If Only I Had Known

Margaret Hollis is seventy-four. For forty years she ran the Harbour Light, a small fish and chip shop on the seafront in Whitby, on the north-east coast of England. Last spring she sold it to a young couple from Leeds, and her granddaughter, who is studying psychology, gave her an unusual piece of homework: write a letter to yourself at twenty. This is what she wrote.

Dear Peggy (that's what everyone called you then, before you became Mrs. Hollis to the whole town), you are twenty years old, and you are standing behind the counter of your father's shop, wishing you were anywhere else. I know exactly how you feel. I remember the smell of oil in your hair and the way you watch the trains leaving the station.

Let me tell you first what I don't regret. You will marry Tom Hollis, the shy fisherman who always orders cod and never says more than four words at a time. People will say you should have waited for someone more exciting. Ignore them. He will make you laugh every day for forty-three years, and I wouldn't change a single one of them.

You will take over the shop when Dad's heart gets weak, and you will be good at it. Better than good. Your mushy peas will appear in a national newspaper, and on summer Saturdays the queue will reach the end of the street. People will tell you that you should have gone to university, that you were too clever to fry fish. They're wrong too. Feeding people is honest work, and you will love it more than you can imagine now.

But there are things I wish I had done differently, and I'd like you to hear them while there is still time. I wish I had traveled. You keep a list in the drawer of your bedside table: Venice, Morocco, Iceland, the Pyramids. If only I had gone to even one of them. We always said we would go next year, when the shop was quieter. The shop was never quieter.

I wish I hadn't worried so much about what people thought. You will spend years being polite to people who don't deserve it and staying silent when you should speak. You should have told the bank manager in 1985 exactly what you thought of him. I still think about the words I could have used.

And I wish I had learned to swim properly. It's ridiculous, I know, for a girl who grew up by the sea. If I had learned, I would have gone out on Tom's boat more often instead of waving at it from the harbor wall.

If only someone had told me how quickly it all goes. One day you will be wiping the counter, and you will look up, and the boy you served chips to will be bringing in his own grandchildren. Don't wish the days away, not even the busy, greasy, exhausting ones. Especially not those.

So here is my advice, for what it's worth. Choose the same life. Marry the same man. Run the same shop. But take one week off every year, whatever it costs, and go somewhere you can't pronounce. Learn to swim. Say what you think. With all my love, Margaret, the old woman you will be lucky to become.

When her granddaughter read the letter, she was quiet for a long time. Then she opened her laptop. "Venice or Iceland?" she asked. Margaret laughed and said it was far too late for all that. "It isn't," said her granddaughter. "You should have gone fifty years ago, but you could still go in June." And in June, Margaret stood on a bridge in Venice, eating an ice cream, thinking that the fish and chips at home were better, and that she didn't regret coming at all.