P.O. Box 2, New Hanover, 3440.
Poetry by Roald Bartholomew
Far from the clamor of cities, in rural Natal, our connection to the wider world hinged on a simple metal rectangle: P.O. Box 2, New Hanover 3440. A postal box. Our farm lay 15 kilometers outside that one-donkey town, a speck on the map so modest it couldn’t even afford a horse. New Hanover was the kind of place where time moved at the pace of a lazy pofadder in the sun, & the post office stood as its unassuming magical wormhole to elsewhere.
The box itself was one among a hundred, slotted into a steel grid embedded in the wall on the stoep of the red-brick post office building. You’d find it just across the single-lane bridge over the Sterkspruit, right beside the New Hanover Hotel, where locals might gather for a pint or a yarn on slow afternoons, which were most of them. Stepping inside the post office was like entering a bygone era. The air hung heavy with the musty scent of brown paper parcels & coils of brown hessian string, mingled with the faint, acrid tang of old-fashioned sticky glue. On the worn wooden counter sat a reel of Scotch tape in a hefty metal dispenser, its weight a testament to things built to last.
Back then, correspondence was an art, not a haste. We’d sit at the dining room table on the farm, pulling out a blue or yellow Croxley writing pad, and take up a Parker or Schaeffer pen. For fancy pants letters, the ones carrying heartfelt news or formal invitations—we’d uncap a fountain pen, fill it from a bottle of ink, and let the words flow with deliberate strokes. There was no autocorrect, no instant send; each letter was crafted, pondered over, sealed with care. Licked by your tongue on the envelope. You couldn’t rush the post, it demanded patience, and in return, it wove threads of anticipation into our days. A reply might take weeks, but when it arrived in that humble box, it felt like a small miracle, bridging the isolation of our rural life with the voices of distant friends & family.
At Grey my mom would post me letters from the farm and include R10 notes which would be tuck money. A coke & a doughnut would be weeks in the planning and dependent on a letter coming through the post.
Oh, and Christmas! We would send Christmas cards and hang the ones we received on strings and pegs in our living room. It was a ritual. Poof! No more.
These poems by Roald Bartholew are crafted in that same manner as old fashioned mail. The joy of words, & I licked my computer screen!
🌊Waves of the Veld
