At Aberlour House we were forced to write a letter to our parents first thing on a Monday. After morning run, and our porridge breakfast (Monday, Wednesday and Friday were always porridge), and an assembly, seated cross-legged on the parquet floor, we were sent to our form rooms. That first year it was the science room, my lies watched over by the host of reptiles and rodents, one ingesting another in glass cages that encircled the room. I found these lies more difficult to construct than any of the others that would follow.
It rained often and I sat in my too-starchy, too-new uniform, watching the tears on the glass. I’m sure I was good at the dreaded grammatical connectives – first; then; after; when. What was impossible was to find the words to fill in those spaces that must go between, each one choked from me one letter at a time. It felt too impossible to write how it really was. Of the few I still have, I read that Ed and I are preoccupied with the weather. We ask what it is like ‘over there’, knowing that in Saudi it will be blazing sunshine and cloudless skies.
By contrast, many of the letters we receive are almost wholly preoccupied with logistics. Did I receive the cheque? Have Beaver Travel sent the visa? Would I please get in touch with the school secretary regarding hotel arrangements for a transit in Amsterdam? In one letter there are instructions on how to buy a train ticket, and anxiety over how I will travel the ten miles between school and the station to make the purchase. In another they have organised for me, aged thirteen, to be sent a visa application form to complete myself.
A letter of mine asks what date Granny will be taking us out. I’m worried, I write, because I cannot read her handwriting. About that transit in Amsterdam a few years later I worry too. How will we find the hotel, I ask, and will anyone help us to get back to the airport in the morning? What if we miss our flight?
The combination of love and distance in these letters feels like a coach trying to manage a team down a phone which keeps cutting out.
‘It was good to hear your voices,’ Mum writes, ‘and to know that you made it over to Granny’s ok as per the instructions …..’ (her ellipsis – all five dots – I take to mean that her instructions have not been followed to the letter), or ‘Hope the journey back to school went well. The lady sitting beside you looked a right grump.’ Dad asks: ‘Have you heard from the travel company about your visas yet? You should be sent the passports fairly soon, so look after them – no more leaving them in the wet.’ In another Dad says he has spent the day imagining my movements through airports. His plans have unravelled. He is only able to locate me through a family friend. ‘You’ve gone to Kinross,’ he tells me. It is not the only occasion the arrangements have not worked out as they should: a lost identity card, lost shoes; a drowned passport and a mounting anxiety that my incompetence will bring all their carefully laid plans to nought.
These letters from home were handed out by a member of staff, shouting out our names as we picked up our orange squash and biscuit at break. Every day, at least once, someone would call out Violet’s name. I would focus on the secretary’s dog, who drooled copiously, willing ‘Doyle’ to be called.
After a few years I stopped being interested in my parents’ letters. My mother’s, which were typed up and photocopied for the generalised recipient, with postscripts sometimes added by hand, were so boring that I often wouldn’t bother to read them at all. Even now, only occasionally does something catch my attention and always when the typescript is broken up by pen.
One PS for instance tells me that she’s had a sniffy note from Sean, complaining about her typed, standardised correspondence. If I also have a problem with it, she writes – ‘Too bad!!’
In my mid- to late adolescence Dad’s letters comment on how I haven’t written. He underlines how very long it has been and that Mum is going scatty about it. Perhaps I was no longer interested in spinning the line.
But before, back when we all knew the story needing to be told, Dad says that the best bit of one letter was the last line. According to him, ‘I like school and it’s really nice.’
Reading these words, I look back to that heroic bent head, my eleven-year-old self struggling to make it up, and can’t imagine where she found the reserves for such deceit. Ever since, the bare page has held no fear. I have faced it in more straitened circumstances before.