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Return to Sender

That white ceramic inkpot sitting snugly in the corner of my desk. The agony of a crossed nib. The difficulty, being left-handed, of fol­lowing the direction ‘light on the up stroke, heavy on the down stroke’. The blotting paper. The blue-black permanent stain on my finger. My first pen, an Osmiroid, and a bottle of Quink. I loved lifting the wee lever to refill the pen.

My best friend introduced me to Churlston Deckle. The paper looked as if it was something Moses would have practised his com­mandments on before he had them engraved. The man I married wrote to me every week – sometimes twice – for four years. That’s some correspondence, in a box under the bed.

Now I get a letter once in a blue moon. Emails and texts, yes – but a letter? In a distinctive hand, so you know who sent it before you open it? Those days are gone. It’s a shame. Something about the intimacy of the writer’s communion with the paper, the space between their thoughts and their pen, the scorings out, the drawings, is precious. A letter in your hand is as intimate as a kiss. It may be marvellous to type thoughts, see them appear like a printed page, but in our heads, as we compose, we are writing in longhand, with our own idiosyncratic script, formed by long dead primary-school teachers. Miss Merriman made me keep a ruler handy in case my writing sloped backwards. If it did, she slapped me on the hand with the same ruler. Hard.

It’s odd, in this interconnected world, to imagine sending a letter to ‘the Backside of the World’ and having to wait a year for a response. But if your son worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company you had no other choice. I’ve worked for years on a novel about Isobel Gunn, a doughty Orkney woman who dressed as a boy and worked on the Bay ‘as hard and well as any of the men’ until she was discovered giving birth on her employer’s carpet. It’s a remarkable tale, one of many from the beginnings of Empire, when desp

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That white ceramic inkpot sitting snugly in the corner of my desk. The agony of a crossed nib. The difficulty, being left-handed, of fol­lowing the direction ‘light on the up stroke, heavy on the down stroke’. The blotting paper. The blue-black permanent stain on my finger. My first pen, an Osmiroid, and a bottle of Quink. I loved lifting the wee lever to refill the pen.

