The Written Word

I have recently spent two and a half days up to my ears in archives and old documents doing research for our local history project. I am trying to track down the truth behind some very lurid legends and have to trace a family of gentlemen landowners to work out who did what, when and to who! What struck me almost immediately was the age of some of the documents I was reading and handling even....they had been written when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne. It felt weird and humbling. Some of the writing lapsed into Latin and it was off with a quick squawk for help to the lady behind the desk who just read it as though it was a shopping list. Sadly I think I may have blown one of the legends completely out of the water ...perhaps its a case of letting sleeping dogs lie...or lurid legends live on ...I don't know yet.

The strength of the written word was enforced yet again on Thursday when six intrepid purple people met up in Wales. As we sat around the dining table at ElizabethM's with the door open to the beautiful views of the hillsides and valley below we wondered at the strange feeling we shared ...that we had known each other for ages. Some of us were only meeting for the first time, some for the second and others just a few more and yet there we were yakking away for all we worth as though we were in the midst of a school reunion. There was none of that awkwardness when strangers meet. So what was our common thread? I suppose we are of an average age, arty crafty, country lovers...but it was the written word that has been our main communication medium.

In a tin trunk under my stairs are dozens of old postcards, saved over the years. Some tell first hand the story of my grandparents illicit courtship.....she was betrothed to another, he was a trainee police constable and younger than her to boot! Yet meetings were arranged, feelings discussed, agonies agonised over ...all on the back of painted pictures of Bridgnorth and for the price of a stamp. The postman must have been very discreet in those days. Just imagine doing that today! Others appear much later ...the grandparents are married and living blissfully happy with three children in various towns and villages throughout Shropshire according to where Grandad took up his Policing duties...shopping trips arranged between sisters, a discussion about elastic for Vera's knickers, a trip to see aged parents, to the seaside, lives arranged in words on little oblongs of card.

Then the letters....from sons to a mother...ensuring their safety in war torn areas of the world. The war years ...millions of letters confidently winged their way around the world...and even surprisingly reached their destinations. Whole courtships were carried on via letter for years on end. Letters came out of the Prisoner of War camps to be read and re read by anxious families and lovers. I can remember one lady showing me such a letter, it had turned to a soft material because it had been handled that much...she knew every word... It was from her husband ...when a prisoner in the Far East.

I wonder how the teenagers of today would cope if they had to swap their mobile phones and computers and resort to communication by letter or card to carry on a courtship, make friends, keep in contact with families? Wouldn't be as many young immature mothers with babies as fashion accessories for a start...whoops nearly on a rant there!

We were encouraged to have pen friends at school, we all read each other's letters from far away places such as Greece and Turkey that then seemed as unattainable as the moon. We had maps of the World to trace where these unseen people lived. Even when we left school we kept in touch with long newsy letters for years. It has diminished to a letter in Christmas cards now...but they still come and I still do them as well.

Leaving the tin trunk I can rummage around in the bottom of the wardrobe into piles of letters collected over the years. I remember vividly having a ceremonial bonfire of a huge quantity of letters from a boyfriend when the relationship disentegrated....Churston Deckle paper and envelopes...dozens of them...pale lilac or blue...cringe. ( a man using pale lilac paper and matching envelopes...yuk)

Perhaps we underestimate the power of the written word, in that it does break down barriers....how can you sit there in an attack of shyness when everybody knows so much about you anyway? Is that why when purple people meet there is this hilarious, hysterical atmosphere while characters are linked to physical beings? Ah well...back to the researching...but it does make you think...this written word business...I'm back in Elizabethm's dining room overlooking those hills...listening to all those voices clamouring for space as though we had known each other for ever......