Will you be my penpal?
Every issue, our Editor at Large, Valery, will be reliving the best bits of our lives. This fortnight, the joys of a friendship on paper
My penfriend wasn’t one really. My best friend Jude and I started writing regular letters after my family moved from one end of the country to the other when I was 16. We’re still good friends today – although now we use phone and text. But nothing can replace the thrill of that letter plopping through the letterbox and for Yours readers, those letters were arriving from the States, Australia, New Zealand and all parts of Europe. Plus, for Margaret Phillips, the Far East: “When I was 15 I was a fanatical Walker Brothers fan. I used to write to six Japanese fans who could barely write in English. It was a military operation keeping it all together. I wrote the same letter to each one and answered any questions they asked at the end. “It was worth it – they sent me magazines and pictures of Scott, John and Gary not available in England. I still have them, but sadly not the penpals.” It was heartwarming that most of you are still in touch with early penfriends – and now swapping stories of grandchildren, including Janice Boulter. “When I was nine in 1957, my dad’s colleague emigrated to Australia and promised to find someone for me to write to. That’s how Merilyn and I started a long and really lovely friendship which continues today, some 60 years later. “Of course it is much quicker to receive each other’s news with today’s modern technology but I honestly feel waiting for the postman to deliver those letters was more exciting. And in 1969, I had the joy of meeting Merilyn when she came over to be my bridesmaid.” Like many, Sylvia Foster’s penfriend came via school. “We exchanged letters with a class in Scotland and I got a boy called Jim. We wrote about family and hobbies, then one Christmas I received a present – a pair of American tan tights. My mother told me not to write again, thinking it was forward.” What a spoilsport. But romance wasn’t always nipped in the bud... “When I was 18 I started writing to a young man who lived in another part of Ireland,” writes Christina Kelly. “We found we had a lot in common and wrote about once a week. Two years on we met, carried on writing and eventually knew we wanted to spend our lives together. Work was so scarce in Ireland Seamus moved to England. We continued writing and when I was 23, we got married and were happy for 55 years. “My beloved husband died last year, but up until then we never forgot we were penpals and continued to write letters when apart. Seamus spent the last week of his life in a hospice and I wrote to him every day and got a nurse to read my letters to him every night. When we spoke about how we met, we used to say,
‘Well we did our bit for the Post Office.’” More than one of you met your future husbands responding to a request to write to the armed forces. Sadly, for Yvonne Parsons, that was not to be... “In November 1956, I noticed a letter in the newspaper from soldiers serving in Jordan who would like a penpal. I wrote and had a reply from Jimmy, a regular soldier, who would be 21 in January 1957. I replied that I’d be 16 in January 1957. He wrote back asking my parents’ permission to write to me as he was five years older. Mum and Dad said yes and so our letters continued. “He wrote that the regiment was coming home on leave for Easter and we arranged to meet at Charing Cross Station. I came home from work on the Wednesday before Easter to read in the paper that Jimmy’s plane had been blown up in Jordan. I was devastated and have never had a penpal since.” But there are happy endings: “I was 11 when my Dad came home from work to say his secretary had a Danish friend searching for a children’s book in English about the Tower of London,” emails Marjorie Edwards. “I knew my school library had one, so I asked my teacher if Dad’s secretary could buy it. All the arrangements were made, then my teacher said, ‘Why don’t you ask if there’s a little Danish girl you could write to?’ So my letter went into the parcel. A letter of thanks came back, together with the name and address of Nina in Gentofte, Sjaelland. I went to the post office myself to get the right stamp and my letter winged it’s way across the sea. “Nina wrote back and thus began several years of exchanging letters ... about school, hobbies, fashion, The Beatles, boyfriends, books and a whole lot more. Then Nina wrote to say she was going to work in Scotland as an au pair and would send me the address as soon as she was settled, but her letter never came. By this time, I was working and engaged so time was short, but I never forgot her and often wondered how she had fared. “Then one day, nearly 40 years later, while watching a TV programme about Denmark, Nina’s address popped into my mind! Surprised that I should remember it so clearly, I wrote a letter with ‘Please forward’ on the envelope. A month later... I received a letter from Nina! Her parents still lived in the same house and had handed my letter to her! Now, we are back in touch and catching up on the last 40 years!”
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