A Letter for Me

A man knocked on my door one day. I’d never seen him before. “Hello,” he said and pulled from his pocket a stamped addressed envelope which he held up. “This, I think,” he said, “is yours. Came to me by mistake.” He handed it to me.

“Oh, really? Thank you.” I took it from him.

“Yeh. You’re J.B.Grant – I’m B.J.Grant. And you’re number forty-two and I’m just up the road at fifty-two. Easy mistake to make.”

“I guess it is.” I studied the envelope. Cheapish, nondescript. Address typewritten. And on the back when I turned it over, the name of one of the estate agents who were desperate in those years to cash in on the local housing boom. I generally tossed them into the bin without opening them.

“OK,” he said. “There you go,” and turned away.

“Very kind of you,” I replied.

He raised a hand as he headed for the front garden gate. “See you around.”

I never thought any more about it. Except I wondered why the postman hadn’t bothered to check the post code – which was correct and was mine. But then perhaps a house only five doors away would have the same code anyway. Or maybe the postman was just having an off day.

One evening, about six months later – when it was winter and the nights were dark early – as I was finishing my dinner, I had a fancy for a beer. It was a rather odd ‘fancy’ for me to have – I’m really not much of a beer drinker. And I had none in the house – so if I were going to have one, I’d have to go out for it. I’d go to the pub about a ten minute walk up the road. It was the nearest, though I hadn’t been inside it for years – in my early teens in fact, when I used to help a local baker on his delivery round. He’d take me in there with him sometimes at lunchtime and sit me down in a corner with an orange juice while he’d have a bottle of Guiness.

The walk took me down a side street with a few closed shops, then along a narrow, empty, ill-lit street of small, early 20th century houses. It was cold. There was no one else around. Apart from distant traffic on a main road and the occasional aircraft, low on its approach to Heathrow, the only sounds were of my own echoing footsteps. That was until I heard the other footsteps behind me. They seemed already strangely close and gave me a bit of a start. Ah – but then their owner must have come out of one of the houses I’d just passed. Thinking little more of it, beyond half-wondering why whoever it was seemed to be neither gaining on me nor slipping further behind, I continued on to the pub.

It was nice inside – busy, warm, welcoming. I went up to the bar and ordered a pint of ‘Directors’ Bitter’. While it was being poured, I fished in my pocket for some money. As I did so, I noticed the door to the street opening. And in walked a man I’d seen only once before – when he’d stood at my door and held a letter up in his hand.

It turned out a strange encounter. We said, Hello. Expressed some surprise at meeting again like this. Was this his local, I asked him. He shook his head and said it was his first time here. He too ordered a pint of Director’s Bitter – for which I insisted on paying. He seemed quite taken aback by that and thanked me effusively. We took our drinks to the nearest empty table and sat down. Though affable enough, he was no great conversationalist and the talk hardly flowed. For a while we mused intermittently on his, that and the other – till he suddenly surprised me by asking me what I did for a living.

My telling him that I worked in the film industry drew a familiar response – “Have you met any famous people?” To which I gave my usual reply. “A few. Yes.” And then, to avoid getting caught up in dubious media rumours about celebs, I moved things on by asking him what his work was. He completely bypassed the question and went on instead to tell how he came from a military family, his father being something pretty high up – I think he said a Major. They’d travelled all over the world and lived in a number of countries. Because of that, he’d had no proper schooling and sadly, no real home life. He’d even been born abroad – in India. In some remote place in the Himalayan foothills which I, like every other Brit he’d ever mentioned it to, would never have heard of – called Dehradun.

My mouth threatened to drop open. In a drawer in my desk back home I had – and still have – the key to Room 17 of the Motel Kwality in that far off town. A few years prior to this I’d spent three months in India making a film on Hinduism for US television. A week of that time had been spent filming temples in Dehradun – Room 17 at the Motel Kwality had been my hotel room. But I swallowed hard and kept all that to myself. I think I was getting a bit puzzled by the mounting bevy of coincidences that seemed to be popping up between the lives of this almost perfect stranger and myself. Instead I merely expressed my interest in his peripatetic life and sympathized with his sadness about never having had what he thought of as a genuine home life.

The conversation sagged again. We nattered vaguely about the state of the world and the looming climate crisis. He offered to top up the drinks. I declined saying I’d soon be off. Did I therefore mind, he asked, if he bought another for himself. Of course I didn’t. I looked at my watch. He went off and brought back another pint. Then, as though the break had reconnected him with his previous thoughts, he asked me if I had ever been in the forces.

I finished off what was left of my beer. I replied with a wry smile that I had, indeed, been in the army once. I was one of the last unfortunates to have to do National Service. He grimaced and said how he felt for young men such as I in those days – “Dragged in off the streets and treated like dirt.” I wouldn’t have put it quite so scathingly, but he asked me what so-called ‘job’ they’d allocated me to and had they sent me overseas. No, I told him, they hadn’t, unfortunately, sent me overseas – but they’d put a real square peg in a round hole when they gave me the job of a Drill and Weapons Training instructor and made me spend the whole two years in this country at a barracks on the South Coast. Hilsea Barracks in Portsmouth.

He nearly spilled his beer. Wiped his mouth rather frantically with a tissue and said that was totally extraordinary because that’s where he too had done his basic training – when he’d been forced, by fatherly diktat, to enlist in his late teens. Now, wasn’t that amazing!

My mind shut down. This was beyond me. I apologized profusely, made the usual excuses about having to make a phone call and not realizing the time. Smiling a wan, confused smile, he raised a limp hand in farewell as I left.

I walked back home in a daze. The same surname; the same initials in reverse order; the same street, the same group of houses; the same postcode; his footsteps following me along the street in the dark; my strange feeling of needing a ‘beer’; his very first time in that pub – and my very first visit to it in over thirty years; not to mention a remote town in the foothills of the Himalayas and to cap it all, Hilsea Barracks in Portsmouth. I wondered if he’d slept in the same barrack room there. Pee’d in the same dodgy old toilets. Or made out with the same civvy girl who worked in the CSM’s office. I’d had enough coincidences for one evening. Did he make it all up? Was he some unique sort of prankster? Or was it the truth – all of it? And if it was, what sort of game was Life playing with the pair of us?

I never saw him again from that day to this. Even though I lived in the same row of houses for another five years. But there are times, even today, when I still wonder who he was, where he’s got to and what he’s doing. Did he even exist – or was it me, making it all up? Is he, even now, lurking around some corner I’m about to turn?

Not yet, anyway. Not yet.

CODA: The above is a true story. It happened to me more years ago now than I care to remember. The only thing I’ve played with a little is the characters – myself included – in order to keep their odd relationship interesting. But the actual events, locations and timings are just as described. It was a pretty weird experience.