I have bundles of old letters stored in the basement. From my parents, former girlfriends and close friends.
I am kind of terrified to go near them. The other day I pulled one out from under an elastic band. It was from an ex, who I still see in a platonic sense. I squirmed – and what made me squirm the most was the thought of what I’d written to her. Does THAT letter still exist? Can I ask for it back and destroy it?
Is this an issue for anyone else?
mikethep says
I have kept a very odd letter I received from a friend and former colleague some time around 1970. Handwritten and very formal, it goes something like this:
Dear Mike,
I know you are a good and honourable man, and you will be mystified by this letter no doubt. But I think it best if I break off contact with you now. Please do not attempt to contact me or ask me to explain.
Yours etc…
I was indeed baffled. It was almost like a Dear John letter – we were good enough friends, but not that good. But as requested, I made no attempt to contact him.
Then, not long after, I saw him walking down Hampstead High St with a woman and a baby in a buggy. I recognised the woman – she was another ex-colleague, with whom, I remembered with a bit of a shock, I’d had a rather perfunctory one-afternoon stand some time before. I hadn’t been very nice to her and I had a bit of a guilty conscience about that. Now, I suddenly wondered: had I got her pregnant? No precautions had been taken – it was a time when your average hairy herbert sort of assumed that anybody who was willing to have sex with him would be on the pill.
Had my former friend done the decent thing and taken her and the baby on? I couldn’t get close enough to see the baby and do any calculations. But the strained, almost Victorian tone of the letter suggested that a decision had been taken not to let me in on the truth.
Over the years I’ve convinced myself that there can’t be any other explanation. Well, the only other possible explanation is that he’d been holding a candle for me, and my persistent inability to even realise this had made him decide to give up. But that seems less likely than the possibility that somewhere I have a 48-year-old son or daughter.
As I say, I kept the letter for no reason I can really explain. The friend is now a mildly famous writer, but I couldn’t possibly release it if anybody ever wrote a biography of him. Just so odd, I suppose.
chiz says
Maybe it’s just that no one wants a bloke at their dinner table with a ‘I’ve shagged your missus’ grin on his face?
Bingo Little says
Yes, the baby thing, but also – maybe you shouldn’t have kept killing all those people, Mike?
Tiggerlion says
No, the baby isn’t yours.
He met the love of his life who described how unpleasant you had been to her. He put his eggs in her basket and didn’t want to risk the discomfort of the three of you being in a room together because of his ‘friendship’ with you.
Mike_H says
Inclined to agree. He realised he was in a position where he had to take a side and he chose hers.
It’s a bit like sometimes when a couple you’ve been really good friends with break up acrimoniously. You either take a side and retain one friend or refuse to take a side and end up losing both of them.
mikethep says
You may well be right – I don’t know enough about the timing to be able to say one way or the other. I think though that I’d prefer to describe my behaviour as offhand rather than unpleasant – we’re not talking Harvey Weinstein here.
Raymond says
We need to get to the bottom of this, Mike.
Have you read this guy’s work? If so, were there any clues there?
On a less facetious note, it may also be possible that the person had mental health issues and that his reasons for writing the letter would only make sense to him.
hubert rawlinson says
Just found some from 30 odd years ago while clearing out.
Should I take a look?
As John Prine says
I hate reading old love letters
For they always bring me tears
I can’t forgive the way they rob me
Of my sweetheart’s souvenirs
Lodestone of Wrongness says
I found a Valentine card the other year which, of course, was anonymous.
Back in the day I had I assumed it must be, it must be, from Anne Cheyne who I fancied something rotten.
When I read the words inside I just knew it had to be Anne (although for some mysterious reason she continued to ignore me as she had always done and continued to do until she moved away to Lerwick or Reykjavik or wherever)
“I love you, I love you
I love you almighty
I wish your pyjamas were next to my nightie”.
A fourteen year-old boy had a very erotic dream that cold night in Aberdeen…
Locust says
Not an issue for me, because I’ve saved a copy of all the letters I’ve ever written since I was fifteen (and the ones I wrote before that weren’t very interesting, I’m sure). I have seven binders full of them by now. The first years are a bit squirmy, but mostly for the annoying experimental style choices I made…making them tough work to get through!
But they serve as a sort of diary for me, since I’ve only periodically kept one, but most of my life I’ve been a prolific letter writer (it will come as no surprise to anyone, I’m sure, to find out that I write very long typewritten letters 😀 )
If only I’d done something else in my life that would have made me worthy of a lenghty biography – what a smörgåsbord for a Locust scholar to dive into! 😉
Freddy Steady says
Christ@locust
Really? You’ve saved a copy of all the letters you’ve written since you were 15?
Publish them!
Mike_H says
“The Locust Letters.
Surprise literary sensation of 2019 sparks bidding war for movie rights.
Intense media speculation over who might direct – who could star.”
mikethep says
I favour The Locust Papers myself. Jane Campion would make a good job of directing, I’m sure. So Elizabeth Moss as Locust, then….
