We are delighted to welcome Bethany Walker to the blog for a special guest post about letters.  Bethany’s debut novel Chocolate Milk, X-Ray Specs and Me published with Scholastic this January and is a wonderfully witty and whimsical story told that will appeal to fans of Liz Pichon’s Tom Gates books and Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid titles.  The book is fantastically illustrated by Jack Noel.  Here Bethany talks with us about letter writing and includes some fascinating facts in this not-to-be-missed blog post.

I don’t think I’m creating any spoilers when I write that the main fun of Chocolate Milk, X-Ray Specs and Me is that Freddy Spicer, its main character, has NO IDEA what’s going on. In my spy story, Freddy’s parents are international secret agents but their cover story is that they’re sprout farmers - and sweet, naive Freddy believes it, even when all evidence around him points to the contrary. One of the key rules for children’s writing is: get rid of the adults. Sending Freddy’s parents off on some undercover mission was the ideal way to get rid of them and leave Freddy behind to get into plenty of trouble – but it also gave me the opportunity to write this book in a different way, with the story being told through the letters Freddy writes to his absent parents. By doing this, Freddy’s is the main voice of the book and his letters allow us to get to know him. The letters provide a personal insight into his hopes and fears but also, vitally, tell us what he does and doesn’t understand. Jack Noel’s excellent doodle illustrations also give a further dimension to Freddy’s letters too, almost making them real, tactile artefacts.

Even though (and I hope this doesn’t come as a shock to readers) I am not a ten-year-old boy, writing Freddy’s letters reminded me of how important a role letters played in my life – and made me sad for their continuing demise. Thinking back to my own childhood, so many key events were somehow related to letters, from the obligatory post-Christmas Thank You cards to the annual holiday postcards. Towards the end of primary school, I remember the ‘correspondence’ I had with a boy from the next village – our brothers, at secondary school, acted as postmen, and our letters passed back and forth for months. Unfortunately, when we started secondary school together the following year, our fervent letter writing was not matched by our ability to make conversation and that was that! It was also through letters that I heard about not getting into a certain university and how I applied for my first few jobs.

Of course, there are good reasons why letters have been superseded by other forms of communication, particularly email. However, I couldn’t have Freddy sending emails, or anything else modern and speedy, because the problems and dangers in the story would have been too quickly identified and solved by the adults. And even though Freddy’s letters don’t necessarily reach their intended recipients, I made sure it was not the fault of the postal service. I certainly didn’t want to poke fun at that, although it’s not hard to set up jokes about the postal service. It’s all about the delivery*! (*Sorry, that’s my favourite letter-based joke.)

Reading Freddy’s letters, and the other documents included in the book (newspaper cuttings, communication transcripts etc), the reader is put in the role of historian – using sources to work out what is actually going on. I studied History at university and as a historian, letters are basically the holy grail of primary sources. To get real information from a key historical figure’s hand is amazing; not only does it give you direct information about a situation, but it can also help build up your understanding of the person’s opinion of it – and, hopefully, give you an insight into their personality. Letters recorded the key moments in history, capturing moments of development and discovery. Some letters could even make history – for example, it was through finding letter-based evidence of Mary Queen of Scots’ involvement in a plot against Elizabeth I that Mary ended up being executed. Conversely, even though Elizabeth was suspected of plotting against her half-sister several years before, no written evidence was ever found and so Elizabeth survived to go on to be monarch.

Though generally written on flimsy pieces of paper, some letters can be incredibly valuable. The most expensive letter ever sold at auction was a beautiful piece of calligraphy written by a legendary Chinese scholar to a friend in 1080. The staggering age of this letter was equalled by the staggering $30 million it was bought for. Second to that is the $5.3 million spent on the letter Francis Crick wrote to his son, Michael, in 1953, regarding his discovery of the double helix of DNA, arguably one of the greatest discoveries of the last century. The letter is the first record of the discovery and includes a sketch of the DNA model, but the fact that it was written by a father to his son means that it is not some incomprehensible piece of peer-to-peer scientific terminology. By being written in a language a child could understand, it is made all the more valuable.

While most letters will never reach the value of those cited above, all letters have a value in that everyone appreciates receiving a thoughtful note. Over lockdown, feel-good stories have come out over new letter-based friendships that have been developing, such as the six-year-old girl becoming pen-pal to a 94-year-old care home resident, or the woman who discovered a child’s fairy garden and started writing little notes as the resident fairy for the child to discover. Out of everyone I have known, my mum was the most fervent letter writer and, when I left home, not a week went by without receiving some kind of lovely missive from her. She died seven years ago and I still miss her letters landing on my doormat – but, occasionally, I find an old one she sent me, in her illegible scrawl, and it makes me happy.

Chocolate Milk, X-Ray Specs & Me by Bethany Walker and Jack Noel is out now, published by Scholastic.