Going Postal

A St. Petersburg apartment letter-box

A few weeks ago we caught up over lunch with some old friends from our Bristol days [1], and the conversation inevitably turned to how different things are now for our children than they were for us back then, when we were their age; not necessarily worse or better, just different. Very different. Having broached the usual topics of senior reminiscence – phones (scarcity of), internet (absence of), typewriters (noisy ubiquity of), TV (absence of and indifference to), music (incontrovertible superiority of), and so on – we stumbled onto something we all had in common but hadn't before realised out loud, as it were: that when we were college-age and to an extent into our twenties, we all used to send and receive regular letters to and from our closest friends.

A letter, I should probably point out for the sake of younger readers, is (or was) a personal communication, usually written by hand on a sheet of paper but sometimes typewritten for the sake of legibility, which was then folded and placed into a paper enclosure known as an envelope onto which the name and street address of the intended recipient had to be inscribed, and which was sealed by licking the gummed flap (!). A postage stamp of a suitable denomination then had to be stuck on, also by licking the gummed back of the stamp (!!). The whole "letter" assemblage was then entrusted to the mail service by "posting" it into a post box, a sturdy receptacle usually situated within a few hundred yards somewhere on a nearby street. You may have seen these quaint relics of a former era round and about (no, not the ones with a door, those are phone boxes, another story altogether). Within a few days, and only occasionally more than a week later, the letter would (usually) reach its destination, and (usually) be pushed through the appropriate "letter-box", that is, that draughty aperture in the front door mainly used these days for pizza flyers and charity bags. Unless, of course, it was going abroad, in which case several weeks or more might well pass between posting and receipt.

I don't have many surviving samples of this obsolete mode of communication from that time in my life any more, and with any luck few of mine will have survived, either. Welcome as they were at the time, most were not worth keeping after a few years going stale in a drawer. Compared to the published correspondence of literary and political figures, the letters we wrote rarely rose above the juvenile, the facetious, and the ephemeral; we were, after all, little more than kids, and no-one in my circle was writing with even half an eye on posterity. Some, though – and these were always letters from female friends – did feature the kind of post-adolescent, introspective sincerity that can soar to a dizzy peak of emotion from a standing start, like a torch-song sung by Whitney Houston or Adele, or equally well sink into an abyss of abjection (ditto) [2]. The weight of the envelope was usually the best hint of what lay inside: the heavier it was, the more likely it was to be some late-night, multi-page threnody, fuelled by one too many spliffs, a faithless boyfriend, or even – I suppose I should admit the possibility – my own thoughtless words or behaviour. It can be tough learning not to be a complete dickhead, although I like to think I was what the Americans call a quick study.

However, from that lunch-time conversation it emerged that the regular exchange of letters with friends, however trivial or hair-raising the content, seems to have been an important feature of that phase of life for many of my generation; at least, based on a sample of four. People have always written letters, of course, long before the establishment of a reliable postal service or even the invention of paper – the clatter of a cuneiform clay slab coming through the tablet-box must have made the morning of many a Mesopotamian – but I think this was something new: ordinary young people – young men, in particular – staying in touch with the friends of their youth by written exchanges of news, views, and long-distance, long-delay badinage.

It's possible this had something to do with the epistolary habits encouraged by "pen-pal" and foreign exchange programmes, both essentially phenomena of the second half of the 20th century, set up to promote friendly relations across Europe after two devastating world wars. I have often been surprised to learn of friendships that began as stiff exercises in language-learning, nurtured over decades of home visits and letter-writing, with the eventual result that the mutual pen-friends became, in effect, members of each other's families. Surprised, I suppose, because nothing of the sort was ever going to happen in the case of my own German exchange partner, with whom I had absolutely nothing in common other than the fact that we both lived in flats, unusual in our "twinned" towns, and the only conceivable reason we'd been partnered. We couldn't stop writing to each other soon enough.

In fact, I suspect this letter-writing between friends probably had a lot more to do with the confluence of two other factors. First, the advent after 1945 in Britain of extended free schooling for state-educated children, up to and including university. In the memoir of his life that I encouraged my father to write in his last years, no mention is made of any friends before his war service, which began when he was 21. After all, he had left school at 14, and by 1939 had already been an apprentice and employed in a foundry and then an engineering firm for seven years, an eternity at that age. By contrast, I spent my entire youth until the age of 18 in the company of essentially the same group of thirty boys. The melodrama of friendships and loyalties might change over that time, but the cast remained the same. When some of us went off to university, staying in touch by letter seemed a natural thing to do. Especially for me, left behind at home for a "gap year" enforced by the peculiar timing of the Oxbridge entry exams.

