Autumn and Rosie – best friends in The Start of Something Wonderful – meet face-to-face for the first time after twenty-four years of friendship. Their relationship started as penpals aged eleven after their respective English teachers set up a penpal exchange. With Rosie living in Cumbria and Autumn living 330 miles away in Surrey, meeting up wasn’t an option.
I was fifteen when I ‘met’ my penpal Liz through the MAYC (Methodist Association of Youth Clubs). For a weekend in May, youth clubs from all over the UK would descend on London dressed in yellow and green. The weekend culminated in a gig in a London park, after which attendees threw a pompom with their name and address attached to it. Liz, who was a year older than me, caught mine. Like Autumn and Rosie, we lived at other ends of the country me in Teesside and Liz in West Sussex – so meeting up wasn’t an option, but we wrote to each other regularly over the decades that followed. These were the days before mobile phones, emails and social media.
As Autumn and Rosie say, there’s something so exciting about receiving an actual handwritten letter in the post. Every time a letter arrived from Liz, I’d take myself off somewhere quiet to read all her news and start planning my reply. It seems Liz did the same. She told me, ‘When a letter from Jessica arrived, it was always really special and I loved sitting down, often with a cup of tea and my feet up, and reading her news.’
I had another penpal whose pompom I caught at the MAYC weekend and we wrote for a couple of years, but then she stopped. I also had a French penpal for a while. Liz had over 20 at one point although I was her first. She says, ‘I loved writing to people and sharing fun stuff and trials and tribulations of being a teenager. Often this was related to boys – or lack of them!’ Liz and I were in our late twenties when we finally met for the first time. We haven’t written for a lot of years now, tending to send messages via social media instead. I do miss the letters, but finding quality time to write is a challenge.
Liz has actually kept all of my letters and I really wish I still had all of hers but I moved all over the country after graduating from university and had to make some difficult decisions about what I could and couldn’t keep. Liz says, ‘I’ll always keep Jessica’s letters because they are a key part of my growing up and I can try to remember what I was going through and talking about when reading her replies. They’re very evocative of our teenage years!’ I’d love to read my letters to her one day as I bet there are things in those pages I’ve forgotten about.
So many penpal relationships don’t last but I’m grateful that mine with Liz has and I’ve loved exploring how strong a letter-based friendship can be in The Start of Something Wonderful.
Big hugs
Jessica xx
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