Death of a Post Office
They shut our Post Office yesterday. For the first time in living memory there is no early morning light in that end of the ancient cottage and the little shop that went with it. The stacks of newspapers and magazines with unlikely titles have disappeared overnight.
No longer can a letter be weighed to go to the ends of the earth. No more the postmaster, with one elbow on the counter, turning the thick cardboard sheets with the bright-coloured stamps of all prices lurking between them, painstakingly adding them up to the right amount for a letter to Easter Island or Nizhny Novgorod. No more blue airmail stickers to speed the thing along like a migrating bird. The letter box remains, but what good is that without a stamp? It is a ghostly reminder that yet another service in another part of life is finished.
So it is into the car once more to queue in the Bakewell supermarket, instead of walking down the hill, looking at the gardens and the dogs, and seeing the minibus calling for the schoolchildren. What about the old people who haven’t got a car?
What about the other pensioners in the village? No one cares about them because they don’t stab each other after a bout of drinking and have never bothered the police or a councillor in their lives. For these people, who spend most of their time alone at home, the Post Office was like a club. Old and young met there, people called in on their way to work to pick up a paper, as well as children on their way to and from school. They had a chat, a grumble, compared gardening notes or gave news of a former resident who has gone to New Zealand. We all knew each other, we knew when someone was ill or had gone on holiday. Now our meeting place is dark and dead.
The government doesn’t care. It pretends to be keen on ‘rural welfare’ and to have invented community centres. It spends our money building monstrous new ones when our PO was one. A vital support, impossible to value in money but sticking out a mile to those of us who live in villages, has gone.
Teas in the cottage remain popular, but the locals don’t go out to tea, they have it in their own homes. Fine weather walkers and tourists are welcome, but they don’t belong, their roots are elsewhere.
There has been a PO in Edensor since 1886 — 122 years. It was one of the first in a small village, presumably provided to serve Chatsworth. By 1892 the postmistress, Mrs Jane Bacon, dealt with two deliveries and two collections on weekdays and one of each on Sundays. The then Duke of Devonshire and his politician guests made good use of the newly installed telegraph office and the locals appreciated several other services.
A bell-boy, aged 12, was the human on whom Chatsworth relied for telegrams. One of his jobs was to run the half-mile to the Edensor PO with telegrams. His name was W.K. Shimwell. This education served him far better than sitting in a classroom, as he went on to be private secretary to the Duke, when he was governor-general of Canada, 1916-21, and later he became comptroller of Chatsworth and clerk of works to all the buildings scattered over the thousands of acres of the Derbyshire estate including Chatsworth itself.
It’s all gone. There is no bell-boy and no Post Office. Now, that horrible form of communication, email, rules. Even people in the same office send emails to each other instead of talking. Bang go human relationships. All is sacrificed to speed. No time to ponder — bung off the email and back comes another in the ridiculous new language invented for it. With no proper signature, no envelope for privacy and paper galore, manners, spelling and grammar are out of the window. Email is cold, impersonal, demanding, invading and often incomprehensible. Like the hymn, it is immortal, invisible... and silent as light.
Deborah Devonshire
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