How I came to write these letters is a rather extraordinary story in itself. I first got to know Mr Bigelow through his daughter, Rosalind, who was a wonderful friend. She and I grew to know one another through a funny misunderstanding; one of the many coincidences that have feathered my life and made it much happier.
During the Second World War I used to visit overseas servicemen in hospital in Bournemouth. By 1947 I had saved up the fare to sail the Atlantic in order to visit the Americans and Canadians who had become friends. On my way home, I met three ladies from St Louis and we got talking. The women were amazed to learn that England still had rationing of food, petrol and clothing. I told them that the dress I was wearing was made out of a tent and that I had another made from strips of air balloons. They promised to send me a parcel of clothes and a parcel of food to keep or distribute as I chose.
I waited excitedly for these gifts, and eventually a gigantic parcel did arrive, stuffed with silk blouses, nylons and the most beautiful brand-new gabardine suit. There was nothing to say who these riches came from but the box was inside another box and that had a label on it from a tailor in St Louis addressed to a Mrs Rosalind Akin.
I wrote to Mrs Akin thinking she must have been one of the three ladies I'd met but whose name I'd forgotten. She wrote back and said no, but she'd heard about me, and the weird clothes I was wearing on my trip. And so a pen-friendship grew between us, ending only with Rosalind's death in 1984. Although Rosalind was extremely wealthy and I was poor, we had the same take on life.
In one letter Roady said that she hoped I didn't mind but that she'd taken to the habit of cutting pieces out of my letters to send on to her father, Commodore Paul Bigelow who was, she wrote, very old and lonely, living in a big house with only a housekeeper and a dog for company. She did not say why he was lonely, and thereafter I think there was a conspiracy to prevent me knowing that he was deaf, as he would not have invited pity.
Roady was not only a wonderful friend, she was also very generous: she overwhelmed us with parcels of food and clothes. Because I'm independent and I don't like being on the receiving end all the time – and because I couldn't send Roady presents that were anything like the ones she sent me – I thought that if I wrote to her lonely father might not that be a kind of present for her? On January 24th 1949 I started writing to him. And so began my marathon.
I didn't have a typewriter at home so I wrote the letters in the week during my lunch hour at the Baths. It would have been wrong to use Council property for personal correspondence so I would switch to using old typewriter ribbons. The letters didn't take me long because I was a very fast typist, and provided I had my little list of notes of what I wanted to say next, I could do one in ten or fifteen minutes. I called them my 'Saturday Specials' but I actually mailed them on Friday when I went to the post office with the office post.
I only once ran over into office time. Life at the Baths was either all or nothing: nothing happened for forty minutes, and then you were rushed off your feet for twenty, and then back to nothing. In one of those empty stretches, my boss, Mr Bond, caught me drawing something: Mr Bigelow used to make the most wonderful rag rugs, and he would send sketches, and I would transfer them onto graph paper so that it was easier for him to follow.
My boss wrote very bad letters but liked very quick dictation. He made me sit on a chair but not at a desk, and I had to write resting on my knee taking down 125 words a minute. I had to change the sentences as I went along so that his letters made sense; it taught me how to write a letter the hard way, I suppose.
Mr Bigelow did not reply to my first few letters, but when he did I believe his notes were aimed at cajoling, annoying, or pricking me into writing an extra mid-week letter. His letters were indecipherable scrawls on scrap paper with no date and no 'Dear Miss Woodsford' or 'Dear Frances'. (My family and friends call me Norah, but when writing to Mr Bigelow I chose to call myself by my first name, Frances, because I preferred it.) I am terribly sorry now not to have kept his notes to me, but they weren't consecutive – word-games, jokes, that sort of thing. Mr Bigelow wasn't a pen-pal; he was a sparring partner. Still, I got him tamed, and he looked forward to hearing from me I think. He kept the letters in a special wooden box, so they weren't loose about the place.
Writing to Mr Bigelow was very important – it lightened my life. Without the weekly letters I would have been enclosed in the to-and-fro of home and work. I was sharing a small flat with my mother and my brother, Mac, and I didn't have any social life because I couldn't afford it. Mac had the social life; he was out to find a wife! He was a committee clerk at the town hall, and during the time I was writing to Mr Bigelow, he was headhunted to be Deputy Children's Officer at the Council.
I didn't like my job. My office window looked over the pier, the one nice thing about it. We had such appalling staff – they stayed a day and a half if I was lucky – and I was always the Muggins who had to take over their job. My boss didn't mind! I was called secretary but I really ran the Baths except for the engineering side and estimates and stock-taking (although I ended up doing that too). And I had to deal with all the complaints because my office door was labelled Superintendent Enquiries and Mr Bond's was labelled Private! He wasn't silly.
