Grandpa's Letters

Isla had always thought of her grandfather as a quiet, practical man. For thirty years, he had repaired clocks in a narrow shop near the center of Glasgow, and in all that time, as far as anyone knew, he had never missed a day's work. On Sundays he would walk to the park with a newspaper under his arm, buy two bags of sweets, one for Isla and one for himself, and complain about the football. He was kind, reliable and, Isla thought, a little boring.

Three months after his funeral, she went up to the attic of his house to help her mother sort through his things. Behind a pile of old coats she found a shoebox tied with a faded blue ribbon. Inside, there were nearly a hundred letters, all addressed to her grandfather in careful, sloping handwriting, and all with Gibraltar stamps.

The first one was dated 1956, when he was nineteen and had just finished his national service in the navy. The writer was a girl called Rosa, and it was clear from the very first line that they had met while his ship was in Gibraltar. "I have been looking at the sea every evening since you left," she wrote, "trying to guess which of the ships is yours."

Isla sat down on the dusty floor and kept reading. The letters covered almost six years. Rosa would describe her week in detail: her job at her father's bookshop, the market, the Barbary apes that stole fruit from the tourists. She would ask about the cold, wet Scottish winters and tease him for his terrible spelling. Every few months, she would include a pressed flower or a photograph, and every letter ended in the same way: "Write soon. Always yours, R."

Isla could only read one side of the conversation, but it was easy to imagine the other. He had obviously been sending her long letters for years, full of plans. In 1959, Rosa wrote that she had been reading his description of Glasgow so often that she felt she could find her way around it blindfolded. In 1960, she mentioned the money he had been saving for a ticket south. He had been working extra hours in the clock shop, it seemed, for almost a year.

Then, in the spring of 1962, the letters changed. Rosa's father was ill, and she could not leave the bookshop. Her letters became shorter and less frequent. The very last one was only a page long. She wrote that she had been thinking about it for months, and that she could not ask him to wait any longer for something that might never happen. "You deserve a life that is happening now," she wrote. "Please go and find it. I will always be grateful for these years."

Isla's mother came up the stairs to find her crying over the box. She picked up the last letter, read it slowly and then smiled. "He met your grandmother eight months later," she said. "At a dance. He used to say that he went only because a friend had told him he needed to start living again." She paused. "I never knew who he meant."

At the bottom of the box there was one more envelope, unopened and never posted. It was addressed to Rosa, in her grandfather's handwriting, and it was dated the week of Isla's grandparents' wedding. Isla and her mother looked at each other and decided not to open it. Whatever he had wanted to say, he had chosen to keep it to himself.

That evening, Isla walked past the old clock shop, which was now a cafe. She thought about the young man who had worked there late into the night, saving for a journey he never made, and then about the old man who used to buy her sweets every Sunday. For the first time, she understood that they were the same person, and that he had not been boring at all. He had simply been very good at keeping his promises, including the one Rosa had asked him to make.