Added to that were the close bonds formed within the youth counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. By 1970, the fashionable habits and attitudes of metropolitan bohemia had spread out to the young in even the dullest suburbs and villages, carried by pop-cultural vectors like records and magazines. As even the softest of recreational substances were heavy-handedly policed and frowned upon by even the most easy-going parents, a degree of secrecy and trust were a necessary feature of the close-knit home-town crews that were springing up everywhere, even though indulgence in anything stronger than an underage pint was more often a fantasy than a reality. Belonging to a secretive in-group possessed of forbidden knowledge and with its own home-grown myths and legends builds a special sort of bond, with the consequence that, when these small-town bohemian friendship circles were split up and scattered by higher education and social mobility, their half-life was rather longer than usual. Indeed, in my case I'm still in sporadic touch with a few of my old homies, although it's true this has everything to do with the magic of email, and nothing to do with the chore of letter-writing, which fizzled out decades ago along with the residual legibility of my handwriting.

I've already described how much I like email (You Have Mail) and I still do: for me, it's a perfect fit as a communication medium. Despite its use of snail-mail metaphors – right down to the open and closed envelope icons – email has few of the disadvantages of letter-writing. For a start, unless you had been writing with an eye on posterity and kept copies of your own letters (and how narcissistic would that have been?) you would probably have only the vaguest memory of what you had actually written in a letter, and in all probability would never see it again. By the time your correspondent felt sufficiently motivated to sit down and write you a reply, even that vague memory would have dissipated. They, of course, would have your actual letter immediately to hand, and would be writing a reply, quite specifically, to whatever had been set down on paper by you. Oddly, it seems rarely to have occurred to many respondents – myself included, I'm sure – that you might need reminding of what, precisely, you had written; it was as if they thought you were still somehow personally present, embodied in whatever illegible scrawl your hand-eye co-ordination had risen to deep into the small hours. So you would eventually get a letter, weeks or months later, that contained mystifying allusions, angry refutations, and baffling responses that, abstracted from their instigating source material, could seem like the free-form effusions of a lunatic. I do still occasionally get such ravings by email, but at least I now know why.

In the end, the only real redeeming factors of a letter over email are its dogged persistence as a material object (if kept well away from fire, the shredder, or the bin, of course, which is where most end up), and, primarily, its intimate connection to its author. That sense that someone has taken the trouble to follow the comparatively elaborate and time-consuming procedure of writing and posting a letter, leaving traces of their physical presence on paper in the process, does endow a certain magic, not to say value if that person has achieved some prominence in their life. By contrast, it is highly unlikely that anyone will ever pay several thousand pounds at auction for an email allegedly from some notable person, or for their comment on a blog or Twitter feed, much less go to the trouble of tracking them all down in ancient decommissioned mail-servers to compile into a volume or database of "collected e-correspondence".

Assuming that would even be possible. The idea that "everything is still out there on the internet" is an illusion. We seem to have passed into a time when ephemerality is taken for granted: it is the price we pay for convenience and immediacy and the relentless churn of technological advance. In terms of historical documents, these years – when, ironically, millions might seem to be busily documenting their every moment, their every passing thought  – may well turn out to be a new Dark Age, invisible to posterity.

When I retired I intended to preserve some of the hundreds of useful and important emails I had accumulated over my working life by downloading them selectively, but in the end sorting a bucketful of e-wheat from the mountain of e-chaff was too much: I had to let it all vanish when my account was deleted. Which, I have to admit, did feel as liberating, personally, as when I periodically empty into the recycling all the greetings cards, bills, payslips, and other redundant paper stuff that has come through my letter-box. But, say anyone wanted or needed to trace back any of the work-related projects I'd been involved in? What if they had to track down all the electronic back and forth between me, my colleagues, and the various third parties we had to deal with over the years? Well, tough: there is no equivalent to the grey steel filing cabinet full of memos, minutes, and correspondence I inherited from my predecessor. Everything was email and attachments, and everything has gone; which, I suppose, both simplifies and complicates matters. But, as we were saying a few weeks ago when we caught up over lunch with those old friends from our Bristol days, life today is not necessarily better or worse than it was 40+ years ago, just different. Very different.

Another letter-box

1. Late 1970s to mid-80s, in my case broken by a year in London: it all still seems like yesterday...

2. Sadly, two of my most voluminous correspondents are now dead. It's doubtful whether they would have kept any of my letters and, if they did, I'm sure their husbands would have quickly disposed of ancient mail from anyone who knew the bride when she used to rock'n'roll. Certainly, their letters to me have all long gone. Well, most of them...