Dear Nell, I'll be over on Thursday, From Luce
This short letter, written in pencil, was sent to my Nan by her
sister and was found amongst her possessions. The date at the top,
is just “Tuesday”.
A meaningless letter? No, it’s nine words that tell so much.
1. Nobody had phones.
2. The littlest thing had to be written in a letter, stamped, and walked to the postbox, a day or two in advance. People had conversations by letter, no need for preamble or lengthy sign-offs. These conversations could stretch over days.
3. Luce doesn’t say a time, and expects that Nell will be in, whenever she arrives. If not, she’ll wait, confident that Nell will appear soon.
4. There’s no allowance for Nell to say it’s not convenient, she’s away, she’s doing something else.
5. It took two buses to get from Luce’s to Nell’s; add on the walk to and from the bus stop and the wait in between, it’s a journey of well over an hour, but she proposed it anyway. Does this show their easy familiarity? Tell us that life was much more predictable? That Luce knew Nell would be free on Thursday because she always was? And Nell knew what time Luce would arrive because she always did?
6. It’s the kind of thing that would now be an email or text.
I recall in my university holidays, my group of friends would all write to each other, even over Christmas when we were only apart a fortnight. We found the time, each day or other day, to write to each other, to find the Basildon Bond, or the cute writing paper with matching envelopes in lilac or pink with a picture in the corner, to choose the pen with the nicest or funkiest nib, to write everything that had happened that day and what we thought about it. Pages and pages.
If the letter were to a special boy, we might spray perfume on it, or apply lipstick and kiss the back.
The arrival of the postman was exciting.
I can’t remember when I last hand-wrote a letter; or received one. Probably Christmas or my birthday, but these are summary newsletters, not representations of daily life.
Now I write emails, containing the minutiae of my day. But where’s the record of them? Hard-drives break, computers are thrown away. I never print off emails.
When it’s time for someone to sort through my belongings, a great swathe of my life will be lost for ever – the friends I had, the way my life was. No one will ever know.
Do you think that future historians will mine computer dumps for evidence of personal lives at the turn of the millennium? How else will they ever find out?
It will never be so easy to read a discarded hard drive as it is to untie a bundle of letters and reconstruct times gone by. Does it matter?
A meaningless letter? No, it’s nine words that tell so much.
1. Nobody had phones.
2. The littlest thing had to be written in a letter, stamped, and walked to the postbox, a day or two in advance. People had conversations by letter, no need for preamble or lengthy sign-offs. These conversations could stretch over days.
3. Luce doesn’t say a time, and expects that Nell will be in, whenever she arrives. If not, she’ll wait, confident that Nell will appear soon.
4. There’s no allowance for Nell to say it’s not convenient, she’s away, she’s doing something else.
5. It took two buses to get from Luce’s to Nell’s; add on the walk to and from the bus stop and the wait in between, it’s a journey of well over an hour, but she proposed it anyway. Does this show their easy familiarity? Tell us that life was much more predictable? That Luce knew Nell would be free on Thursday because she always was? And Nell knew what time Luce would arrive because she always did?
6. It’s the kind of thing that would now be an email or text.
I recall in my university holidays, my group of friends would all write to each other, even over Christmas when we were only apart a fortnight. We found the time, each day or other day, to write to each other, to find the Basildon Bond, or the cute writing paper with matching envelopes in lilac or pink with a picture in the corner, to choose the pen with the nicest or funkiest nib, to write everything that had happened that day and what we thought about it. Pages and pages.
If the letter were to a special boy, we might spray perfume on it, or apply lipstick and kiss the back.
The arrival of the postman was exciting.
I can’t remember when I last hand-wrote a letter; or received one. Probably Christmas or my birthday, but these are summary newsletters, not representations of daily life.
Now I write emails, containing the minutiae of my day. But where’s the record of them? Hard-drives break, computers are thrown away. I never print off emails.
When it’s time for someone to sort through my belongings, a great swathe of my life will be lost for ever – the friends I had, the way my life was. No one will ever know.
Do you think that future historians will mine computer dumps for evidence of personal lives at the turn of the millennium? How else will they ever find out?
It will never be so easy to read a discarded hard drive as it is to untie a bundle of letters and reconstruct times gone by. Does it matter?
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9 Comments
But there's a 50-year gap, when for many people all that stuff happened on the phone. In some ways the historians are better off now: in theory, our emails are still around. I have a theory that the reason that Outlook and Outlook Express make it so bloody difficult to backup emails - unlike just about every other kind of programme, where it's bleedin' obvious what you do - is that no one thought emails were permanent. They thought they were replacing phone calls and didn't realise they're also replacing the letter...
Mind you, my ex-husband's aunt, born c. 1930, was the classic maiden aunt, living with her mother, and they didn't get a phone until 1990. My in-laws lived 10 mins down the road, so why would you? They only got one when the mother started going a bit dotty, and Auntie Irene didn't like to leave her... This was the middle of Birmingham, not half-way up a Scottish mountain, I hasten to add...
Whisks, my maternal grandfather took photos for a local postcard company in the early 1900s, and many of the postcards of the time feature members of his family feeding the ducks in the park, strolling along the prom, etc. When he was courting my grandmother, he sent her quite a formally worded postcard even though I think they were engaged by then. She wrote on it in pencil 'Darling Bert, I do love you'. I don't know if she ever showed it to him, but my mother and I thought it was very sweet when we found it.
But a few years ago I went to extraordinary lengths. Diligently and with great emotional will, I whittled my whole life down to the absolute bare essentials I could carry in one rucksack. A very large rucksack, I should state, but a person’s complete and rewarding life in one bag, nonetheless. This is a feat of great difficulty, especially to the natural hoarder of things personal. Love letters of past romances, great books, music and film collections, travel memorabilia, trophies: everything was passed to friends, donated to local charity organisations, or sold. Staggeringly, very little ended up at the local refuse tip, and considering the amount of pointless junk I had accumulated and 'lofted' over the years, this was extremely uplifting and left me with an acute sense of achievement and finality. I would in no way recommend this extreme level of decluttering to anyone else, as it can be heartbreaking. But to me it was also immensely liberating and I felt freer than ever before. Free to go far without nagging doubts, things to tend to or a material bolthole to run back to in tough times to come. It is completely and utterly a state of mind whether you consider your life to be the tangible sum of what you have around you, or whether you trust that your memories and feelings are enough to make you who you are.
But all those personal letters did go to the tip, and I wonder if I will ever regret that?
I still write letters but these letters are to people who do not use computers.
Steve - a colleague at work is getting rid of all his possessions too - selling everything on e.bay. He doesn't want a cluttered life.
Mike, I didn't know that laser print lifts off the paper eventually - that's interesting and worrying. Or is it? I dunno. Do we need all this clutter?
Steve, I was interested in your declutterisation. I went travelling for an extended period once, and also relished living like a snail with all my worldlies on my back - you're right, you're so much freer. But then I'd left a lot of stuff at my father's house. Did you have a parental stash? I couldn't imagine binning my entire history - all the photo albums, diaries, momentoes. It would be far too final for me. I could imagine stashing it in a big container though and walking off with a key round my neck.
As a novelist it's a good game, though: how do you use a letter to convey information (in other letters, in the untold parts of a story, or things the writer doesn't know they know) that isn't apparently intended by the writer. That's actually where TMOL originally came from.
What I did do was electronically store everything I could, taking a laptop and a mobile as my two luxury items. The mobile was my phone/camera/radio/alarm clock/torch... etc... and the laptop was my computer/cinema/Hi-fi... and storage device for all the old photos I'd scanned, and stuff like that. Perhaps I should have done the letters, too?
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