When writing letters to ‘loved ones’ was in vogue

In my day we called it ‘tuning’, nowadays I understand it is called ‘kukatia’.

In plain English, it is the art of charming a daughter of Eve to accede to your wishes.

I have my suspicions, however, that even though the intentions remain the same, the two are as different as letter writing is from texting.

But let me leave it to the experts to define the differences.

I was a letter writer of some distinction in my time, perhaps to compensate for the fact that when God was distributing wooing skills he left me deficient in the verbal and looks departments.

I wrote numerous letters to many girls with varying results, but it is the failures that I still remember most.

It is through these that I learnt that one did just wake up one morning and, because he had taken a fancy to a girl in the neighbouring village or school, put pen to paper to tell her wonderful she was.

HOUR-GLASS

Before you wrote in praise of her hour-glass figure, milky-white teeth and the fact that her face reminded you of a full moon, there were a number of things to consider such as age, status and even height.

You particularly avoided the sort of blunder I made when I wrote a love letter to a girl I thought I was madly in love with who unfortunately was a couple of years older and a class or two ahead of me.

I talked to her brother, who was sceptical and reluctant, to deliver the missive.

After a few days of agonising, I finally received a reply — in the form of my own letter with the following words scrawled at the top, “Leave me alone you little boy.”

This sense of superiority was not confined to the girls and I once had the opportunity to get my revenge against such slights and snobs.

After sitting the examinations that graduated one from primary to secondary school, it was and still remains the custom in my part of the country for boys to undergo the cut that said you were finally a man, even if only a 14-year-old one.

This was no ordinary initiation — it came with serious elevation of status and in my case, my first pair of shoes and a Kaunda suit to boot.

This had seemed to have the effect of making me quite desirable in the eyes of girls in the village. Unfortunately, they were not of an age and learning that I felt suited my new Kaunda-suited status.

You can therefore imagine my consternation when two smitten girls in my old school got together and wrote me a love letter which got intercepted by a teacher and was read at parade.

There was murder in my heart when afterwards, I met one of the girls and ran after her down the village footpath.

In those days mail, including love letters, was delivered by hand, opening up room for mischief.

Boys who had older sisters were particularly favoured as messengers, and they perfected a form of mail ‘hacking’ by steaming open the envelope flap or carefully blowing it open.

RESEALED

After carefully reading and digesting the contents, the envelope would be resealed so that there was no evidence of tampering.

The letters would be the subject of hot boyhood gossip among the boys in the village while herding cattle.

In this way, we knew all our sisters’ secrets which could be used to our advantage whenever the need arose.

For instance, you could always threaten to spill the beans if she insisted on being mean with her pocket money.