Stomping ground

I went out yesterday; it's been a while! Put on my lipstick (the colour of a pimento pepper, I just noticed that it's called 'Kiss of Life') and went out to meet my two old schoolfriends. We go back 40 years and I've written about them before here. And one of them was the friend who wrote the letter I mentioned a few posts ago on this blog too. She had no recollection of obsessing about Sham 69 and Jimmy Pursey in 1978, by the way, but the evidence was there in black and white....  We got the giggles.

Our rendezvous, as usual, was in the town where we all grew up together. The town where we went to school, the town where we learned to ride bikes and swim, where we puffed tentatively on our first cigarettes, where we had our first clumsy kisses, our first pint of warm cider, our first naïve fumbles with dodgy boyfriends. Our first of many gig experiences too – which we reminded ourselves about when we'd finished our lunch and went on a mini-tour of our old stomping ground. We pulled in at the old maltings building which used to be our rather excellent little music venue, where we had seen the Banshees in January 1978, Adam and the Ants the following year, and countless other bands of varying degrees of notoriety and ability. In retrospect we reckoned we were so lucky, growing up in a rural town but only 45 minutes by train from London. We had fields, woods and riding stables at one end, a rock/punk club (and jazz and folk if you wanted it too) plus the Granada cinema at the other... our homes on the hilly streets between.

The town has changed; like most places it's bigger than it was even 20 years ago, new estates on its perimeter have spread progressively outwards like ripples on water, buildings in its centre have grown upwards like plants struggling to reach sunlight in crowded beds. But its heart still does have some heart, in spite of the increase in boho-chic shops with French names and the ubiquitous estate agents. The road by the market square still has its brick style paving, overlooked by buildings dating back to the 14^th century, even though they now sport their Mexican and Italian restaurant chain frontages. I never really noticed the beauty of the architecture as a kid - you don't, do you? - never thought about the history of the half-timbered houses or grand Georgian facades.

But you didn't really want to read about all that, did you? No, well... if you really must know, my first naïve fumble was with a boy called John in the bushes by the playing fields behind my house, on a Spring afternoon after school. I really didn't know what he was doing, nor what I was supposed to do either, everything felt unknown and daunting - my childhood had been so very innocent up to then.  As I said to my friends yesterday: “It was hard...”   Oh, I didn't mean like that! That's for me to know and you to wonder about.  Growing up with lovely friends like mine, though, everything else really was quite easy, and picking up where we left off all these decades later always is too.

Please Mr Postman

From the exotic Netherlands.... Shocking Blue

The other day I received a beautiful handwritten – handwritten! – letter from an old friend.  She’d embellished the edges of the notepaper with decorative squirls and even the little PTO in the bottom right corner was executed in a fancy script.  It took me right back just to see her handwriting again.  Just about the only handwriting I see, or do myself, is on shopping lists, post-it notes and cheques: unimaginative and functional reminders of  life’s most boring bits.  Whereas, letters… letters can be so much more.

As a child I was a keen letter-writer.  I never wrote to Father Christmas, though, because I figured that if he was smart enough to get into our house which had a wall-mounted gas fire and no chimney, then he probably had sufficient magical powers to know what I wanted without me having to spell it out.   However, the first letter I ever wrote was soon after he’d made his superhuman entrance, when I sent a little note to my Nan and Granddad thanking them for my present.  (Proof if any were needed that Father Christmas did have the miraculous ability to get it from them to the pillowcase at the end of my bed, even if it meant secreting himself in through a gas pipe.)  Nan wrote lovely letters back on small sheets of  blue Basildon Bond, in her traditional old-fashioned fountain pen handwriting, where all the characters were very even and modest. Somehow, her sweet letters felt like virtual hugs.

Around the age of eleven, I got into penfriends.  Being a precocious little twat I only wanted foreign penfriends and the more exotic the country, the better.  For a while I exchanged letters with a Swede, a New Zealand Maori and the daughter of the Jamaican Ambassador for Haiti - see what I mean?!  However, my favourite penpal for a couple of years was Mandeep.  Mandeep was a Kenyan Indian Sikh and, best of all, a boy.

Mandeep wrote the most beautiful letters.  He was articulate and imaginative, and even his handwriting looked intelligent, somehow – slightly sharp edges made it appear confident, while the characters with descendents had large flamboyant curls… passionate curls.  When those folded blue aerogrammes with his handwriting on came through my letterbox I felt new things.  Letters from Mandeep made my heart skip and my head rush in ways I’d never known before, nor really understood. 

The eleven-year old me fell a little bit in love with Mandeep, or at least with the idea of him, and it seemed to be mutual.  Gradually we began to write quite romantically… paying compliments in the most touching of ways, hinting at something between us that we didn’t quite comprehend and allowing each other to read between the lines.  He had a poetic turn of phrase and was never boring.  By the age of twelve, in my imagined future, I was going to marry this exotic, dark-skinned boy and have his babies, and all because of the way he wrote.  I hadn’t even seen his picture.

Of course the dream was shattered when we eventually met.  He came to the UK to stay with some cousins and incorporated a side trip to see me.  It felt like a huge event, and it was perhaps inevitable that it would be a let-down, as well as one of the most awkward, cringe-worthy days of my life.  We were both embarrassed, inhibited and painfully shy.  He was nothing like I’d imagined; it was as if the skinny adolescent boy sitting there on my sofa nibbling on a Barmouth biscuit and struggling for words was an entirely different person to the hero of my romantic fantasy who wrote those thoughtful, exciting letters, and I know my disappointment was reciprocated.   After that, our exchanges immediately lost their magic and stopped soon after.

Perhaps letters are best used as an extension of a friendship or connection you’ve already made?  Or when you meet someone occasionally but not often enough, and writing can keep the bond strong.  Up until email took the place of letters, I was still using pen and paper to write long, rambling missives to distant friends, enjoying the very craft of expression through the written word.  The actual, physical written word.  Likewise I’d still get that extra special pleasure from a handwritten reply, the sight of an individual’s distinctive script, even just the knowledge that their pen had touched the paper and their hand had held the pen gave it more of a connection.  I love email for all the obvious reasons, and a lot of the time I couldn’t be doing with all that tiresome scribing any more when I can type quickly instead, but a bit of me misses that extra something that you give – and get - with a handwritten letter.  If it wasn’t for the cost of stamps and the threat of an aching wrist I might send more.