by Chris Barker
On the summit of the Jungfrau, however, it was his turn to be confused when the water failed to boil on his pocket stove. Was there something wrong with the fuel tablet? He didn’t understand about altitude.
Mother’s art became even more important as we departed for university. She bought a kiln and fired glass on copper. She staged an exhibition of her enamels at Christ Church tower near St Paul’s Cathedral in 1969 and sold many of them.
Her tutor remembers her at the pottery studio, ‘pushing, struggling to develop her understanding of clay and its possibilities’. She used the techniques of the coil pot to produce original, large-scale sculptures and sensuous exotic vases. He admired her passionately held ideas, love of debate and strong sense of social justice. Like my father, she could grasp the essential point, often in a single, prescient sentence. Confronted by the Cultural Revolution, Mother remarked: ‘Just wait until Miss Red China wants her lipstick.’
Chris and Bessie at an exhibition of Bessie’s art, 1969
After Cambridge, I married Ann, a biologist from York University, and embarked on a career as a teacher, school leader and academic. Our children, Chris and Irena, were born in the 1970s.
Irena inherited her grandfather’s love of language and has become a journalist, with her desk in Holborn not far from his last posting as assistant superintendent in charge of London Chief Office in King Edward Street. Dad lived to see her marry Nick, from Mauritius, but not to meet his great grandchildren, Conrad and Marcel.
Peter worked for the Probation Service for thirty years and married Penny (a civil servant) in 1981. He was a Family Court Adviser for a further seven years. In retirement he founded a child contact centre and initiated a campaign to ask that centres should be placed on a statutory basis. He acquired stepchildren, Sara who became a teaching assistant, and Simon who is a recruitment consultant in Perth, Western Australia. His granddaughter Rachel is a medical researcher.
Dad retired in 1974. At first it was a nuisance for my mother to have him home with his 46-year Post Office career behind him. But gradually they developed a new life together. Dad was intensely proud of his wife as the house filled with paintings, tapestry and sculpture, and the lawn was reduced to make space for a great variety of species.
They were vigorous members of the Post Office Art Club, joined the Royal Horticultural Society, attended the Chelsea Flower Show and toured gardens in search of ever more unusual plants. They loved the new National Theatre, especially when Bernard Shaw’s plays were performed.
They bought a ground-floor flat in Folkestone to share with brother Wilfred and divided their time between London and Kent. Despite his rude good health, Dad announced that he needed to be near a hospital. After a final trip to Paris with friends, foreign travel was abandoned. Aged seventy, Dad became a vegetarian and hoped to convert his meat-eating friends and family.
He was interviewed in 1986 for the controversial television series The Hidden War, about the conflict in Greece after the Germans withdrew. Dad copied some of his war letters for the producer.
When Mother’s memory began to fail, Dad took over all household responsibilities. For fifteen years or more he cared for her, maintaining the house and a wide circle of friends, old and new.
His fifty-year old Olympia typewriter kept him in touch with Post Office veterans, fellow survivors of captivity with the Greek communist partisans (with whom he sympathised), his grandchildren and his nephews and nieces, to whom he was devoted.
In hospital with pneumonia, Dad regarded himself as a prisoner and maintained a jail log, ticking off the days to his release. After a cerebral haemorrhage a few years later, he was equally determined to escape, begging me to smuggle him out.
He taught himself to talk, walk and write again but in the end recognised that coping with Mother was beyond him. With the help of relatives, friends and carers, he visited her in the nursing home every day, always taking with him pieces of carefully wrapped chocolate and apple.
If no friend could take him that day, he would go by bus, limping on and off the platform and hobbling down the street. At first he told me that he was not like the vacant and the demented people he met there. Eventually he worried that he was descending towards them.
Bessie died, aged ninety, in 2004; Chris followed, aged ninety-three, in 2007.
