‘Will the door just open and you walk in?’
There was a moment, last autumn, when I was rummaging through old storage boxes and came across a container I’d never seen before. This happens periodically. It’s as if the layers of softening cardboard boxes, plastic crates and vintage suitcases convulse and shift to throw up unexpected treasure. Metal detectorists would understand the breath-stopping moments of surprise, the quickening excitement with which one picks out the unfamiliar item, brushes off the dirt, peers at the possible treasure. This trouvaille is a cuboid cardboard box, 8 ½” square and 6” deep. I’ve no idea what it had have held originally. A teapot perhaps? It was tied with string and marked LETTERS / Old Letters (Family). I prepared myself for disappointment: business correspondence, school Sunday letters kept out of duty. Inside there was a mass of letters, hundreds of them, many on blue airmail forms – I haven’t counted them all yet. I felt a thrill when the first letters I glimpsed w...