To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  I have just seen a Penguin, ‘Living in Cities’, very attractively setting forth some principles of post-war building. I always think how well off we suburban dwellers* are compared with the people who live in places like Roseberry Avenue or Bethnal Green Road, and die there, too, quite happily since they never knew what they missed.

  I saw a suggestion for a new house to have a built-in bookcase, or place for it, and thought this a rather good idea, especially as my three or four hundred nondescripts are shoved, wedged, packed tight at the top of a cupboard at the moment. I carry with me now only an atlas, a dictionary, Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ (ever glanced at it – a philosophy), selected passages from R.L. Stevenson, and ‘The Shropshire Lad’, by Housman.

  We all try to carry on as though we were at home, and where we act differently we are doing things we would have liked to have done at home, if the chance had arisen. The Army turns very few saints into devils, though it may be easier than the reverse process. A Sergeant Major is usually a curt, barking, more-in-anger-than-in-sorrow, kind of chap. Yet the one we have here couldn’t treat us better if he was our Father. He does more fatigues than anyone else in the Camp, asks you to do things, never orders. When he came here three months ago, we had one dirty old tent to eat our meals in, and that was all. Since then, we have added several more tents; plenty of forms and tables; a rest tent with a concrete floor; dozens of games, a regular weekly whist drive, a small library. Once we could only bathe in our tent, petrol tin fashion. Now, we use the showers in town, doing some forty miles in the process. If this is the Army – well, it’s not bad.

  We get a Film Show every Saturday; whatever the weather, it is held in the open air, the audience (stalls) sitting on petrol tins, while those in the gallery sit on top of the vehicles, many of which come several miles for what is usually the only event of the week. I have sat in the pouring rain with a groundsheet over me. I have sat with a gale bowling me over literally while Barbara Stanwyck (in ‘The Great Man’s Lady’ – she was a brunette) bowled me over figuratively. Only occasionally does a weakling leave the huddled concourse. We take our fun seriously, and when we can get it, though I always think of the Open Air Theatre at Regent’s Park, seeing ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ on a brilliantly lit sward, with a pre-war searchlight dancing in the sky above us.

  George Formby has done a lot of talking since his trip here, but not a word (publicly) about losing ten bottles of beer from the back of his charabanc. Some chaps I was with at the time did the pinching and subsequent drinking, so I know!

  Best wishes, Friend (The Lord Forgive Me),

  Chris

  Chapter Six

  Neither Snow nor Rain nor the Flatness of Norfolk

  In 1633, The Prompters Packet of Letters, yet another popular how-to manual for an increasingly literate Europe, displayed a woodcut on its title page of two galloping horsemen. The first carried the mail in his saddlebag, the second, an aristocratic type with a whip, was probably there to protect the first. The mail carrier sounds a bugle as he rides, and the sound he emits appears in a speech bubble that says simply ‘Post Hast’. The phrase had already been in use for at least 60 years, a regular instruction for speedy delivery written on the outer letter as ‘haste, post, haste’.

  But how typical was this galloping sight through the English countryside? How did the post work?

  For the beginning of the answer we need to briefly revisit England in the fifteenth century, and a wealthy extended family called Paston, named after the seemingly idyllic coastal Norfolk village where they lived (seemingly idyllic until letters reveal local anarchy, executions, civil wars, domestic shortages and bitter cold). For the Pastons, letters were the glue that held the family together. Their correspondence consisted of frequent (usually weekly, sometimes on consecutive days) communication through several generations and the reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III. The many hundreds of letters that survive make up the most illuminating concentration of letters of fifteenth-century England. After a prolonged period of obscurity (the Paston line ended in 1732), the letters were rediscovered by local historians at the end of the eighteenth century and were acquired by the British Museum in the 1930s.

  What can we learn from them now? Most are what we may call personal business letters – matters of property and legal affairs conducted colloquially through family members. A fair number are about love and marriage, several are about family decorum, and many are requests for supplies, not least heavy gowns and worsted cloth to ward off the winters. A modern reader may feel closest to Margaret Paston, wife of John Paston I (and mother to John Paston II and John Paston III), as she writes to her scattered family in London. Over the course of about 70 letters she acts as maternal moral advisor and estate manager, and despite her relatively comfortable domestic situation she must frequently ask for extra supplies of food and clothing. But these things are merely daily blips in the face of the grander issues, such as the threat of being overrun by charging armies. The bloody pageant of the Wars of the Roses unfurls in the background as she writes, and her days appear frantic (the majority of her letters are written ‘in haste’ as she regrets that ‘want of leisure’ prevents her writing more).

