Chris and Bessie met only twice between his first letter in September 1943 and his demobilisation in May 1946, and their postal romance describes a fitful and compacted arc. Older readers may recall the advertising campaign for Fry’s chocolate bars, a treat Chris particularly enjoyed. In the adverts, five boys are each depicted with a different facial trait: Desperation, Pacification, Expectation, Acclamation, Realisation. We get a similar range in this correspondence, not always in that order, often within a single letter. We pass swiftly from overwhelming physical compulsion to domestic furnishings. But we detect no hint of irony from the writers: they just let rip. Many of their letters were several pages long, and contained fleeting and dutiful observations of little interest to us today. There is also much repetition, not least of their romantic yearnings. Occasionally, Chris embarks on extended philosophical discussions of trade unionism, family politics and the state of the world in general. In my attempt to present a progressive and engaging narrative, I have chosen to retain only the most relevant, substantial and engrossing details. Accordingly, many letters from Chris have not been included at all, while others have been trimmed to a few paragraphs.
Who were these two people? What occupied their thoughts before each other? Horace Christopher Barker (or Holl to his parents) was born on 12 January 1914, and the austerity of the period never left him. His father, a professional soldier, spent the Great War in India and Mesopotamia, and later became a postman (with a sideline in emptying public phone boxes of their coins). Chris was brought up first in Holloway, north London, and then four miles away in Tottenham. When he left Drayton Park school at the untimely age of fourteen his headmaster’s leaving report noted the departure of ‘a thoroughly reliable boy, honest and truthful, and a splendid worker. His conduct throughout was excellent: he was one of the school prefects and carried out his duties well. He was very intelligent.’
His father had lined up a job for him in the Post Office, confident of a secure, if predictable, lifelong career. Chris began as an indoor messenger boy in the money order department, fared well at the PO training school, and found a position as a counter clerk in the Eastern Division. His passions were journalism and trade unionism, and he combined them in his regular columns in several Post Office weeklies. He was a pedantic, reliable, headstrong man. Not the life of the party, perhaps, but a solid fellow to have in your corner. He was certainly no Casanova.
The Barker family moved to a semi-detached ‘villa’ in Bromley, Kent, shortly before the outbreak of war, and Chris lived there until 1942. His training as a teleprinter operator ensured his status in a reserved occupation before the demand for army reinforcements brought him first to a training camp in Yorkshire in 1942, and then to North Africa.
Bessie Irene Moore (known as Rene or Renee to her family and some friends) was born on 26 October 1913, two years after her brother Wilfred, and she spent her early years in Peckham Rye, south London. She had two other siblings, neither of whom survived infancy. Her father, also called Wilfred, was another ‘lifer’ at the Post Office. Bessie won a scholarship to her secondary school, passed her exams with credit, and became a postal and telegraph officer in the female-only offices in the South Eastern, Western and West Central districts. She shared Chris’s view that there could be no more worthwhile employment, filled with human incident and variety, and dedicated to public service.
Bessie was twenty-five when she moved with her family to Blackheath in 1938. The Moores enjoyed a relatively prosperous lifestyle, taking regular holidays to the seaside and frequent trips to West End theatre. Bessie particularly admired the work of George Bernard Shaw and Kipling, and developed an interest in gardening and handicrafts. Shortly after the outbreak of war, her training in Morse led to a job at the Foreign Office deciphering intercepted German radio messages. She endured the Blitz and engaged in fire-watching duties, and volunteered for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force until her mother died in 1942 and she began looking after her father. When her relationship with her boyfriend Nick broke up in 1943 she believed she had wasted far too much energy in the pursuit of love.
Chris Barker in Libya, 1944
I first came across Chris and Bessie’s letters in April 2013. I was completing my book To the Letter, a eulogy to the vanishing art of letter-writing, and I was becoming increasingly aware that what my book lacked was, unpredictably, letters. More specifically, it lacked letters written by people who weren’t famous. I had been concentrating on Pliny the Younger, Jane Austen, Ted Hughes, Elvis Presley and the Queen Mother, and I had been talking to archivists about how historians will soon struggle to document our lives from texts and tweets. It became clear that what the book needed was a significant example of the ability of letters to transform ordinary lives.
And then I had a stroke of luck. I had mentioned my book to Fiona Courage, curator of the Mass Observation archive at the University of Sussex, of which I am a trustee. She mentioned the recent arrival of a comprehensive collection of papers of a man called Chris Barker, a pile of boxes that included newspaper articles, photos, documents and many letters – a musty, lifelong stash. I arranged to visit the archive immediately. After ten minutes in a room with the letters I was sure that his correspondence with Bessie Moore was just what I was looking for. Within an hour I was close to tears.
That these were valuable documents would have been evident to the first historian to encounter them. Almost all their letters were handwritten, many dashed off with evident hurry and distress. (The physicality of correspondence is another pleasure all but lost to us now, and one need only look at the manic array of stamps and inscriptions and directions on the outer wrappers to understand that these letters did not enjoy a smooth journey.) Shortly after my visit I was talking to the man responsible for placing the papers at the archive, asking to use some of them in my book. I expressed the distant hope that they may one day form a book of their own. Permission granted, I selected about 20,000 words from just over half a million, and interleaved them within my existing chapters.
When my book was published a few months later, readers responded to Chris and Bessie with enthusiasm; rather too many said they skipped through the main chapters to discover what happened to the couple next. Shortly afterwards, Chris and Bessie featured in a series of performance events called Letters Live, where superb readings from Benedict Cumberbatch, Louise Brealey, Lisa Dwan, Kerry Fox, Patrick Kennedy and David Nichols won them even more fans. And so, by what I can genuinely claim to be popular demand, here is a fuller account of their story.
What lessons may we learn from their exchanges? First, that the generous intimacy of letters casts a spell like no other. Grand histories have no time for the peevish minutiae of the infested billet or the unfortunate wartime shopping purchase, much less the silent devotion of lowly combatants. But beyond the grand sweep of adventure, it is these incidentals that hold us most: the Larkinesque disappointment of the film show; the jealous sideswipe at a former companion; the corduroy trousers ahead of their time; the cadging austerity that wormed its way into the soul; the way a postal delay brought on by a thunderclap over France could cause a person to fear the very worst.
Secondly, we know that Chris was a breast man. He had all the standard urges of a healthy male in his lustful prime, compounded by desert deprivation. The sexual highlight of the week was too often a man dressed as a woman in a touring variety show. Chris did not fail to express this hormonal bottling. In my edit – reducing more than half a million words to about 85,000 – the simplest task was trimming the references to Bessie’s chest, and his desire to embrace it in a multitude of original ways. One imagines that even Bessie would have tired of this malarkey after a while, although perhaps not. It is clear from her letters that she needed constant reassurance that he was not going off her; moreover, her own frequent references to her anatomy seemed certain to arouse him further. (In the second half of their correspondence, having seemingly satisfied his urges, Chris shifts his lustful gaze towards the purchase of carpets.)
It is also clear that they wrote with far more passion than they could ever express in person. Chris repeatedly regrets being tongue-tied and ineffective during their two intermediate