It's a small world: letter turns up 41 years later

Marilyn (pictured), who now lives in Blandford Forum, Dorset, sent the letter to her dad Ted when she worked in the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) based in the Far East. She said it was an uncanny coincidence that her friend Marlene Murphy purchased the book from a Kent charity shop and anyone else would probably have thrown the letter away. “Marlene was really spooked when she opened a poetry book that she had bought from a branch of the Oxfam charity shop in Gravesend and found the letter I had sent to dad 41 years ago. My brother Ian still lives in Bexhill and cannot remember seeing the poetry book at Dad’s at all.

“Gravesend is about 56 miles from Bexhill so it is quite a mystery as to how it got there.”

Marlene purchased two poetry books by the Gravesend poet RE Hull. On arriving home she discovered the letter with a Singapore postmark tucked inside the book called Happy Days, which was signed by the author to a Mr K Jones of Gravesend.

Her curiosity was aroused when she saw the letter was sent from a PO Box number that she recognised and the name of the sender, ‘Hollands’ (Marilyn’s maiden name) and addressed to Mr E Hollands care of the Bexhill Post Office. It didn’t take long for the pieces to fall into place.

Marilyn said: “Marlene phoned me to say something weird had happened. What are the odds of a letter written by your best mate falling out of a book bought in a charity shop?”

Marlene was working in the office directly next door to Marilyn’s when she wrote the letter to her dad in 1970 advising him of the possibility of a call at Christmas, which he’d offered to pay for. The letter reads: “I have inquired as to whether I can have a call home at Christmas and they can’t tell me, because Christmas instructions for UK calls have not come out yet, but I’ll let you know when they do. It will cost just under ten pounds for six minutes.”

Today that brief call, with inflation, would cost a whopping £121.

For the past 10 years Marilyn, who now works for the Civil Service, has been running a weekly quiz night at a local pub. Recently she celebrated presenting her 500th quiz, having asked 25,000 questions but she still can’t find the answer to how her letter ended up in a poetry book, which was not published until 14 years after she wrote the letter.

Marilyn said: “Dad was not a lover of poetry. Things were cleared from his house when he died in 2009, but none of the family remembers seeing a poetry book.”