  Unlike most of the male members of her family, Margaret Paston dictated her letters to a local scribe. On 7 January 1462 she began a letter to her husband in her usual way (‘Right worshipful husband, I recommend me to you’), and continued with news composed straight for the history books:

  People of this country beginneth to wax wild, and it said here that my Lord of Clarence and the Duke of Suffolk and certain judges with them should come down and sit on such people as be noised rioutous in this country . . . In good faith men fear sore here of a common rising . . . God for his holy mercy give grace that there may be set a good rule . . . in this country in haste, for I heard never say of so much robbery and manslaught in this country as is now within a little time.*

  Taken as a whole, the lexicographer and grammarian may also learn much from the Paston correspondence about the state of fifteenth-century English. The letters are packed with simple but well-formed sentences, and a high level of literacy and learning. We learn, as above, that the polite method of greeting is no longer ‘greetings’; family and friends, male and female almost all open their post to read a derivation of ‘Name of Recipient, I recommend me to you’. There are many early sightings of proverbs and other epithets: ‘I eat like a horse’, one Paston brother writes to another in May 1469, a metaphor not recorded again until the eighteenth century, and in a letter to the youngest Paston brother in 1477, a cousin advises him not to be discouraged by his prolonged pursuit of a wife, ‘for . . . it is but a simple oak that is cut down at the first stroke’.

  ‘If you love me . . . you will not leave me’: Margery Brews sends one of the earliest Valentine greetings to her fiance John Paston III in February 1477.

  But we also learn about one other great thing: the workings of the post. By the 1460s, the smooth running of the economy demanded an efficient mail system, but it was not always forthcoming. The Pastons were well connected (with strong links to the legal profession and parliament), but so many of their letters concern the fate of other letters – letters received, letters gone astray – that one can easily imagine the additional stress placed upon their lives by such a significant but unreliable service. They wrote at a time before the establishment of any official postal network, trusting their letters to friends or professional carriers. The system was thus little changed from the service at Vindolanda about 1,350 years before, a process of write, entrust and hope.

  The Pastons occasionally write of finding ‘the first speedy carrier’ to rush information through, and they frequently called on a man called Juddy to journey back and forth on horseback to London (because of their status, the Pastons may have relied on Juddy almost as a private chauffeur). But the letters tell their own story of uncertainty; undelivere
d letters may mean unreliable carriers, or they may mean worse. At the start of her letter to her husband regarding Norfolk’s lawlessness, Margaret Paston wrote:

  Please it you to weet [know] that I sent you a letter by [my cousin] Berney’s man of Witchingham which was written on St Thomas’ Day in Christmas; and I had no tidings or letter of you sin the week before Christmas, wherof I marvel sore. I fear me it is not well with you because you came not home or sent ere this time . . . I pray you heartly that ye will vouchsafe to send me word how ye do as hastely as ye may, for my heart shall never be in ease till I have tidings from you.

  A hundred and forty years later, in the last years of Queen Elizabeth I, one may reasonably have hoped for improvement. In an intriguing bit of postal sleuthing, the historian James Daybell has forensically tracked one letter from 1601 as it travelled in vain from London to Dover and back again without ever reaching its intended reader. The letter, which now resides at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, was written by Sir Robert Cecil, the secretary of state. Its recipient should have been the MP Sir Francis Darcy, but Darcy is still waiting for it.

  The letter was slight, merely a cover note informing Darcy that he was to receive other letters from court and an unnamed French book. Sir Robert left a large amount of blank space around his 57-word note written on a sizeable sheet, denoting power and profligacy. It was written by a scribe but signed by Sir Cecil. Addressed ‘To my verie loving friend Sir Francys Darcye knight at Dover,’ this wasn’t quite as optimistic as it would be if we sent such a letter today. It wasn’t the vagueness of the location that stumped the post – being a Sir, he probably would have been tracked down to some or other courthouse, coffeehouse, alehouse, or house of ill-repute – so much as the fact that Sir Francis had already fled Dover for elsewhere. The instructions on the outside of the letter – ‘post hast hast hast for life life life lyfe’ – was not only in vain, but evidence (for such a perfunctory message) of a sort of desperate madness.

  The letter was carried along the Dover Road on horseback, presumably (as was the custom) by a number of riders working as a relay. The letter was endorsed with the words ‘For he Mats affayres’, which permitted it to travel free of charge by an early version of the royal mail, rather than by private carrier. The regally endorsed riders would be stationed at a series of established stops, either inns or signposts, a similar system to the one established within the Roman Empire. These ‘post-stage’ landmarks, which were usually towns dotted from eight to twenty miles apart, can also be thought of as the earliest forms of pillar boxes; before such a practical thing was invented centuries later, a regular series of deliveries and collections would be made along a set road, with letters being either dropped off as a final destination or handed on to the next rider like a baton. The Dover Road was one of England’s very few established routes, so the Robert Cecil letter arrived within a day, and, failing to find Darcy, finished its journey in the hands of Sir Thomas Fane, Lieutenant of Dover Castle.

