Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in The Pennard Valley ·
The Box That Takes It Twice
In Pennard Valley there is one letterbox that takes a letter twice, once from the sender's hand and once after the letter has been read, and the second collection never shows a collection.
- status: folklore
Now you'll want the plain facts first, because the valley folk give them plain enough and leave the strangeness to find its own way in. Up past Pendar row, where the lane goes over the ford and up through the beeches, there stands a wall box built into the stone by the second stile. Cast-iron door, the VR cipher on the plate, painted the post-office red that the surveyor's men kept up until the survey stopped coming. It is on the collection round like any other box. It is emptied twice like no other box you ever heard of.
The first taking is the ordinary one. You post your letter, door swings, letter drops into the box, and on the Tuesday and the Friday the carrier walks up with his empty bag and takes what's there. That's the collection the Head Office sheet records, and it balances, because the valley letters all arrive where they're sent, next morning, clean postmarks, no complaint from anyone.
The second taking is the one that makes the rounds at sheep-shearing and wakes you at night if you let it. The box takes a letter again. Not from the sender — the sender's hand is long finished with it. It takes it back after the letter has been read. That's the rule of it, and every family in the valley has had the rule proved to them at least once, and they'd as soon not have it proved again.
Here's how it goes when it goes as it does. Aunt writes to nephew away in the town. Nephew reads the letter, keeps it in his jacket a week, then makes up his bundle of papers to post back — sentiment, duty, whatever brings a family letter home again. He posts the aunt's own letter, read, handled, softened at the folds, back through the same box. Down the lane it goes. Next morning, up at the house, the aunt takes her ordinary delivery, and among the circulars is her own letter, fresh as the day she sealed it. Her own hand on the front, her nephew's address in her own ink. Never been through the town. Never been read, not by any mark that a sorter could swear to. But the family knows the letter, because the aunt keeps her habit of telling what she wrote, and what she wrote she wrote.
The fold is the tell that the old ones check first. A letter back from the reading comes home with the crease gone soft, the paper gone faintly grey along the line where a thumb rides, the flap lifted and pressed down so slightly that only the sender's own eye would catch it. Nothing you could put before a post office and have a hearing on. Everything you could put before a mother and never get let back in the kitchen. The letters that come home the second time are read, and the box doesn't keep them long — two days, three at the outside, the interval between collections, as though there's a schedule the same as the carrier's and it runs on the same Tuesdays and Fridays.
What the box does with the taking is the part nobody has settled. The letters come back unposted by the usual routes, that's certain — the postmarks don't add up, and folks from the sorting office who came to look in the sixties left with their asks unanswered and their forms unfilled. But some hold the box takes the letter back so the valley keeps what's read and out in the world stays what's not; and some hold the reverse, that what goes out second is what the box had kept the first time, and the story's only spoken of on the up side of the ford, past dark, at the second stile itself.
Who tells it today: it's told wherever the valley gathers to wait on a postal day — by Nanny Cleveland at the Pendar row gate, who found her sister's handwriting after her sister was four years in the ground though the letter was four months sealed; by the ford ferryman's boy, whose word nobody takes and whose letters always come home twice; and by me, as I was told it, standing at the box this last May with my own envelope in my hand, deciding the question the whole valley leaves open: whether it's safe to post what you've already read, or whether the box takes it because you did.