Reading, writing, faded letters to a
Writer revisits his primary to meet children with a stamp of success
The letters were sent more than 30 years ago between two young boys keen to become friends.
Now, decades later, those childhood exchanges between my penpal Stephen O’rourke and myself, have inspired a new generation of childhood letter writers in the towns where we grew up.
Hoping to ease our transition from P7 to S1, my big sister Wendy arranged for me to write letters to her pal Janet’s wee brother Stephen in the late 1980s.
Stephen and I were at different primary schools in the neighbouring Inverclyde towns of Kilmacolm and Port Glasgow, due to follow our sisters into Big School at St Stephen’s in Por t G l a s g ow several years later.
We eagerly exchanged letters, sharing jokes and tales about holidays, f a m i l y, sport and schoolwork, laying the bedrock of a boyhood friendship which, our sisters intended, would make us allies in the early days of high school.
Stephen, though, ended up at a different secondary, and our letters petered out as our teenage years began and we found our way through secondary education, making new friends as we went.
Our story became one of the threads of my BBC Radio Scotland documentary Lost Letters, detailing my attempts to reconnect with the penpals from my youth after finding the faded missives in an old shoe box in my parent’s loft last year.
The quest took me from New York to Nairn, and brought about first- time meetings as well as connecting the memories, words and photographs from the distant past to some magical, unexpected reunions with forgotten friends in the present day.
It even led to me finally meeting my old letter-writing chum Stephen, now a top QC in Edinburgh, and rekindled the exchange of letters with some of my old pen pals.
Last week, I discovered how that exchange of letters between Stephen and myself has seeded friendships between children of Port Glasgow and Kilmacolm
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It is of great value because of skills involved
today. After listening to Lost Letters, the teachers at Kilmacolm Primary and Newark Primary, Port Glasgow, took a lead from our sisters’ penpal initiative, setting up an interschool letter writing programme among Primary 7 pupils ahead of their transition to first year at Port Glasgow High.
Kilmacolm Primary head teacher Simone Mccredie said: “When we heard about your exchange with Stephen on Lost Letters, we thought that was the perfect way to encourage children to write letters. It’s an art