by Peter Wells
This introduces an important, inescapable motif. When Lewis Carroll, a thirty-year-old man, wrote his books for Alice Liddell, aged twelve, he was creating some of the most enchanting tales in literature. In 1892 Alice Through the Looking Glass was twenty-one years old. It was a psychologically astute ‘nonsense’ tale of great richness.
There is a further shadowing here: of a clearly adult male sending the book to a nine-year-old. Today we are so accustomed to the brutality of paedophilia and to looking around us for signs of ‘grooming’ that it is impossible not to be discomfited by some of the emotions nascent in these adult letters to a child. ‘Bless your ringlets,’ Mercer writes at one point. Many of the letters end on a cascade of kisses: ‘Just 3 and a half times as many, sweet ones, as you have sent which will be 121 which you can half with dear Emily giving her 60 & a half & keeping 60 & a half for your dear self,’ one letter ends, before opening to a more formal and proper farewell: ‘With kind love to you all, I am, My Dear Jessie, yours affectionately, R Mercer.’ I cannot verify what compelled a bachelor (there is no mention of a wife or children) to send these fervent notes to a clearly enchanting little girl.
But maybe in this case we shouldn’t look beneath the surface, but rather look carefully at the surface. The letters are all written in coloured inks, which Mercer sometimes playfully interwove. In one particularly splendid letter, the lettering is a pyrotechnic display of different colours, forming a kind of intricate mosaic. It is an artwork in itself. Layout is often unstable, at times almost Sterne-like in its breaking of linearity. The intention was simple — to make reading and letter writing fun (and, with the 121 kisses, to encourage subdivision and the skills of arithmetic).
The content of the letters was usually fantastical and consciously entertaining. On 17 August 1893 Mercer tells Jessie he has ordered her some new books but they have not arrived. Once they do, ‘I will send them along either by Balloon, Under Ground Railway, Steam or Sailing Ship’. An 1892 letter, the first to survive (an interior page appears to be missing), opens a second page with a small upside-down note saying, ‘You can turn over’: that is, you turn the page over and the writing is now upside down. It begins a broken-off sentence with ‘smelling salts, and anything else she might have to hold. And the coach along with your Auntie Florry to hold her Fan … with no outriders or footman. There was a young footwoman and there was exactly 4 wheels under the Coach … I don’t know how many horses there were.’
It is hard to make sense of only part of a sentence, but it appears to create a fabulous universe in prosaic Hawke’s Bay of coaches, footmen, smelling salts and a ‘young footwoman’ — perhaps nine-year-old Jessie herself. ‘I must now tell you I am very much pleased with your writing,’ he ends his letter, ‘it is very good. and I think you and me are about eKal in spelin. never mind we will grow better in time.’ This gentle humour is meant to be instructive. Jessie did not yet spell correctly. ‘Hoo ra it’s bed time’, this lonely bachelor writes late on a Sunday evening in a small town in which there was probably very little to do apart from listening to church sermons and the mournful tolling of a church bell, ‘and I’se getting so sleepy. So good night and pleasant dreams (as usual) to you.’
The central whimsy in these letters is in the form of a circus, itself based on a book. Our Noah’s Ark was printed in Bavaria, under an imprint of Frederick Warne & Co., a company which specialised in quality children’s books by authors like Kate Greenaway and Beatrix Potter. The book opens up to reveal a diorama of stand-up animals, and in Jessie’s copy the flyleaf is inscribed with the characteristically whimsical Mercer brio: ‘Madamoiselle J. Purvissimo’s Unrivalled Collection of Wild Animals. etc etc. N.B. The only collection of its magnitude ever exhibited in the Colonies. Admission 1/-. Pay here.’ Jessie, her sister Emily and Mercer were going into business together, showing the circus animals, charging one shilling and hence making their fortunes.
By October 1893 Mercer displays a slight vibration of annoyance, playfully based on the lack of profits from their enterprise, but as much for the lack of attention from his correspondents.