  The markings on the envelope provide yet more details, the Elizabethan equivalent of UPS tracking. The first endorsement was ‘London this 23 of September at 8 in the morninge’, possibly written, James Daybell suggests, by Rowland White, the Post of the Court responsible for gathering official correspondence from several quarters to the main depot in central London. The next endorsement, ‘London at past eight in the morning’, was followed by ‘Dartford at 11 in the fornone’, and then Rochester ‘at 2 in the afternon’. We also know it got to Sittingbourne at 7 and then Canterbury after 9, reaching Dover at some point the following morning. Sir Thomas Fane woke up to learn that Darcy had scarpered, and tried to locate him in the Kentish Downs, another failed mission.

  Sir Thomas then sent the whole thing back to Sir Robert in a covering packet, which stopped off at all the places it had stopped off on its way down (reaching Dartford at almost 4 a.m.). In addition, the new packet was endorsed with an illustration of a gallows, presumably donating urgency, or the fate a trembling postmaster would meet if the letter wasn’t delivered.

  Beyond all the clear absurdities of this frantic toing and froing through night and day across the pastures of England for nought, the example did at least point to one unmistakable truth: the post – even the fate of a single transaction – was important. The post may not have been particularly private (Sir Robert’s tired letter was opened before he got it back, perhaps by his secretary but conceivably by others too, and it may have passed through a dozen hands before it didn’t reach where it was intended) but there was no doubting the investment in trying to get it through. If you wrote it, many people would try to deliver it. The fact the post-stages existed at all, and the bureaucratic feat of tracking the letter at every calling station, meant there had indeed been slender improvement in at least one primitive branch of the postal service compared to the preceding centuries.

  But this was a court letter travelling with all the haste and urgency that royal command could throw at it, a system for the chosen. What hope for the commoner? And what hope even for the landed commoner such as a latter-day Paston?

  The stirrings of what we would now recognise as a modern regular postal service did slowly emerge in the sixteenth century, and for this we should be grateful to a cause célèbre – the passions and paranoia of Henry VIII. It helped everyone concerned with the transmission of letters that Henry VIII had reason to write letters of his own beyond the usual tally of courtly housekeeping. His letters to Anne Boleyn, some of the very few he wrote by hand, are amongst the purest examples we have of a smitten monarch from any era. The tone of the correspondence is vulnerable and lavishly purple, and, if we didn’t know how the story turned out, would have been a classic romance for the history books. The letters form a rare sequence, a wooing that stretches over 18 months of their early courtship from around May 1527 to October 1528. Presumably there were more; his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the separation from Rome that accompanied it would take five more years. Through the letters we are able to track how a proud and ambitious courtship by the king meets an initially non-committal response from his intended, and how his love life entwines his plague-ridden, hunt-struck daily one. Because they are undated, there is disagreement among historians as to the correct ordering of the letters, although there are enough clues to provide at least a rough framework.

  ‘On turning over in my mind the contents of your last letters,’ he begins,

  I have put myself into great agony, not knowing how to interpret them, whether to my disadvantage, as you show in some places, or to my advantage, as I understand them in some others, beseeching you earnestly to let me know expressly your whole mind as to the love between us two. It is absolutely necessary for me to obtain this answer, having been for above a whole year stricken with the dart of love, and not yet sure whether I shall fail of finding a place in your heart and affection, which last point has prevented me for some time past from calling you my mistress . . . But if you please to do the office of a true loyal mistress and friend, and to give up yourself body and heart to me . . . I will take you for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only.

  Two others follow with similarly hesitant tone, one with news of ‘a buck killed late last night with my own hand’ which the king hoped would cause Anne to ‘think of the hunter’ when she ate it. Court and public gossip then appear to cause Anne to be banished to her childhood home of Hever Castle in Kent, where, regretting her absence, Henry sends her ‘a picture set in a bracelet, with the whole of the device, which you already know, wishing myself in their place’. Even by the sixth letter her affection remains cool, although he is sure ‘that I have since never done any thing to offend you, and it seems a very poor return for the great love which I bear you to keep me at a distance both from the speech and the person of the woman that I esteem most in the world’.

  ‘Wishing myself in my sweetheart�
�s arms’: Henry promises all to Anne Boleyn.

  By the ninth letter, a few weeks later, he expresses concern at her recent illness, perhaps the plague, and promises to send his physician as fast as he can, and subsequent letters carry further news of illness, more advice on keeping well, and another slain hart to aid her recovery. By the twelfth letter, Henry’s usual letter carrier Suche is also ‘fallen sick of the sweat’, and so he sends a new man. By the fifteenth letter, addressed to ‘Mine own SWEETHEART’ he is again openly lovestruck, reporting both grieving and pain at her absence. The letter is brief (he has a headache), but he closes ‘wishing myself (especially an evening) in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty dukkys* I trust shortly to kiss.’

  The final letters touched upon hopes for the divorce, the attainment of a lodging for Anne for improved mistress proximity, and further news of hunting. The seventeenth letter was, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘Written after the killing of a hart, at eleven of the clock, minding, with God’s grace, to-morrow, mightily timely, to kill another, by the hand which, I trust, shortly shall be yours.’