I would patrol the Baths once an hour to find out what crisis had erupted. I organised the staff timetables, the wages and tax returns and the correspondence – and did the flower arranging and helped with the washing-up in the café when needed. I organised the Police Gala, and all the other galas, and in summer we had a water show, and I had to be Front of House Manager, and receive honoured guests. I would wear Roady's beautiful silk dresses – it was wonderful because if somebody came to complain and the person they were complaining to was better dressed than their wife then they couldn't bully me quite so much!
The Baths was a very closed circuit but the letters gave me broader horizons. Mr Bigelow and I had common interests in books, films, theatre and music and common fears in hospitals and dentists. I would keep him informed of local events and British news, and we would often discuss international politics. He sent me copies of Holiday magazine and I would always clip out 'Giles' cartoons to send on to him. When Roady came to visit, I sent Mr Bigelow reports from our jaunts in the invariably wet English countryside.
I regularly attended Civil Defence and First Aid Classes and these were good subjects for my letters, full of satirical potential. I had always been good with my hands, and signed up for Pottery and Painting at evening school, but with varying success; Mr Bigelow got to hear about the scrapes I got into, and I would send him the fruits of my labours. I also learnt to drive in the early years of writing to Mr Bigelow and Mac and I bought a car together. My share of the car used to be on Sundays between two and four o'clock when Mac was having his nap. He would also drive me to work and pick me up at the end of the day, but he was always late. I didn't stay at the Baths one moment more than I had to, and I would wait for him outside on the steps. That was why I started learning French, to occupy the time.
I never met Mr Bigelow and, recently, I was very upset to see a photo-graph of him as he was when I wrote to him, with a pale, haggard, thin face – a sad old man – and not the virile yachtsman with a cap on his head and a grin on his face that I had imagined. I didn't intend to write to him for twelve years; I didn't expect him to live that long. 97 and a half is a very good age to reach – after all, I'm only 95 and a half!
I was told that my last letter written on February 11th 1961 arrived at 'Casa Bigelow' on the day he died. My brother had got married and left home in August the previous year. I had lost the two most important men in my life within the space of six months.
After the funeral I wrote to Rosalind to ask if she would keep my letters and I would pick them up if I ever got back to America. She wrote back, most upset, to say that she was very sorry but they had been disposed of when the house was cleared, and that was sadly that. Some time later I disposed of his letters to me.
Then, in 2006, I received a 'phone call. The letters had turned up!
In 2005, George Mitchell of Long Island, New York, was accompanying a friend, Bob Sheppard, with the travel delivery of a new yacht from the South. Over the four-day voyage, they got talking about their early lives. The name of a Long Island yachtsman, Paul Bigelow, came up, and Bob said that his brother had been married to Mr Bigelow's granddaughter, Clare, and that her daughter, Cindy Leadbeater, had been researching the family.
George recalled that his mother-in-law had been Housekeeper to a Commodore Bigelow of Bellport and when the old man died the Housekeeper, Gudrun Arnfast ('The Tin-Opener' in my letters) was asked by the family to dispose of various effects. When Gudrun died, her daughter was clearing the house and came upon a decorated wooden box full of letters to Mr Bigelow written by an Englishwoman. She showed them to her husband, George, who was about to ditch them, but then he read a few and decided they were far too good to throw away. He wanted to read more and put them in his basement. And there they had sat for over forty years.
It transpired that Bob's brother was still alive, although gravely ill, and Bob went to visit, and brought with him the box of letters that George Mitchell felt a good deed to return to the family. Cindy's cousin, Nancy Akin (and Roady's daughter-in-law), was still in occasional touch with me and knew just how thrilled I would be to hear of the rediscovery of the letters. She called to say the letters had come to light. My cousin Barbara came to visit, and shared my delight. She suggested we try to get them published.
This book is the result of happy chance and teamwork. I wrote the letters all those years ago, but the book would not have happened if my cousin, Barbara Bass, had not had the idea of publishing the letters, and been enabled to make it happen with the technical support and patience of her husband, Colin, and the encouragement and expertise of her agent, Andrew Lownie. Barbara reduced twelve years of letters to two books. Clara Farmer, my editor at Chatto & Windus, reduced the two to one. To all of them I am very grateful and to Cindy Leadbeater in America for returning the letters to me in 2006, and to George Mitchell for returning them to Cindy's family. I am thrilled that this chain of goodwill has resulted in Dear Mr Bigelow.
Frances Woodsford
Bournemouth
June 2009