As Benedict Cumberbatch and Louise Brealey read their words at the Hay Festival in May 2014, my parents come alive again. They entrance a new audience with their tenderness, intensity and unassuming ordinariness. I worry that I have exposed their love when privacy was important to them but I am also pleased that their writing has won so many new friends. The unwanted attention and celebrity would have embarrassed them. They were both great debunkers. But now, I believe their life and love belong to the ages.
Epilogue
by Irena Barker
Thoroughly utilitarian beings that they were, I would never have imagined my grandparents to be romantic sorts. They were never much into giving each other gifts, expressing their feelings or being anything less than rigid and British.
Certainly in the case of my granddad, there was a strong flavour of puritanical discipline in everything he did. The way he attacked the washing up before the last mouthful was swallowed. The way he forced down dry, tasteless food, chewing mercilessly with his false teeth – because it was ‘only fuel’.
His toilet paper of choice, attached to the wall in a special ceramic dispenser, was of the old-fashioned and uncomfortable ‘tracing paper’ sort. Granny probably had the romantic edge, with her youthful smoking habit and love of painting. Her choice of softer, more luxurious paper hung snugly alongside granddad’s on a roll. Indeed, this toilet paper scenario and the many other hilarious eccentricities of my grandparents form some of my strongest and longest-lasting memories.
For me, Granddad was defined by the food he served: his firm belief that salad and good quantities of roughage were the key to a long and healthy life was forever represented in his meals, which he prepared with vigour and enthusiasm.
Until only a couple of years before his death, he was ferociously grating carrots on a rusty old grater and filling the house with the stink of grease as he rustled up fried potatoes in a pan, the handle held together with masking tape. He served a unique beetroot soup that tasted of dust and nothing else. Slices of beetroot and festoons of lettuce and watercress made it onto every life-giving platter. I always thought, as an atheist, he feared death, and he seemed to be a pioneer of superfoods way before his time. I can’t look at a beetroot now without thinking of him – every mouthful feels like a homage.
But he also succumbed to treats – dates, brazils and halva – and he always sent us on our way with a carrier bag with a twisted nugget of these goodies at the bottom. I remember driving through the Blackwall Tunnel on the way home from visits, trying to make out the contents in the dim light.
Granny preferred chocolate. When she went into a nursing home, Granddad would visit every day, meting out small pieces of Dairy Milk each time, so she did not consume too much at once. As he cared for her in later years I remember the tiny squares of toast and marmite he made her in the mornings. The apples he cut into tiny pieces that would be easier to chew. The endless cups of weak, sweet coffee he would serve. Maybe it kept her from falling asleep in her chair too much.
Despite the puritanical approach, both grandparents were as warm and giving as one could hope. Granny would assault us with alarming hugs and kisses when we turned up on visits.
When my brother and I were very young, Granddad set us up a workshop in his shed, where we could bash away at bits of wood, metal and leather on every visit. It was a highlight of life at the time. ‘The shed’, with the strips of leather on rolls, pots of nails and screws and its mysterious musty smell, had an almost magical allure.
Later on, Granddad took to sending us many letters and numerous newspaper cuttings (mostly chopped from the Guardian, the institution that educated him).
Wh
en I went to live in France for a year, alone, he sent me every episode of Posy Simmonds’ Gemma Bovery cartoon strip. I still have them curled up in a carrier bag in the wardrobe. He had faith in the postal service to inspire and revive a lonely soul.
When I was in my early twenties, I lodged with Granny and Granddad when I worked in London. I felt guilty every night that an old man in his eighties who was recovering from a major stroke was cooking my tea.
When I came back late in the evening on the train, he would risk being attacked, meeting me in the darkness of Kidbrooke station. He would hobble home with me on his arm (or was it him on my arm?).
There are too many memories, really. Everything about them made an impact on me, from Granny’s devotion to wearing trousers to Granddad’s funny bald head and itchy, tweedy hat.
It is a true delight to discover, through their letters, that there was even more to them than any of us could have imagined.
At Greenwich Park in July 2003, the last trip Bessie made from her care home. The couple are both 89, and have been married for almost 58 years.