‘October 31 1893
‘My Dear little Partner,
‘Your very, very, very short note duly to hand this afternoon, and I lose no time in replying to it. to let you know that if you are as half as sorry as I am about the menagerie, you are “sorry”! Here I am, been waiting patiently for part of a year, for an account of the Show. And the monies taken at the doors. But no thank you No for Joseph, not a Bronze as come my way and then told the Hanimals have all been laid up. Whats been the matter with em, I suppose the Elephant is gone dead lame with corns on his toes, never been looked after the Giraffes have had the Croup, the monkeys the measles & hooping cough … It wont do you know. I am getting tired of waiting for my monies … perhaps your dear sister may write saying how, why, and wot for she did not write sooner. With Kindest love to you all, I remain, Yours very sincerely, R Mercer.’
It was a harmless correspondence, an entertainment on both sides. As to whether Jessie herself ever felt uncomfortable with it, it’s significant that she attached this particular explosion of a letter to an album of signatures she kept as a young woman. She clearly prized the letters as part of a vanished childhood.
But this does not mean there is not something painful in the letters, foreshadowing the abrupt way a child can change his or her affections as they grow older. For the lonely adult, the warmth of a child’s regard has great meaning. For the child, an adult’s attention can be precious and educative — if only too easy to forget.
‘23 June 1895
‘My dear Jessie
‘I cant tell you how sorry I am that yourself in connection with Your dear Sister should have wasted so much good time at the School where they don’t teach young Ladies to write how soon we forget all we have been taught. As in the case of you two girls having entirely lost all idea & use of pens, ink, paper & postage Stamps & the Post Office. Tis human nature to forget.’
But R. Mercer could have taken pleasure from the fact he had educated Jessie in the delights of letter writing. I would assert that this is where her facility with it began. By 1958, when she was seventy-five, she had no trouble turning out an eight-page letter — only one among three that she wrote weekly to Jean and Patti, her two daughters in Wellington, and Bess in Auckland. She wrote with a complete lack of self-consciousness. From childhood onwards, she was at home with letter writing as a way of communicating across space and time — forming a self out of words.
She was born, after all, at the high water mark of literacy, when the written or printed word was at its maximum extension of power. Cinema had emerged but was not yet influential. Words were what mattered. And words needed to be correctly spelt and clearly legible within a letter for the writer to be ‘correctly dressed’ in the costume of language. Poor grammar and spelling pointed to a poor background. (Although not exclusively: upper-class people could spell and write appallingly. But then they were often badly educated, too.)
If I can conceptualise my grandmother, it is through her strict adherence to matters of etiquette. She was tightly corseted in person. A lady did not go out without her stays. She had what was regarded as a good carriage, which meant you had a rigid backbone and your shoulders sat back (this related to horse riding originally). She was also almost obsessive about observing the niceties of table manners, dressing a table with a table cloth, setting a table, using a butter knife, not putting pots or jars on tables. You could say this was a typical lower-middle-class trait, expressing anxiety about where to fit in. Or you could say it was a branch of aesthetics, about how you liked things to look.
I think of a book that sat in her bookshelves. It was called Manners and Rules of Good Society — Or Solecisms to be Avoided. Written by ‘A Member of the Aristocracy’ (1922), it was a guide to such niceties as ‘calling’, precedence at dinner parties, and so on.2 (Jessie may have learnt from this the rituals of card leaving: ‘Leaving Cards upon New-c
omers. — In the country the residents should be the first to leave cards on the new-comers, after ascertaining the position which the new-comers occupy in society.’)3 This esoterica wasn’t native to her; she had to learn it. And she learned it sufficiently for it to become almost second nature. Likewise, she knew exactly how to set out and end a letter.
But as for the rest of the letter’s contents, they remained a wide, open prairie over which she could range at her leisure, constructing a world as she saw fit, holding forth with her own opinions fearlessly. The fact is, a letter, for so long as you are writing it, is one of the most personal statements about the world you can make. Because it is enclosed and personal, one to one, this often raises the stakes even higher. Letters can and probably should be indiscreet, opinionated, soaked in the very essence of a personality; the letter is, in fact, a kind of flag floating in the breeze, utterly individual to the writer, at that moment of time.
