Only a person of my age would be likely to find dozens of handwritten letters, legible and literate, in a forgotten and bulging folder.
My parents, born in 1920 and leaving school at 15, wrote well and wittily. But letters from my contemporaries, who of course I struggle to think of as ‘old’, were a surprise. I found closely written pages about their lives, recognising their handwriting from cards sent throughout decades of friendship. The most sophisticated technology available at the time would have been a typewriter, and that mostly in a workplace. So they wrote. Those living abroad had no alternative. Long distance phone calls, prohibitively expensive, were rationed for birthdays or Christmas.
We would have been in our early thirties with young children. I try to imagine young women of today taking the time, having the time to write at length – and in complete sentences! Of course, their lives are different. They, we, were mostly stay-at-home mums. But when did that ever give time for lengthy considered letter writing? For they were ‘considered’. It would be an unusual text message or social media post that could offer the sort of reflection that the slower pace of handwriting produced.
Thought, and especially kind thought, needs time. I still have the letters my mother received on the death of my father, who died in the mid-1990s. Two of my friends wrote to me when my marriage ended. We would have spoken on the phone but writing allowed them to dare to offer advice or to express affection that shyness might have precluded in a conversation. Even in the early '80s, and certainly in Scotland, friends didn’t regularly say ‘I love you’!
We live in a time of fast-moving technology. That doesn’t mean that folk don’t care about each other as much as ever. But the slower pace of writing a letter lets writer and reader stay with the thought for a little longer.
There are gains and losses in every development. The idea that some bot will choose what I write is anathema to me. Then again, the arrival of the printing press was feared as the devil’s work! For me, the speed and the ready-made nature of today’s communications can’t compare with those thoughtful letters I have discovered.
Alison Clark is a published author and playwright writing in various genres. Work includes the nonfiction How to Stop Flogging a Dead Horse. Her prize as runner-up in a Leaf Books Flash competition was to have the anthology given the title of her story: ‘The final theory’. She lives in Scotland on the Isle of Bute.
