Dear Reader

I am often asked where the idea for Classic Correspondence came from. Well the idea of serialising books is not terribly original, after all Charles Dickens wrote all his books as episodes for a popular ;pot-boiler magazine. Classic Correspondence though, came from a much more personal source.

I had a maiden aunt who was the eldest of five and because her own mother was stricken with arthritis and wheelchair bound, she raised her four siblings more or less on her own. Possibly because of this she never married and focused her affections on all her nephews and nieces. In return she was the favourite Aunt to all of us. If you can recall the actress Joyce Grenfell, then you get a pretty good picture of my Aunt.

When I had grown up, she was quite old and living several hours away, I would visit perhaps every five or six weeks. She was by this time quite deaf but vanity would prevent her from admitting just how serious it was. As a result she would talk without pause for the duration of my visit just in case I spoke and she misheard it. In many ways she was my link to my cousins whom I didn’t see very often. They all wrote to her, from the far corners, with their news. So she would always get out these well-thumbed letters first and read me the most interesting bits. Meanwhile I would refresh the teapot and reload the biscuit plate.

After this she would seamlessly move on to the lives of her favourite TV personalities (She was particularly interested in lives of certain attractive young sportsmen) the fictional lives of the soap characters and even where she was up to in her current bedtime read. She did not distinguish between the factual and the fictional, her interest in both was just as real. Not surprising really as these characters came into her living room, every day, through the television.

When it came time for me to leave, she would throw her arms in the air and protest that she hadn’t heard any of my news. Quickly followed by a request for me to telephone when I got home. A clever cover-up really because she could hear quite well on the phone.

Driving home I would muse on my inability to write a decent letter and wishing my life was as exciting as the risqué bedtime romances she loved so much. Well you can see where I am going with this.

However, the idea really gelled a couple of years later when, on visiting an old friend, her six year old son opened the front door and wouldn’t let me in till he got out a carefully folded envelope from his pocket, withdrew the contents and read me the letter from the local bank which was accepting him as their latest young saver. His finger moved word by word over the page as he read to the very end. He even read the address on the envelope. Meanwhile his mother stood silently smiling behind him.

She explained that this was the first letter, addressed personally to him, that he had ever received and he was so excited by it that he read it to every visitor. Before this letter, he had shown no interest in reading and now he was even trying to read his own bedtime stories. He soon became the best reader in the class at school and is now a highly qualified graduate.

Little did the bank manager realise the effect of this standard personalized letter, but I did and that was the push that I needed to start Classic Correspondence.

Strange how these little moments of realisation happen isn’t it?

Kind regards

Martin