My best friend introduced me to Churlston Deckle. The paper looked as if it was something Moses would have practised his com­mandments on before he had them engraved. The man I married wrote to me every week – sometimes twice – for four years. That’s some correspondence, in a box under the bed. Now I get a letter once in a blue moon. Emails and texts, yes – but a letter? In a distinctive hand, so you know who sent it before you open it? Those days are gone. It’s a shame. Something about the intimacy of the writer’s communion with the paper, the space between their thoughts and their pen, the scorings out, the drawings, is precious. A letter in your hand is as intimate as a kiss. It may be marvellous to type thoughts, see them appear like a printed page, but in our heads, as we compose, we are writing in longhand, with our own idiosyncratic script, formed by long dead primary-school teachers. Miss Merriman made me keep a ruler handy in case my writing sloped backwards. If it did, she slapped me on the hand with the same ruler. Hard. It’s odd, in this interconnected world, to imagine sending a letter to ‘the Backside of the World’ and having to wait a year for a response. But if your son worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company you had no other choice. I’ve worked for years on a novel about Isobel Gunn, a doughty Orkney woman who dressed as a boy and worked on the Bay ‘as hard and well as any of the men’ until she was discovered giving birth on her employer’s carpet. It’s a remarkable tale, one of many from the beginnings of Empire, when desperate times needed desperate measures. In the mid-seventeenth century, two Frenchmen, Radisson and des Groseilliers, discovered that North American furs could be sold for vast profit in Europe. Persuaded by his cousin, Prince Rupert, Charles II granted a Royal Charter ‘to the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England’, giving them a monopoly of trading priv­ileges ‘in all those Seas Streights Bayes Lakes Creeks . . . together with all Landes and Territories’ accessible via Hudson’s Bay. This vague and remarkably presumptuous land grab anointed the Governor and his intrepid trappers ‘true and absolute Lordes and Proprietors’ of an enormous nation, on payment of two elk and two black beaver should the King happen to visit. You might think that Arctic fox fur, soft and snowy, was the most popular commodity, but it was the humble beaver who was sacrificed for profit. He had a waterproof coat, perfect for gentlemen’s head­gear. Between 80,000 and 100,000 pelts were sent to Britain each year, and in 1690 the Hudson’s Bay Company reported, with some complacency, ‘our returns in Beaver this year by God’s blessing to be worth £20,000’. Over the next century, wars depleted the manpower available in England. So the man-hungry Company cast its eyes north. Orcadians made ideal Servants, as the Company styled its employees, ‘more sober and tractable than the Irish’. They knew how to sail and live off the land. They also lived in dire poverty, so an offer of five years’ work for £8 – twice what they could get labouring at home – was tempt­ing. By 1800, nearly 80 per cent of HBC employees were Orcadians. There are, as a result, many Orcadian names in Canadian phone books. As beaver declined and competition from the French increased, there was a constant need for expansion. Like the East India Company, the HBC became a spider’s web of bureaucratic inter-actions controlled by London, sustained by countless reports, instruc­tions – and personal letters. Often, these personal epistles missed their objects. The Servants had finished their service, deserted their ships or died. The Company returned this vagrant post to its London office, and over the years amassed a file of about 250 ‘undelivered letters’ which remained sealed for the next century and a half. Only when the HBC Archives were moved to Canada were the letters opened by the archivist Judith Hudson Beattie, and subsequently published (in 2003) as Undelivered Letters to Hudson’s Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830–57. The contents are fascinating, offering us a unique insight into nineteenth-century life. Real people, spelling in their own dialects, come alive. Clipped ringlets are enclosed. Script crosses and re-crosses the page – post was expensive. Illiterate sweethearts get teachers to write for them. Sisters tease. Mothers are pious, fathers anxious, brothers bawdy. Take for example the story of the wonderfully named Jonty Buck from Cork. His father Frederick was a miniature portraitist. The Peninsular War had been good to Frederick. He kept a supply of partially painted ivories ready in their gold cases, adding faces and insignia after a brief sitting with departing soldiers. The family was well off but burdened with many children. In 1842 Jonty was Second Mate on a ship bound for the Columbia River. Two years later his mother put together a family package full of news. There’s enough in this brief summary to make a novel. Through their letters, the voices of the family flesh out the story. Matriarch Harriet establishes her character firmly. ‘Not a line from you for twelve long months . . . you are at the time of life to form a character . . . lean on the foundation Purity Integrity and Sobriety . . . I hope you are prudent about your money.’ She knows him well. She’s also aware that she can’t control the family narrative. ‘I suppose the Boys will each tell their own story . . .’ Indeed they do. Adam says, ‘I hope there is no fear you will run away with one of those she Indians that you gave such a glowing account of.’ The family is reeling from young Alfred’s sudden marriage – ‘Just think what an age he has brought the cares of life on him, he is 19 and she 16!’ sister Harrietta observes. ‘Mama faltered about it but the boys are greatly amused.’ Jonty’s girlfriend in Innishannon says, ‘Was not Alfy’s marriage funny? You must not follow his example or I shall be jealous.’ Frederick is stiff. ‘Mother never told us a word about it until she produced the cake . . . the whole thing is a mystery to me and I don’t wish to think of it.’ John reports on less personal matters, bad tidings of French revolution – ‘the King has abdicated the Throne . . . Guizot the Minister is in the hands of the people and ere now his head off . . .’ – and good tidings about the Irish potato famine: ‘the winter has passed over without any deaths of starvation’. We can speculate endlessly about the effect Alfred’s behaviour had on the Buck clan, in their close-knit Cork society. Perhaps the last word should go to the miscreant himself. ‘A great change has taken place in me,’ he tells Jonty. ‘I am married . . . she is not 17 years of age yet but very knowing (not at all girlish I mean).’ The rest of the letter deals with another man’s fraud. Alfred, or Fuzz, as he was known, wanted to divert attention from himself. That nickname sig­nifies he was still barely shaving. Maybe he wanted to be seen as a grown-up. Jonty never saw his perturbing family news. The invaluable Editors’ Notes on the senders and receivers of letters – an enormous exercise in itself – tell us that he deserted at the Sandwich Islands, perhaps in pursuit of a girl, and died in the Gold Rush, digging in California. The Bucks were a literate, financially stable family. Contrast them with one of the many Orcadian families who feature in this collec­tion, the Hornes, whose descendants still walk the streets of Orkney. Brothers George and Henry set off for Fort Victoria, Vancouver, in 1850. George’s sweetheart Isabella fills her letter with local news, and can’t resist using her sister to disguise her own insecurity: ‘mary sinds kind love to you and tells you not to fall in love with an Indian . . .’ Henry’s sweetheart Anne is less literate and less circumspect. She produces a howl of desire, in broad Orcadian. It’s a pure stream of consciousness. If I read it aloud I can hear her talking. She brings her lover up to date with local gossip and her travels (‘at Glasgo and dundeay ant many more plases’). Now she’s back working in the ‘lonsome’ garret, where clearly she and Henry spent happy private time. ‘I wish you was here besid me . . . have you got A swethart where you are I supose you haf got A half a Dousen.’ She asks for a lock of his hair, reminding him ‘it is wan year an four deas since you left orkney’, and ends ‘O be sure and writ.’ The Notes tell us she didn’t have to worry about Henry’s con­stancy. The brothers came home together, landing in London in 1851, and the following year Anne and Henry married in Orkney. Not all the stories are as simple. John Spense’s letter to an old friend ‘on board Prince Rupert laying in a five-fathom hole York Factory’ hints at the difficulties faced by Servants who married ‘in the custom of the Country’. They entered into alliances with First Nation women and had children. This is not surprising, given the lonely nature of the work and the integral part First Nation women played in the smooth functioning of Bay life – netting snowshoes, gutting, canoeing, preparing pelts. The Company had to tolerate it but refused to take financial responsibility for these Country wives. Many were simply abandoned when men had served their time and came back home. John completed his five years and returned to Orkney; but he had a conscience about the family he’d left behind in Canada: ‘Joseph Give My Compliments to My Old lady . . . I am not married here yet . . . there are plenty girls in Orkney . . . to me they want Money to keep them up, they are remarkably dressy an old fellow like me wanted a Clean Pocket handkerchief every day they dazzled my eyes so.’ It’s clear he feels out of step, back home. His old First Nation lady would not have had much time for dressing well, and barter would have been her currency. An open mind about liaisons was the only way for sweethearts waiting at home to cope. Londoner George Barton writes from Canada that he has signed on for another five years, after earning credit for thirty-two hours spent saving a boat locked in ice. His fiancée Maria hopes he won’t stay the full term because ‘it is a long time to look forward to’. She requests furs, and then says, casually, ‘I had allmost forgoten but I suppose your sweetheart and your little Child was very glad to see you again.’ Her brother also had a second family on the Bay, according to the Notes; perhaps she was used to the idea. But ‘allmost forgoten’? I wonder. So many stories, saved purely by chance. Reading them makes me realize how close we are to our forebears. I recognize with delight young Edward Wallis who tells his big brother Charles, ‘When I come to sea I shall not come as a common sailor but be a captain at once!’ He adds a drawing of himself inside a whale. ‘This is its ribs,’ he has written, helpfully. Then, ‘here i am’ – a tiny figure, standing firm in the belly. He put pen to paper in Bromley, in September 1847. It could be yesterday. Maybe it’s time to rediscover the hand, the Osmiroid, the intimacy of paper and ink. Get the Churston Deckle out. There’s a whole generation who have never had a letter! Anne was wiser than she knew when she told her lover, ‘O be sure and writ.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 72 © Morag MacInnes 2021


About the contributor

Morag MacInnes is an Orcadian writer and lecturer.

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