My Dear Bessie (48 page)

There are too many memories, really. Everything about them made an impact on me, from Granny's devotion to wearing trousers to Granddad's funny bald head and itchy, tweedy hat.

It is a true delight to discover, through their letters, that there was even more to them than any of us could have imagined.

At Greenwich Park in July 2003, the last trip Bessie made from her care home. The couple are both 89, and have been married for almost 58 years.

Editor's Note

Editing these letters has been a wholly pleasurable task. I cannot express enough my gratitude to Bernard Barker for depositing his father's papers at Mass Observation and to the Barker family for entrusting me with their promotion and editing. (Bernard curated the papers with dedicated assistance from Katy Edge; the copyright is owned jointly by Chris's and Bessie's younger son Peter Barker and their granddaughter Irena Barker.) The fact that Bernard and Irena's epilogues complete the picture in astute and vivid detail is surely a genetic inheritance.

The entire collection of Chris Barker's papers is available to view, by appointment, at Mass Observation's home at The Keep near Brighton. Please visit
www.massobs.org.uk
for more information.

More photos of the letters and the Barkers in later life may be found at
www.simongarfield.com
.

TO THE LETTER

A CURIOUS HISTORY OF CORRESPONDENCE

Simon Garfield

Every letter contains a story, and here are some of the greatest. From Oscar Wilde's unconventional method of using the mail to cycling enthusiast Reginald Bray's quest to post himself, Simon Garfield uncovers a host of stories that capture the enchantment of this irreplaceable art (with a supporting cast including Pliny the Younger, Ted Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, David Foster Wallace and the Little Red-Haired Girl). There is also a brief history of the letter-writing guide, with instructions on when and when not to send fish as a wedding gift. And as these accounts unfold, so does the tale of a compelling wartime correspondence that shows how the simplest of letters can change the course of a life.

A shining success'
Sunday Times

‘Excellent, amusing and moving'
Financial Times

‘Wonderfully elegant'
Observer

£9.99

ISBN 978 0 85786 861 9

Also available as an ebook

eBook ISBN 978 0 85786 860 2

www.canongate.tv

 
 
To the Letter
by Simon Garfield
 

 

 

Chapter One

The Magic of Letters

Bloomsbury Auctions is not in Bloomsbury but in a road off Regent Street, and since its inception in 1983 it has specialised in sales of books and the visual arts.
Occasionally
these visual arts include conjuring, a catch-all heading that offers a glimpse into a vanishing world, and many other vanishing items besides, as well as sleight-of-hand, mind-reading, contortionism, levitation, escapology and sawing.

On 20 September 2012 one such sale offered complete tricks, props, solutions for tricks and the construction of props, posters, flyers, contracts and letters. Several lots related to
particular magicians, such as Vonetta, the Mistress of Mystery, one of the few successful female illusionists and a major draw in Scotland, where she was celebrated not only for her magic but also for her prowess as a quick-change artiste. There was one lot connected with Ali Bongo, including letters describing seventeen inventions, and, improbably, ‘a costume description for an appearance as The Invisible Man'.

There were three lots devoted to Chung Ling Soo, whose real name was William E. Robinson, born in 1861 not in Peking but in New York City (the photographs on offer suggested he looked less like an enigmatic man from the East and more like Nick Hornby with a hat on). One of the letters for sale discussed Chung Ling Soo's rival, Ching Ling Foo, who claimed that Chung Ling Soo stole not only the basics of his name, but also the basis of his act; their feud reached its apotheosis in 1905, when both Soo and Foo were performing in London at the same time, and each expressed the sort of inscrutable fury that did neither of them any harm at the box office. In order to cultivate his persona, Chung Ling Soo never spoke during his act, which included breathing smoke and catching fish from the air.

Between 1901 and 1918 Soo played the Swansea Empire, the Olympia Shoreditch, the Camberwell Palace, the Ard-wick Green Empire and Preston Royal Hippodrome, but his career met an unforgettable end onstage at the Wood Green Empire – possibly the result of a curse laid by Ching Ling Foo – when his famous ‘catch a bullet in the teeth' trick didn't quite work out as hoped. On this occasion, his gun fired a real bullet rather than just a blank charge, and, as historians of Soo are quick to point out, his first words on stage were also necessarily his last: ‘Something's happened – lower the curtain!' Among the lots at the Bloomsbury sale were letters from assistants and friends of Soo claiming he had been born in Birmingham, England, at the back of the Fox Hotel, and
that the death may not have been an accident. ‘We who knew Robinson,' wrote a man called Harry Bosworth, ‘say he was murdered.'

But the stand-out lot was the one involving the Radium Girl, the Aquamarine Girl, Carmo & the Vanishing Lion, Walking Through a Wall and the origins of sawing thin female assistants – the items relating to the life of Val Walker. Walker, who took the name Valentine because he was born on 14 February 1890, was once a star performer. He was known as ‘The Wizard of the Navy' for his ability to escape a locked metal tank submerged in water during the First World War (a feat later repeated in the Thames in 1920, witnessed by police and military departments and 300 members of the press). After drying himself he received offers to perform all over the world. He subsequently escaped from jails in Argentina, Brazil, and, according to information contained in the auction lot, ‘various prisons in Spain'.

Walker was the David Copperfield and David Blaine of his day. He appeared in shows at Maskelyne's Theatre of Mystery, next door to BBC Broadcasting House, the most famous European magic theatre of the time (perhaps of all time), surprising audiences with swift escapes from manacles, straitjackets and a 9-foot-long submarine submerged in a glass-fronted tank at the centre of the stage. And then there was the trick with which Walker secured his place in magical history: Radium Girl. This was known as a ‘big box' restoration illusion, a process in which a skilled woman enters a cabinet and is either sawn in half or penetrated with swords, and then somehow emerges unscathed. Walker's role in this trick is fundamental; he is believed to have invented it in 1919, building the box himself and devising the necessary diversions and patter to make it the climax of his show.

The trick is one we've seen on stage or television for 95 years: an empty box on casters is displayed to the audience, its sides and base are banged, an assistant climbs in and is secured by chains, the door is closed, knives or poles are inserted into pre-drilled holes, followed by sheets of metal that seem to slice the woman into three parts (feminists have consistently placed this trick in their Top Five). Weaned on cynicism and trick photography, we have become blasé about such things today, but Radium Girl was once quite something. The sheets and poles and swords are then (of course) all pulled out, the door is opened and the chains removed, and the woman is smiling and whole.

Britain's secret weapon: Val Walker contemplates his escape.