By a Cowbeech Resident
Written after our real-life letterbox was stolen from flint wall…
A fantasy tale……
He only borrowed it really. It was an hour after he posted his letter in the rural lane that he saw the unopened stamp book on his kitchen table. The letter was to his maiden aunt to thank her for the £5 book token she had sent him for Christmas. He felt mortified. It was already the 23rd of January and the lateness of his ‘thank you’ on top of the error of having no stamp would be severely frowned upon by his aunt.
The thing he knew for certain was that he would be unable to be there when the letterbox was emptied the next morning. He had to be up early to drive the 76 miles to visit his mother in her nursing home – a routine he had done on a weekly basis for the last five years. Time was therefore of the essence.
He went back and had a look at the letterbox. A very fine example of one it was too. A Queen Victoria cast iron model, as opposed to the more common Edward IV, built into what looked like a flint stone wall. He did just hope the opening might be big enough for him to hook something in to retrieve his letter. But he soon realised that idea was fruitless. What he needed to do, he decided, was turn it upside down and shake his letter out. The idea grew and grew in his mind until, only an hour later, it was a complete obsession. He rang his neighbour, a hard-working farmer, and asked if he could borrow his tractor for an hour. He told a little white lie and said one of his trees had just fallen and he needed to drag the logs aside. His neighbour was more than willing and even dropped the tractor round. By now it was past 10pm.
It was easier to drive a tractor than he thought and he soon had it positioned against the letterbox. Its tow bar was solid and there was even some cable attached, with a big ring on the end. He had brought the remains of an old wrought iron spade handle which fitted through the ring. It also fitted snugly into the opening of the letterbox. All it then needed was for him to slowly drive the tractor forward. It did not take much. There was a silent thud as the letterbox and part of the wall gently caved in and fell on the grass below. “Wow, that was easy” he thought. It was less easy to get the letterbox onto the back base of the tractor to carry it home. The only option was to ‘tow’ it. This he did and, despite driving really slowly, in the darkness of the night he could see sparks flying as it bounced along the road on its back. Interestingly, not one single other vehicle passed. He would happily have told them the tale if they had stopped and asked.
Obviously, his intention was to retrieve his letter and return the letterbox to its original home, rebuilding the wall in the process. He was confident everything would be back in its place within two or three days. He even planned to give the box itself a good clean and perhaps a new coat of paint.
The next day was taken up with his visit to his mother but the following morning he managed to get his letter out of the letterbox. It was not too difficult and just involved crow-barring the letterbox upside down and slowly fishing the letters out. Apart from his, there were only three other items – one a Daily Mail competition entry, the other a typed letter to a firm of solicitors and the third a Readers Digest renewal.
It was then that he began wondering about the intricacies of rebuilding an old wall. He dug out his old Encyclopaedia Britannica to look up ‘flint stone walls” and was disturbed to find it suggested lime mortar, as opposed to just cement. He knew little about either but he did have an old bag of cement in his garage which he had been planning to use. He decided to visit the local library for more information – and of course post the four letters.
He was not expecting the scene or atmosphere in the library when he arrived. The normally hushed tones were replaced with a babble of voices all talking over each other. Talk was all about the terrible crime that had been committed in stealing the letterbox on Cowbeech Hill. His ears burned as he heard comments such as “What sort of people would so such a thing?”, “It was such a part of local history” and “The wall was Grade II listed”. One elderly lady was almost in tears. “It’s been there all my life”, she wept. He tried to look equally distressed and sympathetic but he did not even get to the stairs to the non-fiction section before deciding to make a hasty exit. He was in a state of shock as he had been totally unprepared for the distress his little exercise seemed to have caused.
During the next couple of days he didn’t go out at all and spent his time taking care of the beautiful letterbox. First he washed it and then he started furiously wire-brushing it. He went on and on until what must have been 15 layers of slightly varying shades of red paint were removed. His toils revealed the sharp lettering of the manufacturers, W T Allen & Co, London, and the magnificence of the Queen Victoria emblem. All the while he had the stomach-churning thought that he would not have the ability to replace the letterbox in its original position.
Instead, a seed of another idea started to grow. He had seen adverts in his Exchange & Marts from dealers wanting to buy antique ‘street’ items for the American market. They promised to pay very high prices.
He had seen many great films of Route 66, which ran across America, and enjoyed the famous Nat King Cole song of the same name. The vision slowly crept into his mind of the letterbox sitting proudly by the roadside of that famous highway. Not in the wind and rain of its existing life but in kinder climes. Or, even better, it could be built into a building on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. He had watched the lovely Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard more than once.
“Hey, ho”, he thought. With the proceeds of him selling the letterbox, he would commission good builders to rebuild the wall and with the balance of the monies he would buy lots of flower bulbs to be planted throughout the village and the rest he would put behind the bar of the Merrie Harriers for all to enjoy. The Royal Mail would surely replace the box with a more modern one – or perhaps they would not at all – but there were plenty of other letterboxes around, he reasoned.
His excitement grew until he found himself doing a little dance around the kitchen table. Now, where was his latest Exchange & Mart……..
About the author:
Being a non-published but obedient person of a certain age, I am submitting this, having just met one of the site administrators – herself a very funny writer. I witnessed our beloved letterbox disappearing overnight from the flint in which it was set.