Editor’s Note
Editing these letters has been a wholly pleasurable task. I cannot express enough my gratitude to Bernard Barker for depositing his father’s papers at Mass Observation and to the Barker family for entrusting me with their promotion and editing. (Bernard curated the papers with dedicated assistance from Katy Edge; the copyright is owned jointly by Chris’s and Bessie’s younger son Peter Barker and their granddaughter Irena Barker.) The fact that Bernard and Irena’s epilogues complete the picture in astute and vivid detail is surely a genetic inheritance.
The entire collection of Chris Barker’s papers is available to view, by appointment, at Mass Observation’s home at The Keep near Brighton. Please visit www.massobs.org.uk for more information.
More photos of the letters and the Barkers in later life may be found at www.simongarfield.com.
TO THE LETTER
A CURIOUS HISTORY OF CORRESPONDENCE
Simon Garfield
Every letter contains a story, and here are some of the greatest. From Oscar Wilde’s unconventional method of using the mail to cycling enthusiast Reginald Bray’s quest to post himself, Simon Garfield uncovers a host of stories that capture the enchantment of this irreplaceable art (with a supporting cast including Pliny the Younger, Ted Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, David Foster Wallace and the Little Red-Haired Girl). There is also a brief history of the letter-writing guide, with instructions on when and when not to send fish as a wedding gift. And as these accounts unfold, so does the tale of a compelling wartime correspondence that shows how the simplest of letters can change the course of a life.
A shining success’ Sunday Times
‘Excellent, amusing and moving’ Financial Times
‘Wonderfully elegant’ Observer
£9.99
ISBN 978 0 85786 861 9
Also available as an ebook
eBook ISBN 978 0 85786 860 2
www.canongate.tv
To the Letter
by Simon Garfield
Every letter contains a miniature story, and here are some of the greatest. From Oscar Wilde's unconventional method of using the mail to cycling enthusiast Reginald Bray's quest to post himself, Simon Garfield uncovers a host of stories that capture the enchantment of this irreplaceable art (with a supporting cast including Pliny the Younger, Ted Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, David Foster Wallace and the Little Red-Haired Girl). There is also a brief history of the letter-writing guide, with instructions on when and when not to send fish as a wedding gift. And as these accounts unfold, so does the tale of a compelling wartime correspondence that shows how the simplest of letters can change the course of a life.
Read on for a preview...
Chapter One
The Magic of Letters
Lot 512. Walker (Val. A.) An extensive correspondence addressed to Bayard Grimshaw, 1941 and 1967–1969, comprising 37 autograph letters, signed, and 21 typed letters, with a long description of Houdini: ‘His water torture cell simply underestimated the intelligence of the onlooker, no problem to layman & magician alike,’ describing a stage performance by him where Walker was one of the people called on to attach handcuffs, and another at which he fixed Houdini in his own jacket, continuing with information about his own straight jacket, his ‘Tank in the Thames’ and ‘Aquamarine Girl’ escapes, and other escapology, including a handbill advertising ‘The Challenge Handcuff Act’, and promotional sheet for George Grimmond’s ‘Triple Box Escape’.
est. £300 – £400
Bloomsbury Auctions is not in Bloomsbury but in a road off Regent Street, and since its inception in 1983 it has specialised in sales of books and the visual arts. Occasionally these visual arts include conjuring, a catch-all heading that offers a glimpse into a vanishing world, and many other vanishing items besides, as well as sleight-of-hand, mind-reading, contortionism, levitation, escapology and sawing.
On 20 September 2012 one such sale offered complete tricks, props, solutions for tricks and the construction of props, posters, flyers, contracts and letters. Several lots related to particular magicians, such as Vonetta, the Mistress of Mystery, one of the few successful female illusionists and a major draw in Scotland, where she was celebrated not only for her magic but also for her prowess as a quick-change artiste. There was one lot connected with Ali Bongo, including letters describing seventeen inventions, and, improbably, ‘a costume description for an appearance as The Invisible Man’.
