Writing love letters at school was dangerous business. Someone could find it, and he’d never live it down. Three years left at this school, though if the letter were found maybe he’d have himself thrown out. He wasn’t sure how to go about that, but Tommy H, a year below him, was on his fourth school of the year. He’d have some pointers.
“My darling angel” he scribbled. His handwriting was atrocious, everyone said. He disagreed, although he often couldn’t read it himself. He crossed out “angel”, then “darling”, then “my”.
“To the beautiful Alice” he tried. He couldn’t tell whether it was better or worse, so he assumed worse. He went back to “My darling angel”. Although the “my” felt presumptuous; he wasn’t sure she knew he existed, and certainly she didn’t know his name.
That would make signing the letter a bit unhelpful, unless he included a description of himself. But a love letter wasn’t supposed to be about him, he knew that much from his English lessons. Or some romantic comedy he’d watched with his parents. Or maybe Wikipedia.
He paused, thought that through, and checked Wikipedia, then WikiHow, although he already knew, from that time he tried to make an aquarium, that WikiHow should be taken with a grain of salt and a snorkel.
He decided to stick with his first line for now and move on. There were only ten minutes left that period.
“I imagine the touch of your hair.”
That was creepy, wasn’t it? Also, why was her hair touching him? Perhaps “feel” was better. “I imagine the feel of your hair”. Still creepy, surely? Girls weren’t into creeps, his sister said. He wondered whether a love letter was inherently creepy, irrespective of its choice of words. Maybe he shouldn’t be demonstrating just how obsessed he was with Alice.
He looked at the teacher for a moment to pretend he was paying attention and all his scribbling was note-taking. Something about the first world war. He reached for his phone again and googled “world war one love letters”.
He didn’t get up when class was over. Now able to put his phone on his desk, he scrolled through the letters, fascinated.
That was his great-grandfather’s photo at the top of the page. An entire collection of his love letters was on one of the war museum’s websites.
The handwriting was atrocious in a familiar way.
He stared at the photo, the young man in a new uniform. It had been attached to the first love letter. He’d never seen it; had never even thought about it. Certainly, in crafting a letter to Alice, he hadn’t seen himself as continuing a tradition of clumsy prose in clumsy handwriting. His great-grandfather’s spelling was also clumsy; he’d dropped out of school early to get a job at something that wasn’t important enough to save him from the war.
His last love letter, the museum explained, had arrived after news of his death; the postmaster had delivered it to his great-great-grandmother, leaving it to her to decide whether to give it to her daughter. The museum didn’t say what she did.
His great-grandparents were not married; it had been an outrage. His great-grandmother had been married to another soldier, but the timing of his grandfather’s birth always suggested he was a bastard. This man’s bastard; a letter writer’s bastard. The letters had all made it to the museum, but who had delivered that bundle? Was it his great-grandmother, wanting her lover remembered? Was it her mother, wanted him forgotten, or at least exorcised from the house?
The bell rang for the next period. He grabbed his things and ran, his letter to Alice clutched in one hand, his phone in his pocket. He hadn’t thought of love letters as history, or family tradition, or an element, if only in their sudden absence, in the careful restoration of a marriage to a man who, himself, never wrote such things.
He sat down for Geography and smoothed out his letter. “My darling angel”, he decided, was a solid start.
Arkin Prose 
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