MY DEAR BESSIE
TO MY
VALENTINE
When writer Simon Garfi eld fi rst published selected wartime letters between Chris Barker and Bessie Moore, he didn’t realise how much his readers would be captivated by their story. Now he’s published a fuller collection of their correspondence, which comes out just in time
for Valentine’s Day. We’ve picked out a few of our favourite letters from the book
Bessie and Chris at Greenwich Park, July 2003, both aged 89
I i rst 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 specii cally, 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 signii cant 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. ... 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.
SIMON GARFIELD, EDITOR My Dear Bessie: A Love Story in Letters. Published by Canongate, Thu 5 Feb.
28 THE LIST 5 Feb–2 Apr 2015