Royal Corps of Signals

Dud's Army.
Chapter 19
Dear Fred

Mail passes in and out of an army camp on a daily basis, bearing news and views in an intimate exchange between senders and receivers. The act of posting a letter is in itself a communication for it represents a degree of care on the part of the one who writes, one who has set time to one side, conjured a vision of the intended and begins that curious process of writing a letter. When the tangible evidence of that effort arrives, who cannot be charmed by its coming even before the opening and reading of it. Contained in the missive may be expressions of love, hate or even the cruelty of indifference but still and all it‘s a letter; even the dreaded Dear John is a letter.

But how tragic to receive no letters. One feels cruelly singled out on receiving no mail. Word gets around and one is pitied. Fats Waller was so cognisant of this kind of heartbreak he sat right down and wrote himself a letter - “A lot of kisses, on the bottom, And I’ll be glad I’ve got ’em.” He makes us smile when we hear those lyrics but they belong to what is essentially a sad song, the song of the clown.

Write a letter to a soldier and for sure it will be read and reread, and with no small assiduity. The letter will be carried about for repeated readings as brief moments through the working day allow. It will be read shortly before lights out, then stored under one’s pillow to be recovered again at reveille with a renewal of pleasure. It will take on the status of a small treasure. So when Fred, one of our Signalman linemen, reached a point where he could not take his no-mail situation any longer he sat right down and composed an advertisement, placing it in a British newspaper. In effect he called attention to his need for a pen-pal of the female variety. Whether Fred wrote to a Nottingham paper, where it was reputed to have a disproportionate population bulge of a mind-boggling, ten girls to every boy, or that the wording of his ad was so poignant it touched the national consciousness one cannot report, but the effect was electric. Mail addressed to Fred began arriving at 280 SU by the armful. In a single day Fred received more mail than the rest of the camp put together.

Fred’s reaction was extraordinary. It appeared that with the arrival of these hundreds of letters he had achieved his objective; he was now receiving mail. The contents of each letter did not seem to impact him so much as the package’s arrival bearing his name on the front of it. He loved the business of receiving. He loved mail call. He loved the envelopes. He studied them, the addresses, the handwriting, whether the stamps were affixed at sexually-alluding angles, checking for SWALK and BURMA acronyms or lip-sticked impressions on the envelope’s back, savouring the scented ones, turning them over and over as though marvelling at their very existence. He did not want to open them.

And he enjoyed the camp gossip, the notoriety that swirled about him. He took to going about with wads of unopened letters, offering them around like cookies he‘d just baked. His tent was like a post office, with mail piled up all over the place. Blokes who had missed him on his rounds came calling and never left empty-handed. Fred was generous to a fault with his letters.

Corporal Hodgeson, a fellow regular soldier and sharing the same tent, was of a decidedly different bent to Fred. The corporal read through as many of Fred’s letters as he could manage, finally making his choice. He wrote a brief note to the writer explaining who he was, how he came by the young lady’s letter and suggesting she might care to write to him rather than to Fred. The corporal was not a tight-lipped sort of fellow so to us few army mates he would bare his soul given a sympathetic ear. For our part, this was not so easily given as we thought he was nuts. All the same, one must be polite to one’s superiors so we patiently listened to the hopes and dreams our fired-up corporal had staked on his analytic screenings, his final selection and his cryptically-worded, posted-away application. Two weeks later Corporal Hodgeson received a ten-page reply and a photograph.

If he could have played the bugle he would have removed his shorts, beribboned his manhood, climbed to the ablutions roof in the centre of camp and played taps, thereby signalling to the universe the anticipated demise of his bachelorhood. He was delirious with joy. If we’d asked him then he would have scissored his two stripes and given Jack and I one each. We worried for him.

By way of reply, Corporal Hodgeson wrote, scrunched up and re-wrote, the mother of all ten-page letters. Thereafter, the ten-page exchanges never faltered. In sickness and in health the mail went through. Post office employees, civilian and military, must have remarked on the reliability of this epistolary intercourse even though PO types are notoriously case-hardened to the emotions and eccentricities that post is capable of engendering. We continued to worry for Corporal Hodgeson.

Fred, in the meantime, alarmed at the obsessive behaviour now bedogging his immediate superior, figured to himself that ten-page letters to read - and especially to write, too high a price for any normal bloke to pay. Armed with this revised understanding Fred voluntarily returned to his no-mail situation, his enhanced reputation around camp now secure and his declared lack of any further interest in letters treated by the camp population with sympathetic understanding.

Chapter 20

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