To the Letter. Simon Garfield

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       A letter to Signalman Barker tries to get through.

       Chris Barker, 29, was born and grew up in Holloway, north London. He left school at 14 to join the Post Office, working initially as a messenger boy and then a counter clerk, becoming an active trade union member. His training as a teleprinter operator, a ‘reserved’ occupation, kept him out of the war until the end of 1942, and after army training in Yorkshire he enlisted as a keyboard operator with Middle East Command. After a long sea voyage via the Cape, he arrived in Cairo in May 1943.

       Four months later, serving with the Royal Corps of Signals in Tobruk, on the Libyan coast, he was looking after communications for the RAF in the southern Mediterranean. With time on his hands, he began writing to friends he missed back home.

       His letter to Bessie Moore and her boyfriend Nick was just one amongst many (Chris had worked with Bessie at the Post Office). She was now working at the Foreign Office, where her training in Morse code was employed to translate intercepted German radio messages. She was 30 when their correspondence began. She remained in London throughout the war.

      Our disembarkation arrangements were perfect and after a not uncomfortable rail journey we were brought to the above address. I had expected to be parked on a pile of sand, and told it was ‘home’, but the Depot is a very pleasant place, surrounded by pine and eucalyptus trees. The water comes from a tap, and one sits down to meals. There is a Church Hut, quiet and fly-free, an Army Educational Corps hut, where are excellent books, a good NAAFI and a Cinema. A little further away is a tent, run by voluntary labour, where refreshments are served (not thrown at one) at reasonable prices, and there is a lounge, library, writing room, games-room, and Open Air Theatre, where a free film show takes place weekly, also a Concert. There is a lecture one night, bridge and whist another, and a more ‘highbrow’ musical evening another night.

      Directly I arrived, my brother applied for my posting to his units, and after two months of base life I started on the wearying but interesting journey to him. I met him after a separation of 26 months, and had a fine time talking of home and all that had happened there – the rows and the rejoicing – and in the evening walked through the sandy vineyard to swim in the blue waters.

      Since leaving the [Post Office] Counter School and joining the Army, a period of twelve years, I had little real rest. I was either actually on the counter or doing some Union work. If I did relax, it was not for long and I was conscious of being ‘guilty’. Since joining (or being joined to) H.M. Forces, I have had a great deal of leisure, and I have spent most of it reading and writing.

      Since I have decided to make this my last sheet I had better drop a few remarks on the people here. The Egyptians, nominally neutral, are hostile, as are most people without ‘independence’. The Arabs, poor, unhealthy, ignorant, need to be seen to be believed. Metropolitan life turns them into pests, but away from town they are not bad people. They work 12 hours for the shilling; only 25% of them can read and write, 170,000 have only one eye and they die about 40.

      Oh, the Pyramids; yes, I have seen them, sat on them, and thought what a gigantic case for Trade Unionism they present. How many unwilling slaves died in the colossal toil involved in erecting these edifices. And how insignificant the erection compared with Nature’s own hills and mountains?

      I visited the Cairo Zoo, happily in the company of two young Egyptians who were being educated at the American mission. They made the day a success. The cruelty of having a polar bear (noble creature) in this climate, and the effort to console him with a 10 second cold water dip!

      Excuse the writing, and confusion of this effort. But it’s me, alright. I hope you are O.K. Nick, it’s a long way from our Lantern Lecture on Sunny Spain at Kingsway Hall!

      All the best Bessie.

      Chris

* If a letter was particularly urgent, the folded and sealed papyrus would sometimes be addressed ‘To Antogonus – now’.

      ** ‘If you’re well, that’s good – all’s well with me.’

* ‘Caesar’s Body Shook’, London Review of Books, 22 September 2011.

* There were probably more; this is what survives. Seneca’s letters were rather longer than the norm, ranging from 149 to 4,134 words, with an average of 955, or some 10 papyrus sheets joined on a roll. Philological scholars with time on their hands have calculated that a sheet of papyrus of approximately 9 x 11 inches contained an average of 87 words, and that a letter rarely exceeded 200 words. Cicero’s letters ran from 22 to 2530 words, with an average of 295.

      Chapter Four

      Love in Its Earliest Forms

      You will not believe what a longing for you possesses me.

      Around AD 102, more than 20 years after Vesuvius, Pliny was writing to his third wife Calpurnia.

      The chief cause of this is my love; and then we have not grown used to be apart. So it comes to pass that I lie awake a great part of the night, thinking of you; and that by day, when the hours return at which I was wont to visit you, my feet take me, as it is so truly said, to your chamber, but not finding you there I return, sick and sad at heart, like an excluded lover.

      Calpurnia had been unwell; Pliny had been away on legal business. In another letter he wrote:

      You say that you are feeling my absence very much, and your only comfort when I am not there is to hold my writings in your hand and often put them in my place by your side. I like to think that you miss me and find relief in this sort of consolation. I, too, am always reading your letters, and returning to them again and again as if they were new to me – but this only fans the fire of my longing for you. If your letters are so dear to me, you can imagine how I delight in your company; do write as often as you can, although you give me pleasure mingled with pain.

      The letters were an addiction now, reinforcing the couple’s devotion just as they confirmed their absence. ‘Write to me every day, and even twice a day: I shall be more easy, at least while I am reading your letters, though when I have read them, I shall immediately feel my fears again.’

      How can the modern reader not be stirred by these outpourings? But Pliny’s letters (alas we don’t have Calpurnia’s) are valuable for another reason beyond their intimacy. They’re almost all we’ve got. Beyond them, as we’ve seen, there’s little evidence that epistolary love existed at all in the ancient Roman world.

      But there is one other exception, discovered by chance in the Ambrosian Library in Milan in the nineteenth century. Cardinal Angelo Mai was something of an expert in the palimpsest – a scroll or document that has been scrubbed clean of its original inscriptions to be used again. In 1815 he came across something exciting written beneath something boring: the Acts of the first Council of Chalcedon of 451 concealed the second-century correspondence between leading orator and teacher Marcus Cornelius Fronto and a youthful Marcus Aurelius written some twenty years before he would become Roman emperor.

      Three years later, the cardinal discovered СКАЧАТЬ