There were three lots devoted to Chung Ling Soo, whose real name was William E. Robinson, born in 1861 not in Peking but in New York City (the photographs on offer suggested he looked less like an enigmatic man from the East and more like Nick Hornby with a hat on). One of the letters for sale discussed Chung Ling Soo’s rival, Ching Ling Foo, who claimed that Chung Ling Soo stole not only the basics of his name, but also the basis of his act; their feud reached its apotheosis in 1905, when both Soo and Foo were performing in London at the same time, and each expressed the sort of inscrutable fury that did neither of them any harm at the box office. In order to cultivate his persona, Chung Ling Soo never spoke during his act, which included breathing smoke and catching fish from the air.
Between 1901 and 1918 Soo played the Swansea Empire, the Olympia Shoreditch, the Camberwell Palace, the Ard-wick Green Empire and Preston Royal Hippodrome, but his career met an unforgettable end onstage at the Wood Green Empire – possibly the result of a curse laid by Ching Ling Foo – when his famous ‘catch a bullet in the teeth’ trick didn’t quite work out as hoped. On this occasion, his gun fired a real bullet rather than just a blank charge, and, as historians of Soo are quick to point out, his first words on stage were also necessarily his last: ‘Something’s happened – lower the curtain!’ Among the lots at the Bloomsbury sale were letters from assistants and friends of Soo claiming he had been born in Birmingham, England, at the back of the Fox Hotel, and that the death may not have been an accident. ‘We who knew Robinson,’ wrote a man called Harry Bosworth, ‘say he was murdered.’
But the stand-out lot was the one involving the Radium Girl, the Aquamarine Girl, Carmo & the Vanishing Lion, Walking Through a Wall and the origins of sawing thin female assistants – the items relating to the life of Val Walker. Walker, who took the name Valentine because he was born on 14 February 1890, was once a star performer. He was known as ‘The Wizard of the Navy’ for his ability to escape a locked metal tank submerged in water during the First World War (a feat later repeated in the Thames in 1920, witnessed by police and military departments and 300 members of the press). After drying himself he received offers to perform all over the world. He subsequently escaped from jails in Argentina, Brazil, and, according to information contained in the auction lot, ‘various prisons in Spain’.
Walker was the David Copperfield and David Blaine of his day. He appeared in shows at Maskelyne�
��s Theatre of Mystery, next door to BBC Broadcasting House, the most famous European magic theatre of the time (perhaps of all time), surprising audiences with swift escapes from manacles, straitjackets and a 9-foot-long submarine submerged in a glass-fronted tank at the centre of the stage. And then there was the trick with which Walker secured his place in magical history: Radium Girl. This was known as a ‘big box’ restoration illusion, a process in which a skilled woman enters a cabinet and is either sawn in half or penetrated with swords, and then somehow emerges unscathed. Walker’s role in this trick is fundamental; he is believed to have invented it in 1919, building the box himself and devising the necessary diversions and patter to make it the climax of his show.
The trick is one we’ve seen on stage or television for 95 years: an empty box on casters is displayed to the audience, its sides and base are banged, an assistant climbs in and is secured by chains, the door is closed, knives or poles are inserted into pre-drilled holes, followed by sheets of metal that seem to slice the woman into three parts (feminists have consistently placed this trick in their Top Five). Weaned on cynicism and trick photography, we have become blasé about such things today, but Radium Girl was once quite something. The sheets and poles and swords are then (of course) all pulled out, the door is opened and the chains removed, and the woman is smiling and whole.
Britain’s secret weapon: Val Walker contemplates his escape.
The Radium Girl illusion.
But then something even more dramatic happened: Walker got bored. He grew tired of the touring. He became envious of the acclaim and riches poured upon those he considered lesser talents, among them Harry Houdini. So one day Walker just quit. His professional disappearing act was, as might only be expected, an impressive feat: he gave up his Magic Circle membership in 1924, resumed his work as an electrical engineer, moved to Canford Cliffs, a suburb of Poole in Dorset with his wife Ethel, had a son named Kevin, and was never seen on a stage again. His gain, one imagines, but magic’s loss.