To the Letter - Simon Garfield

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magician. Walker became convinced, without seeing the act in question, that the patent for his illusion – which he had registered in 1934 – was being infringed.

      This became quite a battle; letters went back and forth for almost a year. ‘I fear,’ wrote John Salisse, secretary of the Magic Circle, ‘that the thing may blow up into a holocaust.’ As the letter trail advanced, so the secrets of the trick emerged. One expert witness claimed Walker’s case was futile, ‘unless you claim that the whole idea of the penetration of a living person originated with you.’ I felt a sadness as I read about the subtleties of the art, and about the great care invested in each illusion. I felt that great magicians shouldn’t be allowed to vanish just like that.

      In the autumn of 1968, Val Walker briefly re-emerged into the spotlight. He attended a magic convention in Weymouth, where he watched a man called Jeff Atkins perform his Radium Girl for the final time. ‘I can never be sure whether it was 1921 or 22 when I built the original in Maskelyne’s workshop under the stage,’ he wrote. ‘PT Selbit watched it in rehearsal and sometime later asked if I minded him using the basic idea for a different effect, which I certainly did not. It was his Sawing Through A Woman that emerged, using the identical cabinet dimensions. I have been both saddened and amused at the plethora of variations on the theme which the public has had to swallow during the intervening 40-odd years. I do not think my version of a penetration has been bettered in this long time.’

      Walker informed the weekly magic magazine Abracadabra that now he had returned to the fold he was already looking forward to the next convention in Scarborough in a year. But he didn’t make it. His letters show a progressive illness: ‘I’m not sure I can attend . . .’, ‘I may not be able to meet you, try as I might.’

      A few days before he died, he sent his last letters from a hospital on the south coast. In one of them, at the close, he said he could be ‘reached at the address above’. He didn’t actually write the word ‘at’. Instead, in February 1969, more than two years before what is widely acknowledged to be the first standard email between two computers, he used an old but generally unfamiliar symbol in its place. The symbol was @.

      What follows is an unapologetic account of an aesthete’s life – his search for the exquisite in all things, his extravagances, his questing passions with Lord Alfred Douglas – and an account of the artistic consolations of a life devoted to Christ. Unable to send the letter from jail, he gave it to his friend Robbie Ross on his release, with instructions for it to be typed twice, whereupon certain passages were misread and excised. The original manuscript is held at the British Museum, where we may marvel at the succulent depths of his language and the calm certainty of his convictions.

      ‘I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age,’ Wilde writes. ‘There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a “month or twain to feed on honeycomb,” but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.’

      Chapter Two

      From Vindolanda, Greetings

      You set off on a clear March morning from the Lake District. You take the road north from Penrith, go east at Carlisle towards Brampton, and then head high into the Pennine Hills. The road undulates and the roads are empty, and a driver will wonder whether this isn’t the stretch where car adverts are filmed. You keep going. There’s a B road south, and when you pass a village called Twice Brewed you’re tempted to stop the car to tweet a photo of the signpost. The road twists down to Winshields Farm and a guest house called Vellum Lodge, and then there you are, two coachloads of children ahead of you, at the historic site called Vindolanda, where the evidence of letters begins.

      Here, between AD 85 and 130, a series of five forts made from timber and turf were built to defend the Stanegate, a wide belt of dirt road over the narrow neck of Britain, vital for the transport of men and supplies in the region. Londinium was a week away in the south, and it was perhaps a month to the heart of the empire in Rome. Vindolanda (its name is thought to mean ‘white lawns’) was one garrison among many: some 50,000 men were stationed around these ramparts, the unofficial northern frontier until Hadrian’s Wall started going up about a mile above it in AD 122. The forts were a vital communication centre too, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when, in the autumn of 1972, the archaeologist Robin Birley cut a trench to drain off excess water from the southwest corner of the Vindolanda excavation site and unearthed the first evidence of a Roman treasure trove.

      What was more surprising was how well some things had survived. About 2.3 metres into the soil, Birley struck a leather sandal that was in such good condition it was possible to read the maker’s name. He discovered other fragments of leather and textiles, and there were realistic dreams of further finds. Here was a moment that would, for decades to come, inspire young people to become archaeologists, a Tutankhamun moment 50 years on. But then the northern rains swept in, and Birley got another taste of the terrible challenges the Romans had faced in this remote valley. He was forced to close up the site for the winter.

      Birley had digging in his blood. His father was Eric Birley, who, in 1929, had bought the Chesterholm estate on which the Vindolanda forts continued to stand and had made some of the key discoveries that had shaped the way we view the Romans’ early defence of northern Britain. But although his work had occasionally revealed a few coins and chips of pottery, there wasn’t much in the way of personal or domestic possessions that would enable us, some 2,000 years later, to bring the ancient world to life.

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       The road to Vindolanda.

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       Robin Birley on site.

      His son’s excavation resumed in March 1973. There was more leather footwear, a gold earring, a bronze brooch, keys, hammers, rope, purses, tools for stripping hide, oyster shells, and bones from oxen, pigs and ducks. These things in the soil were found enmeshed within bracken, heather and straw, and further preserved by what appeared to be excreta. The Romans may have regarded all these objects as rubbish, and there were signs of attempted incineration. But of course their rubbish isn’t our rubbish. The waterlogged conditions of the soil, the matted foliage that enveloped it, and the man-made barriers from repeated building on the site provided ideal conditions for preservation.

      There was something else amongst the detritus: lists and letters. These took the form of thin wooden writing tablets, some a sliver no thicker than a millimetre, most about 2mm, sliced from birch, oak and alder, a few folded over as one might fold paper for an envelope. Most appeared to be written with ink, though some were denser and had been hollowed out to hold a coating of wax to be inscribed with a metal stylus; in some cases the stylus had carved beneath the wax and had left a permanent mark on the wood. In 1973, a total of 86 tablets were recovered, made up of about 200 fragments, more than half with visible writing. The largest measured 8 × 6cm, the size of a credit card.

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