Locust says
Well guys, I’m pretty sure few people outside of my long-suffering group of friends and family would be interested in reading long-winded descriptions of exciting events like defrosting my freezer (even though I did write about finding Fridtjof Nansen in there…)
And any film based on my life would get a perfect zero on Rotten Tomatoes, unless it was reviewed by Insomniacs International Association.
Mike_H says
Papers does look better, agreed.
Moose the Mooche says
Elizabeth Moss is busy filming the new 200-part HBO series In Case You Haven’t Noticed, Men Are Really Absolutely Bloody Awful.
bungliemutt says
I have a very old suitcase full of love letters in my loft. They were all written by my Mum and Dad to each other in the 1950s, before they were married and before I was born. I have never read them, and I don’t really want to, as they belong to a time before I existed and hold thoughts and feelings that are private to my parents, both of whom are now deceased. The thing is, although I won’t ever read those letters, I can’t bear to part with them either.
Mousey says
Yes I too have all my deceased parents’ letters. They are mainly from my Mum to HER mother, to whom she religiously wrote once a week. They’re a great time capsule of a description of parenthood in the fifties and sixties, with the inevitable censorship that goes with letters from a child to a parent (“better not put in the bit about my husband’s colleague who I really fancy” etc).
My parents kept all the letters and postcards I wrote over the years. I can still read between the lines of periods when I was desperately unhappy but of course didn’t feel I could tell them.
This morning my wife and I had a lovely FaceTime conversation with our son in Berlin, which will however be lost in the mists of the digital cloud.
Zanti Misfit says
Recently, I found a handwritten letter dated October 1985 from someone called Dave who I have absolutely no recollection of. It starts off really breezy about him settling in at his new university, making great new friends, how lovely the city of Edinburgh is, the Gothic majesty of the halls of residence etc but then it takes a really sour turn.
” I have a sink in my room so I don’t have to share my washing facilities with nauseating foreign chappies. There are quite a few darkies here, but they usually stick together and are well on their way to becoming civilized.”
He’s so matter of fact about it. I’m glad I can’t recall him. Sounds like the Major from Fawlty Towers.
dai says
Arthur Cowslip says
I think letter writing must have died a quick death once email kicked in in the nineties. I’m in my forties now but I don’t have ANY letters whatsoever.
Or maybe I’m just that guy no one ever wrote to….
Hamlet says
I went to Uni just before email/text became the communication of choice; my then girlfriend and I would write to each other twice a week. I didn’t make a conscious decision to keep the letters she’d sent, but I found some of them in a drawer years later, and I couldn’t bring myself to bin them…there was just so much love and effort that had gone into writing them. It would’ve felt like an emotional betrayal to simply lob them in the recycling bin.
I wonder if anyone writes ‘love’ emails, in the same way they wrote love letters? With the same warmth, care and empathy? The ephemeral nature of email would suggest not, but it’s far easier to steal great love-related quotes and pass them off as your own, so you never know!
metal mickey says
I still love letter-writing (and postcards), and many friends tell me if it wasn’t for my missives, they wouldn’t have had any letters for decades…
… but I’m strangely ambivalent about the ones I receive. As part of the “closure” of breaking up with my first long-term girlfriend, I destroyed all her letters (and as we’d been long-distance for 2 or 3 of the 8 years we spent together, there were quite a lot), and I’ve never missed them (though conversely I still have the letters from my Canadian penpal, albeit unread for many years…)
I’ve also only never been anything but horrifically embarrassed by those I’ve written myself when younger – my parents had a downsizing clearout some years ago, and gave all mine back to me, and just a glance at a few of them was enough to put me off ever looking at them again, though I can’t quite bring myself to burn them.
Moose the Mooche says
I’ve been reading some… I smile and think how much I’ve changed.
Except for me socks.
Lando Cakes says
I have all the letters that the late Mrs Cakes and I sent to each other over the years. I can’t bear to read them but can’t bear to part with them. I don’t want our kids to read them as – if I remember rightly – some bits may be somewhat racy and that’s not a picture I want to leave in their heads…
I may yet read them, of course, however I’ve taken the precaution of leaving instructions for them to be destroyed, unread, in the event of my death.
A bit of a maudlin note there, I realise, but – like making a will – once it’s done you don’t need to think about it again.
mutikonka says
May not be comfortable, but it is worth reading old correspondence. My mum sent me a pile of old letters I’d left in the attic. When I read them it destroyed many of the comfortable myths I’d created about my youth. I was a priggish, self-absorbed twat. But the letters also amazed me by reading my honest, no-delete button opinions as an 18-20 year old. Something about the process of writing things out longhand makes you order your thoughts and think about what you’re saying. I seemed a lot more eloquent, considered and mature then than I do now on Twitter or Facebook. Also a reminder that people I considered best friends forever, I haven’t heard from for 30 years.