The Letterbox at the End of the Lane

The red pillar box at the end of Hallow Lane was taken out of service in 1998. The collection times were unscrewed from its front, a metal plate was fitted over the slot, and the post office moved on to more pressing matters. For a few months the box simply stood there on the cobbles, still bright red, outside the row of little shops, looking faintly embarrassed, like a guest who has stayed on after the party has ended and everyone else has gone home.

The plate lasted four months. It came off in a storm, or perhaps it was helped, and by the following spring the box was receiving letters again. Not many, and none of them going anywhere. People post them knowing this perfectly well. That is the entire point, and everyone in the lane understands it without ever having been told. On winter evenings, when the shop windows are lit, someone can often be seen stopping at the box on the way home.

The letters are collected, in a manner of speaking. Once a year, on a date nobody has ever fixed, somebody empties the box and burns the contents, unread, in a small garden incinerator behind number six. This has been going on for at least fifteen years. The person doing it has changed at least twice, the second time through a note left inside the box, addressed simply “to whoever does this now”. The new keeper found it, read it, and has done the job ever since.

What goes in is nobody’s business, although the lane has a fair idea. Things people needed to write down but did not want answered. Letters to people who have died, mostly, and some to the living. Apologies, thank-yous and plans. A child’s handwriting appears on an envelope every February. The box has been repainted several times, rather badly, and it remains, quietly, the most used object on the whole street, even though officially it does not exist.

The story is invented, but the habit behind it is real for many people. Writing a letter that will never be sent can be a way of putting feelings into words: saying goodbye, saying sorry, or simply saying what never got said. The act of writing matters more than whether anyone reads it. Some people keep such letters, some burn them, and some tuck them into a drawer, but many find that getting the words onto paper helps them feel a little lighter.

So if there is something you have always wanted to say to someone, you do not need a secret letterbox at the end of a lane. A sheet of paper and a quiet half-hour will do. Write it down honestly, and then decide what to do with it: keep it, send it or let it go. The pillar box on Hallow Lane will not deliver it, but it has shown a whole street that some letters are worth writing all the same.