in somewhere exotic like Peru. It’d be make or break, and I’m not brave enough for that.
Please treat me as a pen-pal and send me lovely descriptions of your times in Peru. Then, when you return, and you will return, we’ll meet like pen-pals. It’ll be exciting and terrifying, but if you’re truly patient and loving I believe we may have a chance.
Sam made a flying visit last week. He’s a cheery bachelor. He lives in Luton and devises recipes for tinned soups. ‘Well, somebody’s got to,’ he says.
Dad and I are off to our local English bar now. I’d prefer a tapas bar but the English bar has fish and chips on a Friday, and once a Yorkshireman …
I think of Benedict often and with despair.
With love and hope,
Hilary
Apartado 823
Cajamarca
Peru
Feb 2nd, 1982
Darling Hilary,
Do other people feel conflicting emotions about seven hundred times a day, or is it just me? I’m so depressed at knowing that I won’t see you for almost two years. (I won’t stay here when my option comes up. Without you, I feel as though I’m doing my National Service all over again.) But I’m thrilled that you want to see if we can make a go of things and that you love me still, and believe we may have a chance. (I sound like Cousin Hilda, who went through my letter paragraph by paragraph.)
Progress on the project is a bit slow. The really good Peruvians don’t seem interested. Two or three accepted posts and simply didn’t turn up. Apparently, they hate to disappoint you, so they tell you what they think you want to hear: ‘I will start next Monday.’ Lots of big smiles, lots of bad teeth, nobody starts next Monday!
The Range Rovers are another problem. They’ve arrived, and we don’t know what to do with them! Only three of the English staff drive anything, let alone Range Rovers, and I wouldn’t dare give them to the Peruvians, because they’d simply get too excited at the prospect of driving something so magnificent.
Peru is a smiling, rickety land, full of humour. The main newspaper has a photographic feature on its front page called ‘Pothole of the Day’. An elderly lorry bears the legend, ‘Apollo 2½’. On the frequent, teeming, breast-feeding, sombrero-shaking buses between Cajamarca and Baños Del Inca, the conductor calls out the stops by name. ‘Sausages,’ he cries as we approach Bratwurst Bernhardt’s. I turn to smile at you. You aren’t there.
I flew to Lima last week, on business. I can’t begin to describe Lima and its contrasts, the rich suburbs, the endless shanty towns, it would depress you. I came back on the night bus – a fifteen-hour trip! All along the Pan-American Highway the great lorries roared through the night, lit up with fairy lights, liners of the road! I turned to share the romance with you. You weren’t there.
At every stop, in the dusty, single-storey villages, small boys came on the bus to sell limes and pancakes. Even at four in the morning the boys came. To sell a few limes is worth losing a night’s sleep if your family is really poor. Yet they smile and look bright and well. We stopped every now and then at roadside stalls, rich with sizzling meats and pancakes, the Little Chefs (!) of Peru.
The bus began to growl up into the Andes. The headlights picked out the rocky hills. Dawn came quickly. We were winding through a narrow, astonishingly green valley. White storks were feeding in their hundreds in paddy fields that made me think of China. High above us the road wound ever upward through the sierras, pale yellow and green, dry but covered in plants except for a few rocky outcrops, briefly turned red as the sun rose. It took us two hours and forty minutes from sea level to the summit. As I saw the Cajamarca Valley laid out before us like a smiling woman, I turned to share the moment with you. You weren’t there.
To have this amazing continent to experience, and yet not to be able to share it with you, it’s the story of my life.
One day I’ll share everything with you, my incredible darling,
With ever deepening love,
Your pen-pal!
Apartado 823
Cajamarca
Peru
March 28th, 1982
Dear Martin,
I’ve been meaning for a long while to tell you how sorry I was about the way the election turned out and about my part in it. I’m in Peru now (!) running a Government Overseas Aid project, and getting a very different slant on life.