THIS IS ALL BY WAY of introducing a letter written by Jessie on 24 July 1959 and sent to my mother. It is closely written — eight pages in all, both sides filled with words. It was written on unlined, thick, good-quality notepaper that denoted ‘class’, one of Jessie’s abiding obsessions. Thick paper implied you were not worried about the weight of the letter and thus the price of postage. Unlined paper showed you had perfect balance and control of the medium (a bit like sitting in a saddle, you could ride at an easy canter). Lined paper, on the other hand, inferred you were slightly uneducated and could not control your handwriting, and hence needed ruled paper to maintain an ordered script.
The letter was folded in half, then that half was folded into quarters, to fit snugly within the envelope, which was of the same quality paper as the pages within. It was like a well-tailored suit overall. It was part of the bella figura of letter writing.
Jessie used a fountain pen. She would have regarded a ballpoint as new-fangled and inherently inferior (‘common’). A good-quality fountain pen displayed its high status by the sheen and elegance of its gold-plated nib. A pen from a company like Sheaffer was a gift often given to a young person as a sign of reaching maturity.4 It was a status symbol, not unlike a high-end cellphone today. It was also utterly personal. You wore your nib in as you wrote: the nib gradually accommodated itself to your writing style and became smooth and fluent. It was personal as a pair of shoes. It might be kept for a lifetime. It is clear that Jessie filled her pen with blue-black ink several times while writing this letter, so the pen was possibly quite old.
By 1959 Jessie had been writing letters for decades, so she followed the etiquette of letter writing effortlessly, putting her address — 4 Lawrence Road — at the top right of the page so the reader could both locate the origin of the letter and know where to reply to. Below it was the exact date, down to the year. (The year was gradually dropped as a younger generation recognised there was no longer any possibility that a letter would take more than a month or so to reach its destination. But Jessie’s mindset was essentially from the nineteenth century, so she kept the year.)
Jessie begins the letter with an intimate salute: ‘Dear Chick’.5 Immediately below this, and indented, she wrote, ‘I received your welcome letter on Wednesday.’ This was convention — a letter was always welcome — but it had a practical purpose. Bess could now work out how long the post took to reach Hawke’s Bay and space out her next letter accordingly. In a letter-writing relationship, you unconsciously obeyed the rhythm of letter sending, parsing out the communication equally. An unexpected letter presaged a crisis.
Jessie then drops into the great standby of all letter writing: the weather. ‘I have never felt colder mornings & that is the opinion of everyone I have asked.’ A seemingly early spring had been followed by bitterly cold winds and snow down so low the route out of Hawke’s Bay to Auckland was closed off.
Before we look at what follows, it is worth remembering the letter’s overall context. It is one link in a long chain of letters passed between mother and daughter that first started when Bessie left the family home and went to Solway College. Once Bessie left Napier as a bride in 1939, the letter writing effortlessly recommenced. In one sense, this letter is just part of an ongoing conversation between two talkative women whose intimate, easy tone reveals little sign of hesitation or deliberation about how the contents will be received. (The assumption was mother and daughter thought exactly alike on nearly everything.)
In this way the letter operates on something like a choral level, one voice ceasing when the other takes up, leading to a solo moment of near coloratura intensity. Both mother and daughter were great talkers. (My female cousins share this propensity, so family meetings are raised almost to the level of talking duels.) And because mother and daughter wrote to each other weekly, this letter has a speedy, almost sketchy quality to it, grabbing out at passersby, firing a scattershot of opinion, then moving swiftly on.
‘I meant to say to you,’ Jessie fires up the moment she has dispensed with the weather, ‘I hope Kath McDowell strikes people like herself, never make up their minds what they want & go from shop to shop.’ (Kath McDowell was an Auckland friend of Bessie’s who was a saleswoman in the ‘dress salon’ at the department store Milne & Choyce. She was also an indecisive and endlessly quibbling shopper.) ‘Then she will know what it is like.’
A subtext is Jessie’s sense of self-possession, of knowing best as well as sharing information on shared acquaintances, all conveyed with a smack or a pat on the back. Jessie had ‘run into’ Kathleen Willis in the street.
