Letter Writing

There was a time when the art of writing a good letter was taught in schools, usually as part of the English curriculum - so, for example, pupils were taught when a letter should be formal, in which case it had to end with either "Yours sincerely" or "Yours faithfully". However, I started to learn to write a proper letter not as an exercise but 'for real' at the age of nine, at my prep school, Glengorse, where, on a Sunday morning before we walked down the hill to morning service in Battle church, we were all sat down in our common rooms and instructed to write home. The letter was checked and corrected by the master in charge, and re-written again and again until it was right.

The above letter was written in October 1955, over a year after I joined the school, so you can imagine how awful my letters must have been in January 1954 when I joined the school.

Once I had moved on to public school at the age of 13 there was no requirement to write home but, by that time, the habit was ingrained, so I continued to write to my parents weekly, in increasing detail. I didn't tell them everything that happened - by that time I had learnt that there were things you definitely did not tell parents - but the letters provide a fund of information about life in a British public school in the late 50s and early 60s.

I continued to write each time we took a contract abroad, so this is a letter to my parents in April 1968, from Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia where Mrs MW and I were teaching. As far as possible, the letters were weekly so, once again, I have this wonderful record of our life there.

My parents could so easily have thrown the letters away but my mother kept them; and, every now and again, I retrieve them from the small drawer in the Arab chest where they live, and re-read them, blessing my mother for her foresight in keeping them.