DEAD LETTERS

Recently, I was asked a small favour by the younger of my partner’s delicious nieces, Gaby (not her real name). She had written a letter of application for a sub-editing post and wanted me to run my eyes over it. I readily agreed. As Gaby is a terrifically smart cookie, widely read and highly articulate, I anticipated that this would be the work of a moment.

Not so. Indeed, I found it a ticklish assignment. I didn’t want to recast the letter in the words I would have used – no help in that – but I did feel some of her phraseology struck the wrong tone, both for a job application and for someone needing to be seen as rigorous in the matter of language. In my computing incompetence, I managed to delete the annotated version of her letter that I had prepared from her email attachment, so I rang her and talked it through instead.

It was a few days later that I finally realised what was wrong with the application. It was simply that no one knows how to write a proper letter any longer. No shame on Gaby, for whom epistolary style is as archaic as ploughing with horses. How often has she been required to put pen (or even keyboard) to paper in a formal manner?

When I was a boy, early in the reign of Queen Victoria, we were called upon to write letters rather frequently. Letter-writing modes were taught at school and, unless one were unlucky with one’s parents, at home too. We all understood the important distinction between “Yours faithfully” and “Yours sincerely” and we knew what the strange terms “inst” and “ultimo” meant. I still favour those terms in business letters and use them scrupulously (especially when I am writing a letter of complaint), even while expecting that the recipient will be puzzled. (For the record, “Yours of 3rd inst” means “your letter to me of the 3rd of this month” and “Mine of 25th ultimo” means “My letter to you of the 25th of last month”).

All givers of birthday and Christmas presents had to be thanked by post, carefully set out by hand in fountain pen on headed notepaper. We had to write everything at school in ink too; hence the proverbial pre-computer schoolboy with stained fingers. Now we have Mrs Janes, the bereaved mother to whom Gordon Brown wrote, complaining that the PM should have typed it. In days past, the idea of typing a personal letter would be unthinkable.

The telephone was used much more sparingly in those days. People would write to each other with news. Anything sent through the mail in a business or retail transaction would have a personal covering letter. Compliment slips were thought too sloppy and informal. Letters of acknowledgment were a matter of course – now they are an unexpected occasion for pathetic gratitude. And of course there was no email or texting.

These last two developments have played a great part in the destruction of writing style. I have no doubt that their spread has meant that many more people do actually write to each other than hitherto. But the conventions of these two modes have grown up spontaneously and therefore in an unstructured way. I still am uncertain whether to address somebody whom I do not know or to whom I am emailing for a business reason as “Dear” and to sign off with the usual “Yours sincerely” (if I know their name) or “Yours faithfully” (if the address is to “Dear Sir or Madam”). “Hi”, “Hello”, “Best wishes” and “Kind regards” seem to be the usual style in emails but I cling to older ways.

Texting, by its comparatively laborious method, is more informal and abrupt still. I have yet to learn the common abbreviations that young people bandy about. Only recently did I discover that “lol” is “laughing out loud”: I had assumed it to mean “lots of love”, a rather different sentiment.

What is everywhere apparent in the explosion of writing onto screens is that most people have no idea how to spell (and cannot be arsed to check their spelling with a dictionary) and/or that few of us look over what we have written before we send it. For a positive festival of bad spelling and worse expression, you need look no further than eBay. But I have several friends whose emails are frequently more or less incomprehensible, largely because they hit “send” as soon as they have written what they want to say and do not, as we were enjoined to do at school, “check your work”. We all make mistakes, of course, and those of mine that come to my attention are suppurating wounds for days (sometimes even years) afterwards – did I ever tell you about the phrase “a cheque shirt” that fetched up uncorrected in the published version of my first novel? (Cheque your work, indeed).

Gordon Brown’s letter to Mrs Janes has caused him enormous grief, both in the sense of his own unmistakeable anguish that his unavoidable shortcomings – crap handwriting, compromised eyesight – should have let him down in a way that has been made so public and in the sense that he has been mercilessly harried by a woman with an agenda and a newspaper with an axe to grind. I feel for him. My own penmanship is terrible, ruined by the years of taking scribbled notes as a student and then as a journalist, so now I type a letter unless it is really unavoidable: condolences for a bereavement provide just such an occasion. My eyesight is compromised too, though not nearly as profoundly as Brown’s. And like him I favour felt-tips over nasty biros.

Brown’s effort – which evidently now ranks with the Zinoviev Letter in the annals of political mischief making – was clearly thoughtful and well-meant. Mrs Janes was outraged that he misspelled her name, though it seems to me that, in his hand, it could quite as well have been read as Janes rather than James. Nick Robinson, speaking on BBC News, referred to her at one point as Mrs Jane. Surely that gives The Sun new ammunition in its campaign against the BBC too.

Mrs Janes went to The Sun in the first instance – whether by way of Max Clifford or on her own has not been revealed – and says that she has not been paid by the paper. Not everybody believes her. When Brown telephoned her to apologise in person, she recorded the conversation. The Sun says it had nothing to do with this recording. Not everybody believes it. The Sun of course has very publicly turned its back on the Labour government and is now doing everything in its power to ensure a Tory victory at the general election. There is little doubt that the Tories will go out of their way to please Rupert Murdoch by hobbling the BBC, allowing Sky to take a larger stake in ITV and doing nothing to force non-residents (example: R Murdoch) to pay tax on their income earned here.

Of course, The Sun has never made an error, be it of spelling, of fact, of judgment or of taste. Indeed, the mounting evidence that, on the matter of the Brown letter, it has wholly misjudged the public mood may very well be the first miscalculation that it has ever made.

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The other day, the son of my oldest friend turned 21. I sent him a message – “welcome to big school” – that he probably didn’t appreciate. But to the generation of his pop and me, born within ten days of each other in 1947, 21 will always be the age at which one attains one’s majority. Back in the 1960s, that’s when everything came to you, all the rights and responsibilities (save for sex, which was permitted five years earlier, as long as you were a heterosexual or a lesbian). So Tony and I could not vote in the 1966 general election, when we were 19. As it happens our respective partners --– Tony’s wife Tricia and my civil partner David who, spookily, were born on the very same day – both could vote in the 1970 election when they were 19, because the Wilson government had betweentimes changed the law and allowed 18 year-olds the vote. I always felt a tad deprived by this change, voting myself for the first time at the same 1970 election, although the Labour Party that I would have voted for in 1966 did get back into power.