Steamy secrets of my grandparents’ private letters
|
Version 0 of 1. Like many of their generation, my grandparents, Bessie and Christopher Barker, had a sparse and puritanical approach to life. They sipped a glass of sherry only if there was something truly worth celebrating. They preferred to mend things with vast rolls of parcel tape, blobs of Blu-Tack and strips of leather rather than buying anything new. Letters, postcards, string and buttons were ordered and hoarded for such time as they might come in useful. As a child in the 1980s, I adored the great throne of their 1930s pull-flush toilet with its enormous white wooden seat. My mother expressed disgust at the unmodernised bathroom with its curious plastic bottles full of holes, filled with scraps of soap. Indeed, as there was little room in their lives for luxury or frivolity, it seemed they had little time for sentimentality or romance. Although my granny was given to pounce on my brother and me with alarming wet kisses when we went to visit, they were above all utilitarian, a little rigid and very British. Grandad expressed love for Granny by cutting her jam sandwiches into tiny, manageable squares. Granny expressed love for Grandad ... well, it wasn’t always obvious. But we somehow knew her devotion was unwavering. Even asking them how they had met and married did not yield an exciting story. “It was a registry office followed by a plate of pigeon that tasted like the sole of a shoe,” Grandad once recounted, glossing over how he had come to be with his wife in the first place. It seemed as if the manner of their meeting had become irrelevant to them. And to me it seemed, they had always been together. It was just how it was. Everything was to change after my Grandad’s death in 2007, aged 93. My dad, their elder son, Bernard Barker, told me excitedly that they had written to each other hundreds of times during the second world war – a total of 500 letters and half a million words. Dad explained that Grandad had handed them over in a small blue box shortly after Granny’s death in 2003, but he was forbidden to read them until both his parents were dead. Now, he was allowed to open the tantalising box of missives. I already knew that Grandad had been drafted as a signalman in north Africa and the Mediterranean during the second world war. I had heard his exciting and sometimes amusing stories of being captured in Greece by the ELAS Greek communist partisans. Perhaps these letters would reveal more thrilling details of his soldiering life? After a 40-year career in the Post Office, Grandad’s love of letter writing, and the postal service in general, was already legendary in the family. Typed and handwritten scripts arrived regularly for my brother and me as we were growing up, recounting the minutiae of life and imparting scraps of advice and wisdom. Wherever we ventured in the world, he would write to us – sealing his letters and parcels of educational newspaper cuttings into recycled envelopes held together with tape. He believed in the power of the post to educate and inspire lonely souls. But this mysterious package of wartime letters was something else entirely. It wasn’t until their contents were revealed that we began to see a side of my grandparents that would have been beyond our previous imaginings. As my dad sat down to decipher the pages and create an official archive of their work – an incredible love story was being told. It wasn’t quite Fifty Shades of Grey, but it is not every day you hear your grandmother express her frustration at being a “cold, haughty virgin” ready to explode. Or indeed hear your grandad explain what he would like to do with your grandma’s breasts. Goodness. But while the saucy side of the letters made me snigger guiltily – the story they told was the real revelation. When Grandad set off to serve in the Royal Corps of Signals, near Tobruk in Libya, in 1943, my granny was an acquaintance he had met on a training course. She was in London working as a morse code interpreter, as part of the war effort. Under the heat of the Libyan skies, my hyperactive grandad found himself bored and began to exchange letters with her, soon discovering that she had been dumped by her boyfriend, Nick. It doesn’t take long before the letters reveal the two have fallen in love by letter, and within a year they begin to plan their marriage. Their words reveal their yearning and the power of love and expectation to make something as major as a world war seem secondary to their lives. The couple have never touched and can barely recall each other’s faces, but this serves only to make them write more eagerly, more frantically, with Grandad urging Granny to shrink her handwriting to cram in more and more details of her life and thoughts. The letters also reveal a fascinating everyday perspective on the war. While Grandad struggles with fleas in bed at night (he is forced to wash his “tender parts” and bandage them with a handkerchief when they become inflamed by flea powder), Granny lives with the fear of flying bombs and has to leave a bath to run to the air-raid shelter in the middle of having a bath. She is depressed and feels drab. He sympathises with her “bomb troubles” and urges her to give up “My Lady Nicotine”. Grandad did return home on leave for the wedding – it is not immediately evident from the letters as they do not write about the day itself. But they do have enough time to conceive a “honeymoon baby” before Grandad returns to the Mediterranean for another long stint, leaving Granny to endure pregnancy alone. Their correspondence continues as she lines the nest and they become increasingly frustrated at being separated. It is a relief to the reader that Grandad eventually returns home, to the safety of postwar Surrey and the correspondence ends. In August 1946, my dad was born, followed three years later by Uncle Peter, and family life began in earnest. While my grandad was born in the London slums and left school at 14, both his sons attended comprehensive schools and went on to get Cambridge degrees. This was much to the delight of my grammar-school educated grandmother whose own career was thwarted by virtue of her sex. It felt slightly wrong when I first read the letters that we should be allowing their intimate correspondence to be made public. Would publishing the details of their sexual yearnings make them a national laughing stock? Grandad burned the majority of Granny’s letters to him so as not to reveal the contents to his fellow soldiers. He expressly tells my granny he wants their romance to be nothing but “our affair”. But my father, who created an archive and placed the letters in the public-access Mass Observation Archive, felt few pangs of guilt. Both grandparents were atheists and not at all precious about what happened after their own deaths, he explained – what would they care about people reading their love letters once they were gone? I had a feeling he was right. Besides, Grandad was also a proudly self-taught man, who spent much of his life with his nose in broadsheet newspapers and Roget’s Thesaurus, improving his word power and his turn of phrase. He wrote endless pieces for the Post Office union magazine, and would probably have loved a wider audience for his work. When I first showed an interest in journalism, Grandad suggested I write columns from where I was living in France and “get them published in the paper”. “It’s not quite as simple as that,” I said at the time. Who would have thought, after all this time, publishing notoriety would be theirs, and not mine? After 13 years of life as a journalist, it is humbling that my grandparents’ beautiful love story should be the one that makes the biggest headlines. • My Dear Bessie: A Love Story in Letters by Chris Barker and Bessie Moore is published by Canongate, £8.99. To order a copy for £7.19, visit bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846 |