This year’s birthday present from Melanie came in a plastic sleeve.
Inside was an envelope. Torn at the top, a strip of old yellow tape across the middle, and red and blue airmail stripes around the edge.
The return address is typed in the top left corner.
P. G. Wodehouse. Basket Neck Lane. Remsenburg, N.Y.
I read it twice.
Then I had to sit down.
I have read Wodehouse for most of my life. Jeeves and Bertie, Blandings, Psmith, Ukridge. He has got me through long flights, bad weeks and grey Sundays. If I have a literary hero, it’s him.
And here was something he had held.
Not a book with his name on the spine. Not a photograph. An ordinary envelope from an ordinary day at his desk. He had no secretary for this sort of thing. He typed the address himself. He slid a letter inside, sealed it, and sent it off to England.
For a moment, however brief, this envelope had his full attention.
I held it the way you hold something that might still be warm.
Wodehouse and his wife Ethel bought a house in Remsenburg, on Long Island, in the early 1950s, and it stayed his home for the rest of his life. He wrote there almost every day, walked the dogs, and kept sending Bertie and Jeeves into trouble from a quiet lane a very long way from the Drones Club. He died in 1975, aged 93, and is buried nearby.
The envelope went to a Mr Bruce Bright in Old Town, Swindon. Not far from here, as the Wodehouse letter flies.
Then the stamps.
A 5 cent George Washington. Two 21 cent “USA” airmail stamps with a little jet tucked into the letters, first issued in 1971. And a one dollar Eugene O’Neill, with PLAYWRIGHT printed along the bottom.
A playwright’s face on a letter from a man who spent years writing for Broadway himself. I’d like to think someone at the Remsenburg counter chose it on purpose. Probably not.
Together they add up to $1.47. At the airmail rate of the time, that’s seven lots of 21 cents. Something with a bit of weight to it. A long letter, perhaps. Maybe a book.
The postmark says NOV 29. The year has worn away. The airmail stamps mean it can’t be earlier than 1971, so this was sent in one of his last few winters.
The detail I keep going back to is small and printed in blue, under the return address.
ZIP CODE.
The man who invented Blandings Castle and Aunt Agatha, filling in his zip code like everybody else.
I don’t know what was inside. I don’t really need to.
For a moment, half a century ago, the greatest comic writer in the English language thought about this envelope. Where it was going. Who would open it.
Now it’s on my desk, and I keep picking it up.
I suspect I always will.
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