Pen Pals
... the way we used to communicate in the old days
The topic of this week’s discussion kind of jumped in my head only a day or two ago. A few of the writers I subscribe to here on Substack call their publications ‘letters’, and I thought that was brilliant.
Some writers call their scribblings ‘essays’, but I could never even consider calling my work an essay, more a ramble in an old garden with an old friend and a cup of tea.
But that’s a bit too long, isn’t it?
Welcome to my Ramble in an Old Garden with an Old Friend and a Cup of Tea.
Nope.
So I thought I might start calling these writings Letters. A letter a week to you to let you know what I’m thinking about, what’s stirring the old grey matter, and if anything particular has caught my attention.
I am a 50+ year old woman, so I guess the topics of my letters are things relating to my age. Menopause is a big one - so much to write about there! The sweating! The confusion! The everything! Am I right??? The death of my marriage, and subsequent singledom - again, so much to write but I don’t want to whine about it every week. Things going on in the world which frighten me (i.e. almost everything!) will be something I might write to you about. Cooking is something I most definitely will write and have written to you about. One doesn’t just chef for 38 years and have nothing to say about food! There’s actually a letter on the boil that I’ll send you over the next couple of weeks about cooking.
But this week, I’d like to take you on a wander down amnesia lane, to a time in our (to me) recent history.
A time before phones were things you could take out of the house, unless you were Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street, and in the final beach scene could walk along the sand talking to someone in your massive brick-phone. HOW COOL IS THAT!! I remember thinking.
A time before you could sit at a computer and type out what looks like a letter, and hit ‘send’ and it could go to the recipient immediately. IMMEDIATELY. No ten-day wait. No traipsing to the post office to buy a stamp.
A time when you took photos on an actual camera with film in it, and had to take it to your local film processing lab, and wait for around 2-5 days to see if you’d remembered to take the lens cap off. None of this take-it-on-your-phone-and-instantly-upload-it stuff.
And a time in my life where I was working spilt shifts at a pub in a little town on South Australia’s South Coast called Goolwa.
The shift would start at 10am, you’d get almost two hours of prep time before the lunch crowd hit at midday, and usually petered out at 2pm. Half an hour to tidy up, then off home. For 2.5 hours. Back again at 5pm for the 6pm dinner service, which depending on which night it was, might finish at 8:30, or might drag on (and on and on) until 9:30-10pm.
That 2.5 hour block in the afternoon was so weird. None of my friends were ever available to do anything, they’d all chosen sensible jobs that went from 9-5. Two and a half hours isn’t really long enough to go anywhere or really do anything, especially when you’ve got your eye on the clock because you’ve got to be back in the kitchen again at 5pm.
So I started writing letters.
I think I was already writing to a few people; a couple of young women in England who were somehow distantly related to me, or that I’d met at school during an exchange program (I had one penfriend from Germany who came to my school on exchange, and another one from New Zealand.)
I found it interesting to write to people who lived in other countries, to read what their lives were like, what the weather was like, and to be able to put a pin in that spot in the Map of the World that I had above my desk.
One of those early penfriends introduced me to Friendship Books. These are probably not what you’re thinking, and a quick search on Google for ‘Friendship Books’ brings up books for children all about friendships. That’s definitely not what we swapped. Okay, I’ll try and explain.
So, you’d get a few pages of paper, very small though, as if you were making a book for a doll. Then you’d put your name and address on the front, maybe a bit about yourself and where you were looking for penpals from, and pop it in the envelope with the next letter to one of your penfriends. They would add their name, and pop it in an envelope to one of their penfriends, and so it would go. Mostly you’d get people writing to you from the info in that book - I don’t think I ever got one of those books back - and at one stage I had around 60 penfriends.
Most of them were in Europe, and a couple in the USA. I wrote to a lady in Russia for a couple of years, and another one in Japan. I wrote to a bloke in Tanzania who had the most amazing handwriting - it looked like typing but it was hand written, another bloke in Ghana, and another chap in Algiers who insisted on writing to me in French. I learned French in High School, but struggled to get good marks and understand the ‘rules’ of French grammar, so the letter writing escapade with the Algerian fellow didn’t last very long at all.
There were a lot of penpals who only wrote for a year or so, and others that I wrote to for decades, and am still in touch with. I’ve learned about traffic in Spain, about the rugged beauty of the Åland Islands in Finland, about the biting cold of Russia, and about the peculiar oddness of some folks in the US (I once mentioned that someone was ‘a funny bloke’ and my penfriend wrote back the next time and said, ‘What’s a bloke?’) I had a friend in Ontario, Canada, who always sent me a teabag with her letter, my penpal in Japan sent me little book marks and origami birds, and all of us swapped photos of ourselves. I collected postcards at that stage of my life (as well as clowns and keyrings, because, why not?) and I have three bulging scrapbooks full of postcards from obscure places around the world - a permanent memory of all these people who were part of my life for an amount of time.
I look back very fondly to this time in my life. I think I used those 2.5 hours in the middle of my shift at the pub very wisely. There was always at least one letter for me in the letterbox every day, and I met a few of my penpals when I went travelling around Europe and the US in my twenties.
These days with social media, messaging services, and emails, writing an actual letter seems cumbersome, and is rather exorbitantly expensive - if I might add!
But receiving actual mail, an actual, physical letter that someone has taken the trouble to sit and write, then taken the time to go to the post office, buy a stamp and send it to you, it’s really quite amazing. Letters from across the other side of the world. From people who’ve never seen a kangaroo in the wild, or eaten Vegemite, or enjoyed New Year’s Eve down on the beach.
Life might seem ho-hum and ordinary to us, but to someone from another culture it’s fascinating. And being able to share your life with another person, and make a friendship connection just through words (and the odd postcard or two) is truly one of life’s long-lost joys.
Did you ever have penfriends?
Did you ever meet them?
What weird things did you send each other? Tea bags? Book marks?
Catch you next week,
Maggie x
I remember those friendship books because my mum used to have them. She had so many penpals and still keeps in touch with some of them today. For me, my main penpal was my cousin in Germany. Forty years later, I am hosting her daughter as an exchange student until the end of this month. How amazing is that!
It's funny you write about this! I was just musing last week about sending out snail mail with poems on pretty paper, tea bags, art and pressed flowers. 💛
Was hoping to make that my next little side quest.