SENT NOWHERE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 270, 4 February 1928, Page 26

SENT NOWHERE

Thousands of parcels of letters , each year, are posted without addresses or with insufficient addresses. The following brightly written article from the Sydney "Sun" gives some idea of the work that devolves upon "post office detectives.’’ « YELLOW moon swims amid a drapery of cloud. 11l a long cupboard ghosts whisper. High up in the central mail branch building there are spiritual confidences. Like departed souls in a sort of limbo, these muffled figures in the gloom reflect and repent. They huddle together in dozens in cere l ments of brown paper in a mighty wooden sarcophagus. Listen to their ghostly murmurmgs. What is that they say?” “To Lil, with love; Bob.” A tiny wisp of a brown paper ghost chants the eerie message incessantly. Mauve jazz garters grow petulant in despair. They were not made for that tomb of tremendous trifles. Ah! But had Bob not been caught in the racing rapids of the River Lethe that swirls along the freestone colonnade of the General Post Office those garters would not be in the ghost chamber. Had Bob not omitted to address the package there would have been smiles and rewarding kisses where possibly was only hauteur and indifference. Scores of Them But Bob was not the only person who swam the River of Lethe. Scores of others right through the year bathe in that river till the “dull opiate” of Keats numbs threir brains. They stamp their packages and toss them into pillar-boxes without a vestige of an address. And so the nameless ghosts—the brown paper spectres—join that melancholy company in the long cupboard of the Dead Parcels Office. There, in the dim watches of the night, they exchange their stories. There rises out of the blackness the ghostly whispers, “To Arthur, with love; Mum.” “To Ern, with lots of love; Maudie.” “To my dear little wife, with a million kisses; Cecil.” Now where are Arthur and Ern and Maudie? Where and who is the “dear little wife” who was to have received a million postal kisses? And how does Arthur feel without that tiny Bible from Mum; how does Ern get on without those red braces: how did someone’s “little wife” survive a Christmas that was bangleless and kissless? The ghosts do not know. They strain on the- leash in the silence of the cupboard. Many have their little labels which tell nothing to anyone but Arthur or Ern or Maude or someone’s “dear little wife." Dead Parcels officers in the course of years become as coldly dispassionate as doctors. They are surgeons of the emotions. They open those nameless packets for clues inside. But tiny cards that babble about love anu kisses and seasonal compliments that send some Maudie or Jimmy or Doris into ecstasies of delight leave them cold. They are moved neither by Bibles nor bangles, nor baby’s bonnets. A roll of music, “Oh, Gladsome Day,”

frankly bores them. Vet it is someone's favourite piece, and was remembered by someone who remembered someone. Why should the Dead Letter Sherlock rejoice when a set of aitificial teeth emerges from an addressless packet. They are not his teeth. Yet someone who hurried from a country town left those teeth on the washstand. And wonder of wonders, the housemaid remembered —everything but the address and the name of “No 14, with blue silk pyjamas.” Yet somewhere in the whirl of the city No. 14 is champing on his gums and longing for those teeth. There is no time for philosophic reflection when you have to catalogue that company of ghosts to await inquiries from the people who called them up. “Lady’s paper cap, hymn-book, a clock spring, and a mouth-organ,” calls the packet surgeon to his cterlc.

“Ear-rings, a roll of dress material, a bottle of quinine, and a lace doily.

So the roll call of the ghosts proceeds. And every ghost has his story. That’s why the long cupboard crackles with whispering in the night watches. Take that second-hand razor peeping through a shroud of brown paper. It might be a clue to tragedy. It might be a challenge to suicide sent as the poison cups were sent among the ancient Greeks. It might be the discarded weapon of a razor gangster. Or it may quite innocently represent both the thought and the forgetfulness of a wife who has hurried her husband off on a journey without his razor.

There in the corner a kewpie doll peeps across the brown paper with that arch and mischievous leer. Hispresence there is more pathetic than that of the other ghosts. It means that Christmas was wiped from the calendar for some small citizen of two or three years. Santa Claus was waylaid, sandbagged, sidetracked. And all just because Memory, which Shakespeare described as the warder of the brain, took the day off. What genial soul parcelled a bottle of sulphate of quinine with a jazz record, “Kongo Katie?” What Scotsman failed to get that bottle of Highland dew whose ghost smoulders in the cupboard in fury? Who was the woman who posted her gold wedding-ring in a pillar-box near the city? Why did she not seek it, a valuable ring of stamped 18-carat gold? Behind that ring in iis tiny envelope in the ghosts’ whispering gallery may lie drama. A best seller plot may have been thrust into the maw of that pillar with the “band of gold.” Who posted ear-rings, a gold watch, a woollen cap, a mirror, a wig of hair, and a tin of rouge to nobody and to nowhere? And what of the woman who rushed frantically into the office with the awful news that she had posted two medical prescriptions given her by a specialist? It took three hours sleuthing to recover those prescriptions. And still the ghosts keep fluttering into the cupboard.