The people here migrate from the poverty-stricken countryside to the teeming towns, squat on the outskirts, build primitive shanty towns, skimp and scrape and slave and eventually turn them into houses. It may take thirty years to create a respectable neighbourhood, but they do it, and in the end the State conveniently forgets that they’ve done it all illegally, and gives them electricity, water and sewage as they can afford them. To see the patience, determination and good nature of these people makes one ashamed of Western assumptions. To regard dishwashers, video machines and microwaves as essentials seems to me to be deeply obscene.
I don’t suddenly have renewed faith in the Labour Party or any less disgust at its feuding and pettiness. I don’t believe in grand designs and great schemes, or centralised planning. I still have a lot of sympathy for the Liberals’ approach. But I now believe that only socialism can possibly solve the world’s problems, because at least some of its supporters care enough even if its leaders don’t.
I have no more party ambitions. I don’t believe the world will ever change for the better from the top downwards. It can only change for the better from the bottom upwards, through the actions of millions of good individuals. It’s unlikely, but it’s the only hope.
Nevertheless I’d like to canvass for you in the next election, if I’m home. We’re the only two members of the Paradise Lane Gang who’re still in touch. Can we be friends again?
All best wishes to you and Mandy,
Henry
Apartado 823
Cajamarca
Peru
May 8th, 1982
Dear Cousin Hilda,
Thank you very much for your letter, and I’m really sorry I never replied to your Christmas letter. My only excuse is I’ve been really busy. If I tell you that our twelve Range Rovers haven’t moved since they were parked on some waste ground outside Baños Del Inca, you’ll realise how busy we’ve been. Getting greenhouses built is a major problem. The greenhouse is a foreign concept here, like the garden shed, probably because they don’t have a Radio Times to advertise them in!
Some of our staff have left, partly because they don’t see us getting quick results, and partly because it’s not very good to be British here during the Falklands War! Yet again my timing’s bad. Peruvians believe that in withdrawing our survey ship we signalled to Argentina that we weren’t interested in the islands, they believe our huge fleet to knock the conscript troops off the island is a colonial fantasy, they believe the sinking of the General Belgrano was murder on the high seas. The play No Sex, Please, We’re British, which ran in Lima under the somewhat less catc
hy title of Nada de Sexo, Por Favor, Somos Británicos would stand no chance now. I can hear you saying that that would be a good thing!
I was moved to hear how moved you were to know that I was thinking of you on Christmas Day.
I was interested in all your news in your letters. I’m glad Jack’s been visiting you. He’s very fond of you. I hope the bus shelter in Thurmarsh Lane Bottom has been repaired, and fancy Macfisheries closing. It’s the end of an era.
This will have to be the end of this letter, as I have a budget meeting to attend and I want to catch the post.
With much love as always,
Henry
PS You ask if Apartado is a nice street. It isn’t the street name. It’s actually the equivalent of PO Box 823.
Honeysuckle Cottage
Monks Eleigh
Suffolk
May 19th, 1982
Dear Henry,
I’m sending this to your friend Lampo Davey for forwarding, as agreed, just in case Doris sees the address on the envelope and worries about your being in Peru.
We’re as well as can be expected. I have some arthritis, and Doris continues to slip an inch at a time towards a world of her own. My job is to make sure that it’s a happy world. Of course she can never remember when she last saw people, and will fret that it’s ages since she saw someone who called that very morning, but in your case I think she has a genuine feeling that it’s been a very long time. She does have moments of comparative lucidity. So perhaps you could drop us a line, not mentioning Peru, saying you had a nice visit.
I hope everything’s going swimmingly for you, and that the Peruvians will soon be enjoying cucumber sandwiches for tea. I wish you could find some way of sending me your news.
With much love,
Uncle Teddy
9, Bromyard Mews
London SW3
June 4th 1982
Dear Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris,
Thank you very much for having me last weekend. It was a very enjoyable visit, as always. It was good to see you both looking so well and it was nice to have good weather for once. I was disappointed that I didn’t win any of the games of Scrabble, but c’est la vie, and at least they were hard-fought scraps.