Friday 29 August: I’ve re/written this date about 5 times now, for actually I don’t know what the ‘real date’ is nor even have much sense of what day of the week it ‘really’ is. I know where I am – this place which is once more without water, with flickering electricity and LOUD wind and torrential rain. But half my mind is in Port Eliz’h with a functioning shower where we will be Saturday, and half in north-west England where I will be on Monday, fresh from wallowing in a hot bath with a glass of wine and a novel. In between, the seemingly timeless sardine-can of a plane zipping between continents. Place, space and time contend and are complicatedly intertwined.

Consider the photograph of the folded ‘direction’ part of the reverse of a letter to Mrs Harriet Townsend which accompanies this blog. It’s seemingly very simple. A name. A place. Postage was paid. But simple it isn’t.

For a start, it conjours a time without envelopes, without a ‘fixed abode’, a place where people stayed for long periods and were known, and anyway collected their letters from an unnamed local delivery and collection place. Also, not many weeks before, the same correspondent, a benificent male trader from Cape Town, had addressed his letter to:

Mrs E.J. Townsend / Grahams Town

Consider what a world of difference lies between one and the other. On the earlier missive, the address invokes the covering law of belonging to the (feckless) Edward Townsend in a marital state in Grahamstown. On the later shown here, a woman appears in her own right in a different name and state, and place. Time has passed, things have happened. A young man – aged 30 – has, out of the seeming blue and of ‘brain fever’, died. His debts are then shown to be considerable – and doubtless terrifying to a woman with two children and another about to arrive, who has to survive for their sake and her own. Given conflicting advice, she steers a course – she will not run a school, she will continue pursuing continuing the business started with Edward as a specialist dealer and merchant, she will move from Grahams Town to be with her Mother and sisters in Cradock and re-start the business there.

Simple, eh, one letter Grahams Town and the other Cradock, and what does the shift from Mrs EJ to Mrs H. Townsend matter? But now it’s clear, it matters a lot.

And postage paid? Is this an irrelevance? Come now! In South Africa in the early 1840s, letters were generally paid on receipt. For a recent widow with young children and major debts, the only way to ensure a letter would arrive in the sense of be accepted by its adressee was for the writer to pre-pay postage. Good on him, that Mr Smith.

Last updated: 29 August 2014