This year’s birthday present from Melanie came in a plastic sleeve. Inside was an envelope, torn at the top, with 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 to be sure.
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, and he is my favourite author by some distance. So it’s an odd feeling to hold an envelope he addressed, sealed and sent off to England. It isn’t a signed book or a photograph, just ordinary post from an ordinary day at his desk. That’s what I like about it.
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.
The stamps are worth a look too. There’s 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. Wodehouse spent years writing for Broadway himself, so I’d like to think someone at the Remsenburg counter picked that one 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, so it was something with a bit of weight to it. A long letter, perhaps, or maybe a book.
The postmark says NOV 29, but the year has worn away. The airmail stamps mean it can’t be earlier than 1971, so it was sent in one of his last few winters.
My favourite detail 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, and I don’t really mind. It’s on my desk now, and I keep picking it up.
Leave a Reply