‘I said I was sorry about Mrs Stack passing away. She said they were so sorry, she had been ill for so long & she was just like her old self & taking an interest in things, & looking so bright. Her leg was still bad, she had had ulcers, but Dr Fleischel thought she should have blood tests, she was only at Hospital one day. He said she had better stay & have treatment for her leg. She had Physiotherapy one day, she was dead the next morning. She must have had a clot & the treatment shifted it. Now Kathleen wishes they had never taken her to Hospital. She seemed so sorry. I was too because she has had a hard life.’
This is like a small Chekhovian tale: ‘She had Physiotherapy one day, she was dead the next morning.’ Jessie is clearly enjoying delivering the dramatic arpeggio of her tale, and the coda of the sad Kathleen, who delivered Mrs Stack to her death, gains further extrapolation through Jessie’s explanation that it was all part of the woman having had a hard life. Mrs Stack was one of life’s losers, whereas Jessie, as annunciate or chorus of the tale, is absolved from guilt by feeling ‘so sorry too’, while secretly feeling vindicated by the fact she is sitting there, alive and functioning, gold-nibbed fountain pen in hand, driving blue-black ink over quality paper and enjoying a life of financial ease.
Another subtext here is Jess’s own potential ill health. She had a serious diabetic condition. She lived on her own and always faced the possibility of falling into a coma.6 She knew the dreadful lure and power of ‘Hospital’, as she called it. Napier Hospital had played an important symbolic role in her life. The collapse of the Nurses’ Home during the quake was one of the traumas of her life. Her husband, Ern, had carried their daughter Jean up there on his back when she had caught diphtheria as a six-year-old. She herself had run up the road to the hospital in her apron when she was told Ern lay dying.7
The hospital was only 20 metres away, and towered over Lawrence Road with the omniscience of a Kafkaesque castle, just as its nearby laundry and smokestack, where dressings were incinerated, reduced the status of 4 Lawrence Road. But Jessie should not be backed into a corner as a remorseless snob. Her anxieties tended to focus on the ambiguity of her social standing. For example, she had R. Northe & Sons, the family firm, construct a porch at the back of the house at Lawrence Road so callers did not experience the unforgiveable social lapse of arriving at the kitchen door.8 Jessie wanted to preserve the ideal that these visitors — who? — would arrive in a sitting room before being escorted down the hall to the drawing room, which
was at the very front of the house: the ideal space for conversation and tea parties. This was the framework of her psyche or playground of her anxieties. At the same time, she was an intelligent, lively woman with a vivid life impulse.
‘I met Bill Popplewell & his wife in town on Thursday,’ her pen drives on. ‘Sirett is in Hospital again. I cannot think of Bill’s wife’s name. She said they thought Sirett was going to die one night. George always gets her off to Hospital, he gets panicky. You remember how Rochie [a neighbour] was at times, & they get over it. She is always in Hospital, [getting] proper food & attention.’ A few lines later she philosophises: ‘I would go mad with a life like Siretts, but then I have never been lazy I would rather try & work & not just give in.’
This is like a hymn to Jessie’s energy and ambition. She looked after herself, and rather despised people who gave in to ill health — ‘enjoyed ill health’, as she used to say.
Before moving on she looks closely at her contemporaries the Popplewells, who were an established family in Hawke’s Bay: ‘Bill looks old & rather uncared for. I thought Mrs Pop. looked rather shabby & a bit dirty. She is always nice. Good catholics have had five children & then learn no more.’ (Note the small ‘c’ for Catholics.)9
She continues: ‘Monday I took Mrs Cato’s place at Bridge with Mrs La Roche. We got quite a good score, I enjoyed playing with her.’ Bridge allowed Jessie to deploy her quick intelligence and redoubtable memory to great effect. She was a founding member of the Napier Bridge Club, and also played contract bridge at her women’s club, which met in the sleek Art Deco elegance of rooms in the T & G Building on the Parade. In another letter she commented caustically on an acquaintance who was ‘always crawling after the so called upper class’, but Jessie’s skill at bridge meant she was a sought-after player around the card tables of the affluent and leisured of Hawke’s Bay. It gave her social reach far beyond the status of a coal merchant’s wife.
